Remember when Google adopted “Don’t Be Evil” as its unofficial motto? You’ll find that little ditty at a yard sale next to a Bay City Rollers album and a skinny leather tie decorated like a piano. Because this week Google announced it was drastically changing its privacy policy and the side of sharing – and [...]
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Getting Rational on SOPA
January 25, 2012
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The debate on the Stop Online Piracy Act (known as SOPA) has jumped the shark. SOPA and its companion bill Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) were both shelved recently by Congress and the Senate after a frenzied protest by dozens of websites and Internet companies including Google, Wikipedia and Facebook. The goal of the bills [...]
Read moreWhat the Heck is SOPA?
January 18, 2012
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If you’re online today – or on Twitter or Facebook – you’ve likely seen the acronym SOPA. You may have also noticed that several website including Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo have altered their sites to protest SOPA. Check out the blacked out Google logo above. What’s going on? SOPA stands for the Stop Online Privacy [...]
Read more The Internet’s “Free” Problem
July 28, 2010
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Findings from the 2010 Digital Future Project released this month: 49% of Internet users have tried free micro-blogging services like Twitter 0% of them would be willing to pay for it. That’s zero (Z-E-R-O) percent. As in nobody. As Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future, noted: “Such an extreme finding [...]
Read moreFacebook Has Grown Faster than the Internet
July 22, 2010
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Five hundred million people have signed up for Facebook in the six years since it was founded. The company announced this staggering statistic yesterday. Yet for some people, especially those in business, discussions about Facebook come with an eye roll and references to teenagers. To these people Facebook – like social media in general – [...]
Read moreThe Rise of the Virtual Economy
July 20, 2010
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Imagine the surprise of a Florida father when he opened his credit card bill recently and discovered $600 being paid to Tap Fish. Little did he know that he was pumping up the virtual economy. For those that don’t know – Tap Fish is a free smart phone app that allows users to create a [...]
Read moreHating the Internet is Easy
July 14, 2010
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Alex Beam hates the Internet. The crusty (generally ill-tempered) Boston Globe columnist writes: “Come on. Admit it. You hate the Internet a little, too. Ten years ago, you could get away with saying that the Himalayan peak K-2 was “about 29,000 feet high.’’ Now, that obnoxious guy — you know who I mean — whips [...]
Read moreDo Hyperlinks Endanger Reading?
June 16, 2010
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I’m reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” Generally, I’d include a hyperlink to Carr’s book, but I’m not going to do so until the end of this blog post. Why? Because recent neurological studies cited in Carr’s fascinating book indicate that hyperlinks interrupt reading – and thus damage [...]
Read moreHas the Web Ruined Vacations?
June 1, 2010
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Welcome back from Memorial Day weekend. But did you ever really leave? Did you resist checking your Blackberry or iPhone for email messages? Did you send any in return? Did you update your corporate blog? Or tweet about a work-related topic? Did you get a jump start on that presentation? Or even do some web-based [...]
Read moreLive Dangerously, Go Online
April 20, 2010
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Not long ago, I bought a new computer and gave my wife my the old one to use around the house. She used it primarily for email and online shopping. My wife isn’t very technical (the understatement of understatements). So when she kept getting bothered with pop-up reminders to update the computer’s security software, she [...]
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HighTalk by George F. Snell III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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