Real Estate Marketing Blog

The Anti Web 2.0

Joel Stein Rants at the LA Times about the implied entitlement to interactivity in today's society. (If too many days go by you may have to register.). So much for Web 2.0.

"That address on the bottom of this column? That is the pathetic, confused death knell of the once-proud newspaper industry, and I want nothing to do with it.....I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk at you...is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you...Some newspapers even list the phone numbers of their reporters at the end of their articles. That's a smart use of their employees' time...Where does this end? Does Tom Hanks have to hold up a sign with his e-mail at the end of his movie? ...Are you starting to see how creepy this is?

There are some interesting distinctions that he discusses that I will be touching on in the Web 2.0 section of Blog Myths. Despite all that the hype about User Defined media, there is some amount of truth in his rant. But maybe this is why I have not received a response from my letter to the editor who wrote about the "Bubble Bloggers".

Vista towards Google

Vista-
Definition:  view or prospect, especially. one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage. 

Microsoft made its move for world domination yesterday. All kidding aside Vista has gotten great reviews for its interface, and bad reviews from geeks.

CNET is calling Vista just an expensive upgrade to XP.

So what does that have to do with online marketing?

Your Listings Video a Crime?

It was about a year ago at a Carl Galletti Conference in Las Vegas (Carl is an expert direct response marketer), that one of the presenters came onto the pulpit and explained to everyone how that if they use mp3 audio ontheir website, that they are are violating a license and that they owe money to the inventor of that technology.

Anyway, jump forward to 2006 and a patent has been granted to a relatively unknown California Web-design firm for an invention its creator says covers the design and creation of most rich-media applications used over the Internet. Balthaser Online Inc, the patent holder, says it could license nearly any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks.

Meaning that all these new videos that many of us are posting can equal a payment to the patent holder.

"How broad is the patent? Here's what the patent abstract says it covers: A host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded over the Internet for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account, with rich-media components added to, modified in, or deleted from the rich-media application based on information contained in a user request. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system over the Internet. "

Balthaser says he will probably sell the patent rather than try to enforce it himself.

This is the kind of stuff that goes on in the wild wild West called the net.

It seems copyright and trademark law is all screwed up when it comes to the digital age.

Just look at Google's caching system.  Is this an infringement on my content? Who told them that they can house my data on their computer? Who say that they can crawl my pages with spiders for that matter? And even if I use protocols to ask them to stop crawling my site, they will still come.

Of course, we all accept this intrusion because they bring us our web lifeblood- traffic. But the engines and other web entities seem to have redefined what is right and wrong as far as copyright. And hey let's not even get into Big Brotheresque Privacy issues.

I am far from an attorney. But it seems that the engines have paved the way for more and more people to just turn a blind eye to what would otherwise be a major lawsuit in the world of brick and mortar. Will Balthaser make any money from holding video technology users hostage. Doubtful.

Should he? I have no idea. And I bet none of us want them to. And that is the way it goes in the wild wild West.

Google Bar

Google has recently added Realnames like functionality into its tool bar. Meaning that if you type a keyword into the Google bar, Google will search for your keyword.