Most people in emerging and developing countries see the Internet as a good thing when it comes to education and the economy. And so do giants of our technological age such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, spoke at the United Nations on Saturday to issue a call for universal Internet access. In addition to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he is supported by Bono, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Shakira, George Takei, Charlize Theron and Jimmy Wales.
By giving people access to the tools, knowledge and opportunities of the Internet, we can give a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. We also know that the internet is a vital enabler of jobs, growth and opportunity. And research tells us that for every 10 people connected to the Internet, about one is lifted out of poverty.
Facebook created Internet.org, a service that provides free access to the Internet. After complaints about limitations, Facebook has rebranded its effort as Free Basics and made it more flexible for third-party developers to join in.
In countries where data is expensive and money to pay for it is scarce, this seems like a good deal. Limited access is better than none.
“If someone can’t afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all,” Zuckerberg says.
With one billion people already using Facebook every day, cynics might say this is a scheme to add another billion. Maybe. But Zuckerberg has plenty of company to keep him honest.
It’s easy to be cynical about the Internet. As a reflection of humanity, it definitely has a dark side. But for most people in the world, the Internet is seen as a way of pulling themselves out of poverty. And that’s something worth getting behind.
If you go to Apple’s web page to find out what’s new in the latest version of the software that runs its iPhones and iPads, you’ll find no mention at all about content blockers.
And yet this is the iOS 9 feature that appears to be the most popular. You can now go to the App Store and download an app that blocks all the ads on websites you visit. These apps, which you typically have to pay for, are already topping the charts.
So what does it say when people stampede to pay for something? In our free enterprise system, where consumers vote with their money, it tells me that there are a lot of people fed up with increasingly intrusive advertising.
I recently clicked on a link in my iPhone that took me to a website where an ad immediately took over the page and used up so many resources that it killed the battery and the screen went blank. I can’t be the only one who has an experience like this. No wonder ad blockers are popular.
The readers are rebelling.
Many publishers, of course, are worried that if fewer people see their ads then revenues will drop and they won’t be able to afford to stay in business. To be fair, advertising does seem to be the main way to make money on the Internet these days, but it’s also true that the customer is always right. It can’t possibly be considered a good business model to do things you know annoy your readers.
Even so, CNet doesn’t seem to have learned this lesson. If you try to watch one of their videos with an ad blocker enabled, you get turned away by an obnoxious black screen. All that’s going to do is convince people that they should turn elsewhere for their news.
The problem with the Internet is that there is almost infinite supply. Demand has gone up with the convenience of mobile devices but it will never be infinite. In a situation like this, it’s really hard to make money. So publishers and advertisers increasingly resort to desperate measures. With an abundance of content, customers respond by exercising the option of moving on. Or, as is happening with the iPhone, smart app developers give them what they want — a nice, simple reading experience.
Publishers will have no choice but to adapt to the demands of their readers. It’s always been that way.
Most websites get their advertising by signing up with a company that supplies the ads. The people who run these networks should be scrambling to come up with a solution that makes readers — and, by extension, publishers — happy. Otherwise they’ll become obsolete.
Their biggest obstacle is that they measure success with “views.” If someone sees a web page with ad on it, that counts as a view — even if they didn’t actually look at the ad or absorb what was in it. It’s a shotgun approach. If you keep firing randomly, you’re bound to hit something. There has to be a better way.
In fact we might already have a solution on the horizon based on the success of La Presse, a long-time daily newspaper in Montreal that has announced that its iPad app has become so successful that it is cutting back print publication to once a week in January. They are now in the midst of helping the Toronto Star follow in their footsteps.
What’s different about the La Presse model is that it concentrates on creating a wonderful experience for readers, with advertising integrated into that experience. The main selling point for advertisers is engagement. People are willing to spend a lot of time with an app that treats them like valued customers rather just another pair of eyeballs for products they don’t want or need.
Imagine a future where La Presse sells affordable turnkey solutions like this to publishers large and small. This is the kind of innovation that will win.
All the news organizations in B.C., or maybe Canada, should get together and create a company called NewsFlix. For $10 a month you would get access to beautiful, ad-free versions of their news sites.
I bet a lot of people would sign up. Something better happen soon — this expert says newspapers in Canada will be pretty much extinct in 10 years.
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Google’s new logo is terrible. If you haven’t seen it, go to their website and be horrified.
Google is a whimsical name from a company that brought a semblance of order to the Internet. Now it’s gone for a bland corporate look. But it still has the whimsical name.
These things just don’t go together.
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The best reply I’ve seen to this is Hope vs. No Hope.
Just noticed how well the Obama logo works for Trump with some simple color changes and rotation. pic.twitter.com/1r91SeXTDx
Facebook reached a milestone on Aug. 24. One billion people logged in during a single day.
Regardless of your feelings toward it, this is truly an amazing achievement.
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So someone actually did a study and discovered that almost one quarter of all the verified users on Twitter are journalists and media.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Most of them think of Twitter as a customizable, interactive version of the wire services they’re used to.
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Here’s a fun fact: Solitaire was originally included with every computer because it was considered a good way of getting people accustomed to using a mouse. Yes, kids, a mouse was once considered to be a novelty.
Mohammed Fahmy, left, talks to human rights lawyer Amal Clooney in Cairo.
It’s been a bad week for journalists — two shot dead and two sentenced to prison for three years.
On the surface, it may not seem that these to instances have much in common, but there are parallels.
A cameraman and a reporter were shot dead while they were broadcasting a live interview in Virginia. The killer was a disgruntled former employee who felt his grievances were best expressed by going out with a bang and taking two innocent people with him.
Those journalists were just doing their job like everyone else does their job. The difference from most jobs is that it involves putting yourself out there for the world to see.
Because these two were exposed, they became targets for someone with mental issues to create a splash with a big audience.
Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian journalist working for Al-Jazeera, along with colleague Baher Mohamed, was also just doing his job — reporting on events in Egypt. The government felt that his pieces were too sympathetic to a group it was trying to destroy (the Muslim Brotherhood), so they were hauled off to jail and convicted of supporting a terrorist group.
Fahmy’s work, of course, was also something for the world to see. In this case, the government decided — in its zeal to stamp out the main opposition — to go after Al-Jazeera in the most public way it could. The resulting show trial was a warning to the Qatar-based news agency that they should consider self-censorship when reporting about Egypt.
Even if Fahmy had been favouring the Muslim Brotherhood in his reports, don’t forget that he was merely an employee of Al-Jazeera, which could easily have told him to make changes. But Al-Jazeera is out of reach in Qatar, and besides, going after a journalist with a public face is so much more likely to catch people’s attention.
There are some who say that TV stations are doing too many live reports, and putting their journalists in harm’s way more of than necessary. The solution would be to cut back on them.
Yes, news agencies could also cut back on reports that might piss off the government. It would certainly make things safer for their employees.
While we’re at it, we could also decide to let mentally disturbed individuals and military dictators set the agenda for the news cycle.
Like anyone else, no journalist wants to be shot or imprisoned, but all the ones I’ve known would be hard-pressed to agree to any infringement on their freedom to serve the public as they see fit.
And when I say it’s been a bad week for journalists, that only tells a small part of the story. There is bad news pretty much every week for journalists.
That didn’t take long. Two weeks ago, I posted instructions on how to mute a source on Flipboard because I found the process to be convoluted, and thought I might save other people the frustration I was having.
Now the latest version of Flipboard (3.3.5) makes muting, likes, dislikes and reporting super simple.
Every article in the stream now has a downward-pointing chevron at the top right that you can tap for a list of options. Among them is the ability to mute the site or person the article came from. A nice touch is that Flipboard prompts you with a message asking whether you’re sure you want to go through with it.
You can still go into the Flipboard settings and find a list of muted sources. If you have a change of heart, you can uncheck the source and get it back in your feed.
Access settings by tapping on the person icon at the bottom right of the screen. Then tap on the gear at the top right.
The lesson to be learned from the Ashley Madison debacle is this: If there is something you wouldn’t do in real life — because it’s embarrassing, immoral, dangerous or whatever — don’t think you can get away with doing it on the Internet.
The thousands who signed up with Ashley Madison so they could cheat on their wives or husbands are learning this hard truth after hackers broke into the site’s servers and dumped the files on the Internet where anyone with a little search savvy can find them.
Ashley Madison is quick to point out that the real criminals are the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team. Its customers, they add, are not breaking any laws.
That may be true, but the site does promise anonymity, suggesting that people who use the service fear some kind of consequence if they are found out. In fact, this desire for anonymity is so strong that Ashley Madison was offering to permanently erase members’ files for an extra fee.
Some might call this a form of blackmail. According to interviews with the hackers, many people paid the extra fee, but the company never (for reasons that are not clear) followed through.
This is the situation that prompted the Impact Team to act.
I imagine there are suspicious wives and husbands all over North America sifting through the data dump to see whether their spouse is a member. We may even see a spike in the divorce rate.
Already, the Canadian Press has found credit card data attached to computers at the Department of National Defence and the House of Commons. No doubt, workers from all political parties are busy checking the backgrounds of their candidates. Cheating may be legal, but there are great swathes of the electorate who would never vote for a cheater.
The Impact Team, which appears to be made up of former employees, released a statement saying that the site contains thousands of fake female profiles and that 90 to 95 per cent of users are men: “Chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest affair site, but never had one. If that distinction matters.”
Of course, in many cases that distinction won’t matter — marriages and careers will be ruined.
Robin Williams summed it up best: “The problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.”
From Humans of New York: “He’s a very respectful husband. He’s different from a lot of the men in this region. He never stops me from voicing my opinions.” (Passu, Pakistan)
Now and again, managers in the news industry hear complaints from readers or viewers that the news is too negative.
Their concerns are understandable. Intuitively, it makes sense that exposing yourself to news about the bad things in the world will affect your own outlook.
A blog at Psychology Today, called Why We Worry, says that “negative sensationalism” in the news has increased in the past few decades. The writer, Graham C.L. Davey, cites this as his belief, but many would likely agree with him.
He concludes that “not only are negatively valenced news broadcasts likely to make you sadder and more anxious, they are also likely to exacerbate your own personal worries and anxieties.”
That may be true, but it could also be argued that the news provides a distraction. After all, the time you spend thinking about a devastating forest fire is time you don’t spend thinking about the ups and downs of your own life.
People who describe themselves as news junkies might really be people with a tendency to avoid facing up to the realities of what’s happening at home — even if that reality is simple boredom.
Somewhere in the midst of all this lies the Humans of New York project. This is a blog that consists of photo portraits of ordinary people with accompanying interviews. Sometimes the text is an off-the-cuff remark, but often it details compelling details about the person’s life.
The man behind the project, American photographer Brandon Stanton, has a massive following on social media due to his ability to captures slices of life that go to the core of our humanity. He is currently travelling in Pakistan, where he has been welcomed with open arms.
If you know anything about Pakistan, it’s likely from news reports about violence and terrorism. This is the country where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops. This is the country accused of harbouring the Taliban. This the home of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot because of her advocacy for education for girls.
But Pakistan is a large country with many millions of people who have nothing to do with the things we see in the news. This is why so many of them were glad to have Stanton chronicle the joys and sorrows of their day-to-day lives.
According to Vocativ, his popularity on Facebook has exploded with thousands of new fans from Pakistan.
An open letter to the Express Tribune says it all:
Brandon, it is true that my country, like any other country in the world, is filled with horrible people who do dreadful things. My state has been known to make stupid decisions too. However, there is so much good here as well. There are such good souls here; people who restore one’s faith in humanity. There is always another side to things, and you my friend, are showing the world that side.
The popularity of Humans of New York is not that it presents good news instead of bad. In fact, much of what it shows is mixture of hope and tragedy. It’s different because it breaks through the filter of what those with influence consider to be important. We see what truly occupies, to a greater or lesser extent, every human — families, health, shelter, relationships.
When people talk about there being too much negativity in the news, what they might really mean is that there not enough realism — surely things can’t be that bad.
It’s true that the world is not always a nice place, and we need to know about that so we can continue to find ways to make it better. Still, it’s good to remember that what’s more important could be happening right now in your own home and in the homes of people everywhere.
Flipboard is by far one of the best news-aggregator apps available. It figures out what kind of stories you’re interested in, and gives you more of the same.
Occasionally, it insists on using a source that may fit your interests but espouses a point of view that’s so annoying, you just can’t take it any more.
There is a way to mute these sources, but Flipboard doesn’t make it obvious. So for those of you searching for instructions, here they are:
1. Tap on a story from the source you want to mute.
2. Tap on the comment icon at the top. It’s between the star and share icons. Yes, this takes you to an area primarily intended for leaving comments.
3. Tap on the head-and-shoulders icon. Presumably it represents the person who is the source for these stories. In many cases, though, the source is an organization so this can be a little confusing.
4. You’ll get a list of options, one of which is mute everywhere. That’s the one you want. There is also the option of muting in cover stories if you just want to de-emphasize the source but not completely get rid of it.
5. Now go into Flipboard’s settings — tap on the person icon at the bottom right of the main screen, then tap on the gear at the top right. From there, you can tap on Muted Sources and see the source you just muted.
These instructions work with version 3.3.3 of Flipboard.
Despite being blessed with many wonderful attributes, Kamloops maintains the dubious distinction of being the largest city in Canada without a daily newspaper. It’s been that way for about a year and a half now.
The bright side, if you can call it that, is that this city of about 80,000 souls has become a laboratory for the post-print future.
When The Daily News existed, Kamloops residents could read eight newspapers a week if you included the twice-a-week Kamloops This Week. When the daily folded, KTW upped its game to three a week, but that still left us five issues short.
That’s not just a gap in news coverage, but also a gap in revenue. Between subscribers and advertisers, a bunch of money was left on the table. Certainly, the remaining media did their best to gobble it up, but others also moved in sensing they could get a piece of the pie.
InfoTel, a company formerly known for phone books, changed the name of its website to InfoNews. It has similar sites in Kelowna, Vernon and Penticton. Kelowna-based Castanet expanded its Kamloops coverage — joining spots on its website for Okanagan cities. KamloopsBCNow — a site patterned after KelownaNow — opened shop.
All are notable for being based outside of Kamloops, and for lacking depth in their news coverage. If they are examples of the future of journalism, I can only hope that competition and improved cash flows eventually encourage them to invest in better quality.
And now we have NewsKamloops — a stand-alone news site created from scratch by people who live in the community. Every aspect of the site has Kamloops written all over it. The best part, though, is that the owners are making a serious effort at providing good journalism.
I hope the people of Kamloops give this site a chance and don’t let it slip away. We need journalism that not only informs us about the community, but makes us feel a part of it. Good journalism takes the extra step of explaining how things work so we can form opinions and build consensus.
At the same time, I hope success for NewsKamloops doesn’t come at the expense of the other media in Kamloops. As far as I’m concerned, a variety of voices makes us stronger.
NewsKamloops will no doubt go through some growing pains, and they had better be serious about listening to suggestions from readers. Right off the bat, I have a few suggestions for improving the design.
Also, I wish they would stop referring to it as a newspaper site. Why weigh yourself down with a tired old metaphor? The future is coming whether we like it or not — so we might as well embrace it. In Kamloops, we have an opportunity to show how that’s done.
The great thing about cars is that they allow you to go wherever you want whenever you want. That’s freedom.
But what if you could go wherever you want whenever you want without a car? And without paying for insurance and gas?
In cities where Uber has launched, this dream is becoming a reality. You fire up the app on your smartphone, look at a map to see if any cars are nearby, and request a ride.
Anyone with a car and some spare time can sign up as an Uber driver. Anyone willing to hand over payment details can sign up as a passenger.
In cities with dense populations, and a lot of cars to choose from, you might never need to own a car.
Uber even works with other apps. For example, StubHub — a service where people can buy and sell event tickets from each other — will remind you get schedule a ride so you arrive on time.
The vehicles of today are fast turning into little more than computers with wheels and a place for humans to sit. Proof of this came when hackers took control of a Jeep and crashed it. It won’t be long before cars get viruses.
The driverless cars pioneered by Google use a lot of technology to sense their environment, but they’re basically using computers to do the driving. Looked at this way, it makes sense that a computer company like Apple would be looking into making its own cars. It would give a whole new meaning to mobile.
The day could come when these cars are so reliable that they are able to navigate their way through downtown traffic. When that happens, the next step will be an Uber-like app that allows us to call a driverless car for a ride.
We already have driverless rapid transit in some cities — Vancouver’s SkyTrain, for example. Why not create a system like this for the roads?
While we’re at it, driverless mini-buses could be programmed to work like car pools. The mini-bus would show up at your house every day to take you and a group of employees to work. An app would give you minute-by-minute updates on when it would arrive.
But what about car-sharing? This concept is not quite so futuristic. People sign up with a co-operative to drive cars parked in their neighbourhood. They’re meant for round trips, so you have to bring them back in a reasonable amount of time.
In Vancouver, there are thousands of car-share vehicles. Obviously, the system works but you’re still paying for maintenance of the cars through membership fees.
Real freedom comes when a car is nothing more than a ride.
