Something’s afoot on the internets. Something pretty significant, and yet for reasons I can’t completely understand, there hasn’t been that much chatter about it.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was introduced into the US House of Representatives near the end of 2011, and if things proceed as they have been, it could soon be law.

I won’t explain in detail what this potential legislation actually says. But the long and short of it is as follows:

Long: Wikipedia Entry

Short: WordPress’ official statement plus an explanatory video

Even shorter: If this law passes, companies (as well as the US government) will be able to shut down websites which they feel are infringing copyright law.

On the surface, this seems like a pretty rational thing to do. However, the text of the legislation is so vague that doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy at all. What it does do is give the US government and any company the ability to bury other companies in lawsuits and red tape, effectively suing them out of business. ISPs can be ordered by the government to block access to the domain names of any offending websites (though you’ll still be able to access them directly via their IP address). It also represents a shift from pursuing individuals who post copyrighted material, to targetting the entire website that hosts it.

This is not about a few rogue websites that host ripped DVDs or decryption software. In fact, this legislation has attracted the attention of more than a few large organizations. Observe:

SOPA Opponents List

There’s even an app available in the Android marketplace that lets you see if a company is on the SOPA supporters list (strangely, there’s no such thing in the Apple App Store, even though Apple is on the SOPA opponents list): Android App

Still need a reason to care about this? Think about any site you’ve used in the past whose sole purpose is to share media/info/ideas with others. This includes:

- YouTube
- Flickr
- Scribd
- SoundCloud
- Twitter
- Tumblr
- Facebook
- Wikipedia
-… etc etc etc (See the SOPA opponents list I pointed out earlier)

Now think about what your experience on the internet would be like with most of those websites blocked or sued to the point that they can no longer operate online.

This is not good. This is less about stopping piracy than it is about giving unprecedented power to corporations/government to deem what is and isn’t appropriate for people to consume online. This is about allowing an industry to quash fundamental mechanisms of free expression in order to protect profits.

It’s no surprise that this isn’t getting much coverage in the media, because the media stands to profit from SOPA being passed, but that’s not really the point. Mainstream media/business is intertwined with the same online, social mechanisms that will suffer as a result of SOPA; there are 80,000 people talking about the NFL, and 264,000 people talking about Coke on Facebook right now. Yet both of these companies support SOPA, which would threaten to wipe out those conversations – and the corresponding data. Data which they rely on to drive their advertising initiatives.

Given the list of companies that have lent their support to this bill, I’m not sure that a boycott is a practical way to respond, especially since the number of companies disappearing from this list continues to change. Although if you can manage without engaging any of these companies, by all means go for it. What would help is for people to be vocal. This will affect a significant number of people in some way, shape, or form. If you’re reading this right now, you’re most likely one of them. If you live in the US, write to your congressperson. For everyone else, write about it through whatever channel you deem appropriate.

I recently took a look back at my life around 1990-2000, in which my identity was stamped into a ribbon by a barely-functional label maker. The treks to the food court to consume food which is only now kicking me in the rear. That rayon-polyester smell that never, ever seemed to fade. Upon reflection, I realized that I have an incredible disdain for department stores that remains with me to this day, specifically the monolithic dinosaurs that reside in many shopping malls.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any specific store/brand per se. I have no particular qualms with the Hudson’s Bay Co., or Sears or Walmart or what have you. It’s the actual physical structures themselves that have managed to foster a growing revulsion within me. So I suppose that makes this more of a gripe about mall architecture moreso than anything else. Walk into one – any one at all – and it’ll strike you immediately; this is exactly the same building that you visited as a child (experiences in your area may vary of course). The tiles, the floor, carpet, walls, even the shade of artificial light that soaks each floor is exactly the same as it was in the 1980′s, when 256 shades of beige defined an entire palette of color. Even the sounds are the same. Any time I hear Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good”, I cringe just a wee bit.

Mall designs rival casinos in their ability to trap customers inside and force them to wander around until something catches their attention. No clocks, no windows to the outside, minimal straight pathways from end to end. Get them inside, keep them inside. The next time you’re inside, see how many seconds it takes you before you can turn 360 degrees and not be able to see which way is out. Even the escalators are a trap. Sure they pair them together; one up, one down. However, they alternate between floors so that in order to traverse more than one [floor], you have to wander through more merchandise (design, schmesign, there’s got to be any number of ways to accommodate this).

As if the above weren’t enough to induce a degree of sensory aversion, there’s also the insanity of the December shopping season. Grandmas turn rabid, sock and/or underwear retailers roll in mountains of money, parking lots turn into… parking lots. Malls become even more wretched at this time of year, as retailers everywhere deploy the ultimate Jedi Mind Trick, convincing consumers that they’re getting a much better deal than math and statistics would have you believe. It takes a bit of time after busy holiday season (which I refer to as “the Shopocalypse”) to wind down, for things to revert back to a relative state of calm. No more retina-burning LED decorations, disinterested mall Santas, or endless loops of “Silent Night” by Boyz II Men.

On a final note, I discovered that I’m not the only one who has this particular affliction. A quick Google search led me to Jeremy Michaels’ blog post on just this very idea: Department Store Phobia

2010: A new year, a new decade. It’s also an opportunity for us to eschew some of the vocabulary that has rotted since it attached itself to the lexicon of the industry over the last few years. We’re all painfully aware of some of the offending terms and phrases. “2.0″, “Smartphone”, “Twitter/Facebook/Google” (as verbs instead of nouns), … and my least favourite of the bunch…

Slap this term onto just about any product and you’re guaranteed to increase its [sales] appeal. Back when I worked in retail, I used to joke with my co-workers about adding the term “digital” to certain items just to see what would happen (we sold recreation/games related items at the time – pool tables, board games and such). People responded to it then, when it largely applied to products. People still respond to it now, as the term has spread like a virus to describe just about anything. You can’t have HDTV unless you have a “digital” cable box. Most billboards are being replaced by “digital” signs. Telcos boast about running their services on “digital high-speed networks” (at least they do north of the border). In fact, the term even defines the industry that I have been a part of for the last 9 years; “Digital” Marketing.

The following is (by and large) the accepted dictionary definition of the term “digital”:

1: (adj) digital (displaying numbers rather than scale positions) “digital clock”; “digital readout”
1: (adj) digital (relating to or performed with the fingers) “digital examination”
1: (adj) digital (of a circuit or device that represents magnitudes in digits) “digital computer”

Going by those definitions one can see that there is, at best, a tenuous connection between the term and how it is applied in common usage. For most, the term digital has come to mean something similar to the following:

“Anything to do with modern technology, gadgetry, computers, circuits, sci-fi, fast cars, outer space, and shiny things.”

Truth be told, this is still how I communicate all that is digital to some members of my family that are … less “with it”, but that’s both for their own good and my own sanity. I digress.

There is an argument to be made for the fact that “digital” (by definition #3 anyways) does in fact describe the mechanism that drives a LOT of the products and services we use. Pulses of electrons – 1′s and 0′s – provide the core syntax of the binary language, and it is this language that was first described as being digital. Thus, any bit of technology that made use of that language also had the unfortunate privilege of being described as such.

It’s time to stop. 1n 2010, using the term “digital” to increase the selling power of anything makes about as much sense as extolling the liquid properties of water. In fact, I would further suggest that if that’s the only thing you can think of to make your widget stand out from the rest, it’s probably not worth purchasing in the first place.

So, following by example, from now on AppTheta will no longer carry the Digital bit in its by-line. I promise to give the associated image a proper edit when I’m in front of a machine that sports something a tad more functional than MSPaint.

That’s pretty much how I felt about Google Wave when I first looked received my invite. It could be awesome… later, once I actually figure out what to do with it. But because it’s in limited beta right now, there aren’t really enough people that I can interact with in order to take advantage of all of its features. … Ok, a chemistry set isn’t really a social device, but you get my drift.

Don’t get me wrong. I “get” why it’s awesome. I just haven’t been able to experience it for myself. Depending on how long it’s in beta (which is likely to be quite some time, given their track record with their other products) I suppose the userbase will grow, and soon we’ll all be engaged in really rich conversations about the most recent episode of House, or how much I loathe green peppers or something.

That’s one of the things that amuses me about the mass audience (myself included). We seem to crave really cool, ever advancing technology to perform the simplest of tasks. The vast assortment of new applications dedicated to interesting ways to churn out 140 character posts on Twitter is proof of this. What do any of these apps do that’s really THAT much different from sending a text message to one or more people? Further, given that there IS a difference, how many of us take full advantage of even the most basic features? Given the iconic nature of the image below, I’m willing to bet it isn’t many.

If you’ve seen any of the trailer videos for Google Wave, they make a pretty good case for how it could be used in the course of daily events. A near seamless blending of email/IM/texting etc., making the sharing of information that much easier. But given the ever present challenge of convincing people to change their online habits (IE is still the leading web browser, despite Firefox/Chrome/Safari being better products in my opinion), I’m a little apprehensive about how fast this will take place. This isn’t merely a new tool, it’s a new toolset that’s going to require people to change the way they think about how they communicate.

I guess, as with most things, we shall wait and see. If anyone else out there has access to Wave and wants to give it a spin, drop me a line at my Gmail account (Chris DOT Baboolal).

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.

Fortunately, with a little caffeine and some online radio tunes, I’m able to recover some of the highlights. The early-adopt / early-abandon method was definitely taken by a LOT of people, as evidenced by several accounts that only 1 or 2 posts in the first couple of days since joining. There’s a strong, active community of people (celebs and non-celebs alike) that post no less than a half a dozen random thoughts per day. And then there are some that post one or two well-crafted thoughts with attached links whenever the mood strikes. Of course, there’s a healthy number of hybrid Twitterers (Tweeters? – forgive me, I still haven’t really absorbed the clique-lingo) that fill out the scatterplot as well, of which I consider myself to be one of.

From what I gather, people haven’t come to a consensus about exactly WHAT Twitter is. To some it’s a blog, to others it’s a megaphone, and still yet to others it’s like some sort of lasso, used to corral the random thoughts of others for later processing. As I posted some time ago, it’s not unique, but I suppose all that matters is that it’s still standing.

Some other random highlights:

Brent Spiner – Still amusing, still weird, still strangely compelling to read.
Alan Cross – Yet another channel to follow one of radio’s most knowledgeable and entertaining personalities.
@EverySpam/PornBot that has ever added me to their list – Perpetual proof that there will always be a mechanism out there to add noise to balance out the signal.

1) According to Nielsen, The Weather Network was the 4th most accessed site (in Canada) on mobile phones in Q1/2009. They beat out Yahoo Mail, Gmail, iTunes, Google Maps, MSN Games, and YouTube. Windows LiveMail, Google Search and Facebook took the top 3 spots.

Think about this. 674,000 people were in a position where they needed to access information that is questionably accurate at the best of times. Further, it’s winter in Canada (Q1 2009). You do not need a network of trained meteorologists to tell you that it’s going to be COLD.

2) I’ve decided to use the Twitter account that I had abandoned 3 seconds after signing up for it upon its birth, to actually, genuinely see what the fuss is all about. I don’t know if I plan on updating it. I want to see if I can establish a really ecclectic list of people to follow for starters. My first reaction? Following Brent Spiner is equal parts amazing, creepy, and disturbingly addictive. I’d definitely suggest checking out his feed.

“ALARM! ALARM! Someone has breached the security system! “Ernst, Ernst, to me! (learned that from Picard) STAT! (learned that from ER)”

3) The same could be said about any specialized industry, but I’ve always found the task of describing what I do to be a difficult task, especially when the person asking isn’t in the industry (specifically if said person is older and happens to be in my family). I usually start off explaining a particular project, stepping back to mention that it’s in the Digital Marketing space, stepping back once more to mention that it’s just marketing with a particular technology spin to it, and finally I resort to grunting “I do computers.” This is usually met with a lightbulb reaction and a remark similar to “Ah yes. My friend/your cousin Jane is a programmer too!” It’s usually at that point that my soul dies a little and I start fantasizing about violently dramatic ways to escape the conversation and/or the room.

So, I saw the following article come through my RSS feeds this morning: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/07/games-for-tweens/ After reading it, I wondered where all of the acid-tongued criticism was, and why it wasn’t being being doled out for these games as well. Then I took a step back and asked a larger question. Why are we holding these games (and their movie counterparts, where applicable) responsible for setting the moral compass for these kids? To what degree is society willing to transfer [what should be a] parental role, into the hands of the media?

There’s been a lot of commentary on this subject before, and I’m certainly not going to be the last one to voice my opinion on it. I feel that it’s necessary to maintain a dialogue on this issue though, as whenever an incident occurs that’s supposedly linked to a piece of “corrupt” media, cooler heads seldom prevail. The witch hunts, calls for sanctions, boycotts, and bans usually begin, well before someone opts to take a serious look for root causes.

In 10 years or so, if a contestant for a reality show like America’s Next Top Model (God help me if that show is still on in 10 years) flips out and kills an entire town, I wonder how much blame would be placed on games like those in the Wired article. Or what happens if a girl falls into a manhole while texting on her cellphone? Will the city get blamed, or is it technology’s fault that she didn’t see the large void in the pavement? Oh wait… nevermind.

The Chinese government hobbles Google, Twitter becomes the de facto source of connection for the Iranian election conflict, Bing says hello world, the Palm Pre makes a surprisingly impressive entry into the marketplace, and the web itself felt the strain of half a dozen celebrity deaths.

With each of these events comes the maelstrom of online commentary, as people attempt to reflect and organize the information into digestable units. But in recent weeks it seems that there hasn’t been enough time to consume one event before another explodes onto the scene.

How do you think this affects our overall ability to communicate about events that occur all around us? Do these things go into a queue for future processing? Do some things get filtered out? Is it possible to process them all in parallel? All of the above?

YouTube has not helped in any way, shape or form to resolve this issue. In fact, it has exacerbated the problem. Prior to YouTube, the fleeting memories of “that thing with that guy in it” would pop in and out of one’s consciousness without any need to investigate further. Now, especially for people like me, that becomes an impossibility.

The following videos are the result of several hours (though not consecutive, thank goodness) of trying to scratch that mental itch that comes from such memory fragments:

1) Night Walk – Night Ride: Aired between 3 and 5am on Global TV in the late 80′s. Yes, I was up during those hours as a kid.

2) An anti-drug PSA with a voice-over from Mark Dailey (Local celebroty -Toronto news anchor for City-TV, and former Police Officer).

3) The new Heinz campaign is responsible for planting this jingle back in my head, and I’m not even a fan of ketchup.

4) There’s a part of this video that’s shot in black and white, where a guy’s reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It’s always been in my mind, and would I have realized it was from a song that I actually know, I might not have searched as hard to find out where it was from.

Perhaps that’s what YouTube will eventually evolve into – a repository for all the little bits and pieces of mental confetti that prevent one’s memory from performing more efficiently. … Or at least that’s the story I’ll stick to.