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YouTube Red: Again, More Content Subscription Services

Image Credits: Adam Clark Estes, gizmodo.com, “YouTubers Are Up In Arms About YouTube Red”, 10/22/15

It Keeps On Coming
Again, more paid content to choose from: Will we have more unique Apple, ComCast, Netflix, HBO, Hulu services — ad nauseum? Do we already have too damn many subscription services for $10 monthly? Will it ever end?

It’s reasonable to answer yes to more unique programming, hell yes to endless $10 monthly bundled rates — and hell no: Because of ever-evolving media, it will never end.

Evidence: Now comes “YouTube Red”, the social media goliath’s next big step to monetize, for $10 monthly, certain things we post, certain things we love, and many things we certainly hate. Stuff we don’t care about, and stuff we adamantly do.

Who Is Affected?
Upon first reading, regular users — ranging from those like me who pull up Neil Young and listen to his entire discography for free or find old college football games to watch in their entirity, to those who endlessly post kitty videos — might not be affected too much right away. (January is the rollout target month.)

But it’s very difficult to think people who eventually refuse to pay 10 bones per month will not be left with chaff, while those who do will get much more, or simply get what we get right now.

Deal Long in the Works?
Maybe this is the kind of deal YouTube has been presenting to premium content providers and media groups that represent artists like Neil Young or Katy Perry. The deal might have gone something like this: Give us your stuff for free now, while we all pay a loss-leader, and then later on (like January 2016), we will rev up YouTube Red and we all live pretty happily thereafter.

I’m in the media business and giant media ever-fascinate and confuse me. Most YouTubers are freaking out, based on today’s Twitterverse. Here are other perspectives:

Adam Clark Estes, gizmodo.com, “YouTubers Are Up In Arms About YouTube Red”, 10/22/15

October 26, 2015 at 10:00 AM: YouTube Red And The Future Of Paid Streaming, Tom Ashbrook, OnPoint from WBUR Boston

“Meet YouTube Red, the ultimate YouTube experience”, Wednesday, October 21, 2015.

“Some gaming videos are getting blocked in the United States due to YouTube Red”, 9:00 AM on 10.25.2015, by Jed Whitaker

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.

DreamForce: SalesForce’s Gaudy & Annualy Necessary Tech Show

Photo Credit: SalesForce

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — DreamForce ends today in downtown San Francisco after four raucous days of innovative exhibitions, product demos, bands and mini-concerts — and parties. SalesForce, the force behind DreamForce, is the world’s largest and most-used software used by any number of businesses and institutions to track prospects, to earn business and to crunch data and serve it up conveniently like no one’s business.

All on your phone or anywhere else. While in San Francisco. And doesn’t sales data strike you as Party! material?

Well, it does to millions.

So perhaps the most emblematic app heralded during DreamForce has been PartyForce, which, as BusinessInsider’s Eugene Kim, says “comes with a lot more features than you’d expect, like a list of all the parties, a photo feed of user comments and photos, and even messaging. If you’re lucky, you might even get a chance to party on the Dreamboat, the cruise ship Salesforce rented for Dreamforce.”

Not bad. Obviously SalesForce is a sales kingpin and has taken businesses in many successful and documented directions, with more customers than anyone offering smart sales data to their customers. But with DreamForce, I get the whiff and memory of Apple partying like it was the early 2000s with their iPhone debuts, with now Apple only hoping to rival the energy of the current SalesForce phenomenon.

Read much more in Kim’s BusinessInsider piece, “This app shows the real reason most people come to Dreamforce”.

Ultraprivate Smartphones – The Great MIT and Silent Circle’s Phil Zimmerman

All image rights and credits the sole property of Technology Review and David Talbot’s piece, Ultraprivate Smartphones.

Quaint Times
We all love our smartphones, and we both love and hate the addiction — perhaps most of us anyway. Many of us remember a time you had to head home, or go to the office, or find a corner phone booth to make a call. Arguably most of us remember having actually to wait until we were at home or at work to make a phone call or pull up our email, or to do too many things nowadays to count on our phones. What drudgery, some might think of the pre-smartphone era. But what quaint times.

Phones Are Becoming Our Internet Experience
We all know the conveniences of our smartphones: Get a text from your college son or daughter who needs a little cash before the end of the month, then transfer money to their bank accounts; while camping, take a shot of a beautiful sunrise, then text the pic to your parents; see a great football action shot of your favorite team, then text a whole group of your friends. Any time, practically anywhere. Among other wonders. All on your phone.

Pitfalls A’Plenty
Before we get to some points about the amazing crypto-security wonders happening at MIT, with associated technology brainiacs and their work on phone privacy, I will point out that we all “kind of” know the pitfalls of our smartphones: They are, in order, security, security and security. In the back of our reptilian brains if not in our frontal lobes, we know that whatever and whomever we text, email, call or visit, is stored by any number of companies, governments, individuals and whoever the hell else. Either through hacking or questionably legitimate means, we are inextricably watched and listened to mother ship phone and web servers that monitor our every keystroke and GPS us at every turn. For better or worse.

Phones Are Glued To Our Kids’ Hands
Whether we like it or not, we just love all this Internet crap. My wife made sure our sons, now ages 19 and 21, had cell phones when they were 7 or 8. “Why does a 7-year-old need a smartphone?” and “Why do I feel like an idiot if I wonder whether my uninitiated young sons need a phone?” I would ask her. “To keep them up to speed!” and “So I can call them whenever I want!” she would retort, while I looked like (and still do) a comparative Luddite in our home. Looking back, my boys were early adopters and we think they gained more than those whose parents kept phones away from their kids. My boys were in the arena at an early age.

In The Arena, Full of Sweat & Dust & Blood
We all generally need to be in that arena, whether we like it or not. If you aren’t there, your competitors, families, friends and colleagues are. So that’s where we all want to be, security be damned.

Ultraprivate Smartphones, Phil Zimmerman & PGP
Now to MIT. What more can these gals and guys do to advance the security of phones? In “Ultraprivate Smartphones: New models built with security and privacy in mind reflect the Zeitgeist of the Snowden era”, by David Talbot of TechnologyReview.com, covers the work of Phil Zimmerman, founder of Silent Circle, which helps individuals and organizations keep their phone calls private. Talbot and others call Zimmerman a “crypto warrior” who stands against the forces of secret metadata collection and surveillance. Zimmerman is a longtime privacy advocate, and is credited for starting “PGP” technology that most Internet Service Providers use today to encrypt email going to and coming into their servers.

Read Talbot’s Technology Review piece on the great cyber warrior Phil Zimmerman, and vist Zimmerman’s Silent Circle web site.

New “Alphabet” Name Shows How Presumptive (And Good) Google Might Be

Attribution and All Photo Illustration Credits: The Guardian

“Alphabet” Presumes A Lot
It’s hard to imagine naming your company “Planet Earth”, or “Universe” or “Everything Under The Sun”, but Google comes pretty close. In recent corporate re-structuring hailed (temporarily) by Wall Street, Google restructured and re-named itself “Alphabet” to bring all its disparate companies under one roof. From its core search and advertising business that underwrites it all, to energy, to curing cancer, to driver-less cars, to web-enabled eyeglasses, Alphabet now enlists “moonshot” projects along with what everybody knows Google best for: search.

Laudable Missions
Google’s missions are laudable and reflect worthy passions among its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn. After all, besides moonshot pioneer Elan Musk, few executives of publicly held web companies do not often stray too far from stockholders’ collective wishes: core business.

“Banal Search”
According to The Guardian’s Evgeny Morozov, in his August 16, 2015 piece, “Google may have changed its name but the game remains the same”, the company is simply temporarily righting its troubles with investors. Morozov writes that Page and Brinn aspire well beyond “banal search” and the advertising that supports it.

“Alphabet – a nice example of corporate plastic surgery at work – makes explicit what everybody has known for a while,” Morozov writes. “Google’s founders are tired of and deeply embarrassed by the company’s core business. Selling ads, after all, is not a business that requires a PhD from Stanford or MIT – in fact, it’s so mind-numbingly banal and inelegant that all those brainy scientists on Google’s payroll must have an identity crisis every time they realise how their moonshot projects are actually financed.”

Google/Alphabet Does Good Work, No Matter What
Page and Brynn revolutionized search and have established Google — that is, Alphabet — as the undisputed data Goliath of our digital times. The very verb “to Google,” now means “to search” for mostly all of us. And the business pair are serial (and I would argue “benevolent”) entrepreneurs at the highest levels with their work outside search. So even if Morozov and others consider the re-naming of Google a deft attempt to boost Wall Street stock, so be it.

Cable Unbundling Thankfully Continues, As Do Pitfalls

Attribution and All Photo Credits: Gannett Corporation

More on ESPN’s Woes Due To Cable Unbundling: Andrew Logue’s August 12, 2015 Des Moines Register Piece, “Cable unbundling makes college power brokers uneasy”.

ESPN Still Widely Watched & Loved
Like tens or even hundreds of millions of viewers in this country and around the world, I love ESPN and always have. The network has covered historic games and matches; has uncovered countless numbers of stories, athletes and teams around the country since the early 1980s; and has driven greater sports media from other providers, while introducing us to great American sports communities like no media before.

Ways of Watching ESPN Evolving
ESPN came to us only through cable television for its first 25 years or so, but with the advent of web streaming for at least a decade, viewers have subscribed to EPSN’s wide variety of sports web channels, or have simply put up with cable costs sometimes five times the cost to subscribe to widening digital ESPN and many other web streaming choices, what the industry calls “over the top” services, like Netflix, Hulu and HBO.

Why Is ESPN So Important?
As viewers flocked to ESPN over the years, cable companies used the very popular ESPN as a battering ram to gain and retain viewers to continue paying the cable monster. Cable companies — awash for decades in subscriber money while still enjoying revenues from commercials, which subscribers are forced to watch, although we already pay for cable! — provided some other popular content (examples include Comedy Central, Disney and Fox channels among them). But beyond these rare good channels, the rest have been what many Americans might politely describe as crap. Thus, the flood to find cheaper and better web streaming alternatives.

Current Cable Unbundling Trends Put ESPN At Risk
ESPN has reportedly lost more than three million cable subscribers in a little over a year, and its parent company Disney has demanded deep cuts into ESPN’s budget for 2016 and 2017. Current web streaming is gutting the cable industry, the same industry that brought ESPN to all of us many years ago. And given ever-widening digital alternatives, no signs indicate this trend will change.

Swift Shakes Off Apple, But Others Reveal Swift’s Own Apple-Like Demands

Photo Credit: Petapixel.com – “An Open Response to Taylor Swift’s Rant Against Apple”, by Jason Sheldon

First, Swift Got It Right With Apple
Got to hand it to Taylor Swift, who stood up to the age-old antics and threats of companies like Apple, which perennially treat content providers frankly often like garbage. After Swift told Apple that she would withhold her album “1989” from iTunes, Apple responded in less than 24 hours by acknowledging they had made a mistake by not paying their streaming artists for three months to boost Apple’s current three-month campaign to stream music for free to users. The move by Apple to not pay artists was a classic loss-leader — get users in the door quickly, then move the goalposts by making them pay. All good if you pay the piper yourself, but all bad if you are doing it on the backs of music creatives.

Second, Swift’s Demands Reveal Her Own Apple-Like Demands
The young Swift, a celebrity because she is a music creative with currently unrivaled promotional prowess, has done the right thing, and the creative community salutes her. But many creatives, especially photographers close to celebrity image work, salute only halfheartedly. For example, Jason Sheldon, a photographer who writes for Petapixel.com, also thanks Swift and other artists for standing up to Apple in his piece, “An Open Response to Taylor Swift’s Rant Against Apple”.

Swift Plays Apple Boogie Man Role Herself
But he points to Swift’s own hypocrisy in her and her company’s demands of photographers and other creatives in terms of publishing rights. Swift is not alone among well-known artists, but essentially, Sheldon says Swift largely restricts photographers from submitting photos of herself to other publishing groups, while at the same time reserving her own rights to submit photos or other content by those same creatives as she or her company sees fit.

Music & All Media Are Shifting-Sand Land
This is an old story: Those with the cash, as with Apple — or the cache’, as with Swift — can call many shots. And in an ever-changing, media-saturated world that grows more saturated, quite literally, less than every second that passes, the demands, demonizing and doubling down of too many interests to count will evolve.

Or, in many cases, devolve.

“Rise of The Hackers”: PBS’s “Nova” Reveals Digital Security Wars Among Teens, Criminals & Nations

Photo Source & Complete Documentary: PBS – “Rise Of The Hackers”

“Rise of the Hackers” appeared in November 2014, but the digital security challenges explored in this exceptional documentary merit full mention here. Click Rise for the full piece, and rewind to explore concepts such as “ultra-paranoid” computing; the Stuxnet worm that hacked Iranian nuclear plants, and was launched by the United States and Israel in 2010, according to the piece; quantum machines cracking code in temperatures colder than deep space; and subconscious passwords, through muscle memory, specific to each user. Remember prime and subprime numbers? They are so yesterday, but still so today: Prime and subprime numbers, or RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) encryption, still represent the foundation of our current Internet and our exponential faith in it. According to the computer scientists in this documentary, RSA is at risk of being cracked, which could bring down the Internet as we know it if we do not enlist more powerful systems like quantum computing and smarter passwording.

Digital Wars Are The New Landscape
Except for the threats of nuclear war, which have hung darkly over humankind since the 1940s through today, the never-ending battles to secure and steal information represent the very present and future of sustained warfare — more precisely, digital information for power grids, water plants and other vital societal systems — that is begged, borrowed or most likely stolen.

The revealing and frightening “Rise of The Hackers”, PBS’s Nova documentary from 2014 and re-broadcast in May 2015, informs us that keyboards, not bombs, are what should keep us awake at night. The well-known Target and Bank of America cyber-hacks represent proverbial tips of digital glaciers. Hacking: Teens do it; terrorists and criminals do it; banks, financial lenders and borrowers do it; large nonprofits, international causes and charities do it; and nations, governments of all kinds, good ones and bad ones, do it. Many say the worldwide Anonymous “hacktivist” group is good, but others argue it is bad. Hackers are used for good purposes, for example to fight terrorism, crime and underworld activity, although one must think most hackers are criminals bent on theft, harassment or even simple DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on individuals, companies and countries.

Being Ever-Social Nourishes Us, But Can Harm Us
Our quests to be social and reach out to people and institutions next door and around the globe, combined with our perceived and (created?) demands for the conveniences of living digital lives, put us in peril. But great minds are working to heighten security through ever-strengthened encryption, subliminal passwords, ultra-paranoid computing and quantum computers, according to “Rise”.

So we all hope. Read “The Rise of the Ethical Hacktivist”, from Linux Insider Reporter Katherine Noyes, who quotes cybercrime analyst and author Pierluigi Paganini:

“Just one tweet, a picture, can blow the wind into a revolution.”

“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.

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.

WinComBotJournalismThumb
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.