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Every once in a while, I do a vanity check and run my name and URLs through Google. I don’t aspire to any level of Social Media Stardom, but it’s nice when someone reads my rants.

This Google gadget by Chris Anderson automates the process, and uses Google’s PageRank system to provide some metrics. I found the gadget in a Wired article called Internet Famous.

When I ran “Bill Sodeman” through that Vanity Validator gadget, I got a score of 54%.

Not bad, considering the scores I obtained for some very well-known bloggers:

• 67%: Julia Allison
• 61%: Dave Winer
• 59%: Ze Frank
• 59%: Robert Scoble
• 57%: Chris Pirillo
• 54%: Gina Trapani
• 54%: Bill Sodeman
• 47%: Cory Doctorow

But there’s room for improvement.

As the rumors swirl about a new iPhone model, there’s speculation that the phone will include a GPS chipset. The original iPhone simulated GPS though some Google technology, as described in this Business Week article by Arik Hesseldahl. He believes that Apple might wait on true GPS, and add it to the 3rd generation iPhone in 2009.

I think that we will see a GPS-enabled iPhone this month. Om Malik claims the new iPhone will have new GPS capabilities because of FCC regulations. Emergency 911 services are just one way that GPS can help mobile phone users.

Google engineers have been working hard on the company’s Android platform for mobile phones. This is a Linux-based system that can be used in a wide ranges of devices, from low-power basic models to CPU-intensive touch screen devices.

It’s about advertising revenue

Google, Apple and advertisers really want mobile phones to produce ongoing revenue streams, and the easiest way to do that is by placing advertising on the devices.

The Android platform will let Google serve ads onto these phones in a seamless, personalized manner. GPS chips help content providers find and serve appropriate ads based on the user’s location.

Apple and Google saw early indications that users wanted accurate location-based mobile services within the first 3 months of iPhone service in the US, according to another Om Malik article. Google Maps usage on iPhones rose quickly, while YouTube usage lagged.

The first generation iPhone suffers from its slow EDGE connection to AT&T’s network. Users want to access location-based services when they are on the move, away from WiFi networks. YouTube is a connection-intensive application, and a good indicator of user acceptance for bandwidth-intensive, media-rich location-based service.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Our iPhone page has over 25 articles from billso.com
• 29 April 2008: New iPhone will be subsidized, faster and thinner
• 22 April 2008: Android vs iPhone

Advertisers in the US are growing more concerned about the planned digital television (DTV conversion in the United States on 17 February 2009. The date is carefully timed - it’s after the Super Bowl, but before the NCAA basketball tournaments.

Unfortunately for broadcasters and advertisers, the conversion comes in the middle of a sweeps month. The Nielsen Ratings service, which calculates television viewership a broad-based sample of American households, has released some surprising figures. Senior citizens seem more prepared for DTV than previously believed. Households with two or more television sets are more likely to have at least one set that is not ready for DTV, despite an endless barrage of television announcements about the conversion plan. Hispanics and African-Americans and younger households are more likely to lose their television service:

Using its ratings panel, Nielsen found that 9.4 percent of households, or roughly 10 million homes, were “completely unready” for the switch as of April 30, meaning that all their television sets would go dark next year. An additional 12.6 percent of households were partly unready.

See this New York Times article for more information.

Related pages on billso.com:

• Digital television

Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, is arguing that ISP content filtering is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Statute. That’s a five-year felony sentence for the ISP, and perhaps for any ISP network administrators who actually set up and performed the monitoring, because the statute personal and corporate responsibility.

This seems like a steep price to pay for monitoring traffic, throttling P2P apps and serving up highly targeted advertisements on web pages, but AT&T, Charter and Comcast seem willing to take the risk. Perhaps they are betting on amnesty from President McCain.

Verizon hasn’t implemented content filtering because of the legal issues. Read this article on Wired for more information.

Will video kill broadband?

According to another Wired article, ISPs and telecoms are growing more concerned about IPTV - television over the internet - as a potential showstopper. Content filtering a la Charter and Comcast is a good example of bad blocking by ISPs. Demand for Internet video keeps rising while bandwidth growth hasn’t kept pace.

If ISPs do get to use deep packet inspection (DPI) to insert their own ads in web pages, Google and other web advertisers may retaliate by using SSL to encrypt their web pages. That prevents content filtering, but the cost in the server farm may be worth the effort for Google.

The rank-and-file residential user may not like a slower, encrypted search engine, however. Jakob Nielsen pointed out in this BBC article that Internet users are becoming more aware of latency and search accuracy. Users want faster, more relevant search results so they can go straight to a web page without visiting the target site’s home page first. Users have alredy learned to ignore banner ads, according to Nielsen’s discussion in this 20 June 2007 Wall Street Journal article. Content filtering won’t help matters.

Image courtesy of bryankennedy through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts on billso.com

• 14 April 2008: Virgin Media CEO claims net neutrality is “bollocks”
• 9 April 2008: The all-seeing advertising cookie
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 19 March 2007: About e-commerce part 2: US ISPs sell web analytics data
• 28 July 2004: Stalking the P2P users

According to the New York Times, UK company Phorm has developed the long-feared ultimate ad-serving cookie.

The term “cookie” is a nickname for persistent client-side web browser data. Cookies solve one of the earliest problems of the commercial World Wide Web: storing user information in the web browser for multiple pages of the same web site. Wikipedia’s article is rich with details, and has a good reference list.

Most Web browsers allow users to erase their cookies, usually through a setting in the privacy or security settings. But users are lazy, so most browsers are left in their default, cookie-storing state. Some web sites recommend the defaults, so users do not have to reenter their credentials during their session.

Advertising revenue

Web advertising firms sell third-party cookies, which work on several different web sites. This helps advertisers track users, so that the ad firms can serve up appropriate advertisements to each users. Users can opt-out of these third-party cookies by finding an opt-out page that itself sets a cookie in their browser.

Google’s main source of revenue is advertising. So is Yahoo’s. In fact, many large web portals, blogs and magazines rely on their advertising revenue to survive. So anything that can provide more precise targeting of advertisements might improve revenue.

Phorm’s cookie technology relies on ISPs. Phorm installs hardware in ISP networks that helps Phorm track individual users at the web page level, no matter what site they access because Phorm’s cookies are linked to the third-party advertiser cookies.

For more details, read the articles at Open Rights Group and Richard Clayton’s blog. The Wikipedia article on Phorm has many more references.

Clayton’s security analysis of Phorm’s Webwise technology is also available as a PDF document, with even more technical details. Clayton doesn’t like the technology at all, for very good reasons:

Phorm assumes that their system “anonymises” and therefore cannot possibly do anyone any harm; they assume that their processing is generic and so it cannot be interception; they assume that their business processes gives them the right to impersonate trusted websites and add tracking cookies under an assumed name; and they assume that if only people understood all the technical details they’d be happy.