Internet ad spending has overtaken TV for the first time, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) today.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, said: “Internet advertising has beaten all expectations to achieve growth in the most challenging market conditions.”

TV revenues fell 16.1%, according to the figures, meaning it has lost its status as the medium with the biggest market share to the one that had the smallest share only six years ago.

Online now has a 23.5% market share compared to TV’s 21.9%.

PricewaterhouseCoopers online advertising expert Eva Berg-Winters said “Perhaps surprisingly, a slowing economy has accelerated the migration to digital technology and hence the continuing shift from more traditional forms of advertising to online, which promises return on investment and measurability in a period of instability. The only certainty is that this transgression demands fundamental structural change of business models across all industries.”

The marketing director Lindsey Clay of Thinkbox, a UK commercial TV marketing body is one of those who doesn’t want to see their business model change.

The original articles here:

Internet outstrips TV but total ad spend plummets 17%

Online advertising spend ’surpasses TV’

While I enjoy using openSuse 11.1 Linux (since switching over from Windows) one thing that has consistently bugged me is the Network Manager. It was always problematic with regards to wireless networks. And googling will show many posts pointing out that it is bugged. So for the life of me I just don’t understand why it was included with the openSuse releases when it is so clearly broken.

However, I have discovered an alternative that works!

Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings.

Now when this software even has a page on the official openSuse website, why is it not in the official release?

I have the good fortune to have a number of interesting clients who are often writing about bleeding edge topics, especially in the realms of digital media, marketing and communication.

Alan Moore, a mobile and engagement marketing expert is currently writing a new book, “No Straight Lines”. I’ve been privileged to have a read of one his drafts. There were a number of points he raised in his writing that I found very topical with regards to recent media stories.

“In Audience Atomization Overcome Rosen writes In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.

This ability to connect, to go round, over, under and through what were for years barriers to information are the means by which we challenge the authority of mainstream media.”

But the push is on to stop this, as Opennet.net sets out to show by listing all of the available internet filtering techniques and which countries are currently using them. It would appear the trend is on the rise.

Australia is currently the test case, and all other “democratic” Western countries are watching with interest. Governments have a tendency to copy each others legislation, especially if one sets a precedent.

…election rigging? No, finding out about it.

The above CensorDyne advert from GetUp!, a non-partisan lobby group, was created with the intent that it would be aired where possible in Australia to try to get their message across to Australian legislators. One of the aims of the CensorDyne campaign was to have the advertisement aired on every Qantas flight. However this week Qantas refused to run the CensorDyne ad claiming they have a policy of not airing political material. However this response has been called into doubt as the airline has perviously air political satire. But most telling of all, David Epstein, a Qantas executive with close links to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has dismissed suggestions that he personally barred an anti-internet censorship advertisement from airing on flights to Canberra.

These same “democratic” governments who have long been critical of the likes of Chinese Net censorship, are the very same governments who are looking at the very same technology for their own use, and in some instances, purchasing that same technology (software).

It is true what you say. This new networked world is very empowering, and that is precisely what the “establishment” do not want – a very public forum of discussion, debate, criticism, parody and outing is not welcome.

And that establishment is the corporates who pull the strings of government.

“Funny that, and of course we had the whole ‘cash for questions’ issue in the UK, and then recently four Lords again using their influence, so it is claimed, to change legislation to the benefit of companies in exchange for large amounts of cash.”

What we face is similar to the great American land rush of the 1800’s. People streamed Westwards to claim their bit of turf, at the expense of those already there (digital natives) and set up their own little “utopias”, hence the Wild West. And indeed many times I have read the internet equated with this.

But it was not too long before “authority” and regulation caught up with everyone, and that being because big business interests moved in – Ranchers, Railroads, Mining.

Question is, will WE manage to establish some sort of Digital Constitution, or Bill of Rights to our own data before we are filtered or locked out?

Or rather the question is, will WE take the time to properly inform and educate ourselves about this technology that we use?

While perhaps we despise malware authors and others out to steal our bank account details, defraud us and cause general selfish havoc, and provide the “establishment” further excuses to lock the Net (mobile or static), these malicious persons are actually forcing people not to take their data for granted.

But there remains that question. Will people be lazy, and not take personal responsibility and run to the open arms of the “establishment” for protection from the internet nasties, or will make the effort to become better educated?

In another marketing gaff, this is a real Microsoft ad that they recently pulled because people found it, well, um… tasteless. It was meant to be promoting their newly released browser IE8 which they’ve tried to sell people on in other shonky advertising. It seems Microsoft is realizing it is really behind in the browser race / war and is desperate enough to try any trick to get you to use their browser. I think I would do the same thing as the woman in the ad if I too had to use Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer helps you explore your stomach contents.

When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off — anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.

Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no — and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers’ design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window (”Nothing, honey, wasn’t doing anything…just checking statistics”)re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you’ll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.

Read the full article here:

Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

The forth coming Firefox 3.5 brings with it a slew of DOM and CSS advances, while not forgetting to mention the rendering and JavaScript speed improvements. These improvements ratchet up the competition for Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. (Silverlight? I’ve never found a site that uses it yet.)

Firefox 3.5 adds support for the HTML 5 audio and video elements and now fully supports the HTML 5 offline resource specification. Rich internet applications here we come.

The full list of improvements can be found on the Mozilla page Firefox 3.5 for Developers.

The famous and infamous Pirate Bay has recently lost its legal battle in which the site’s owners are accused of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. However Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström who were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD), after a trial of 9 days, will appeal against the verdict. The website to date has been unaffected and remains online.

The Pirate Bay verdict appears to be achieving the opposite to the outcome intended by the copyright advocates with support for the site and its political offshoot, the Pirate Party reportedly going from strength to strength.

Future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bittorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler which uses no centralized server, making it harder for authorities to track and prosecutions be braught against any one body of focus. Anonymous VPS services such as iPredator, will also offers file sharers protection. So its an ongoing arms race.

Piracy

Exciting things lie ahead with emerging browser technologies supporting the new HTML5  standard.

I found this blog post “Video Tag and Subtitles” which demonstrates the new video tag, but also uses JavaScript to add subtitles.

The demonstration requires a standards compliant browser supporting the HTML5 video tag, which currently is Firefox 3.1 / 3.5 or the nightly build versions of Safari (Webkit) or Opera.

This is so cool and Nerdy.

Darth Vader’s imperial march played with a Tesla coil. Vader would be so jealous.

That’s the impressive party trick demonstrated by ArcAttack, a group that uses Tesla coils to make music.

Original story “This new-fangled electric music“.

You know its strange how some people think that the internet, with all of its interactivity, user colabration and social networking, is the place more of the same old, pump and dump.

The Smarthouse post, “Banned Freeview Video Reappears On New Web Sites”, explains how Freeview requested YouTube to pull a parody video of their advertisement. Freeview are promoting an internet TV service, where you can watch, as the parody puts it, more of the same old stuff that you can see on the standard free to air TV stations, but wait for this, you still can’t skip the ads.

And so now in true internet justice the same banned ad is now appearing again on many more sites on the internet. It reminds me of 2Clix’s attempts to stiffle public opinion. Some people just don’t have a clue.

Here’s the clip.