wikipedia
Online Healthcare Consumers Head to WebMD Pharma Sites Not Popular
source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Online-Healthcare-Consumers-Head-WebMD/1010219
Pharma websites are not especially popular
Healthcare consumers are headed online in significant numbers to research both their ailments and treatment options. A July 2013 survey of US internet users conducted by healthcare marketing company Makovsky Health and research firm Kelton found that, despite a wealth of options available to them, consumers are most often turning to WebMD.
More than half of respondents named the website as their most accessed digital resource for health information. Wikipedia was next, named by 22% of those polled, followed by health magazine websites (22%) and advocacy group sites (16%). Pharma company websites were the least accessed sites, named by only 9% of respondents, indicating that drug makers have some work to do in establishing themselves as credible sources of information.
Overall, advertising appeared to have little effect on driving traffic to pharma websites, with web ads seeming to have less impact on internet users than either television or magazine ads. In fact, referrals to pharma websites were led by physicians; 42% of respondents said a physician’s referral would be the most likely reason they would head to a pharma website. Next were news articles (33%), recommendations (30%), television ads (25%) and drug discount cards (14%). Only 11% cited web ads.
Web users were also most likely to visit pharma websites following a diagnosis, rather than after they experienced symptoms or before they’d filled a prescription. That indicates that consumers are! most often seeking information about pharmaceutical products once they know what their illness is and are assessing various treatment options available to them.
eMarketer projects that healthcare and pharma digital ad spending will grow relatively slowly over the next few years, rising from $1.2 billion in 2013 to $1.5 billion in 2017.
Job Applications – Eliminate Resumes, Applications, Keywords
Wikipedia Has Figured Out A New Way To Stop Vandals In Their Tracks
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/pending-changes-safeguard-on-wikipedia-2012-12
In a small but fundamental change to Wikipedia, a tool which protects articles from malicious vandalism while simultaneously permitting good-faith edits has gone live on the English Wikipedia.
When a page under ‘pending changes’ protection is edited by a new user or a user without an account, the edit does not go live until it has been reviewed by a more experienced editor.
Edits made to Wikipedia articles are normally visible immediately.
The new tool is in contrast to the typical means of page protection on the online encyclopaedia, which, in the case of a flurry of vandalism to an article, completely locks it from being edited at all by new users.
Pending changes is already used on the second largest Wikimedia Foundation project, the German Wikipedia, but unlike the English one, on which pending changes can be assigned to and removed from pages that are frequently subjected to unconstructive edits, it’s applied to all articles by default.
This is a significant and long-awaited development. Wikipedia cannot remain the resource that it is if its four million-plus articles – the product of enormous amounts of volunteer time – are fair game.
At last, the burden for dealing with problematic edits is being shifted away from good-faith editors constantly having to challenge them, and onto those who make drive-by and contentious edits, who may now find themselves arguing the case for why their changes should even appear, let alone remain once already published, as they otherwise would.
There is already plenty of evidence within the project that suggests this is the only way forward. More and more experienced editors are inserting FAQ sections in the discussion pages of articles to save themselves fro! m consta ntly dealing with the same questions and disputes, and at the top of the dispute resolution ladder, the Arbitration Committee has a large list of sanctions for various articles and topics, which can be applied to editors who don’t follow the rules.
But some might argue it’s much too little, much too late. Wikipedia has regrettably served as an anonymous platform to libel people, one which appealed to Johann Hari when he used it to describe people he didn’t like as alcoholics, anti-Semites, or homophobes.
Pending changes would not only have made it much more difficult for such edits to get through, but might even have diminished the incentive to make them in the first place if they didn’t appear immediately after submission.
And then there’s the matter of simply getting things right. If pending changes was enabled on all articles, would Lord Justice Leveson have inadvertently labelled a 25 year old Californian student as a founder of The Independent newspaper?
The fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone is arguably both the site’s best and worst aspect: without it, it wouldn’t be what it is. But with September 2012 seeing the lowest monthly level of new editors since September 2005, a laissez-faire attitude to content is no longer sustainable. Sharing knowledge is a worthy and appealing undertaking; baby-sitting its potentially fleeting presence in a digital no-man’s land, not so much.
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Why New Top-Level Domains for Google and Amazon Spell Trouble [Video]
Companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple are currently competing for a new round of top-level domains—think new versions of
.com
and .org
like .search
, .blog
and .app
. They think this will make the internet easier to use, but we think it’s a bit sketchier than they’d like to admit. Here’s why.
What Is a Top-Level Domain?
A top-level domain is the last part of a URL, often something like .com
or .org
. It’s at the top of the domain hierarchy (hence the term “top-level”), and is the first thing your computer looks for when you type in a web address. When you type in lifehacker.com
, for example, your browser asks your DNS server where it can find the .com
nameserver. Your browser then contacts the .com
nameserver for the lifehacker
subdomain, where it finds this web site. You can see an example of this below, courtesy of Wikipedia.
These domain names are all managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), formerly a government organization but now a private, non-profit entity. ICANN not only manages which top-level domains exist, but also make sure everything is stable and runs smoothly.
ICANN Is Handing Out New Top-Level Domains, Lottery-Style
A few years ago, ICANN began expanding the number of top-level domains, so porn sites, for example, could use the .xxx
domain. Recently, though, they opened this up so companies can create and apply for custom top-level domains. For example, Google wants to claim .blog
, so all blogs created by their Blogger service would have an easy-to-remember .blog
domain name. They also want .search
for obvious reasons, while Amazon wants to claim .book
, .music
, and .cloud
. Allowed domains can range from brands (like .ipad
, .kindle
, or .gmail
) to generic words (.bank
, .fun
) and geographic locations (.nyc
, .paris
). Not all top-level domains will be exclusive, but when a company applies for one, they can choose to make them exclusive to their own pages, like Google wants to do with .search
and .blog
. Many of these companies have applied for hundreds of top-level domains (ready to pay millions of dollars for them), even ending up in battles over who gets what—both Google and Amazon are currently fighting over .cloud
, for example, and you can bet everyone’s looking to get their hands on .app
.
Why the Domain Lottery Is Sketchy
As you can imagine, some people think this lottery is a little ridiculous, and we tend to agree. It might seem innocent enough to give Amazon ownership of the
.kindle
domain, since the Kindle is their product, but you can easily see how things get more complex when they’re asking for an exclusive claim to the .book
domain, or Google the .search
domain. Not only that, but it opens the door for a lot of unfair treatment. It wouldn’t be out of character for Google to float .blog
sites to the top of search results, or the company who owns the .news
domain could give preferential treatment to sites that share its political biases. It ends up being a huge, confusing, and sometimes misleading mess—and the only ones who benefit are the companies and ICANN, who despite being a nonprofit, stands to make a ton of money from this endeavor. Photo by MoneyBlogNewz.
These controversial domain applications are still in review, but ICANN has yet to say or do anything that would lead us to believe they won’t accept them. All we can do now is wait and see. What do you think about the new generic top-level domains? Will they make the internet easier to use, or are they only going to benefit companies and confuse users? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below. And, if you’re interested in reading more, here are some other articles on the subject:
- Generic Top-Level Domain [Wikipedia]
- .blog, .lol, .foo: Google, Amazon Top List of Global TLD Applications [Ars Technica]
- Amazon’s Domain Power Play: We Want to Control Them All [CNET]
- New Internet Domain Names May Make for a More Tangled Web [Washington Post]
- Should Gooogle and Amazon Be Allowed to Control Domains? [GigaOM]
Congress Is Crawling out of the Woodwork to Oppose SOPA [Infographics]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5877725/congress-is-crawling-out-of-the-woodwork-to-oppose-sopa
See? Congress does listen to the will of the people on occasion—especially when that will is wielded as a blunt instrument. As this infographic from ProPublica illustrates, yesterday’s blackout protests not only culled the official SOPA supporters by 15 congressmen, it actually added 70 opponents.
In all, official supporters for the House’s anti-piracy bill dropped from 80 members to 65 over Wednesday night, while the bill’s opponents swelled from just 30 members to 101 with another 41 polling as “leaning no.” Granted the “leaning no” crowd hasn’t ruled out voting for an amended version of the bill at a later date, doubling opposition to the bill overnight is a promising start. It’s amazing what 24 hours without Wikipedia will do. [Propublica]
And here is a larger size of the image:
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What Is SOPA? [Sopa]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa
If you hadn’t heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet’s most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?
SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress…
House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it’s formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a “mark-up period” on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by it’s cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.
…that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet…
The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there.
…which would go almost comedically unchecked…
Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court’s permission.
The language in SOPA implies that it’s aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that’s why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that’s just part of it.
…to the point of potentially creating an “Internet Blacklist”…
Here’s the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don’t even need a letter shut off a site’s resources. The bill’s “vigilante” provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.
Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.
…while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily…
SOPA also includes an “anti-circumvention” clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government “enjoinment.” They could and would be shut down.
The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.
…and potentially disappearing your entire digital life…
The party line on SOPA is that it only affects seedy off-shore torrent sites. That’s false. As the big legal brains at Bricoleur point out, the potential collateral damage is huge. And it’s you. Because while Facebook and Twitter have the financial wherewithal to stave off anti-circumvention shut down notices, the smaller sites you use to store your photos, your videos, and your thoughts may not. If the government decides any part of that site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can’t get it back.
…while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective…
What’s saddest about SOPA is that it’s pointless on two fronts. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that infringing material be taken down. We’ve all seen enough “video removed” messages to know that it works just fine.
As for the foreign operators, you might as well be throwing darts at a tse-tse fly. The poster child of overseas torrenting, Pirate Bay, has made it perfectly clear that they’re not frightened in the least. And why should they be? Its proprietors have successfully evaded any technological attempt to shut them down so far. Its advertising partners aren’t US-based, so they can’t be choked out. But more important than Pirate Bay itself is the idea of Pirate Bay, and the hundreds or thousands of sites like it, as populous and resilient as mushrooms in a marsh. Forget the question of should SOPA succeed. It’s incredibly unlikely that it could. At least at its stated goals.
…but stands a shockingly good chance of passing…
SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, it remains popular in the House of Representatives.
That mark-up period on December 15th, the one that was supposed to transform the bill into something more manageable? Useless. Twenty sanity-fueled amendments were flat-out rejected. And while the bill’s most controversial provision—mandatory DNS filtering—was thankfully taken off the table recently, in practice internet providers would almost certainly still use DNS as a tool to shut an accused site down.
…unless we do something about it.
The momentum behind the anti-SOPA movement has been slow to build, but we’re finally at a saturation point. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic: they’ll all be dark on January 18th. An anti-SOPA rally has been planned for tomorrow afternoon in New York. The list of companies supporting SOPA is long but shrinking, thanks in no small part to the emails and phone calls they’ve received in the last few months.
So keep calling. Keep emailing. Most of all, keep making it known that the internet was built on the same principles of freedom that this country was. It should be afforded to the same rights.
—
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Popular Posts – Week of June 7, 2010.
Why the power of the people is the only way to go
When the founder of Wikipedia and/or a small team of volunteers deletes purportedly “pornographic” images per their right, activists and others have a problem with that — even ones who support the concept. But in an automated system (where when enough members of the community click “flag as inappropriate” the content is removed) the community has spoken and the community has policed itself — the way Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon (flagging inappropriate reviews) do it.
Dispute brews over pornographic images on Wikimedia
A row over sexually explicit content on the web encyclopaedia Wikipedia and related sites has escalated.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales has given up some of his site privileges following protests by contributors angered that he deleted images without consultation.
This Is What Your Wikipedia Edits Look Like
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5495353/this-is-what-your-wikipedia-edits-look-like
Normally I’d file this image under our “what is this” image cache, but as you’ve already clocked, it’s somehow related to our Memory [Forever] theme. Those pretty colors are a visualization of the thousands of Wikipedia edits made by a bot.
It’s not just a one-off visualization for adding to our Tumblrs either. It’s the work of Many Eyes, a website set up by a pair of computer scientists at IBM, to catalog visual representations of data. Looking at the site now, two years after Wired brought it to light and interviewed founder Martin Wattenberg, recent artworks tackle the issue of migration in the US, and cremations.
When asked by Wired back then why he’s so keen to visualize data, Watterberg responded that:
“Language is one of the best data-compression mechanisms we have. The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings. The entire literary canon may be smaller than what comes out of particle accelerators or models of the human brain, but the meaning coded into words can’t be measured in bytes. It’s deeply compressed. Twelve words from Voltaire can hold a lifetime of experience.”
Wikipedia data remains a favorite for them though, thanks to the “idea of completeness” Watterberg talks about, that even though all the data on Wikipedia equals a terabyte or so, “it’s huge in terms of encompassing human knowledge.” [Many Eyes via Wired]
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
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