(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph)

In 2008 Jonathan Zittrain, in his powerful book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, envisioned the ‘appification’ of the Internet. Instead of using our web browsers to visit different websites to perform various tasks, we are switching to apps to do these things.

Everything from downloading music to booking flights, from reading news to connecting with friends, it’s all being appified. Users are abandoning the clunky and difficult experience of websites and replacing it with smooth easy-to-use applications on our mobile phones and tablet PCs.

A few weeks ago Wired authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff chimed in on this issue as well in their article The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.

As Anderson states, “over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

Where Zittrain sees this trend away from open web standards to closed apps as a bad thing – stifling innovation and handing control of the Internet to the corporate giants that control the app platforms – Anderson isn’t so negative about it. He sees great opportunities for businesses to monetise the appified Internet, where many struggle making money off of the open world wide web.

Especially for media companies an appified Internet seems to be a Godsend. Wired magazine itself eagerly embraced the iPad with a very good paid app, enabling them to make money off of their content online where previously their wired.com website was (and still is) essentially a loss-making enterprise.

For newspapers the rise of apps is perhaps a true lifeline, a beacon of hope for the future where previously all forecasts were naught but doom and gloom.

By selling news apps with advanced features a newspaper can distinguish itself from news websites, be it their own site or that of their rivals. Especially for regional newspapers such as the Belfast Telegraph tapping in to the geo-location functionality inherent in smartphones and tablet PCs can open up a whole new way for readers to interact with the news, and can become a cornerstone of a digital revenue model.

Apps present a business model with much greater revenue potential than a website. An appified Internet, for all its drawbacks, may just present the salvation of professional journalism.

Barry Adams is online marketing specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast-based full service digital agency. He’s never bought an Apple product in his life (and probably never will).

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph.)

In his forthcoming book The Shallows author Nicholas Carr argues that surfing the web has a negative impact on how we think. He quotes research stating that exposure to bite-sized chunks of information, from short videos and blog posts to tweets and Facebook updates, trains our brain to prefer this type of information. As a result we are losing the ability to focus on a single thing for longer periods of time.

This is not a new argument – in an article for The Atlantic magazine in 2008 titled “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr laid out the groundwork for his upcoming book. In a recent blog post Carr outlines a specific aspect of how the nature of the internet affects how we consume information: Links embedded in a text distract us from fully reading and comprehending the text. Instead of linking to other web pages from within the text, Carr wants us to start putting links at the bottom of a piece of online content.

As with his original article for the Atlantic, this latest blog post has not gone unnoticed by his critics. Clay Shirky, another notable author and web guru, stands firmly on the opposite side of the debate, claiming that the internet is a force for good. The web, he argues, allows for a wider spread of information than ever before, and has enabled an entirely new means of engaging with politics and society.

As a web professional spending close to 10 hours a day online, saying bad things about the internet runs counter to my livelihood. Yet I too cannot deny the fact that my mind works differently now than it did 15 years ago when I discovered the internet. Many of the symptoms outlined by Carr are eerily familiar to me, such as the big gaps between short- and long-term memories and an increasing inability to concentrate on a single thing for a long stretch of time.

I’m not sure if this is an entirely bad thing, though. The internet works in a certain way, and perhaps our brains are adapting to this online landscape to allow us to perform better in it. We’re developing new skills and new ways of thinking so we can deal more effectively with a globally connected world. Perhaps this type of hypercharged multitasking mindset is exactly what we need to succeed in modern times.

But at the same time I share some of Carr’s concerns that maybe we are losing something in the process. The question, then, is whether what we stand to gain measures up to what we might lose.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph.)

Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii.

But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru.

On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed.

We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google.

Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there.

But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal.

Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google.

It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.

Barry Adams is search engine specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast web design & development firm. He’s thinking of taking a Russian language course.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph.)

We know that Google stores a lot of data about us online. What we search for, which websites we visit, who our online friends are – we know that Google knows.

Many governments see this as a problem. Recently ten countries sent a joint letter to Google in which they criticise the search giant’s approach to privacy, focusing on the launch of Google Buzz which gave rise to a great many privacy concerns.

Google has so far not responded to this letter in any depth. Their official comments are nothing but bland corporate statements.

But all is not what it seems. There’s a more subtle battle being waged here, one of public perception.

Almost simultaneously with the privacy letter being sent to Google, the company released a new tool that allows all of us to see which countries make requests to Google for release of private data. Private data that, according to the governments requesting it, is necessary to track down criminals.

Interestingly, as Wired UK noted, eight of the ten countries listed on that letter to Google are also among the countries making the most requests for private data from Google, with the UK leading the pack by a significant margin.

So perhaps these countries don’t really care about privacy as much as we’re led to believe. Maybe they don’t care about privacy at all – something that residents of the UK will find unsurprising, used as we are to ubiquitous CCTV and an omnipresent nanny state.

Maybe these countries just resent Google for hoarding all this juicy private data, data that these governments would really like to have for themselves.

It’s time for us as citizens of the digital world to make up our minds. Who do we trust more with our private data, Google or our governments?

One thing is for sure. I’ll never be lifted from my bed at night by a search engine company.

Barry Adams is a search engine specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast web design & development firm. While he thinks he has nothing to hide, he’d rather not you look too closely at his PC’s hard drive.