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What next? “THE FUTURE IS SOMETHING WHICH EVERYONE REACHES AT THE RATE OF SIXTY MINUTES AN HOUR,” SAID C.S. LEWIS. Happy new year! I have again amazed myself by being here at the start of another year. I will thank you profusely and unendingly laud your stoicism if you manage to read to the end of this article! Despite the fact that all kinds of dramas have unfolded, I thought I would start the year highlighting the issues confronting all of us as internet users. The impact on us will affect our cash flows and the commercial and personal attitudes we may have to adopt. Google has, again, fiddled with its algorithm and created all kinds of worries. This means you had better keep an eye on your website ranking. Should it drop, advise your webmaster as soon as possible. But I digress! They, like Facebook and Twitter, have been forced into action because of the continuing saga of fake news; again, they have managed to give top rating to false information despite their earlier assurances that the matter had been resolved. Their ‘breaking news’ carousel appears to be the real culprit and has, at least for now, been abandoned. Doing some research for this article, I discovered Universal Toilet Day. Now, I do know that the world has gone silly with days to celebrate almost anything and everything, but… toilets? Yes, that calendar entry has been created by the UN to draw attention to yet another sanitary issue suffered by mankind. I discovered this gem by doing an ‘I'm feeling lucky’ search on Google. Try it sometime, you will be amazed by what turns up. If you have not yet twigged to Google's doodles, which change at various intervals, the experience will be quite enlightening. Trivia and trivialisation appears to be man’s growing flavour of preference. Having set myself on this path, let me astound you further... Did you know that Google is named for the number, ‘googol’, which is the numeral ‘one’ followed by a hundred zeros? Type ‘Google 1998’ into your search and you will find what our friend looked like on day one. This year is also its 20th birthday. And a hundred zeros is not so fanciful because, according to Google, there are hundreds of billions of web pages within the Google Search index, and it is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. Google leads the world in digital and mobile ad revenue. Nearly $50 billion will come from mobile in 2017, according to the analyst estimates. Google owns domains of common misspellings of its own name, like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com and more. Google also owns 466453.com, which are the corresponding numbers that spell out Google on a phone’s keypad. The impact of digital advertising is very obvious, even in our press, which fills many columns with self-advertising. Obviously, these will not generate any income for the publishers. Google owns YouTube and today, YouTube’s billion-plus users upload 400 hours of video every minute. Every hour, Instagram users generate 146 million ‘likes’ and Twitter users send 21 million tweets. In August 2015, Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that the site had passed
"an important milestone: for the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day”. That amounted to one-in-seven people on Earth using Facebook to connect with friends and family. That should make you sit up and wonder how you can tap into all of this to promote your business. Social media, in all its forms, is the alpha animal of promotion! According to some sources, a whopping 16 percent of employees at Google have a PhD. The best estimates claim there are around 2000 of these super-bright minds at work there. It is no wonder that this company leads in so many computer science-based advances. The latest news is that Google has unleashed an artificial intelligence in your Gmail account that can read photographs and screenshots of documents just like a human can. It not only understands what you have written in an email, but also can read and understand words in your pictures. It means that any photo or screenshot of a document you have sent to someone, say a passport, a driver’s licence, a power bill, can be read and understood by Google’s machines. It means Google knows details about you that you probably take for granted, but go to the core of your identity. Think about it: your tax file numbers, your home address, your transactions. I am not suggesting that Google has malicious intentions, but it does mean Google can find the secrets in pictures that people thought were safe from prying eyes. And it is building a detailed, searchable profile on anyone who sends or receives an email from a Gmail account. Just search for the article by Peter Judd published in the Geelong Advertiser to read more. Net neutrality is a huge question raised by the actions of US legislators. The intent is to allow ISPs to charge different rates for content provided by different domains; a concept blocked by President Obama's legislation. Simplistically, it means that a consumer can be charged for a Foxtel movie feed data differently to that of Netflix data, varying even with their location. The bottom-line is that the internet will not be a free access resource as it was originally intended by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. How much of that will migrate to or impact on Australia remains to be seen; the opponents will be the Googles and Facebooks of this world; if for no other reason than to guard the huge advertising cash flows they enjoy. I am looking forward to what the rest of 2018 will fetch, after all it is the Chinese Year of the Dog! By Arvo Elias, Cybercons SUMMER 2018
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