Phone number portability in Canada

While much of the rest of the world takes the consumer-friendly position that wireless cell phone numbers ought to be portable, Canada still lags behind in this respect, my Globe colleague Dave Ebner reports this morning.

It's a shame,” said Eamon Hoey, a telecommunications consultant. “But there's no champion for this. The industry is not motivated. And the regulator is protecting them.”

Perfect PR

Just ran across an ad for the following book while catching up on my reading:

Feeding the Media Beast: An Easy Recipe for Great Publicity
By Mark Mathis
Explains how to deal with journalists in a systematic way from the newsperson's point of view and establishes only 12 rules that cover everything any PR person ever needs to now.

This book was published in July, 2002 by Purdue University Press.
Anyone reading this blog care to pass on these 12 rules or comment on this book? I'm curious.

The Decline of the Internet?

Researcher Eli Noam says in his paper, The Internet: Still Wide Open and Competitive?,:

“We have found pronounced horizontal and vertical trends of concentration in the Internet sector. What are the implications? It would take a lengthy essay to fully analyze this question. But some implications can be anticipated:

  1. Higher user prices, and a higher profitability of the major firms.
  2. A slowing of innovation and upgrade.
  3. Increased power of major Internet firms over:
    (a) its governance, standards, and protocols
    (b) access by content and applications providers
    (c) hardware providers
  4. Cross-subsidies within major Internet firms to segments that are more competitive, distorting competition.
  5. The emergence of regulation to deal with such power.

If the Internet becomes dominated by a few firms, and given its centrality to commerce, culture, and politics, it is not likely to be left alone by regulation. Earlier debates over the opening of cable-provided Internet access are an early example. Others are likely to follow. Hence, the Internet might, in the long term, move from an entrepreneurial and libertarian model to one of market power and of regulation resembling or even exceeding that of other electronic media. These findings and conclusions may not fit the Internet’s self-image of being wide-open and competitive, but business strategies and public policies will benefit from a realistic rather than wishful assessment.”

Clipped from ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog

Is Wi-Fi dangerous?

I love wi-fi, the wireless fidelity standard that lets people access a high-speed Internet connection over short distances. My home is wi-fi enabled and I try to evangelize for the standard wherever I go. A lot of folks, though, think Wi-Fi is dangerous:

Parents of students take action against an Illinois school district for using Wi-Fi in classrooms, claiming that exposure to the low-level radio waves may damage students' health. [CNET News.com]

I seem to recall hearing other incidents like this in the U.S. Love to hear from anyone who's got some thoughts about the science behind this or knows of other such groups trying to ban wi-fi on health grounds.

Blogging into the void

The Media Post reports that few blogs have the traction of more traditional Web sites. It cites a a new survey by Perseus that says most bloggers are teen-age girls who update twice a month. The Perseus survey was done for the just-concluded BloggerCon. FYI: I am not a teenage girl and I am doing my darndest to update this blog more than twice a month. From that story:

The study fleshed out demographics on the blogging population, which it said with 90% being created and written by people between the ages of 13 and 29. Fifty-one percent of bloggers are between 13 and 19, and 39% are between 20 and 29. Just under 6% are between 30 and 39, with 1.3% or under between 10-12, 40-49, 50-59 and 60-69. A slight majority of bloggers (56%) are female, and the study found they're more likely to stick to it than males.

Languages on the Net

More people communicate in English than any other one language, according to the latest statistics, but the number of non-English speakers is easily the majority:

“We have just published an update to the Global Internet Statistics page:
Here is a summary of the number of people in each language zone connected to the Net, and what this online population represents worldwide:

  • English 262.3 M (35.6% of total world online population)
  • Non-English 474.3 M (64.4%)
      European Languages 257.41 M (34.9%)

      • Spanish 58.8 M (8.0%)
      • German 51.6 M (7.0%)
      • Italian 27.4 M (3.7%)
      • French 22.7 M (3.3%)
      • Portuguese 19.4 M (2.6%)
    • Asian Languages 216.9 M (29.9%)
      • Chinese 90.0 M (12.4%)
      • Japanese 69.7 M ( 9.6%)
      • Korean 29.2 M ( 4.0%)

P2P and the BBC

Now, this is fascinating. As I wrote a month or so ago in The Globe and Mail, the BBC plans to unlock its vast library of television programming and make much of it, particularly news and documentary shows, available online under a Creative Commons license. The Guardian reports that to overcome the immense server and network costs associated with putting what some say is the world's greatest library of television programming online, the BBC hopes to employ a P2P architecture a la Napster along with its own proprietary media player. Not sure if I think adding a proprietary media player is a good idea, but what a terrific idea to harness the Internet to serve up your content via P2P.