Category: Internet
-
Social media’s transformation over the years
These days I find myself, somewhat unconsciously, viewing more videos on Facebook than YouTube. This is something that Facebook has been pushing for some time.
-
Was spam invented to kill electronic communications?
This thought has occurred to me more than once and seems that there is some logic to this thinking, namely whether the main purpose of spam is to kill electronic communication. Take e-mail – one of the oldest forms of electronic communications still around. On my google mail ID, for instance, I have been getting…
-
Are news paywalls still relevant in 2022?
Or perhaps the question should be “were they ever relevant at any point of time?” Recently I was checking for news about the ongoing political and economic crisis in Sri Lanka and came across a couple of articles that were behind paywalls. Needlessly to say I simply went on to click other links. In this…
-
Pre social-media online presence and disappearance
A recent blog post from my brother on social media led me to think of online networking before social media giants like FaceBook and Twitter became popular. In those days, the main source of online networking was through blogging, internet forums and sites like Flickr which catered to a fairly niche audience (in Flickr’s case,…
-
Static vs dynamic personal blogs and interacting with readers
In this day and age when the average internet user’s online presence is mostly restricted to social media sites where the main form of interaction is clicking/tapping on `like` and `fave` buttons on a mobile screen, having an online identity like your own website seems like an extravagance, particularly when you choose to own a…
-
The non-content of the Internet
Beware, this is a bit of a rant. Today I clicked on `Pocket`, Mozilla’s built-in content aggregator and offline reader which is sneakily advertised in Firefox. Then found this apparently “Pocket-worthy” article among others. From its very title, I knew that it was one of those empty “non-content” articles — where a bunch of inane,…
-
Blockchain domains for a censorship resistant Internet?
Most of us associate blockchain technology with cryptocurrencies and I guess that’s the most visible use of that technology today. However, while doing some reading on cryptocurrency-related technologies, I found that blockchains can be used for a lot more than that. Wikipedia defines blockchain as a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked…
-
There are no real online shopping deals
The Indian festive season is here. Online shopping sites offer “up to 40% / 50% off” along with mouth watering credit EMI offers and want you to loosen your purse strings… And all the time, I’m still waiting for that elusive item that is genuinely discounted at 40%. Most, if not all, of the online…
