The Internet Industry

Week Four

RISE OF THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET – a global system of interconnected private, public, academic, business, and government computer networks that use a standard set of commands to link billions of users worldwide

PACKETS – segments of messages that contain digital instructions that allow them to reassemble properly at the same time at the destination

ASPECTS OF THE INTERNET

HYPERLINKS - highlighted words or pictures on the internet that, when clicked, will connect the user to a particular file, even to a specific relevant part of a document

This is a hyperlink that will take you to the “History of the Internet”: http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/

HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE (HTML) – a computer language system that allowed people to access a system of interlinked documents through the internet. HTML is used to define the structure, content, and layout of a page by using what are called tags

TABLE 6.1 Demographics of Internet Users

INTERNET DEMOGRAPHICS

FIGURE 6.1 Timeline: History of the Internethttp://www.routledge.com/cw/turow

TIMELINE: HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

TABLE 6.2 What Adult Users Say They Do on the Internet

DAILY ACTIVITIES ON THE INTERNET

PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND EXHIBITION ON THE INTERNET

USER-GENERATED CONTENT (UGC) – creative products, such as videos and music, generated by people who visit websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram

INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER (ISP) – a company that sells access to the internet

WI-FI – a radio technology (called IEEE 802.11) that engineers designed in the late 1990s to provide secure, reliable, fast wireless connectivity

FIGURE 6.2 How Wi-Fi Works

HOW WI-FI WORKS

NET NEUTRALITY CONTROVERSY

The desire by websites and advocates to make sure that ISPs do not charge sites for transmission

Net Neutrality News

The New York Times: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/net_neutrality/index.html

The Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304049704579320500441593462

SOCIAL MEDIA AND SEARCH ENGINES

SOCIAL MEDIA SITE (SNS) – an online location where people can interact with others around information, entertainment, and news of their own choosing and, often, making

SEARCH ENGINE – websites that allow users to find sites relevant to topics of interest to them

WEB CRAWLERS (WEB SPIDERS) – programs used by search engines that search the internet to retrieve and catalog the content of websites

MORE ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES

ALGORITHM – a complex set of mathematically based rules that search engines use to come up with sites that relate to your search terms

NATURAL OR ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS – websites that come up based on a search engine’s algorithm without any influence from advertisers

SOCIAL SEARCH – a search that is carried out to find what people in a person’s social circle say about an item

FUNDING ONLINE CONTENT

CLICK-AND-MORTAR COMPANIES – firms with both an online and offline sales presence

KEYOWRK ADVERTISING – when software determines what a person is reading and sends the person ads for products that advertisers consider related to the topic

CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING – when software uses the words in the search box to send the person ads for products that advertisers consider related to the topic.

MORE ABOUT ADVERTISING ONLINE

PROFILING – creating a description of someone based on collected data

COOKIE – information that a website puts on your computer’s hard drive so that it can remember something about you at a later time; more technically, it is information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication

CLICKSTREAM – computer jargon used to describe user movement through websites

BEHAVIORAL TARGETING – the process of following people’s behavior and then sending them material tailored to what was learned about them

DATA MINING

DATA MINING – the process of gathering and storing information about many individuals—often millions—to be used in audience profiling and interactive marketing

AD NETWORK – a collection of many websites that a company knits together in order to sell ads on them

AD EXCHANGES – electronic auctions in which various publishers and ad networks offer advertisers the ability to reach specific types of people, often at exactly the moment those people are entering certain sites.

FIGURE 6.3 The Data-Mining Process in Action

THE DATA MINING PROCESS

THE BUSINESS OF ONLINE

APPLICATIONS (“apps”) – software that uses the internet, but not the web, to bring material to audiences

FEATURE PHONE – a mobile telephone that carries extras unrelated to calling (“features” such as texting, calendars, cameras, and media players) but does not have the sophisticated web-browsing, app-importing operating system of a smart phone.

SMARTPHONES

SMARTPHONE – a mobile telephone that uses a special computer operating system to offer connections to the internet through a web browser as well as through special applications (apps) that are compatible with that operating system

MOBILE APPLICATION (mobile app) – computer software designed to help the user of a mobile device perform specific tasks

MEDIA ETHICS

PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION – the name, postal address, or any other information that allows tracking down the specific person who owns a device

OPT-IN APPROACH – the view that marketers should not be permitted to collect information about a person unless the person explicitly indicates that it is all right for them to do so

OPT-OUT APPROACH – the view that marketers should be permitted to collect personal information from consumers as long as they inform people of what they are doing and give them the opportunity to refuse