The Internet has been envisioned as many different aspects since the beginning; starting as an information educational network to an almost anything goes libertarian world. As it has become adopted across the world, various governmental organizations have tried, some with success and some without, to dictate domestic rules across the Internet.

Governmental organizations are not alone in this regard as multi-national corporations have been trying to push governmental organizations or the United Nations to impose rules favorable to the respective corporation that goes against the core of what a libertarian-viewed Internet is supposed to be about. Napster’s free music shut-down, Comcast’s P2P filtering, and so forth are examples of these aspects to re-make the Internet into a more structured system that is (in their opinion) more conducive to business.

It is in this same way Google’s concept that brands are an answer to the Internet not being very conducive for business and thus Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Yes, the answer was to allay fears over Google trying to take over the role of publishers and advertisers, but instead Google’s CEO let out an interesting view into what Google wants to change with the Internet beyond what Google has already done with its massive permeance (some say monopoly) in search and other online aspects.

The thing is, many people do not always want to do business online and are often looking for information, games, data, forums, etc. that come from random sites that are not brands. In fact, if the site is successful enough, it could actually become a brand from the very “cesspool” Google’s CEO believes to be a problem.

Of course, we still are assuming what Google’s CEO considers as a “cesspool.” Malware sites? Spam blogs on blogger? Thin affiliate sites? There are many definitions that people consider, and for me one of things that I strongly believe is that brands are not the solution. Sure, they can help, but so can random sites that provide just what people need when browsing the Internet. There is no one solution to any cesspool (whether the Internet is/has one or not) when you have both small sites and brand sites doing many of the same things that people find harmful.

When news outlets hype things up without enough information or when every far away local disaster is “breaking news” that has to scroll across the screen, that is a cesspool of useless information that these brands are doing. Even inside of the SEO world with brand sites such as SEOmoz or WebmasterWorld hyping fears of the tests that Google does to its algorithm on a daily basis (in this case the use of AJAX for Google’s SERPs). These sites can provide useful information at many other points but when there is a hyping fear of things without enough proof as news to me that is a cesspool within the Internet that should not rank or show up.

Large and small sites, or brands and non-brands, these can all create cesspools within the Internet, and one should always be careful on believing there is only one answer to everything. It is that hubris that could lead to unforseen consequences that will not benefit Google in the future.

Update at 4:41PM:

The idea of whether Google should fix some of cesspool it has indirectly spawned from its own services such as Made For AdSense (MFA) sites is an idea put forth by John Andrews, but then the question becomes, where should Google stop fixing the web? Paid links, paid posts, and affiliate ads are livelihoods of many people (whether rightly or wrongly) that can and has brought up and then knocked down their living standards.

Regardless of the view on this matter, whenever one company has something close to total control, these problems manifest into greater issues that all sides begin to fear to some extent, particularly when there are black boxes into what goes on behind various search algorithms or when more trust is given to some sites than to others that can be placed solely on one company, whether fairly or unjustly.

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I have noted my dissatisfaction before with the awfulness of Enterprise; enough so that I always called it “quasi-Star Trek” due to the many violations of Star Trek canon. Producer Brannon Braga apologized for the horrible ending of Enterprise noting that it did not even live up to his own expectations for what he wanted in the final episode stating:

My analogy with Star Trek is I divorced my wife, I love her dearly, she’s with a great guy, and I’m so happy for her. At the same time, in the back of mind, someone else is with my wife. That’s how I feel. I can’t help but feel emotionally attached to Star Trek. But predominantly my feeling is it’s in great hands with J.J. Abrams and I can’t wait to see the movie.

While the apology on the ending was nice (although really should have apologized for the whole thing), I think the thing that bothers me the most is that since he knew it was going to be the final episode, you would think that he would have scrapped the ending once he saw it and do it over for a proper Star Trek send-off.

Then again, he never cared for the canon anyway, so really never should have expected anything more.

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The technology today continue to advance towards some really amazing abilities with robotics and bio-mechanical (mind-controlling) abilities such as this video with people being able to mentally control a prosthetic arm. Unfortunately am unable to embed it, so you will have to click on the link above to actually watch the video which I found on Technology Review.

Of course, this may seem somewhat similar to the Borg (with a picture of Jean-Luc Picard as Locutus), but is different in that there is no collective control over the device with sole control belonging to the wearer themselves. One of the interesting things in the future will be whether humans first become integrated with mechanical parts before the advent of the Singularity of artificial intelligence.

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I know I am not a geek (I am certainly a nerd), but I thought I would take this test, Geek Social Aptitude Test 2.0, anyway with the score below:

You Scored a 16 Out Of 50

You wear a “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me” shirt you bought at Hot Topic, but you rarely have trouble gathering a crew to play Left 4 Dead at your place. Sure, you might not have been prom king, but you’ve found your niche and similar people to you and you’re making it work for yourself. You can’t really argue with that.

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Google got tricked again today first with Google Suggest, then with Google Trends (more or less inter-related) with the phrase, “I am extremely terrified of Chinese people,” first broken here:

At one point the phrase got up to position 24 with 10% of the searches coming from Providence, Rhode Island (#1 by cities).

These phrases show up in the hot trends when a group uses their network of people to search for the phrase, and if it is interesting enough, more people will type out the phrase themselves, snowballing the effect (aka: going viral).

Oh, and the page that comes up is NSFW, so I would advise not going there.

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Quick note that if you want to learn a quick way to use advanced segments within Google Analytics for eCommerce, I strongly suggest heading over to the Google Analytics Blog.

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Google, knowing that digital TV will become mandatory within the US removing the ability to use all analog TVs without converters, has introduced a digital video recorder that can report for Google TV ads into Google AdWords.

Through a partnership with Dish Networks, the tool monitors time-shifted data from DVRs to give advertisers insight into how and when viewers see ads during the playback of recorded content. About 25% of television households in the U.S. have digital video recorders or DVRs installed, according to the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Google said it processes DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes to provide accurate, detailed time-shifted impression counts. There are several ways to view the number of impressions, from same day to seven days. As with all metrics in Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. The data is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free.

This, of course, leads to it being used within Google Analytics to provide additional information on the ads’ ROIs for free as well.

Would this be television’s savior as companies shift budgeting dollars to the Internet that has the ability to track at a deeper level? Maybe, but the problem still occurs that there is no direct correlation to one watching the advertisement and actually seeing the ad beyond the use of vanity URLs that could potentially come through other marketing channels.

That said, computers and TVs are slowly (in a technological advancement aspect) merging into one whole unit that will likely make the DVR specific device obsolete in ten to twenty years once devices such as HP’s Media Center become the norm and TVs becoming just tertiary (not secondary because one has to have two computer monitors) monitors that connect wireless to a household mainframe computer.

Unsure about how that would work? Look at how Youtube is becoming interactive now and the huge jump in tracking that will provide in the future for television (or online video content) with a simple mouse click away.

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Get ready for a more “Minority Report” world as new public ads could actually be watching you and changing the ad based on who is looking at the ad:

“Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.”

Search engines have already numbed people to a heavy amount of data analysis and tracking that goes on around the web in order to provide more and more relevant ads (assuming that advertising agencies and the like are doing the job properly), so it was only a matter of time before offline ads become very in-depth as well.

As a thought process it sounds scary, but these things get rolled out over time in a way that people just get used to seeing them as a part of everyday life. For example, when you sign up to GMail, you give Google (that is, its algorithm) the right to “read” your email in order to serve you relevant ads. I personally find that quite horrific as I consider all my emails to be private and non-negotiable for any kind of reading, but millions of people use the service as they realize that there is no real harm in allowing an algorithm to serve you ads and nothing else.

In the end, public ads that watch you will become an everyday thing–just as long as the ads are not using your name as you walk by.

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A fascinating article by The Telegraph about the possibility that the new Zipingpu Dam actually helped to trigger the horrendous Sichuan quake.

The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake.

Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.

In fact, there is some evidence of this occuring elsewhere in the past with the article noting that earthquakes did occur with the completion of the Hoover Dam, but no where near the scale of the Sichuan earthquake.

The idea is very contentious and not surprisingly (and unfortunately) the Chinese government is refusing to allow studies about whether the dam may have actually caused the earthquake for the obvious reason that this would firstly place the blame on the Chinese government (which is never at fault of course) and stop the development of other dams around China that would prevent the much needed expansion of electrical power.

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