In short, the freedom of the Internet is too danged important to think that all is well in the domain of Internet censorship.

So how can I convince you, oh readers of Clickfire, that it’s important that we remain vigilant? Let’s take a brief look at what a grim future SOPA, PIPA, and similarly-constraining Internet regulations could mean, both in reality and in theory.

The Future of SOPA, PIPA, and Other Legislation

The officially-listed purpose of the SOPA legislation reads as follows:

To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.

Two words: ha and ha. The true thinking behind SOPA was so transparent that conservatives and liberals alike united against Internet censorship on January 20th, 2012; both political factions recognized that in order to “promote prosperity, creativity…and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property,” the United States Congress would essentially need to grant itself new regulatory powers.

Common sense recognizes that something’s not quite right when big corporations and organizations like the RIAA are given the power of government to enforce their intellectual property in the way they see fit. Not only is it unfair, it’s downright un-American.

That’s not to say that intellectual property doesn’t exist, or that protecting it should not be a priority. But we should all be – and have been – extremely wary of when the government gives itself new powers for any purpose.

After the massive demonstrations against the policies took place, SOPA and PIPA lost momentum. But a new threat has emerged from the legislative mind of Lamar Smith, and this time it’s coming under the guise – of all things – of “protecting children from Internet pornographers.”

Once again, it’s hard to disagree with the central promise. We agree with SOPA that intellectual property rights should be protect. We agree with the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 that children should be, well, protected from Internet pornographers.

We just hate the way Lamar Smith suggests the government should go about “protecting” all of us.

As Wikipedia reports regarding PCIPA:

Section 4 would require providers to retain a log of customer IP addresses, linked to “corresponding customer or subscriber information” listed in subsection (c)(2) of 18 USC 2703, for at least a year. This includes, but is not limited to forcing Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers’ information — including their name, address, phone number, credit card numbers and bank account numbers.

Surely there’s a better way to protect children from Internet pornographers than to force Internet providers to essentially work as another arm of the CIA.

The Future of the Internet

I am cynical about the future of the Internet – but it has little to do with the Internet. The Internet is doing well; it’s prosperous, thriving, and free. The fact that it has some problems is only indicative of human nature – human beings in general have problems.

However, my central premise is that regulating the Internet under the guise of fixing its darker problems won’t only not fix those problems (really, how can you control that many people? And besides, laws against theft and child pornography are already on the books), but it will introduce new problems.

Consider how our privacy is already an issue with the Internet. In many cases, this is a matter of our own permission – we agree to give away some of our privacy in exchange for using Facebook. It’s not a great thing, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to agree to those terms if we want.

In other cases, our privacy can be taken from us. Sure, it’s taken by hackers, spammers, and other scummy webmasters who have nothing better to do with their time. But when our own government is depriving us of our basic privacy because they assume the worst about us and censor us without due process, it’s time to worry.

So what might a future Internet look like? If you ask me, it will likely look very much the same – at least for now. Between some web sites going offshore to ensure that they can avoid government shutdowns and protests like we saw earlier this year, it’s apparent that people are willing to fight for their freedoms. And that’s a good thing.

But a potential problem comes when we don’t remain vigilant. When we passively accept the whims of the government because we’ve grown tired of fighting the constant debates, the constant legislation, the constant wearing down of our rights. One day, the Internet may be a heavily-regulated shell of what it once was, and innovators and entrepreneurs will be forced to find some other way to interact freely with other people to generate prosperity for themselves and their families.

If the government can shut down whichever site it likes without due process, we live in very scary times indeed. In the present world, governments like China already heavily censor the flow of information and commerce simply by extending their heavy hand over markets in which they don’t belong.

Is that what we want for the United States? For all our innovation – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Silicon Valley, and every App that’s come along in the past few years – to become a relic of what we once were?

It’s entirely possible. Restricting peoples’ freedoms means also restricting their freedom to succeed, to prosper, and to profit. We need that in a tough economy. We need to give people the freedom to do well on their own, to create, to innovate. It’s not enough to say that the government should regulate more simply because there are problems that exist.

What do you think?

Many businesses are turned off from using public cloud services whilst fears over the security of sensitive data and applications exist.  Public cloud hosting services are now well established but experts still point to it taking up to 2 years for all potential risks to be identified and security improved sufficiently for businesses and enterprises to have enough confidence to use a cloud service.

Even the release of a summary of the strategic security issues within a cloud service by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has done little to allay fears.  This report issued earlier this year looked at the strategic and tactical security issues facing any data center which provides cloud hosting services, along with recommendations to deal with them.

Despite the low uptake, confidence within the industry is growing as the biggest security firms have issued notice of pending product launches which are aimed at solving many of the problems associated with cloud hosting.  For customers this is a big change in the way security issues are being addressed as typically they are forced to take up a new service before any consultation on security has occurred.  Instead of dealing with security problems on a ‘as they happen’ basis, they are instead looking at security pro-actively and putting measures in place before businesses take up a service.

A study by Aberdeen Group’s Derek Brink was published in July of this year.  The study called ‘Security and Cloud Best Practices’ talked to 110 IT business, yet almost half of these said they were pushing cloud providers to apply adequate security measures before they will switch.  Trust within the industry is fairly low at present however, analysts do point out that there is little evidence to show that security within a public cloud is poor.

In the fact, studies have proven that cloud hosting structures provided today are often more secure and able to deal with any attacks far better than most private networks.  But businesses are still reluctant to sign up with less than 170 of 500 surveyed by IDC in August of this year saying they thought a cloud hosting provider’s security was more secure than their own in-house architecture.  This comes in direct conflict with those who have made the move to cloud services who say they are confident that their providers offer better security than their own IT department could deploy.

It would appear then that there is still some confusion about cloud hosting and the level of security if can offer.  Providers have done little to build confidence with most remaining silent about their security measures, partly because they do want to divulge those practises which give them an advantage over their competitors and partly because divulging their security practises could leave them open to attack.

This it seems could be the deep rooted problem.  If providers are not forthcoming about their security practises and the depth to which they run then businesses will not be satisfied that a provider is doing enough to ensure security of data and critical applications within a cloud environment.  It may only be through certification by third parties such as ISO 2077 that businesses will gain sufficient confidence that providers will deliver on their security promises to take up cloud services.

News article written by Georgina Clatworthy, a freelance writer working on subjects related to business, IT and technology.  I am not associated with Quality Tech but I can recommend them for secure hosting services to suit any business need.

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Now, we’re asking ourselves if Matt Cutts’ blog is one of those sites.

With so many webmasters devastated by the Panda update – and just as many complaining that high-value sites have taken the beating low-value sites were supposed to – Matt Cutts’ blog might be one of the most high-profile examples of Google Panda having unintended consequences.

First, consider that the Google Panda update was rolled out in February of this year. Now, examine the Compete.com report for Matt Cutts’ traffic since then:

There definitely seems to be a downward trend coinciding with the release of Panda, but perhaps more revealing is Alexa.com‘s take, which shows a sharp drop coinciding with the Panda international rollout in  April:

How could mattcutts.com be impacted by the Google Panda international rollout when the site is not technically an international site? Here are a couple of things to consider:

• Mattcutts.com would certainly be expected to receive large amounts of international visitors due to its subject matter. Might that constitute an international site in the eyes of Panda?
• Not all sites impacted by the international Panda rollout were international sites.

Third party traffic statistics sources like Alexa and Compete.com do not accurately measure site traffic, but the estimates they offer are commonly referred to in the search community.

If Matt Cutts is indeed feeling the Panda burn, he’s not the only one. As Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.com wrote in April (bold added):

Google said the algorithm works even “deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.” So if anything, it appears to impact even more sites and Google confirmed that, saying an additional “2% of U.S. queries” were impacted by this update. Impacted how? I do not think sites have claimed to be released from the algorithm update, even after updating their sites – but I do see more sites claiming they were hurt by this update.

Google itself has listed some bullet points for measuring a site’s quality in the form of 23 questions site owners should ask themselves like “would you trust the information presented in this article?” however don’t seem to apply to all of the sites that are feeling a traffic crunch after the new algorithms were rolled out. If one of Google’s own – and undeniably a provider of value to the search community in Matt Cutts – is vulnerable, what other high-quality sites is Google missing?

Juxtaposing mattcutts.com against the 23 questions leave only two that could possibly apply:

• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

Was Matt Cutts’ blog impacted by Panda? If so, there may be more than 23 questions to ask.

Update: Matt confirmed via Twitter that he was not impacted.

The change in strategy, confirmed in an email to Wired.com, was articulated by one of Google’s spokesmen thusly:

The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1’s and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.

In a recent Google Webmaster Central Video, perhaps the best known Google spokesman to the SEO community, Matt Cutts seemed to be optimistic about the possibilties when asked if plus ones have any effect on search rankings:

We’re still looking at the plus ones and how much effect that can have. It’s definitely promising. We’re excited about it and we hope to figure out a good way to use that, but you don’t want to rush into it. You want to make sure that it looks like a good quality win and not just throw in a signal because you’ve got it.

There’s no immediate indication as to when these changes will go into effect, but it’s obvious for web marketers that now is as good a time as any to get started to focus on social media results as part of their search engine marketing plans.

Is this the first time we’ve seen a major search engine get heavily influenced by social media? Hardly. Recall the Yahoo-Facebook “Six Degrees of Separation” idea, a social test to find out whether or not everyone on earth really is only separated by, at most, six degrees. This experiment could spell out a future potential partnership between Facebook and search engines in which social factors influence rankings, such as how  many of your friends recommend certain links.

As for Google’s +1 innovation, forward-thinking search engine optimizers will want to start paying attention to their social media statistics as well as their places in Google’s rankings. Their future popularity could depend on it.

Facebook CEO and young social media icon Mark Zuckerburg took to the stage at the F8 conference yesterday and addressed what’s already been a hot-button topic for Facebook’s massive list of active users: the recent updates. Any time Facebook updates its news feeds or navigation systems, of course, users are generally slow to embrace them, but there has been some special vitriol in the reaction to these latest updates. One report puts Facebook “haters” at  5 to 1.

While the updates – including a new “timeline” feature that looks to put all of your individual updates and recent shares into an almost biographical context – are simply aimed, from Facebook’s side, at making the site more comprehensive, others are worried about privacy, as CNet notes. The infrastructure changes essentially allow Facebook users to share just about everything – including what they’re doing – with the information being fed into a Twitter-like “ticker” which is instantly updated on friend’s home pages.

Many Internet users list privacy as one of their top concerns, which has fueled some hostile reaction to these updates. CNet was able to gather some of the key phrases of this reaction:

• “Frankly, after this last round of messing around with Facebook, there are a whole lot of us thinking seriously about dumping it”
• “after F8 last night, I decided to finally quit Facebook”
• “Facebook’s becoming the operating system of the human Web. Brilliant, yet alarming in its implications”

Whether or not this mass negative reaction to the updates will put any dent in Facebook’s rapidly expanding active user total, of course, remains to be seen.

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That the iPhone 5 will be unveiled in October has been a very public secret, but “sources close to the situation” are now pointing to the upcoming Tuesday October 4th date as the one chosen for both unveilings.

This will be a major coming-out party for Tim Cook, who has never before taken command of this type of event – at least not for Apple – and will have to strike a tone of enthusiasm not only for Apple‘s latest product, but for the overall direction of the company now that Steve Jobs has moved to a much less public role.

As for the iPhone 5, the usual chattering and rumors are swirling as they do around any iPhone unveiling. Amongst the rumors rounded up over at CNet: T-Mobile may be out of the picture, and another iPhone edition (the iPhone 4 – plus) may be in the works for a release later this year.

Of course, any iPhone update has a lot of implications on the world of mobile phones and mobile marketing. Whether or not Tim Cook can maintain Apple’s innovations remains to be seen.

While most would agree that Twitter.com provides one of the most simple, easy-to-use social media experiences on the Internet (and 100 million active users can’t be wrong), a new wrinkle in the Twitter experience that allows you to give a tweet a bit more “push” might turn that on its head.

The idea is called “Promoted Tweets,” and it’s a bit like sponsored Google results or other social media advertisements. The folks over at SearchEngineLand.com recently highlighted some of the more curious aspects of this new tweeting power, and they answered an important question: where can people expect to see these new tweets?

Like “sponsored” tweets, these new promotions will appear at the top of users’ home timelines, the top of search results, and in search results for promotion trends.

A dastardly deed on the part of Twitter? Consider that Promoted Tweets have actually been around since 2010, only on a limited basis. However, Twitter has embraced a “slowly but surely” method of introducing these advertisements that has been ramping up from small, private promotions to Promoted Tweets that are actually seen by people who aren’t following you.

The news of the day is that Twitter is expanding these Promoted Tweets to what it dubs “a small number of users” – however, for an answer as to who those users are, just refer to two paragraphs above.

Clickfire’s guess is that within another year or so “sponsored” or Promoted Tweets will become a regular thing, seen by a widespread audience, and similar in visual form to Google sponsored results.

Bing.com is joining the party, as they’ve recently announced a new “adaptive search” feature that analyzes a user’s search history and tries to figure out what they’re looking for. In short, the idea is to avoid using each new search term as a fresh start; instead, Bing.com will be using the entire context of the user’s search patterns to give them the best results possible.

While this might sound a lot like what Google has already done, the key to Bing’s strategy is to go deeper into a user’s search history to understand what they’re looking for.

For example (as Bing explains it), if you’re a frequent traveler, a search for “Australia” might yield key places to visit or even places to book arrangements. But if you are a more frequent searcher of movies, the top result might actually be about “Australia” the movie.

Using your behavior patterns on a long-term basis is likely the future of search and something that SEO experts will have to get used to. It will lead to greater unpredictability in generating SEO results, of course, but many of the principles will remain the same – with the goal still being to get in front of as many relevant eyes as possible.

Considering that according to Search Engine Land, Twitter sends around 100 million clicks around the web each day, there’s going to be a lot of information to track. Here’s what we know about the analytics:

• There is full integration with t.co, Twitter’s URL shortener.
• There will be tracking to see how many tweets point to your website
• A “leaderboard” that will display which sites are generating the most tweets and are therefore the most popular

With some three million sites now employing the Tweet button, this opening up of analytics to everyone (and not just Twitter advertisers) will add a whole new dimension to the social media game. Social media firms will be able to report real results to clients and not rely on other analytic platforms like Google Analytics. Traditional analytics aren’t going anywhere, of course, but hopefully Twitter’s analytic introduction will encourage other sites, like Facebook, to join in the fun.

For more information on the Twitter analytics, be sure to go right to the source: the Twitter Analytics introductory video posted by TechCrunch. There, at the bottom of the post, you’ll watch Twitter Business Development director April Underwood explain the new system. And one thing to remember: Twitter analytics is free.

The same senate body, the Judiciary antitrust committee, was the same body – though with some different faces – that Microsoft so famously stood up to during its antitrust hearings. At this point, however, it looks like a majority of the issues the government has with Google are simply at the “inquiry” stage, with no immediate action planned as of yet.

Said Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), “Google is a great American success story, but its size, position and power in the marketplace have raised concerns about its business practices, and raised the question of what responsibilities come with that power.”

Though many in the marketplace might not see the Google strong-arm dominating through any illegal means, competitors of Google still take strong stands against the company.

For example, when Google’s talks to purchase Yelp broke down, it wasn’t long before Yelp noticed an increased insignificance in the amount of online searches Google was sending their way.

Of course, with a plethora of sites who can claim to have been smacked by Google updates, whether or not Yelp was specifically targeted – and whether that constitutes a monopolistic business domination – remain to be seen.