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“Cord Cutting”: Web Telecom Bundles Are Killing the Cable Store

While it’s hard to tell the difference anymore with media evolving all over the place, giant telecoms — with likely all of them jumping into the Internet bundle market to compete with the digital programming successes of HBO and Netflix — are beating up dinosaur cable companies so badly that many of the latter will do practically anything any more to stop customers from jumping ship.

Cable originally came to most of us during the mid-1980s and later. Cable broke the four- or five-channel model that most Americans watched practically since the early 1950s. We welcomed cable, which instead offered us 24-7 content with a lot of good and bad channels: the sports we liked (ESPN); the news machine we really liked and really hated (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News); the news we scoffed at and now feel sorry for (Ted Turner’s CNN); at-times revolutionary but largely inane music videos (MTV); and specialty raunchy but wry content (David Chappelle and Comedy Central).

But over time, bad cable channels have greatly outnumbered the bad. Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 dirge, “57 Channels And Nothing On”, dates me — but well illustrates the point.

Most of the country’s viewers are still comprised of people too lazy, too scared of change, too fearful that something will go wrong and waste time, or just plain too damn busy to switch away from a model that grants cable companies nearly regional monopoly status. These cable companies still earn astronomical profits as practical “cable annuities.”

Count me among the sheeple still paying into the cable annuity monster. But I — along with millions of us, blessedly — am increasingly converting to the Internet bundle world of watch-as-you-want, when-you-want, at monthly rates sometimes considerably less than 10 percent of standard cable. Tens of millions now pull up “Game of Thrones” on HBO, along with “House of Cards” and the enchanting “Peaky Blinders” BBC series on Netflix, whenever they want.

Many have labeled the shift away from cable to Internet program bundles as “cord cutting.” Some lament the dizzying array of program offerings, among them the great Tim Wu in “The Dreaded Bundle Comes to Internet TV”, from the May 3, 2015, New Yorker.

Also comes The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Pfanner, who writes “Sony Joins Crowd of Online TV Providers,” about Sony PlayStation’s Vue service, and many other Internet services taking shape.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

“Mobilegeddon” Fallout: Google’s April 21, 2015 Mobile Search Algorithm Changes

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Image Source & Credit: SearchEngineLand.com. They and others are already calling winners and losers, but it’s far too early to say for many reasons.

How Mobile-Friendly For Search Is Your Web Site? Click Google’s Test Site To Know Whether Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Mobile Phone Advantages Are Clear, As Search Is Always Changing
Although the verdict is still out on Google’s major mobile search changes on April 21, 2015 — which could lessen or boost your web site’s chances of showing up for your customers — changes for better or worse (depending on any changes for your site’s “searchability”) are happening. Preliminary data show that important brands have suffered significant declines, at least for now.

For example, according to SearchMetrics, megasites like Reddit.com (27% loss in percent of actual visibility), NBCSports.com (28% loss) and WalmartStores.com (31% loss) have seen losses in the number of mobile users who had previously searched keywords and phrases that Google had generated for these sites.

Declines for these sites, amid likely upticks for others, has happened in just six days, according to the full Search Metrics report.

Changes Will Be Dynamic Over Time
But that’s the catch: It’s really quite early, as the planet is not even a full week into this. Whether Google is chasing its tail to catch up and reveal to researchers what changes are occurring (Google’s blogs are saying that mobile site search has gained a 5 percent uptick), or whether currently “deposed” sites need to improve their mobile SEO — OR whether a likely untold number of other factors apply — these worldwide changes to Google’s search markers will continue dynamically to show up over time.

So, much more later.

Amazon’s Dash Button: Easiest & Wildest Way Yet To Buy Family Products

Amazon might convince all of us how easy this “Internet of Things” might get — and potentially, how ubiquitous.

Never mind, if possible, concerns and promises over Amazon’s controversial delivery drones, otherwise unmanned, small, whirling, low-altitude flying machines (with live-feed cameras) delivering products to our homes. Also never mind, if you can, concerns over all those potential additional connectivity needs foreseen to be required inside our homes. (More on that in a minute.)

It’s just too darn easy to use Amazon’s new Wi-Fi Dash Button (introduced the day before April Fools Day, 2015). All Amazon requires to buy products is pre-enabling your phone, and pushing a separate “dash button” that you can place almost anywhere in your home. Welcome to Amazon on your fridge, on your coffee maker, on your kitchen sink, on your washer and drier, in your bathroom medicine chest.

Or stuck, of course, to your tissue and toilet paper holders.

And stuck on your hallway walls. In your cabinets. On your stairwell. In your closets. And stuck on your home office desk. Anywhere and everywhere in your home are good by Amazon.

Running out of Tide? Push Amazon’s “Tide” Dash Button. Low on Gillette disposable razors? Push Amazon’s Gillette Dash Button. Jonesing for some good, old-fashioned Maxwell House? Push Amazon’s Maxwell House Dash Button.

In fact, avoid shopping altogether and push your Cottonelle, Bounty and Smart Water Amazon Dash buttons, along with your Olay, Glad, Gerber Amazon Dash buttons, and increasingly those of other international brands.

While most of us can still marvel at the sheer technology of easily pushing a button — while Amazon of course repeatedly dings our credit cards along the way — and have products delivered to our doors, what are the possible societal effects if Amazon and other in-home Wi-Fi ordering systems become widely adopted?

Delivery logistics technology and low-skill manual labor to ship products will surely rise, but getting out of our homes might become less necessary. Grocery stores and large box stores as we know them will surely lose customers, but cheaper prices for packaged goods might benefit customers, at least in the beginning. To be sure: Amazon and their partners will undoubtedly learn a lot more about us, while we sate ourselves with oodles of Cottonelle, Tide and Bounty.

In fact, these dash buttons are just the beginning, says the Wall Street Journal: The truer order of the Internet of Things is that our home, personal and business devices will do our ordering FOR us. Won’t we all be happier if systems charge our credit cards or online accounts, and simply order things and deliver them to us? Surely, we are told, we will.

Here is a piece on Amazon’s most recent home-ordering product from The Wall Street Journal’s Nathan Olivarez-Giles: “Amazon’s Dash Button Is Not a Hoax, It’s Phase One”

Finally, here is Ian Crouch’s take from the April 2, 2015, edition of The New Yorker: “The Horror of Amazon’s New Dash Buttons”

Can A Computer Write A Novel? Automated Journalism, J-Bots & Variable Digital Marketing

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Photo Credit: Washington Post
Read “This is what happens when a bot writes an article about journalism”, December 6, 2014, Washington Post

Never mind that the old morning ritual of reading your printed newspaper has increasingly given way to reading your phone, tablet or desktop. You increasingly are reading articles written entirely by computers.

The rise of automated journalism, J-bots and variable digital media has driven many traditional news readers and journalists crazy, at least some of us. Sorry to pigeonhole, but many younger consumers do not appear to mind at all, and media organizations which used to employ real, human journalists, have been forced to adopt content services that radically reduce production costs and times, focus and shape content based on user data preferences, all of which has fueled expected controversies over what real news and verifiable information are. To be blunt: Hundreds of thousands of unemployed former print journalists and marketers will tell you that print now follows digital around like a long, lost — and replaceable — puppy dog.

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Illustration Credit: Automated Insights
Among many emerging software companies that offer application services that automate writing and other content creation is Automated Insights and Wordsmith, their “platform for automated, personalized writing.”

While automation software kinks might churn out articles and content that don’t sound or read quite right — remember the HAL 9000 computer that illogically started singing “Daisy” in the 1968 movie classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”? — fewer and fewer readers or content consumers can tell the difference between a human-written piece and a computer-generated article.

Advocates of greater automation — in public media, corporate annual reporting and many other arenas — argue that dramatically reduced costs, enhanced accountability through tracking, and simply “giving consumers what they want” represent at least three compelling reasons to keep pushing the mediabot revolution. Many in the automation industry talk about the ability to “turn up the satire or snark” in an opinion piece, or “turning down confrontational language” in a human interest story. Automation particularly appeals to advocates in the statistic-heavy professions of financial and sports reporting, as some applications can spit out as many as 2,000 stories per second, complete with art, charts, graphs and video. Except for input work and writing new software to produce even more content, no human being can do that.

Opponents say that automated content reduces the human element, diminishes important serendipity in terms of what media we read, watch and engage in, and that we are increasingly seeing damaging effects of constantly data-mining ourselves and fellow human beings through: 1) our digital devices that are produced and networked by large telecoms and Internet service providers; 2) through our use of social media like Facebook, Twitter and nearly countless others; 3) through the exploding growth and use of free gaming applications that burrow their way into all our devices and track virtually every bit of our personal data; and 4) through online retail giants such as Amazon, Alibaba and many more, which track our digital information, relaying back the “who, what, when, where and why” of our lives.

Facebook Tracking Logged-Out Users, Belgians Say

Read The Article Here – By Ben Woods, Author, The Next Web, March 31, 2015

Facebook, America’s virtual meeting place for tens of millions of citizens and overwhelmingly considered the world’s foremost marketing engine titan, provides opt-out preferences for its users, and based on those preferences, Facebook says those who prefer tracking will get tracked, and those who opt out of tracking are not tracked.

Now come allegations from across the pond that Facebook also has been tracking (at least Belgian) logged-out users, in violation of European Union data privacy laws. Facebook disputes the charges and argues that an untold number of other web sites track users in many ways, permission-based or not, and those sites use Facebook tracking code that activate digital ads back to Facebook when users log back into their Facebook accounts. Belgium argues that Facebook is liable for all other web sites that are using Facebook code to track users.

Awareness that all users are generally always tracked likely is the best consideration when registering for anything at any web site, perhaps especially social media and applications. When you sign up, assess your own wants and needs, and change your preferences accordingly. If you feel you are benefiting from being tracked by getting good deals online, keep going for it. If you feel your privacy concerns are valid even if you’ve opted out, report that to the site, or further, to local privacy advocates and state or federal authorities.

Elon Musk, Founder of Space X & Tesla Motors, Warns Against Excesses of Artificial Intelligence

April 21 Deadline: Google To Boost Mobile Sites For Phones, Less So For Tablets & Desktops

“Google Will ‘Kick Your Butt’ If Your Site Is Not Mobile Friendly” – Marketing Digest

Same Old, Same Old: Mobile Marches On
If there were ever a time to update your digital content to ensure mobile devices can best show your web site to customers, now is the time.

Google Sets Mobile Gauntlet Date at April 21
Google: “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” Click For Entire Letter from Google

MOOCs, “The End of College” & “The University of Everywhere”

It is clear that education is changing, as it always has and will. But few would argue against thinking that the Internet has changed education most quickly. Massive Open Online Courses, or “MOOCs,” have been around for at least a decade, perhaps made “institutional” by “edX”, the free online college course web site mutually created and managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and California-Berkley.

But now comes “The End of College,” a book by Kevin Carry, an American higher education writer and policy analyst. Many are describing the book as utopian, because Carry envisions free education societies where people of all varieties worldwide gather, most often online and in-person considerably less. Carry argues this “University of Everywhere,” will replace the traditional college experience of living and attending class on campus.

Economics will push many students away from traditional college and toward online courses, as average national student and graduate debt tops more than $30,000. As much as education has changed and continues to, it’s difficult to imagine a world without traditional universities and colleges, which run deeply with the American mindset of families “raising themselves up,” and companies and institutions which still place high stock in college graduates. (Plus: College football still needs a home, right?)

Never Mind “The Internet of Things” – Try “The Internet of Us”

A Man With An Internet Pacemaker Walks Into A Bar…

The device in that man’s chest, a life-giving second or third chance at life, might be connected as an Internet Protocol (IP) address to the Internet. Increasingly, pacemakers ARE connected to the web and enable doctors to monitor heart health and other physical attributes of patients. A positive thing? Many if not most patients would think so. But what if that IP address is hacked by someone living in Kiev, Tehran or maybe Peoria? That someone, that hacker, might be able to jolt that man’s heart, causing pain, suffering or even death.

This is NOT fiction, according to Mark Goodman, a longtime security and anti-terrorism advisor, and author of “Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It”.

Although Goodman breezily takes readers through numerous pitfalls of our increasingly connected age — terrorist war rooms, networks and entire cities — he proposes measures to protect ourselves against hacktivists (at least the bad ones), and challenges governments and companies to create another Manhattan Project, but this time for widespread cyber-security.

Goodman excoriates politicians and CEOs alike for not speaking about threats these people well know. According to Goodman, it takes the average company 211 days AFTER cyber-security threats have already occurred to be aware of any system hacking. Consider only recent major hacks of Sony, Target, AOL and JP Morgan Chase, and you get an idea of the scope — now and in the future — of the problem.

If our cyber-security problems are as small as a golf ball right now, Goodman says consider the Sun as our comparative obstacle in the future. Stay vigilant, take charge and, Goodman advises, “get intentional” about the security of the Internet of Things — and of People.