Jack Wallington discusses eight issues and solutions affecting the internet.
Digital Britain was all a bit strange to me. It had very clear, positive aims but to me it missed a lot of the bigger problems the internet is facing, instead focussing on issues that people shout about the most rather than demonstrating a genuine understanding. The problem with this is that it missed core issues that will affect the long-term use of the internet.
Over the weekend I began jotting down a list of my biggest gripes with the internet that I believe seriously need addressing. Digital Britain, understandably, couldn’t and wouldn’t be the relevant route for addressing all of these issues, but there are some it should have addressed. Hopefully the Government will look into these in the future. One step at a time and all that…
One
Traffic from search engines and social networks – traffic is such big business, that while the honest and best sites gain the long-term success, nearly every site on the internet is now guilty of cheap tricks to win instant traffic. For example, 3 years ago the BBC News site would never have had stories titled “Soho sex workers thank residents”, “Five bludgeoned in Sydney attack”. The need to generate higher and higher levels of traffic instead of better quality traffic is reducing the quality of content on the internet. You may not think it, but this is a fundamental and massive problem.
Two
User Generated Content – is, on the whole, trash content. User generated content has always been a vital part of the internet (e.g. forums, reviews, wikis etc) and it is often the most useful, but it is not a replacement for professionally produced content. Very few users will actually take the time to validate, check and source their statements. We’re becoming a society built less on fact and more on “what I think”.
Three
Domain resellers – you can’t buy the names of thousands of businesses only to sell them back at extortionate rates, people shouldn’t be able to do it with domain names either.
Four
Universal ID / logins – is taking too long to become a reality.
Five
Badly designed websites – are still abundant and it makes the majority of websites impenetrable to the majority of users.
Six
Age ratings – or lack of.
Seven
ViAgRa Spam – it’s still an issue, but actually less so as more people use social networks like Facebook to handle personal messaging.
Eight
Online display advertising – I’ve said this before, but I think the current standard ad sizes can be improved, with online display being a better proposition for advertisers and consumers if their dimensions were made larger. At the same time, I still see websites that stuff tonnes of advertising onto a page, this isn’t good either. Fewer but bigger, I think that’s a good motto.
The solutions? I don’t have all of the answers, but here’s a starter for ten:
One
Website owners, shareholders or whoever’s in charge need to understand website analytics and debunk the “more is better” reports. Find out what’s actually important and stop listening to self-promotional spiel. Otherwise our most trusted websites will be irreversibly changed for the worse.
Two
Search engines will need to filter professional content from user generated content more. Perhaps a combination of Google Options markup code and a Google News style professional content approval process could be used for this purpose.
Three
The Government should make it illegal for a company to exist purely to buy new domains and resell them.
Four
Open ID / Facebook etc are already on the case with this, but they need to work together to ensure the best, most secure option. It would be good if they worked with the Government too to aid trust.
Five
The only solution for better web design is for people to get better at it and listen to those ‘in the know’, but in a world where everyone’s suddenly an “expert” it’s harder to know who to listen to. A starting point would be to make W3C itself more accessible and understandable, and for it to do more than just advise so much on technical accessibility.
Six
All of the major internet browsers could work together to produce a better method of filtering inappropriate content, and website owners could adopt a visible, universal, global age rating system.
Seven
Not a lot you can really do about spam, which is why we should look to social networks or even Google Wave for an alternative to remove email spam by replacing email as we know it. While these networks do have options to stop the likes of invites to use applications, people still need to be educated about these options.
Eight
I guess this is where the IAB comes in… time to round up the troops?
These are only my thoughts, and it may be that some of these issues are already being worked on – so please enlighten me if they are!
