Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

Long live the high street

"The Friday after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the US, and retailers have now created a bizarre ritual in which people are lured to the stores at 5am with the promise of extreme bargains that sell out almost immediately, writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about shopping online. "The spectacle of screaming mobs and fisticuffs over cheap DVD players is, I suppose, a testament to Americans' love of a good deal, but it also makes me wonder: why don't the many people (yours truly included) who despise the Christmas shopping chaos buy more of their gifts online?

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Will Yahoo be cut down to size?

"Yahoo! has had a tough year: Google is killing it in search advertising, upstarts like YouTube and MySpace have occupied territory that should rightly be its own, and its stock is down accordingly," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about whether Yahoo will be cut down to size. "Just as damaging, it has begun to be viewed by many of its partners and customers as slow-moving and ineffectual."

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Google and the selling of simplicity

"The incredible success of Google is easy enough to understand - the company built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to its door," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about Google's expansion. "It has succeeded so well in selling simplicity that the company is now widening its net. It is making a substantial effort to sell advertising in other media including radio, television and newspapers."

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Get out of MySpace

"My 12-going-on-15-year-old daughter is too young for MySpace, but when I watch her on the computer she's doing things that are very foreign to me," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about online social networking. "Am I too old, or too set in my ways, or too anti-social to grasp the core appeal of services like MySpace, Facebook and del.icio.us? Or, is there simply much less to it all than meets the eye?"

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Why politicians won't talk about technology

"It was not so long ago that technology policy was a high-profile political issue in the US," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about why politicians won't discuss technology.  Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the conventional wisdom held that Japan Inc. and the Asian Tigers were gradually overtaking the US (not to mention Europe) in technological prowess, and that something had to be done.

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Bucking the online trend

"Magazines would seem to be among the most vulnerable of all "old media" as peoples' time and attention shifts to the internet," says Jonathan Weber in a comment article about bucking the online trend. "But even though magazine companies are having their problems  they are actually showing more resilience than one might expect."

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Here be giants

"The core conceit of the original dot-com bubble was that the internet was going to force the reinvention of just about every industry on earth," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about Google's acquisition of YouTube. "In Bubble 2.0, though, you don't hear much about all that... it's remarkable how much of the feeding frenzy involves the media business in particular."

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Energy innovation

"Wind, solar, nuclear and geo-thermal are all now attracting attention even from venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, Silicon Valley superstars who until recently stuck to computers and the internet," writes Jonathan Weber in his weekly column. "Yet appealing as it is to think that we can apply the Silicon Valley model of innovation to the energy problem, the fundamentals of energy technology are completely different."

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The virtual world is not enough

"The notion that the internet will lead people to retreat from the physical world – and real human relationships – in favour of digital facsimiles has been around as long as the net itself," writes Jonathan Weber in this week's column. "Personally, I don't see it. Indeed, I'd suggest that even as virtual worlds become more realistic and people engage in all kinds of alternative online realities, the value of real-world, in-person experiences will only increase."

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The good pirate

The news that Google News will have to stop linking to stories from several Belgian publications after a court ruled that the site breached newspapers' copyright rekindled the debate about copyright and the internet. "The proper role and use of copyright is one of the great, unresolved arguments of the internet era," writes Jonathan Weber in his latest column.

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Fixing a leak the hard way

"The revelation last week that private investigators working for Hewlett-Packard had illegally accessed the phone records of company directors and journalists in search of a boardroom leak touched all manner of hot-button topics," writes Jonathan Weber in this week's column. His conclusion: "the things you have to do to find the source of a leak are almost inevitably more damaging than the leaks themselves. And he should now, having been the victim of a leak himself. Click here to read the full article.

The internet: a work in progress

"For all the big problems the internet has helped to solve," writes Jonathan Weber in his latest column, "there are a whole bunch more in which it has made barely a dent. And some of them are the most obvious things."

When booking a hotel, he says, "You can spend all kinds of time chasing down all the possible avenues of research, but most of it is wasted and you never get the sense that you've really seen all the possibilities."

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Are news websites selling us short?

"Just about everyone in media agrees these days that new business models are needed if internet journalism is to thrive," writes Jonathan Weber in his column, which appears each Tuesday on Times Online. "But a model in which the owner will make money from the fall of stocks he knows will be the subject of a negative story? Even though Mark Cuban has been clear from the beginning that this was the plan, it still seems odd and vaguely unclean. Can the journalism be trusted if we know that it's intended (or at least expected) to drive the stock down?"

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