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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There was no way I could not mention about the new Asimov movie on the Foundation Series. My childhood, game characters, and this blog has been influenced through the writings of Asimov’s many books, primarily the Foundations and Robots book series. And though oddly the plan is to make the Foundation Series movies first over the Robots and Empire Series (if at all), I actually made the same mistake and read the series in the reverse order as well.

Though Hari Seldon and Dors Venabili are the main and well-regarded characters from the whole series overall,  the one character that most fascinated me was the enigmatic humaniform robot by the name of R. Daneel Olivaw (seen in the picture to the left from the book Caves of Steel). In particular, it was in the Foundation Series with R. Daneel Olivaw as Demerzel that I empathize with from childhood and use for many of my game-playing characters around the net from playing chess on a Telnet FIC, to a mud-based text game called Sanity’s Edge, all the way up to World of Warcraft.

There are a couple of blogs out there with as much focus around the character of Demerzel (Demerzel’s Echoes), gaming profiles (Navigator Demerzel), computer names (computer Demerzel), social media profiles (Sphinn Demerzel), and art drawings (Eto Demerzel art).

I will be anxiously waiting to see who will make up the cast and of course who will be playing the role of the humanoid, R. Daneel Olivaw. I would not be surprised to see Will Smith in there somewhere as well as he seems to enjoy having roles in many of the latest science fiction movies.

SFF Media was the first on the scene with the news about having a movie on the Foundation Series and I am sure more will come as lately many sci-fi films from the major sci-fi writers have been doing well enough for sequels. Here’s the details so far:

New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov’s classic space opera saga. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Shaye said, “our idea is to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story” but he added that it is a complex novel, “this is not a script you can knock out in six months.” Shaye and Lynne plan to adapt the first book, but if the first Foundation movie is successful, aim to create an entire new Foundation movie trilogy just as New Line did with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Good things will certainly come from this as New Line knows what it is doing.

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Believe it or not, you can actually read just about any major news website that has an online subscription fee, for free! No, I am not referring to downloading the User-Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox (which does work sometimes) and pretending to be Googlebot. I mean actually acting as yourself and viewing the page you want to read.

Why is this useful? Let us say a friend sends you a link to a good Washington Post article (those are rare, but known to happen), but you unfortunately did not get to read it until about a month later. When you click on the link, instead of actually seeing the news article that used to be there to everyone, it is now behind a subscription wall that you are being asked to pay for. Very annoying, correct?

How can you read the online news article for free? Well, the beauty of today’s world is that if you know the title of the article, you can search for the exact phrase in Google, click on the link, and actually read the article without the annoying subscription wall. Don’t know the article title? Put the URL in the search box and you will be able to access this for free as well.

Why is this possible? Essentially the news websites want to rank in Google in order to get a lot of visitors and make money off of the advertisements been shown to you. Google, unfortunately for the news websites, “mandates” that if you want organic search traffic, you must let the first click be free. Otherwise, Google will consider the whole website to be spam and not relevant to what searchers want thereby hurting Google’s brand.

What does this mean? If you are running a news website, Google believes that anything content-based should free and viewable to anyone, a very anti-publishing “establishment” view. Put another way, anything and everything that can be shown online is and will be considered “must see for free” (with advertisements of course). It is another way of saying “If I can turn something into 0s and 1s, then it should be free.”

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People often believe that when something is free, it means two things: 1) Not very good, 2) No competition or a need to update.

As I have previously mentioned about the Golden Age of Analytics with Google Analytics, point one is entirely false as Google has recently been able to really up its game within the web analytics arena by providing some really spectacular online marketing features that will benefit many agencies that take advantage of it. I finally now have access with it for some of my clients and will be salivating through it for probably the next month until I can squeeze just about everything I can from it (my poor GA representative will get to know me over the next month as I call with lots of questions, lol). Go install it after you read this post.

This post tackles the second part with Nuconomy coming out with something that no other qualifiable web analytics package has to date–the ability to track social media traffic and the correlation with them. Now, I know what you should be thinking: Social media does not convert! There is no direct ROI in it. But the counter-argument would be that there is a branding effect, a talking effect, customer interactions, etc. that cannot be measured. Yet, what Nuconomy has done is put their money where their mouth is, tracking those exact effects. Now you can find out whether or not there is an indirect impact for your company and if not, leave the social media fanatics with only this:

So, what do I think is the most important factor in a social media strategy?  Social Media

When competing against a free product or service, you have to be able to market yourself for niche areas, innovate to stay ahead of the pack, and listen to what your customers want. This is where Omniture SiteCatalyst has seriously failed as a Web Analytics provider–it fails to listen to customer complaints (slow load time) and it fails to stay ahead of the pack by not placing in basic SEO tracking that Google Analytics offers for free.

So please, check them out, but do not join the beta–I’m trying to get into that, do not want more competition than there already is to get on that list.

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I talked briefly before about how NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies was done very badly with cutting to commercials and by trying to limit worldwide Internet coverage before NBC would show it within the US. However, the coverage of the competition during the 2008 Beijing Olympics has been very well laid covered and with a large amount of information for people who know little about China.

With each competition, NBC has been talking with many of the athletes and giving background on who they are and what they need without being too boring, too annoying, or too simplistic–a remarkable achievement when most of the media nowadays tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

What has me amazed is how positive the coverage has been for China and the Beijing Olympics in general. This may be the result of being gracious to the country hosting the games or due to the earthquake that China suffered. There have been many stories about China and what you can find there along with the history of China and even the interaction of China and the US. Some of these topics have covered:

• Chinese cuisine (both good and strange)
• Chinese Acupuncture
• Nixon going to China
• Kite flying
• Chinese athlete training programs
• Beijing’s monuments and parks
• Etc

What has made it particularly well-done is that they actually brought in journalists to stay and work within a foreign country and provide on-the-ground reports about the country, something that has been in dire need for those interested in international affairs.

Lastly, even many of the commercials have been geared towards China and the Olympics, providing very relevant ads that I think play very well to the audience watching. These relevant ads do far better when I actually enjoy watching them because they are interesting! Many of these ads have been very memorable including the Beijing Olympics Mummy dual TV commercial.

Budweiser, GE, and some Canadian apparel HBC(?)

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The media (particularly the American Media such as NBC) still does not understand that the Internet generation does not want to sit and wait a full day to know what has happened in the Beijing Olympics. And we certainly do not want them to cut to commercial in the middle of the fracking opening ceremonies (incidently, this is why soccer is a horrible sport to watch on TV in the US, they cut to commercial, a goal is scored, and we completely miss it).

So, what happens when the mainstream media tries to control online content (such as Viacomm and Youtube)? This:

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.

To borrow from Eyes East, this is Olympics 2.0, so stop trying to limit us, we will find ways around what you do.

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If there ever was a good time to exploit an international news niche market, the time is now on the opportunity to provide foreign news to American citizens. Sadly, many of these news organizations are going in the opposite direction:

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Not that many people use Facebook in China when you can make the same service such as Xiaonei (how many times must one say this, in today’s world, the minute an online company plans to go global, you better actually go global or choose the nations that have the highest Internet population–and that means China), but seems China is currently blocking Facebook,as Danwei notes:

Danwei readers in Beijing reported earlier today that Facebook seemed to be blocked. It was accessible in Shanghai this afternoon, but now seems to be blocked nationwide.

Creating a large frustration for presumably many young people who helps provide pictures for Engrish.com

The Wall Street Journal China’s Journal:

Beijing’s Olympic organizers have said that the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics, a dubious claim. If Facebook still is running into interference in Beijing come August, organizers can be fairly certain that at least some of the half million foreign visitors expected here this August will notice.

Wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook has problems for awhile, just like Youtube before it, and Google before that.

Update (07/02/2008):

Aw provides some backend blocking pictures for the proof.

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The Lost Laowai does a superb job explaining (along with good comments) on the difference in the Western and Chinese viewpoints, medias, and perceptions on the recent events in China.

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How many years do you expect until this industry dies out (if at all)?

My personal belief is that although the newspaper industry is in a major decline, print will still play a major part in the daily lives of people around 30 and older, and yet, for those who have grown up with the net always there and with the increasing prominence of blogs, it could be another fifty years before newspaper really succumb in the end to the digital revolution.

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