Your First Hit is Free, Kid

I like to think I'm not addicted to Google, but that might just be wishful thinking. Google influences how I experience the internet to a pretty large degree. I use Blogger (obviously) for blogging (once more, obviously), Gmail and Google Docs for email and schoolwork,  YouTube for stupid entertainment, and Google Reader to aggregate just about all the sites I follow, so Google has a hand in pretty much everything I do on the internet.

However, I'm really not sure if that makes me an addict. There are plenty of services that do exactly what Google's products do. I actually have a Windows Live email account, and if Google ever betrayed its customers' trust to the degree that I would no longer feel safe with giving them access to my personal information I could see myself switch to Live. Microsoft has a suite of web apps almost identical to Google Docs. There are other RSS readers that I could use. I don't really care if Google knows what YouTube videos I'm watching.

As to Google's flagship product, Google Web Search, I'm not sure where I stand. I checked my Google web history and went back through the past month, and on average I only actually use Google search about four times a day. I'm wary of Google in that way - if I'm looking for information, I'll usually go looking on sites like Wikipedia before I turn to Google. I think that's probably pretty unusual, but I suspect Google can get a better picture of me from my web searches than it can from the documents I'm saving or the emails I'm receiving. I still much prefer Google Web search over any competing services, though. But if worst comes to worst, I can always delete my Google account and use search without logging in.

But that might just be the equivalent of saying "I can quit whenever I want to." In fact, it's worse. It's saying "I can half-quit if I'm really pushed to."

An Expert Opinion on Stopping Piracy

The best and most-consumer friendly way to stop piracy is to make your content as easy to access as possible. A couple of days ago I tried to find a TV series I wanted to watch. It was on Netflix, but wasn't available on streaming, and who actually waits for their entertainment these days? it wasn't on Hulu. I checked a variety of less-than-legal streaming sites, still nothing.

So I just torrented it. It was by far the easiest thing to do. I think that's really the key to stopping piracy: make it easier to buy something (or otherwise experience it legally) than to pirate it. I think the line of thought I went down before just giving up and opening up a torrent bears some examination: I check Netflix, because it's by far the best  experience. I get high-quality video instantly and easily, and I'm already paying for it. I check Hulu, because even if the video quality isn't going to be as good it's still extremely convenient. I only turned to free, non-ad-supported sites after I tried the legal sites. I turned to a torrent as a last resort.

It sounds ridiculous to say that driving to Best Buy and buying a DVD or waiting for a two-day Amazon shipment is unacceptable these days, but I think it's true. As I said before, I could even get the DVD shipped to me from Netflix for free (because for some reason I still get the DVD service), but I just don't want to wait. I'm not opposed to acquiring physical media, either. I have a small movie collection, and I own every season of Breaking Bad. But I don't buy physical media when I want to watch it right now, I buy it because I'd like to have it conveniently available in the future, and I think that's something that media companies need to come to understand. Convenience and usability is the
prime selling point of media in an era where I can click a button and get something for free.

Infinite Potential Fun = Zero Actual Fun

I worked on a paper for a good chunk of time today, and it got me thinking about something I've considered before: the limitless potential of the internet to provide entertainment results in me experiencing far less of the entertainment that I actually want to experience.

When I'm working on schoolwork on my computer, I rarely take actual breaks. I usually just drift away from my word processor and end up on some mildly amusing website, almost always for a far greater span of time than I would like. But I don't really care for any of the junk that I see on these little browsing excursions. I'd be far better served by closing my document and doing something I want to.

Recently, for example, I've been meaning to watch more of Mad Men, but I don't think I've seen an episode for at least a week. The time that I'd normally watch TV, when my friends aren't around, or I'm just taking a break from something more important, is instead consumed by not-particularly-enjoyable jaunts through vast amounts of non-memorable relatively worthless internet content. I'm usually unsatisfied after an hour or two spent on Reddit or similar content aggregation sites. The web seems to be a place for convenient mediocrity rather than more measured, fulfilling content.

Blogs Suck

I’m generally not a fan of blogs. Since being assigned the maintenance of this blog as part of a class on new media, I’ve been sporadically thinking about the reasoning behind my distaste. It’s because of this that I found Rebecca Blood’s interview with political and tech blogger Scott Rosenberg quite interesting. 

One of my criticisms of blogging as a platform is that most of the time I’d rather just read a full-fledged website for my news, commentary, and whatnot. But in the very outset of the interview, Rosenberg makes an excellent point in the defense of blogs that I’d never given a whole lot of thought: in a blog, the personality of the author has a lot more opportunity to bleed through, both in their style of writing and the things they choose to write about. The community-based nature of blogs lets you find other people with similar personalities and interests as well. Unfortunately, that can be more of a curse than a blessing. It can be easy to only expose yourself to opinions that validate your own, and Rosenberg himself says that he has difficulty reading blogs written from viewpoints that oppose his own.

Rosenberg’s other statements about why one should maintain a blog make perfect sense to me – from the perspective of the author. As Rosenberg writes for Salon, and has authored a book, I can see why he enjoys having an outlet for small bits of writing in between, and he cites personal pleasure as an excellent reason to write blog posts. What I don’t understand is why a reader would necessarily choose to read small bits of thought designed to catch the eye of notoriously flighty blog readers over longer and often more thought-provoking pieces. Not to say that blogs can’t be thought-provoking. I just don’t think the medium lends itself particularly well to thought-provoking.

Lastly, the nature of blogs as collections of large numbers of small bits of information can sometimes make them harder to consume, the opposite of their intended effect. Rosenberg mentions how the wealth of daily posts on the tech blog Engadget makes the blog almost impossible to follow. I used to follow Engadget, and I have on more than one occasion found myself with upwards of 500 unread posts in my RSS reader. That kind of information overload is the exact reason I stopped reading Engadget.

Maybe writing my own blog posts will change my tune, but Rosenberg has failed to.