Online advertising reaches new high

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report[PDF] made in partnership with PWC. For a short summary of the report check out their little announcement. I wonder how this amount money being infused into the web will impact the shape of online culture.

Some quick facts from the report:

For the full year 2007, revenues totaled $21.2 billion, exceeding 2006 performance by 26 %, itself the former record year.
Q4 2007 Internet advertising revenues hit $5.9 billion, representing historic revenues for a single quarter and a 24% increase over the same period in 2006.
This is the fourth consecutive year and 13th consecutive quarter of record results.

Teen Texting Found To Be A Linguistic Improvement

“I was able to gain access to a world that most middle-aged academics never get to,” University of Toronto researcher said after following thousands of teen texting conversations. Texting, according to research, is not a harbinger of linguistic decline but much more like the telegraph before it: Another facet in the constant evolution of language.According to the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, “(m)any people have this black-and-white view of language, that some things are always right and wrong,” she said. “That’s not how it works.” Instead of the end of the English language, teen texters of today are in fact innovators for the future.

Chinese Internet censorship: An inside look

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, has experienced “The Great Firewall of China” firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship, and he explained it in a recent article titled “The Connection Has Been Reset.”

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Geist: France Says Canada Considering “Three Strikes and You’re Out” ISP Policy

Michael Geist blog: Last month I wrote about the pressure to adopt “graduated response,” a policy that is better described as “three strikes and you’re out” for ISP subscribers.  While Canada has yet to take a public position on the issue, a new French document cites Canada as an example of a country that is negotiating an ISP three strikes policy.

Egypt: Coincide Hosting the Largest Communication Conference in Africa, an opposition’s Web Site is being Blocked

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information said today, that the website of the Egyptian Movement for Change:Kefaya “http://Harakamasria.org” was blocked in Egypt and the Internet users who have access to Internet through the T-Data Company, the largest Internet Service Providers in Egypt, which is controlled by the Egyptian Government since 4th May.

Net Neutrality hearings at Stanford: too bad no ISPs showed up

Yesterday, the FCC held a second hearing in its investigation of Comcast’s use of forged RST packets to interfere with BitTorrent and other P2P applications. Free Press has a page linking to written testimony, statements, and audio and video recordings from the Stanford hearing.

At the previous hearing at Harvard Law School, Comcast attracted criticism for filling the auditorium with paid attendees. This time around, the telcos declined to participate at all. They sent proxies in their place: a conservative think tank called the Phoenix Center, freelance tech pundit George Ou, and one ISP: Lariat.net of Wyoming. It’s a pity that ISPs aren’t willing to participate in public debate about their own practices.

They could’ve at least pretended that these hearings meant anything….

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How fast can you spend 3 trillion dollars ?

machinist:
Three trillion dollars is a lot of cash. You know that, but it’s more than you think: For the last three hours I’ve tried to spend $3 trillion and I barely cracked a trillion. Can you do better?

My playground was 3Trillion.org, an antiwar Web site set up by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films.

In his new book, the economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the Iraq war will cost, in total, $3 trillion. The Greenwald site aims to illustrate the opportunity cost of the war — other things we might have done with the money.