And he’s somewhat immature about it.
Yet another reason to become fan of the pickle. 
Edit – it is claimed that this is a hoax. Consider yourselves warned. 
With this post I hope to address some of the misunderstanding and fear mongering which surrounds Google SideWiki and other annotation services. First of all, let me explain what Google SideWiki is exactly. Basically, it’s a plugin that you install (via the Google Toolbar) that enables a sidebar on the left side of your browser. In this sidebar, you can comment on any website you visit – whether that site has enabled comments on their own site or not. This means that the website author loses control over the comments placed on the website. The video below shows how it works.
This is not the only annotation service (I prefer AddATweet), but is catching most of the attention since Google’s name is attached to it.
The response to SideWiki has been very mixed. Especially small entrepreneurs seem to be worried, voicing concerns like “what if my competitors start leaving fake negative reviews”.
Here’s how I see it…
It was never your RIGHT to control comments in the first place.
The Internet enabled this and now it’s disabling the control again. In real life, you cannot control what people say about you or your business. Since the Internet makes sharing ones opinions and reviews so easy, you better make sure you adapt to it and do a great job for others and always stay ethical! If not, sooner or later you will be called on it. This is why I also think we shouldn’t worry about competitors that try to spam your site’s SideWiki with negative comments – because if that’s their business mentality, the Web will destroy their reputation.
Google SideWiki and other annotation services make a more transparent web.
For instance, go to any hotel’s website and usually you can see customer reviews. Of course the hotels moderate these reviews, but with the Internet becoming more central to our lives by its increasing mobility (laptops, netbooks, mobile devices), it will get harder and harder to rip people off by not delivering what you promise. You have to meet expectations and exceed them if you want to succeed in a transparent world.
It’s inevitable.
To be honest, I think the cries for a ‘ban’ of Google SideWiki are absolutely ridiculous and show a complete lack of understanding of the Internet. Within the next ten years, augmented reality will become common. This would let people aim the camera of their mobile device at a restaurant and instantly receive reviews in an overlay on the screen of their mobile device – but this will be possible for every and anything. For an example of this, check out Layar in the video below.
People are already leaving comments about your business in channels you don’t own or control.
For instance on Twitter. It was just a matter of time before someone brought the reviews and the subjects of the reviews together. AddATweet has doen that, which is why I prefer AddATweet over Google’s SideWiki; it combines existing social networks with annotation… plus it doesn’t require me to download some toolbar I really don’t need or want.
The problems will solve themselves.
Yes, anonymous commenters might be a nuisance, but how much weight do people really give to such comments compared to a non-anonymous comment? Also, your personality reflects in everything that you do, so if you’re a troll, people will have trouble trusting your business and they’ll leave non-anonymous comments about this through annotation services. Perhaps there are other concerns – let’s talk about them, leave a comment!
In the end, I think these annotation services will do many times more good than bad (if they’ll do any bad at all, besides create a little more clutter to sift through).
So in short, here’s how I think annotation services, like Google SideWiki, will make the world a better place:
- Increased transparency; you can no longer say A and do B. The web will catch up with you.
- Democratization; we get to say what we want, about who we want and make others listen.
- Creating conversation; this will force any business to converse with and listen to its (potential) consumers.
- Collaboration; you can leave helpful hints for others on any website. For instance, if a website is unclear, you can point others in the right direction.
So, suck it up people. You no longer control the conversation – and you never have. If you’re worried about this, adapt your business model to something more ethical and aim to exceed expectations. Be confident!
Comments? Let’s have a discussion. You can also reach me on Twitter.
UPDATE
Within minutes of posting this, somebody called “SidewikiSux” already tweeted that there’s a lot of “BS” here in his or her honest opinion. Not sure why. Figured I would share this to show the amount of animosity towards Google’s annotation service. Opinions don’t convince me, arguments do… Let’s DISCUSS like mature people.
I’m borrowing one of my favourite Twitter memes called Follow Friday, though I hardly ever participate. On Fridays, many Twitter users recommend their followers to follow interesting people that they themselves are following. It’s kind of like networking. Actually, it’s more than just ‘kind of’ like networking!
I always find it really tough who to recommend, but I love the principle. That’s why I have decided to recommend some of the blogs I subscribe to so I stay in the know about developments in the (new) music business. Maybe you can recommend some to me too?
Digipendent
Looks at trends in music & the digital world.
Digital Audio Insider
Describes itself as a blog about the economics of digital music and I think that’s quite an accurate description.
Digital Music News
Definitely one of the best blogs out there on this topic! So I gave it some sweet italic loving!
Digital Noise
A CNET blog about music and technology. Hightlights lots of interesting innovative initiatives in the digital music business.
FileShareFreak
A blog about filesharing, piracy, torrent sites, lawsuits and other fun stuff.
Future of Music Coalition
A non-profit organisation looking at the future of the music business and how artists can cope with the rapid changes.
Hypebot
A blog about the new music business. Hardly misses a thing. Very impressive!
Make It In Music
Artists have to take more and more control of the tasks record labels previously used to take care of. This blog educates them on how to do that. Also interesting for people who are simply interested in the music business, but not as an artist.
me*dia*or
Kind of a monitor of the music business blogs. Everything in one place here, but I prefer visiting the individual blogs / reading their RSS feeds.
Media Futurist – Gerd Leonhard
The blog of Gerd Leonhard, who’s a media futurist. He appears to be touring constantly, speaking at conferences about technologies and how our society could adopt them. He shares many of his presentations, slideshows and ideas on his blog. Great material! Also check out the interview I had with him about the future of music distribution.
MIDEM(Net) Blog
MIDEM is one of the world’s biggest music business conferences. MidemNet is its simultaneous digital music business conference. The blog is filled with interesting analyses by industry experts.
Music Ally
The corporate blog of this digital music business information and strategy company.
Music Business and Trend Mongering
A blog about the great ideas and trends in the new music business.
Music Think Tank
Awesome blog about what works and doesn’t work (and why!) in the music industry. Highly recommended.
MusicBizGuy Speaks
A music business veteran’s view on the new music business. Very impressive track record and highly insightful articles.
Net, Blogs and Rock’n'Roll
A blog about the digital discovery of music and entertainment.
New Music Strategies
The name more or less speaks for itself. Sporadic posts, but high quality guaranteed.
P2P Blog
Lots of news about innovation in peer to peer technology.
p2pnet
About filesharing, peer-to-peer technology, RIAA madness, and innovation in the sharing of digital information.
Remix Theory
A blog about remix culture.
Rocketsurgeon’s Music 2.0 Directory
A listing of all the tools and services participating in the ‘new media revolution’. Very cool.
RouteNote’s Blog
RouteNote’s a company specializing in the distribution of artists’ music to (digital) music stores. Their blog offers a great look into the world of digital music distribution.
Techdirt
About innovations in technology and how this affects government policy and the economy around us. Probably my favourite blog of this whole list.
The Daily Swarm
A bit like me*dia*or, in the sense that it aggregates content from other places and links back to the full articles. Sometimes they catch something I had missed, so I try to keep up with them as much as I can.
The Forrester Blog for Consumer Strategy Professionals
Not necessarily about the music business, but definitely gives great insight into marketplaces that are changing because of technology. These guys are really on top of the trends and give valuable insights into them.
TorrentFreak
Another favourite blog. They ask some very tough questions to the music business about how they deal with filesharing. Also has a lot of news about torrent trackers, politics, what’s hot in the filesharing networks, and much much more.
TuneCorner
TuneCore also specializes in distributing signed artists’ music to digital music stores. On their blog, great tips about music and technology, insights into the new music business, and how to use the web to your advantage.
Wired | Music
Wired is a technology news website and has a music section too. Great read! They have a very talented staff.
ZeroPaid
Another (good) blog about filesharing.
What are blogs you would recommend? Did I miss any good ones?
Due to the recent case against The Pirate Bay in The Netherlands, which could render The Pirate Bay inaccessible to Dutch internet subscribers, I decided to look at ways that I could access the site if it were to get banned. Not because I want to download copyrighted material from it, but because it’s one of the best ways to distribute my DJ sets to fans. If it were to get banned, the Dutch court would sever a great distribution channel that can be (and IS) used in legal ways too.
It’s not just this case that makes me wonder, but also the fact that Dutch ISPs are required to store the surfing history of their clients for 12 months. They are required to keep a whole list of information, which can be seen at the previous link. Since I don’t trust my backwards, Christian democrat government with my data, let alone the possibility of a right-wing extremist gaining access to it after the next parliamentary elections, I decided to look into proxies.
Then I realized something. Monitoring users and infringing on their privacy, but especially restricting a medium like the internet, turns users into hackers. For instance, a lot of kids are fascinated by hackers – not just because of the picture Hollywood paints of them, but also because they face a lot of restrictions on the internet. Filters on their computer or browsers at home, even worse filters at libraries or their schools, etc. So they figure out how to dodge these filters.
It’s no coincidence that in countries like Iran, or China, which have some of the most restricted internet connections in the world, there are very high amounts of hackers. This should be a warning to those trying to control the flow of information on the internet by banning sites: we, the Internet users, will become better at dodging your filters and will become even less trackable than we are now.
What this means to the content industries (movies, music) is that right now there’s a huge database of information on the use and downloading of music. If the ‘pirates’ weren’t so scared of the industries, they wouldn’t be so anonymous and the information would be even more useful for things like testing popularity of music, but also marketing music to the right people.
Another example are the recent calls in Germany to block right-wing extremist websites. The problem with this is that it will only drive this movement underground, making it harder to track them and to prevent hate crimes. They’re already getting more internet savvy. Instead of spending so much time discussing how they can censor such websites (which will NOT decrease the amount of people with right-wing extremist tendencies), maybe they should look at how they can profile different types of people that fall prey to extremist thoughts and think of ways to integrate them into society, instead of alienating them further and making them more extreme.
By blocking our access, we’re turned into hackers. We go underground. At that point, you lose your opportunity to monetize or to influence us via our favourite medium. You’re not disconnecting us from our favourite sites, you’re disconnecting yourself from us.
Image by LShave, shared under a Creative Commons license on Flickr.
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This afternoon a Dutch court ruled in favour of Dutch copyright protectors, BREIN, in a case versus The Pirate Bay. Within ten days, The Pirate Bay must block access to all Dutch users. BREIN’s head honcho, Tim Kuik, is happy about the verdict, because The Pirate Bay (TPB), according to him, is simply illegal.
What does this verdict change though? Internet users can make TPB’s servers think they’re not in The Netherlands simply by using a proxy. The less tech-savvy users can simply use one of The Pirate Bay’s clones. Those that are getting paranoid can be relieved that people are constantly working on increasing the quality of filesharing and making it harder to track (see this article about HydraTorrent, which, by the way, has already copied all of TPB’s torrents). Now that The Pirate Bay is gone, will the market for music in The Netherlands suddenly be a little bit bigger? No, no, no. Only the lawyers are profiting from this.
So what does it achieve? It makes it easier for people to get websites banned if they disagree with the content. The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any copyrighted content, it links to it. It also hosts a lot of legal content, I personally use it to distribute my DJ sets, so thanks BREIN for killing one of my best distribution channels.
While living in Turkey I witnessed horrible web censorship. I couldn’t use YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the web, unless I used a proxy or some other workaround that simply kills the user friendliness. Why was YouTube banned? Because the Turkish government didn’t like the content of one of the movies on YouTube, because it was against the law in Turkey. When YouTube didn’t remove it, the government had ALL of YouTube blocked via the courts. For years! In an older post I already mentioned that the whole YouTube ban is pointless anyway. Research in Alexa.com’s traffic ranking system has shown that YouTube is the 10th most popular site in Turkey. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan surprised everyone when he stated that even he uses YouTube.
Not only was YouTube banned, at some point ALL of blogger/blogspot was banned, because some blogs contained copyrighted material. The website of atheist Richard Dawkins was blocked, because somebody found it to be offensive.
In Holland, blasphemy is also illegal, so is disturbance of the peace, or insulting people. These could all be precedents to take down websites now that that door has been opened. Tim Kuik is proud, but he’s only keeping lawyers paid and limiting the freedoms of the citizens of The Netherlands.
The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde wants to appeal, but they’re looking for a lawyer that can do the job for free, since they’re out of money. Besides that, they’re suing Tim Kuik for slander, because he accused them of hacking BREIN’s website, which was a hoax by the way, BREIN was never hacked.
Help us out. Spread the word. Understand that blocking sites like this does not help artists make more money, it only helps LAWYERS make more money. When they killed Napster, 10 things came in its place. There is no more stopping it. The business model needs to change. That’s the only way.
Besides that, don’t buy from artists that support this. I personally won’t buy anything anymore from any artist supporting or represented by BREIN. Especially artists shouldn’t align themselves with freedom-infringing practices like this. Art is about expression, not repression and free expression only happens in free environments.
A Facebook app called YearBookYourself is doing its rounds and going viral because of its high level of awesome. Before I talk more of the bore, here’s what I would’ve looked like had I been 23 in the 80s.
Awesome, I know. Go check out YearBookYourself, upload your pic and see what you would’ve looked like anywhere from the 50s to the 2000s, with a 2 year interval. Share the results! (on your blog or in the comments! )
As the regular readers here know very well, I’m quite the techy and invest a lot of time in the social web and the web 2.0 landscape. Doing that, I realize we sometimes take things for granted, so to speak. We feel like YouTube or Facebook have been around for an eternity, but neither of them are more than 5 years old (or open to the public for that amount of time).
The web changes, fast and so does the world around us (which this video reminds us of). Many bloggers and web fanatics, see search engine optimization (SEO) as something holy. If you just figure out the right keywords, manipulate your site’s content in such a way so that the search spiders will crawl your site and give you high traffic rankings, then you’ll be successful.
One of the most important ways in which Google gives page rankings, is links! If your content is linked to often, then it’s worth more than content that is not talked about a lot. To Google, the only content more valuable than that is the content whose publishers will pay for to promote it. Basically, Google assumes that your content is worth talking about, based on the links. The problem that arises now however, is that Google’s becoming less and less able to track the links coming from the most valuable conversations: those on social networks.
Earlier I mentioned Facebook. If you click a link on Facebook, it sends you to the page with a nice and shiny Facebook bar above it. On Facebook a link to this post would look something like this:
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=123091020346&h=ukq9m&u=L423Y&ref=mf
Instead of like this: http://www.basbasbas.com/blog/2009/07/20/the-death-of-seo/
Popular social bookmarking service Digg also does something similar. Actually, they’re worse, because Digg is actually hijacking traffic.
Probably the most common SEO killer is the Short URL. Services like TinyURL, Bit.ly, is.gd and tr.im make URLs shorter so they fit into the 140 characters that Twitter offers, or just so that long and ugly URLs look more elegant or are easier to paste somewhere (sometimes email clients tend to mess up really long URLs).
Where will this lead?
Half the time I’m looking for something, I use Twitter’s search engine. Why? Well, it’s time relevant, personal, let’s you interact with those that share the content and it can reveal trends. Twitter’s engine is still a bit basic and I expect to see some marvellous services that will start rivalling Google in the coming years. OneRiot could be such an engine. Maybe it will be Friendfeed if they reach critical mass so that Friendfeed will not be just for techies anymore.
What do you think? Will social networks mean the death of SEO as we know it? What is SEO anno 2009 and what will it be five years from now? What role will social media play in this?
Share this story on Twitter or Facebook! Here’s the short URL: http://bit.ly/QJ4u0
For a while now I’d been thinking it would be kind of cool if there was a Tweetup in Sofia, especially after all the Twestivals in 202 cities around the world. Well, a fellow Sofia resident, @brainpicker, contacted me with the idea and now it’s finally going to happen.
It will be held on the 24th of February in a bar/club called Hambara, which is a very special location. It’s located at ul. 6-ti Septemvri 22, just behind restaurant Zion. You can recognize it by a wooden doorway in the alleyway behind the restaurant; the door’s unmarked and you have to knock (more here). Would love to see you there at 9 o’ clock in the evening!
So if you’re a Twitter user in/around Sofia, then come to the meet up. Help spread the message and use the hashtag #hambara09.
See who’s Tweeting about the Sofia tweetup (#hambara09) (more…)
amfufu.com by @RuthsCreations has won the Giveaway! So long Entrecard!
I announced earlier that I’ll be leaving Entrecard in my 8 Reasons to Quit Entrecard post. The day has come and my final ad has run. I’m leaving now. I have however 1100+ credits left, that I’ll be GIVING AWAY to visitors of this blog.
For the next 24 hours every EC user that Tweets me (http://twitter.com/spartz) a link to their profile gets a chance to win a share! (keep reading!)
Since I want everyone to have an equal chance and don’t want to give away 100 credits to people (since that’s really nothin), I will do it as follows…
I’ll divide the total number of participants by 7 and pick that number of winners via random.org. I previously suggested to give every seventh person a share, but since this can be monitored, I decided to make it more random. So tweet me now (!) using this format:
@Spartz I am joining your Entrecard Giveaway (http://doiop.com/EC). The link to my profile is: http://is.gd/c9sQ
You can use a link shortener for your profile URL at is.gd – but this is not a rule.
Just follow these simple rules. I highly value people who follow instructions, because it shows that they care and that they’re paying attention. Any entry not according to instructions will not be counted.
I guess this adds one more reason to the list of reasons to use Twitter.
BasBasBas.com is about my life as a Dutch student living in Istanbul. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.
I am leaving Entrecard. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about it and recent events have made the decision all the more easier. I’ve turned off advertising on my blog. When my last ad finishes, on the 16th, the widget goes. Until that time I’m still returning drops.
Entrecard is a social network for bloggers who can drop by each others’ blogs and earn credits in return. With these credits, they can advertise on each others blogs. A nice system, but in the end it’s not worth it for me.
If you’re a blogger using Entrecard, don’t take any of the following points personal. If any of them insult you, please keep reading on until the end of this article.
So stop caring about your Google PageRank (PR) people, I have zero PR and I get a LOT of search engine traffic. Start worrying about writing good content, writing some linkbait and having high keyword density (but not too high or you’ll get flagged as spam ). While Graham is saying the negative publicity is only good for Entrecard, his poor leadership is not and new and current members will soon realize that.I'm Bas, 24, an International Comm. Management student from The Netherlands. Since the summer of 2007 I've lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for a total of one year and Istanbul, Turkey for half a year. I'm currently back at home in The Netherlands. I write about the future of music, living abroad, traveling, all things 2.0, the future, and a little activism. I love photography and making videos, so my posts are often accompanied by those media. More on me? Check out my social media profiles:
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