Archive: February, 2010

Are the wild west days of the Internet over?

Italy would like to think so.

This week the most serious threat to Freedom of Speech online since the internet has been in existence may be the Italian court descision to indict 3 Google executives.

Italy has sentenced them to prison time for content in a video that some anonymous Italian YouTube user uploaded. This Italian user has since been punished with community service only.

This event marks a serious change in the censorship, or prior lack of, that exists on the internet.

Many people in and outside of our industry, are extremely concerned over what this could mean to providers of online content; Many theorize that it signals the beginning of the end for free speech and blogs online.

Left unchecked, this movement could spiral out of control and nations with less freedom of speech than the United States could dictate how Americans use their freedom online.

This however is not an isolated incident; a German court has sued Google over its feature called “street view”.

Movie Director Kevin Smith has bought 10 tickets on Southwest over the course of the past week to go to such events as Macworld. This week he said “I’m never going on Southwest again.”

Smith had reportedly purchased three seats for he and his wife for the flight to Burbank, but Jennifer was unable to make the trip. According to the podcast, Kevin was desirous to utilize two of his tickets, and save one, but the clerk inadvertently printed up all three according to Kevin, and long story short, he was allowed to board an earlier flight as a standby passenger.

Even though he had paid for three seats, only one seat was available on that flight. Kevin was fine with that, apparently the airline wasn’t.

This is where the problems began.

According to the story, (and I am paraphrasing), after Kevin was let on the plane, stowing his bags, buckling his seat belt and awaiting takeoff, he was promptly and embarrassingly asked to leave, in front of an airplane almost full of people. Safety and security concerns were stated as the reason for his removal, although the airline refused to elaborate at the time.

Apparently this was the week for lawsuits.

Another Toyota wrongful death lawsuit has been filed over a fatal auto accident allegedly caused by the uncontrolled, sudden acceleration of a Toyota Corolla. Toyota has been doing its due diligence here, but its hard to put the genie back in the bottle when the lawsuits start.

McDonalds should sell its coffee in bottles as it is sued again for selling overheated coffee. The suit this time is only on the order of $7,000 or $8,000 and is expected to settle out of court. The reprocussions will make us all endure barely warm coffee eventually if this pace keeps up.

Hugh Hefner is also being sued, but by some of his Playboy shareholders who are claiming that he is not taking up any offers to sell Playboy since the business is falling apart. These suits have little or nothing to do with intellectual property, but they are interesting reading. Just like Playboy, for the articles of course.

Have no fear though, there are plenty of suits that concern Intellectual property this week.

How many times today have you waited for a slow loading web page to appear? Did you wait patiently, or did you move on and try another site? Slow site performance could be costing your site a lot of search traffic. After clicking on your site’s link in a search result many visitors may just turn around and look elsewhere if a page is taking too long to appear. I know I do.

Nobody likes a slow website, and now officially Google doesn’t. And by “now” , I mean a couple of months ago. Yes ironic I know, a slow response with this post.

Google is constantly checking your site’s performance and all indications point to this being a ranking factor in future. This was reported a late last year by WebProNews, after an interview with the venerable Matt Cutts from the Goog.

By their own admission Google is all about the ”user experience”, with their prime SEO mantra being; “make websites for users, not for the search engines”. And page load time is one if the most important user experience issues that you’ll encounter when browsing the web.