Product placement is not a new concept – but how many of us are conscious of it? Did you notice in the last movie or TV show you watched what kind of computer they used, what pop they drank, etc. Where they brand names? Did it strike you that the company probably paid large sums of money to have their product featured? You can be sure that it did not just ‘happen’ to get caught on film.

Marketing isn’t just advertising anymore.

Here is new one: stealth marketing. Have you ever read book reviews on Amazon? How about consumer reviews on electronic sites? Do you think any of those are done by people being paid to state a positive or negative opinion? How would you know? You can read the confessions here of one such person: The Escapist. He talks about infiltrating online community forums, with multiple accounts, and after gaining respect in the community begins to hype a product. Others of his personas concur, and it looks like many agree – even though it is only one person doing it all! Would you be fooled?

Then there is this new on that turns my stomach: Funding ‘research institutes’ to a corporation’s advantage. Tabacco companies for years have denied that smokes was a health hazard, and are still working hard to convince people that second hand smoke or passive smoking is not a health hazard. They cannot directly point to studies in their favour, so they work by funding other organizations to say the information. Since there is lots of scientific research that shows smoke is harmful to all who breath it, they decided to attempt to discredit the results and scientists in general. If there is a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the danger of smoke, then people may become confused.

And hey, they seem to have hit on a brilliant idea. If they can show that in general, scientists have a hard time coming to a consensus, then they have an easier time to call into question any scientific study that is not in their favour. So it turns out that a major tabacco company is a major backer of ‘research institutes’ that continue to point to a lack of consensus on climate change.

The oil companies also fund these same kinds institutes. But in their press releases, which journalists dutifully quote to show a ‘balanced view’, no mention is made of their supporters.

This article fleshes this out much more fully: The Denial Industry

Do you trust marketing? Do you recognized when you are being marketed to?

What’s next? People talking about Web2.0 are envisioning connecting information to make it more useful. Not just linking pages together, but actually feeding information from one thing into another.

One example is Google Earth – satellite photos and GPS. But now people can add pictures based on GPS so we can see what it looks like if you are there. They are adding weather patterns and other ‘layers’ with data from outside sources.

These sorts of things are called mash ups. And it’s not just Google and it’s not only about maps.

“Information wants to be free”, I’ve heard. And when information is free, then it can be paired with other information to become very useful.

Or, will an article like this spur us on to make changes now, so that, like Elrich’s works, this is not the scenario that happens in the end?

A long, but thoughful read: Waiting for the lights to go out by Bryan Appleyard at the Sunday Times (UK).

Another company tried to do more, and strike back at those sending the spam by flood the spam sender’s server, but this “campaign of intimidation was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack” against the spam busting company.

Is it even possible to get rid of spammers? Can anyone keep trying when spammers have much more money and resources at their disposal?

Start by reading more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/17/blue_security_folds/

So what? This means that if you save your information in ODF, you will always have the ability to extract your information from the file. Programs comes and go, and with them go file formats. If a program no longer exists to open your ODF file, since the structure of the file is a freely available standard, you could write or have someone write a program to access the information.

A fellow volunteer on the OpenOffice.org users mailing list spoke about file formats that are kept secret or are copyrighted. In effect the company that controls the files format is saying:

“We don’t really own your house. Just the front door and all the keys.”

Please learn about ODF and the ODF Alliance and see who supports this openness.

…Desktop Linux has matured so well that you could deploy it in a greenfields scenario, i.e, one where there were no computers used previously, and the users would take to it as quickly as they would acclimatise to Windows.

That doesn’t mean that migrating to Linux is a quick or painless process, however. Unfortunately, Windows is an extremely difficult platform to move away from. This has nothing to do with the qualities or inherent capabilities of Linux mind you. Migrating from Windows to the Mac would be about as painful. And the Mac is considered to be the most polished and easiest to use of desktops.

…Due to the reality that Windows ships with so little functional software, you need to acquire an awful lot of software – office suites, graphics suites, calendaring, educational, development, technical, specialist business software and more. With few exceptions, most of that software you buy for your Windows PC is in reality only available on Windows. Certainly, almost all of the Microsoft-published software is only available for Windows. This is an example of Application Programming Interface (API) lock-in. That is, lock-in which occurs when software vendors don’t write portable code, but lock their application development to a single (or small cadre) of operating system platforms and programming libraries.

However, there is software available that is cross platform, most of it from the Open Source community.

OpenOffice.org was designed to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office… Firefox is available on Windows, while Internet Explorer isn’t available on Linux. The Gimp is available on Windows, while none of Microsoft’s graphics apps are offered for Linux. Scribus, an excellent entry-level desktop publishing suite runs on Windows. MS Publisher doesn’t return the compliment for Linux. Apache? MySQL? PostreSQL? Sendmail? All run on Windows as well as on Linux. Microsoft’s IIS, MS SQL Server and Exchange, refuse to consider Linux. Programming languages? There are perhaps 50 open source interpreters and compilers which support Windows – not one of Microsoft’s supports Linux.

While Microsoft goes out of its way to curb your every opportunity to migrate away from Windows, the open source community makes every effort to be platform agnostic and ecumenical, once again, giving you as a user, control.

So now what? Try out some of the excellent open source cross platform programs. Once you are familiar with them, if you want to switch to Linux, you would have no problem using it, plus gaining advantages of security and stability!

Neil Postman calls us to examine technology, new and old; to look at why each is or was developed and to reflect on what has changed because of it. Too often, he says, new technologies are not critiqued because we believe any techological progress is good, necessary, and inevitable.

But what have we lost in the process? Much, says Postman. He mentions information overload so that unless one is an expert, there can hardly be a proper critique of ideas. With the information overload then comes a need for more control of information which leads to more and more bureaucracy. Medical diagnosis become trusting machines over observation and disregards mental or emotional states as factors in health. He mentions computers as furthering the reduction of humans to machines with yes or no responses. Even education, Postman argues, allows irrelevant technologies to change learning, such as IQ tests which do little to grade real intelligence but rather pick out those whose thought patterns follow a technological line of reasoning. He critiques polls and statistics for displacing the real issues or answers to real questions, especially in politics.

Interestingly, the World Wide Web gained its size and importance after this book was written. The Internet and the web creates other questions, specifically that we haven’t asked what the Internet meant or what it is changing and whether we should let it make those changes or not. Yet the Internet also has allowed for computers to connect people and create community, in opposition to reducing people to machines.

The picture Postman paints of a loss of culture and increase in bureaucracy without any thought to control the rapid changes technology forces is not very optimistic. He can only envision an education system that teaches history of all subjects, including technology, as a way to view the larger picture of the world, and the ascent of humanity in it, as a way to stop this slide. History of science and art and literature can help to see what has changed because of technology additions. Postman wants critical thinking teachers to help students think critically about the world.

But without a moral or religious framework how can we say something is right or wrong? Would Postman use the ascent of humanity to provide the moral backing for value statements?

The modern world with its dichotomy that splits science from religion is breaking down as we move further into post-modernity. I’m not convinced the ascent of humanity can bring about the cohesion that has been lost. Perhaps something more wholistic, with religion and science integrated could provide a balanced framework to dethrone technology.

There are many red flags and concerns about DRM, and also lots of conspiracy theories. But before we dismiss the entire issue as being blown out of proportion, I’d suggest some caution:

1. Computer chips are being made with DRM embedded in their construction, so this is something we will all encounter this at some point.
2. Educate yourself and read about DRM and other license agreements so that you know what you are agreeing to, especially if it is related to your own content. Sony got caught, so do not assume everyone has your best interest at heart.
3. Ask your IT manager to take care of your company’s data and not to allow the program vendor to do so. It is your information so make sure you have a choice.

This is enough of an issue that librarians are speaking out about their concerns regarding DRM.

Take time to be aware of the issues. Make sure that Digital Rights Management is not about taking rights away.

Update (April 10, 2006): Excellent article: The big DRM mistake

Lately, I’ve been hearing of other projects that used to be proprietary, and now are being open sourced. These are production ready, in use projects. For example:

• Silk, a collaboration tool by Akiva in the same arena as IBM’s Workforce or Microsoft’s Sharepoint. Read about their reasoning in this newsforge article.
• Autodesk released their MapServer Enterprise as open source. For more, read their press release.
• Xara X says it is the world’s fastest and the most versatile graphics software, and was recently open sources by Xara, a UK firm.
• (older release) Eclipse is a powerful integrated development environment (IDE) for software developers. It was released open source by IBM in 2001. Since then it has grown massively in features and use.

So with 140K of projects to sort through what do you do? How do you find out which ones to use?

If you have time, high speed Internet, and a computer for testing, try some out yourself. Look for reviews on how well it performs and the feature sets.

You can also try a consulting company to do the work for you and help you find what you need. Guided Vision is one of many that can help you with this.