The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

Ads: they seem to be everywhere! Ad banners, popups, interstitials. They are never ending; a huge part of the web’s great commerce. However, these ads may be taking more from you then you realize.

Google, eBay and many millions of other sites use ads that spy on us: they find out what we are looking at, where we live, and a whole lot more. Google scans emails sent and received in Gmail, eBay uses are account information.

But what gives them the right? We haven’t asked for those ads, and we haven’t agreed with them, that prying on us and invading our privacy is ok.

A new ad site that has sprung up is Phorm. It already has agreements with BT,Virgin and other UK ISPs, that allows it to look at your live browsing history, and serve appropriate ads. The service isn’t yet live, but will be shortly. In my opinion, this is a direct invasion of our privacy. What gives Phorm the right?

Internet Advertising is now a valuable commodity, with many sites providing free services in return for the ads. Examples are Facebook and Spotify. While it’s great that we can get these free services, it is not ok with me, that these ads are spying on me. I should complain; if only I knew who to…?  

JK

The Net is home to hundreds of millions of websites, ranging from Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, to the taboo, illegal, murky side of the Web.

Should the government be able to stop us accessing this content? What about Torrent sites etc? If the government has power to block any site it wishes, perhaps it will start blocking sites that are critical of it, that speak out negatively about new policy?

What is the limit? Could we start living in a Chinese-Communist society, where our internet is firewalled? I believe this is against our human and civil rights. We should have freedom of speech, and that means accessing any sort of web content that we wish to.

In Australia, the Government has asked the major ISPs to participate in a trial of filtering over 10,000 websites that are deemed to have illegal content on them.

Rightly so, Telstra, the largest ISP has denied this, and other ISPs are following suit. My worry is could we see the same sort of thing over here in the UK? Could we be monitored? 1984 may become 2009. I hope not.

JK

Today, BT has announced a ‘trial’ of fibre to the cabinets technology. In Muswell Hill, London, and Whitchurch, South Wales. Homes and businesses in the area will be able to enjoy broadband speeds of up to 40mb! The trial is due to start next year, and it’s definitely a step in the right way.

But why couldn’t they have done this earlier? What about the rest of us? In Japan and South Korea, users already enjoy 100mb broadband; costing the same as my 4mb! (Sky Unlimited, £10 per month).

The Internet is apparently on the brink of collapse, with the popularity of Youtube, BBC iPlayer and others. This would solve the issue, and make surfing the web amazingly fast. It would also lead to ‘Cloud Computing’, (the use of processing power of high performance computers elsewhere), which demands high speed Internet.

This is something I blogged about a few months ago. Hopefully BT’s trial will be proved successful!

JK

ChaCha are a fairly new company, in the Question and Answer market. Basically, US users text in any questions they like, free, and ChaCha texts back the answer.

How they do this, is using “Guides”; knowledgeable individuals, who get paid to reply to the questions through the ChaCha web portal. For every answer, they get paid $0.10; the top guides getting twice as much.

Out of curiosity, I tried to become a guide earlier today. Unfortunately, they rejected me at the first questioning stage; the ChaCha Fitness Stage. The topic? ChaCha.

Of course, I had no idea. To be honest, the founder of the company, the place that it was announced and the company’s ethos do not really interest me in the foggiest.

I can imagine how important to an American when their out-and-about to find out that “Cha” means dance in Chinese, and Scott Jones invented the concept. Wow.

I also fail to see how ChaCha actually makes any money. Users don’t have to pay anything to the company to text in, and the texts don’t have ads. Great business model.

JK 

Broadband has never been so popular, with over 50% of adults having it in the UK. But as the technology becomes more widespread, and the choice on the Internet wider, is the technology and the experience getting better?