Two heart-warming articles

HW1

Desi does not know ZAINUL ARIFIN; would be proud to "befriend" though, though he's from MSM. MSM is short for mainstream media, borrowed from Howsy.blogspot.com -- he I know via cyberphere, I don't know if I'd hug him in person!
Back to Zainul, KUDOS for a thoughtful commentary on a medium dear to many of my EsteemedReaders. So NSTP does not produce ball-cariers all-the-time; only sometimes as I used to say, in all fields of human endeavour, there is the Normal Distribution if you take a big enough sample. You get the Good (few), the Average (majority), and the Bad (few).

Desi was tempted to say: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,
but Clint Eastwood protesteth. Or was it Lee van Cliff?

Without permit, I'm reprising the article in full. Being a Non-Profit endeavour, I pray the NSTP won't send me a bill. The only guy I know pretty well there is G Umakanthan, and he's not from Finance Department -- Ooops, I digress again -- this is done delibeerately to irrify (combo of irritate and terrify) Mave SM who overly-praised Desi Yesterday, which actually gave me a HI, so the use of "overly" is improper. But what the hell! This is my Blog!:(

The emphasis (as BOLDED THUS) in the article is also entirely mine.



Facts will stand the test of time

9 August 2006.

APART from death and taxes, two things are for certain: The Internet is here to stay and there is no way of policing it.

It is the new frontier, the new Wild West where anything and everything goes. It can be quite liberating, really.

The Internet is the great equaliser. It has low entry costs, consisting of passion, time and a service connection. It allows anyone to participate.

It must be the most democratic of all media currently, taking all comers, and does not discriminate between literary genius and smut, the sacred and the profane.

In cyberspace, it seems you can scream all you want. If you are lucky, maybe someone will hear you. Or else you will be murmuring in the ether of the World Wide Web until the wonders of search engines like Google and Yahoo! direct surfers to you.

This new technology is a revolution in the annals of mass communication. There was a time when mass communication tools required licensing.

During the war, it was the radio, then the teleprinter, and, in its early days, the facsimile machine or fax. Even walkie-talkies required licensing before cellular phones made the law untenable.

These were once licensed to check against the transmission of unsanctioned materials. Nevertheless, technology and the lowering of production costs have made attempts at control redundant.

Regardless, the mainstream mass media such as newspapers, radio and TV are still licensed, with permits to be renewed annually which can be revoked if their reports are found to be offensive. This remains an anomaly in the Internet age.

As far as the Internet is concerned, control and curtailment are pointless. It can be attempted, of course, but it will be expensive and tiring. Above all, any policing will be ineffective.

The telephone line is all one needs, and in the era of Wi-Fi and cellular telephony, you don’t even have to be tethered to your desk.

Two decades ago, if someone were to say that we would be carrying our telephones in our pockets and be able to contact anyone in the world from anywhere, we would have assumed the person was getting too much into science fiction.

Obviously, time and technology have proven to be the biggest disprovers of conventional wisdom.

With all these realities, is the talk about monitoring blogs just posturing and bluster?

In some ways, yes, since technology has argued that it cannot work and we as a nation have pledged to leave the Internet free of censorship.

On the other hand, such warnings should be taken seriously if only for the existence of laws that deal with sedition, libel, security and the like. The intoxicating power of the Internet should not allow someone to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and get away with it, some say.

While I find websites offering pornography and spewing hatred and racism more offensive and, I might add, more popular, I can’t imagine them being blocked either.

Human ingenuity often wins over dictates.

We all know that the freewheeling nature of the Internet often blurs fact from fiction, and perception from reality. Thus, assuming that the end game is to counter false and hurtful content on the Internet, how do we get there?

"Facts, my dear Watson, facts," the fictional Sherlock Holmes would have said. Opinions are cheap, epecially on the Internet, but facts have a way of standing the test of time, even after all the excitement has gone and the dust has settled.

As much as the Internet has blown the lid off information control, it has, more importantly, changed the way we do things. From governance to business to social interaction, we have benefited from this technology.

We should embrace the new media like it is our new best friend, and not alienate it.

We should not be throwing the baby out with the bath- water. In fact, the new media should be allowed to prosper.

Even in the most controlled environment — without the Internet or other alternative media — there will be dissenters and mavericks who defy convention.

But, like water, the Internet will soon find its level.

The issue of the Internet is not control or policing but a question of ethics. It requires responsibility from readers, web owners as well as the authorities and, above all, common sense.


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HW2


Desiderata: you might be interested in this http://theaustralian.com.au report.



Net advertising rockets up 59.4pc
Lara Sinclair
08 August 2006

INTERNET advertising grew by an astonishing 59.4 per cent to $778 million in the year to June, as advertisers reported "disillusionment" with traditional media.

At current growth rates, internet advertising will overtake the $978 million magazine advertising industry by December, according to internet research firm Frost & Sullivan.

General display advertising on the internet, including banner and video advertising, was the fastest-growing sector online in the June quarter, with ad sales rising 32.2 per cent to $76 million.

That still trails the search and directories sector dominated by Sensis and Google, which was up 9.9 per cent to $83 million.

Classified advertising increased by 8.1 per cent to $67 million.

Search and directories was the strongest sector over the 12-month period, up 74.2 per cent to $287.5 million, while display, which grew 60.7 per cent to $247.5 million, overtook classifieds (up 43.8 per cent to $243 million).

Lee Stephens, chief executive of agency Emitch, said online publishers such as Ninemsn, Yahoo7, Fairfax Digital and News Interactive were increasingly focused on video advertising.

Online display advertising would continue to grow strongly as more homes took up broadband internet access, he said.

"There's still strong growth to come, particularly in broad-based advertising such as top-and-tailing video downloads with television-style commercials," Mr Stephens said.

Most publishers, including Ninemsn, Yahoo7, Google - and even the ABC - have foreshadowed online video advertising initiatives in the past month.

Mr Stephens said those initiatives allowed advertisers to book-end downloadable video content with commercials in a similar way to traditional television media buys.

However, he said the jury was "still out" on search engine Google's global click-to-play video advertising offer, announced last month, which allows advertising to be targeted to specific sites or placed on Google's content network.

Finance, communications and computers, automotive and travel continue to dominate online advertising, but Mr Stephens said entertainment and leisure was also showing strong growth.

Meanwhile, the internet is benefitting from "disillusionment" among advertisers with other media this year, according to Paul Fisher, national advertising sales director of News Interactive.

"Clients are not generating significantly additional budgets (to spend online) so the money's got to come from somewhere," Mr Fisher said.

The free-to-air television market shrank by 0.08 per cent in the six months to June, according to figures from industry body Free TV.


DESIDERATA:
The above is about the Australian scene, so the currency is in AUSD. I Guess, though I don't wear any, the scene is similar in most countries, including Malaysia.
The Internet medium will pull away more and more ADEX from the traditional media like the NST, The Star, the Sun, theSien...
So with the likes of Zainul, NSTP will survive.
Desiderata2000 too.

If you were wondering what HW1 and HW2 is about,
there are two licence plates of my two taxis now up for bids on eBoy. Starting @2billion.

If you can't get any AP, get an HP!:):)