OzWebMasters

How’s that for a feel good news item:

 Almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US, XiTi said.

 And I’m guessing many people are like me, still use IE occasionally for when I am forced to. Add that into the equation, and the real figure might be higher still.

Knowing how addictive it could be, I have been putting off adding Scrabulous to my FaceBook. Good thing as well, because like many folk I had just assumed that they had the rights to make it. Turns out the 2 lads from India didn’t, and they’ve been making money from Hasbro’s product.

It has been claimed that the brothers are receiving $US25,000 ($A27,853) per month in advertising revenue from Facebook.

From 500,000 users per day, that is 1/6th of a cent per user, per day.

Obviously Hasbro could have sent their cease and desist a long time ago - my guess is they were waiting until their own FaceBook app is ready to roll, and they will instantly get a massive userbase.

Now that the Copyright Royalty Board is changing the rules, most web radio stations will not be able to operate profitably, because the royalty fee will be on a “per song listened” basis rather than as a derivative of what the station earns.

My prediction is that there will be isolated instances of pirate stations broadcasting online - if only the listeners know the address, they can get away with broadcasting songs for free. If they get caught, they can change their address. If they get into legal problems, they could base themselves in Liberia or somewhere.

This is really a lesson of how products can have a “long tail”. I haven’t inserted a floppy into a floppy drive this century, and yet until now drives have still been available to purchase, and I still see disks on supermarket shelves. While most of us stopped using it, there is a “long tail” of people who marketers and manufacturers might forget about, because they are such a minority:

* enthusiasts (like people who still use LP records)
* the local poor & poor non-profit orgs
* the foreign poor, ie many in Africa
* the technologically challenged (like elderly folk who have a TRS-80 that still does all they need)
* lovers of old pieces of software that are not available in an updated form

The floppy is dead. Almost all products have a finite period of usefulness, but some of us write them off too early.

According to Netcraft,  there are now 101,435,253 websites online, up from 97.9 million last month. I  wonder how many are genuine sites, and how many are just automatically churned out for spammy purposes?  I would say most are not worth visiting.