The newest trend in the internet today is joining one of the many social networking websites. Here, you will be able to keep in touch with your old friends as well as your relatives and you will also be able to make new friends as well as meet new people. With social networking websites, you will see that it will make the world a smaller place.
One social networking website that is so popular among many people from all over the world is Facebook. In this website, you will be able to post your pictures, discuss your interests and hobbies as well as do other great things.
In the past, Facebook was restricted to Harvard College students. In time, it expanded to other schools and universities until it became available for everyone above the age of 13 from different parts of the world.
Presently, the Facebook website now has more than 62 million active users worldwide.
Now, if you have an online business, you will see that Facebook can significantly help you promote your website and your business. Facebook marketing is now one of the hottest trends among online entrepreneurs today. Just think about it, with over 62 million active users worldwide, you will definitely have a lot of potential clients to do business with.
Because of the amount of people joining Facebook, a lot of online business owners are now joining this social networking website in order to market their products or services. With Facebook, you will definitely be able to effectively market your website.
The great thing about Facebook today is that anyone will now be able to join it. Whether you are a college student or you are an entrepreneur looking for a niche market, Facebook is the place that you should go to.
In fact, Facebook is now very popular that it is now investing a lot of money for advertising in order to attract more people to join. With this kind of benefit, you will see the potential on what your business can have.
Facebook as well as other social networking websites are now just beginning to see its full potential.
Today, you will see that Facebook has now launched its Facebook Ads system that will allow you and other fellow business owners to formally advertise your products and services. You have to consider the fact that people are three to five times more likely buy a particular product if their friends recommend it. If you advertise in Facebook, you will be able to increase your sales.
Facebook is now very popular that it now contains ads for big corporations, such as Microsoft, Coca-Cola and other companies.
So, if you are thinking about marketing online for your business and you want to increase your company’s sales, then you may want to try out Facebook. Here, you will be able to increase the advertising potential for your company. Also, you will be able to reach out to more people as well as get a niche market for your products and services.
So, if you think that online advertising or marketing is not working for you, you might want to try out marketing on Facebook. Here, you will be able to see how effective marketing is by using this one of a kind social networking website and you will be able to increase your sales.
On occasion The Official PLOS Blog presents Thought Leadership interviews with scientists leading the way on issues integral to the transformation of science communication and advancement of Open Science. Previous interviewees include Bruce Alberts and Trevor Bedford. Here we present our conversation with Sandra Schmid from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Image Credit: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Over the years, Sandra Schmid has gained a reputation for academic strength and leadership, most recently as Professor and Chairman of the cell biology department at University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center. She’s also gained a reputation for her honesty regarding varied issues, including the position of post-docs, “if it were a job, we’d pay you better and give you retirement benefits,” the training of faculty, “few of us as mentors, as Principal Investigators, were ever taught how to run a lab or how to mentor individuals” and how she participates in open discussion of research before publication “mostly over beers.”
Schmid has been particularly vocal about the misuse of journal impact factors (JIFs) as a way to evaluate researchers and, as she claims, “the unfortunate consequences to the scientific community of their misuse.” At UTSW, Schmid’s home institution, there has been no overt discussion among the leadership regarding JIFs and where faculty should choose to publish. There is no formalized preference for high impact journals. “In fact, we celebrated the founding of eLIFE [a journal which rejects the use of JIFs] and have faculty on the Editorial Board of the journal,” says Schmid. The JIF was “never intended to and indeed does not measure the quality or impact of the individual papers in a journal,” says Schmid. It was originally developed and commercialized by Eugene Garfield to help librarians decide on which journals they should spend their subscription dollars.
“Individuals and institutions are being spuriously judged – by other scientists, funders, governing bodies and administrators – based indirectly on JIF, rather than directly on the quality and impact of their work,” Schmid wrote in “Negative Consequences of the Misuse of Journal Impact Factors for Scientific Assessment” as part of the 8th Forum on the Internationalization of Sciences and Humanities.
Flawed Statistics
The JIF is a statistic calculated based on the average citations of a selection of papers in a given journal. One major problem with the JIF is that citations are highly skewed, with most articles receiving fewer citations. Since citation distributions are skewed, averages are meaningless. “Indeed,” writes Schmid, there are journals that “flaunt their JIF in marketing material to authors that would ironically not accept papers reporting such flawed statistics.” This skewed distribution was clearly demonstrated last year through a collaboration between multiple publishers, including Université de Montréal, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science (see Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates). The analysis, posted on bioRxiv, showed that citation distributions of journals with clearly distinct impact factors greatly overlap—in other words that all journals publish many papers with similar lower numbers of citations, and few highly cited papers.
A Better Option: Citation Distributions
The authors of the bioRxiv analysis call for publishers to make publicly available the actual citation distributions of their journal’s articles, rather than rely on irrelevant and misleading JIFs. Since journals use many different techniques to artificially increase their impact factor, including publication of review articles (which are often more highly cited than the original research papers they review) and front matter, including commentary and mini-review articles (that generate citations but are not counted as “citable” content) comparison across journals is problematic. It is hoped that public disclosure of article citation distributions will lead to more granular comparisons and better informed decisions by authors on where to submit their work.
Then and Now
From the perspective of a senior investigator with a long-established career and history of publishing quality work at all tiers of influence, what has changed for Schmid when deciding where to publish is that in the past, “journals had different purposes and different scopes” and that was good. Before there was the JIF there was an understanding of what journal went with what type of data. “We sent our best biochemistry to Journal of Biological Chemistry; our best cell biology to Journal of Cell Biology. If we happened upon a new and potentially important discovery, even before we understood mechanism, we’d communicate it rapidly in Science and Nature because they were three figure papers.” Before the advent of supplemental materials, more meaty, in-depth studies were published in non-page limited, subject-specific journals.
When asked in the post-print era, how do researchers decide where to publish, Schmid replies, “That is the unfortunate part.” A lot of the decisions are being made by postdocs telling her about impact factors, although she cautions that “publishing in high impact factor journals doesn’t mean it’s high quality work.” Early career researchers are looking at numbers as a distinguisher between journals, says Schmid, so her efforts are focused on getting these scientists to think more broadly. Her response and recommendation? First and foremost is to choose the journal where the work will get in front of the audience that matters the most. Schmid is crystal clear when outlining her main considerations for deciding where to publish her work and the work from her lab:
Are the people who handle my paper able to identify qualified referees?
Are the editors going to understand the discussion and criticisms and be helpful in handling my papers; do they understand my field?
Do my peers read and respect the content in this journal?
Unintended Consequences
The real question for Schmid is how to get the “impact factor genie” as she calls it, “back in the box.” Why is this so important? Scientists and publishers often focus on the limitations of JIFs and the benefits of evaluating work at the article rather than journal level. However, there are more than just limitations to the JIF. According to Schmid there are very “specific and unintended consequences of the abuse of JIF as a tool for individual and institutional assessment.” Many of these, she notes, are direct; others are subtle, downstream ramifications:
Deferred communication of discoveries that might launch new fields as reviewers and editors demand more information per paper
Discouraged follow-up or augmentative studies to verify results due to over-interpretation of findings for the purpose of artificially inflating a work’s value
Misguided evaluation of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty by their individual papers rather than the combinatorial impact of their work in context
Wasted time and resources spent satisfying unnecessary demands of reviewers and editors in high-impact journals
Demoralized early career researchers forced to package an entire thesis or postdoctoral project into one comprehensive paper
A Better Option: Article-Level Metrics
Perhaps wanting to get that impact factor genie back in the box was more than a mistaken mixing of two idioms. The difficulty of reverting to a situation that formerly existed (putting the genie back in the bottle) combined with the repercussions of doing something that causes unexpected and unintended negative consequences (opening a Pandora’s box) does describe the situation the scientific community has with JIFs. Fortunately, this is not an impossible situation to remedy. Article-Level Metrics were developed by PLOS as a better means to assess research value in an electronically networked world. They are gaining acceptance across a broad swath of the scientific community, from scientists to funders and more, since they provide granularity, breadth and proximity (PLOS ALMs are updated daily to monthly, depending on source and age of the individual article). ALMs also allow different scholarly research outputs to be tracked, such as policy impact, datasets, software and code. Schmid also recommends simply using PubMed as a portal for assessing the influence of an article, stating, “from title to abstract to download is a good metric,” although not as complete as a suite of ALMs.
Leadership in Practice
In 2013 as Schmid took up the position of Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at UTSW, she offered an employer’s manifesto (published as a Science Careers column) on the approach her department would take in hiring new assistant professors. This manifesto promised “a better job of screening applicants—and to avoid inappropriate criteria such as journal impact factors.” The idea was to encourage applications from qualified candidates who “might feel sidelined because their paper has yet to be, or perhaps won’t be, published in a high-impact journal.” Schmid closed her column with an enthusiastic “Let’s run this experiment!” Four years later, she shared some of the results with PLOS. Using their Academic Jobs portal the entire faculty is engaged in viewing applicants and every candidate that has piqued the interest of even one faculty member is interviewed via Skype, removing the need for reaching a ‘consensus’ that might rely more on JIFs. Those few candidates whose programs are most likely to thrive in the department’s specific environment are invited to campus to visit. Since taking this approach “our new faculty are indeed thriving,” says Schmid.
This approach suggests that a reduction on emphasis of JIFs in favor of more constructive and meaningful measures of evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, fosters an assessment program that is both fair and thoughtful. This is how science should be; if it works for people it can work for research outputs as well.
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Sandra Schmid is Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair in Cellular and Molecular Biology, Professor and Chairman, Department of Cell Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She was co-founding editor of Traffic, Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Biology of the Cell and president of the American Society for Cell Biology. Schmid was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Vice-Chair of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Scientific Advisory Committee.
Google AdSense is a program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, that are targeted to site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering (also owned by Google). In Q1 2014, Google earned US $3.4 billion ($13.6 billion annualized), or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense.
Marratech e-Meeting – Web conferencing software, used internally by Google's employees. Google acquired the software from creator Marratech on April 19, 2007. Discontinued on February 19, 2010.
GOOG-411 –Google's directory assistance service, which can be used free of charge from any telephone in the US and Canada. Discontinued on November 12, 2010.
Google Labs – allowed users to test and demonstrate new Google products.
Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2011
Google Buzz – social networking service integrated with Gmail service allowing users to share updates, photos, videos, and more at once. It let users make conversations about things they found interesting. It was released on February 9, 2010. Discontinued by end of 2011.
Google Dictionary – it was first introduced as part of Google Translate, it then became a standalone service that allowed searching of words and phrases from over 22 languages. Discontinued on August 5, 2011.
Google PowerMeter – free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
Real Estate – Real estate listings in Google Maps, launched in July 2009 and discontinued February 10, 2011.
Google Directory – Collection of links arranged into hierarchical subcategories. The links and their categorization were from the Open Directory Project, but were sorted using PageRank. It was closed on July 20, 2011.
Squared – creates tables of information about a subject from unstructured data. Discontinued September 2011.
Google Sets – Generates a list of items when users enter a few examples. For example, entering "Green, Purple, Red" emits the list "Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Black, White, Yellow, Orange, Brown." Described in its 2003 patent filing by creators Simon Tong and Jeff Dean as “an inside peek at how Google groups keywords by concept,” it was discontinued in mid-2011.
Google Pack – Collection of applications – some Google-created (including Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Talk, and Google Chrome), some not. (Supported Windows XP, Vista, 7). Discontinued on September 2, 2011.
Google Fast Flip – Online news aggregator that mimicked the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche. Discontinued September 6, 2011.
Desktop (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3+, XP, Vista, 7, Linux): Desktop search application that indexes emails, documents, music, photos, chats, Web history and other files. It allowed the installation of Google Gadgets. Discontinued on September 14, 2011.
Google Image Labeler – game that induced participants to submit valid descriptions (labels) of images in the web, in order to later improve Image Search. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
Aardvark – Social search utility which allowed people to ask and answer questions within their social networks. It used people's claimed expertise to match askers with good answerers. Discontinued on September 30, 2011.
Directory – navigation directory, specifically for Chinese users.
Gears (Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari): A browser plug-in that enables development of off-line browser applications.
In the broadcasting industry (particularly in North America), a network affiliate (or affiliated station) is a local broadcaster, owned by a company other than the owner of the network, which carries some or all of the television program or radio program lineup of a television or radio network. This distinguishes such a television station or radio station from an owned-and-operated station (O&O), which is parent network owned.
Notwithstanding this distinction, it is common in informal speech (even for networks or O&Os themselves) to refer to any station, O&O or otherwise, that carries a particular network's programming as an affiliate, or to refer to the status of carrying such programming in a given market as "affiliation".
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
Privacy and Data Protection Cases and Issues by State
European Union Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
European Union (EU) data protection officials (the Article 29 working party who advise the EU on privacy policy) have written to Google asking the company to justify its policy of keeping information on individuals' internet searches for up to two years. The letter questioned whether Google has "fulfilled all the necessary requirements" on the EU laws concerning data protection. As of 24 May 2007 the probe by the EU into the data protection issue is continuing. On 31 May 2007, Google agreed that its privacy policy is vague, and that they are constantly working at making it clearer to users. After Google merged its different privacy policies into a single one in March 2012, the working group of all European Union Data Protection Authorities assessed that it failed to comply with the EU legal framework. Several countries then opened cases to investigate possible breach of their privacy rules.
Google has also been implicated in Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González, a Spanish Audiencia Nacional and European Court of Justice case that decided Google must comply with the European privacy laws (i.e., the Data Protection Directive) and allow allow users to be forgotten when operating in the European Union.
Czech Republic Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
Starting in 2010, after more than five months of unsuccessful negotiations with Google, the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection has prevented Street View from taking pictures of new locations. The Office described Google's program as taking pictures "beyond the extent of the ordinary sight from a street", and claimed that it "disproportionately invaded citizens' privacy."
France Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
In January 2014, the French authority, CNIL, sanctionned Google to pay its highest fee and to display on its search engine web site a banner referring to the decision. Google complied, yet will appeal to the supreme court of administrative justice, the Conseil d'Etat.
Germany Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
In May 2010, Google was unable to meet a deadline set by Hamburg's data protection supervisor to hand over data illegally collected from unsecured home wireless networks. Google added, "We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue." The data was turned over to German, French, and Spanish authorities in early June 2010.
In November 2010, vandals in Germany targeted houses that had opted out of Google's Street View.
In April 2011, Google announced that it will not expand its Street View program in Germany, but what has already been shot–around 20 cities' worth of pictures–will remain available. This decision came in spite of an earlier Berlin State Supreme Court ruling that Google's Street View program was legal.
Italy Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
Google vs. Vividown: In February 2010, in a complaint brought by an Italian advocacy group for people with Down's Syndrome, Vividown, and the boy's father, three Google executives were handed six-month suspended sentences for breach of the Italian Personal Data Protection Code in relation to a video, uploaded to Google Video in 2006, of a disabled boy being bullied by several classmates. In December 2012, these convictions and sentences were overturned on appeal.
Norway Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
The Data Inspectorate of Norway (Norway is not a member of the EU) has investigated Google (and others) and has stated that the 18- to 24-month period for retaining data proposed by Google was too long.
United States Versus Google on Privacy and Data Protection Issues
In early 2005, the United States Department of Justice filed a motion in federal court to force Google to comply with a subpoena for "the text of each search string entered onto Google's search engine over a two-month period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)." Google fought the subpoena, due to concerns about users' privacy. In March 2006, the court ruled partially in Google's favor, recognizing the privacy implications of turning over search terms and refusing to grant access.
In April 2008 a Pittsburgh couple, Aaron and Christine Boring, sued Google for "invasion of privacy". They claimed that Street View made a photo of their home available online, and it diminished the value of their house, which was purchased for its privacy. They lost their case in a Pennsylvania court. "While it is easy to imagine that many whose property appears on Google's virtual maps resent the privacy implications, it is hard to believe that any – other than the most exquisitely sensitive – would suffer shame or humiliation," Judge Hay ruled; the Boring family was paid one dollar by Google for the incident.
In May 2010, a U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon ordered Google to hand over two copies of wireless data that the company's Street View program collected as it photographed neighborhoods.
In 2012 and 2013 Google reached two settlements over tracking consumers online without their knowledge after bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser. The first was an August 2012 settlement for $22.5 million with the Federal Trade Commission (the largest civil penalty in F.T.C. history). The second was a November 2013 settlement for $17 million with 37 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to the fines, Google agreed to avoid using software that overrides a browser's cookie-blocking settings, to avoid omitting or misrepresenting information to consumers about how they use Google products or control the ads they see, to maintain for five years a web page explaining what cookies are and how to control them, and to ensure that the cookies tied to Safari browsers expire. In both settlements Google denied any wrongdoing, but said it discontinued circumventing the settings early in 2012, after the practice was publicly reported, and stopped tracking Safari users and showing them personalized ads.
“Science and democracy are logical allies, they both flourish with an open network of ideas, evidence and an uncompromising examination of results.” – Cindy Schaffer, former microbiologist with the Environmental Protection Agency
Clever slogans, such as “May the Facts Be with You” or “There Is No Planet B” flourished at the Earth Day March for Science as scientists and supporters of science around the globe chanting “Less Invasions More Equations” and “All Six American Nobel Prize Winners Last Year Were Immigrants” took to the streets demanding attention to the tangible impact of science on humans “Do You Have Polio? Thank A Scientist” and the environment “Ice Has No Agenda, It Just Melts.”
It is powerful for scientists and science-based organizations to show how important scientific facts are to everyday life, irrespective of political alignment, but what happens to this momentum after the collective advocacy effort has passed? What difference does it make, many have asked, and what role should each of us play, considering daily professional and personal commitments and demands on our attention and time. These are the issues faced by every social movement in search of long-lasting tangible impact.
Science Not Silence
The official slogan of March for Science, “Science Not Silence,” is a phrase that has potential to propel advocacy beyond the day of the march. “Because the results of scientific research benefit our everyday lives, we have taken for granted that science would be a vital, respected part of discussions about societal issues that impact health, the environment, technology and other science-based issues,” says Erika Shugart, Executive Director at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB).
“This is no longer the case. If science is not represented and advocated for, then it will be ignored or, even worse, replaced by discredited information,” she continues. “We can no longer be silent and assume science will be at the table, we must stand up for science.”
“My interpretation [of “Science Not Silence”] is that we need to use science and evidence-based scientific results to inform government policy and that we, as scientists, need to speak up about our research rather than staying silent,” says Elizabeth Blaber, Visiting Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. “More often than not, scientists get caught up in their research, writing grants and publishing papers; we forget that our results can really make a difference to the general population. We can use our results to help inform policymakers about important decisions that they need to make about climate policy, research funding, health care policies and the next step for NASA’s human exploration endeavors,” she says.
Blaber cites the unique insight scientists working as government contractors have into government science and the bureaucracy of government agencies. “Science not silence means education to us, educating policymakers on the importance of each scientific study that is being conducted in and outside of government agencies and how these studies collectively make all of our lives better in an unimaginable number of ways.”
Beyond the March
How we harness the excitement and momentum of the march and translate that into action is not a single solution for each scientist or scientific discipline. “When you ask ‘what next?’ that’s when I run into difficulty,” says Dan Schaffer, former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Research Software Engineer. “We can march every week all day long but in the end, there are far more important and difficult decisions we have to make if we are to do something significant about the issue of climate change, for example.” For some scientists, this means bringing scientific evidence into daily habits (and convincing others to do the same). “Here in Prius driving, solar panel powered Boulder, Colorado, folks like to talk about what we’re doing about climate change.” Yet some of these same climate scientists “fly as far as Australia for climate change conferences,” he says. “One round trip from Denver to London is equivalent to driving one of those Prius 9,000 miles. That trip to Sydney? 16,000 miles.”
Individual behavioral changes can, collectively, make an impact. March for Science provides easy opportunities on their Week of Action page. For example, by clicking on ‘Science Connects Saturday’ (available everyday) you can send an email to your representatives just by filling in a few form fields. The relevant representative is determined automatically by your zip code entry. ‘Science Discovers Monday’ leads to suggestions for game night fun, science-style.
For some, follow up from the March for Science means being more open and emphatic, publicly, about what is evidence-based science and what is not. “As a former microbiologist at the Environmental Protection Agency, it disheartens me to hear that we have to prove that science matters,” says Cindy Schaffer. “The more active we, as scientists, can be in promoting real science,” she continues, “the better chance we will have for the false news to remain false in the general public’s mind.”
The message “Science Is Nonpartisan” took to the streets as a demonstration of “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” These slogans call out for participation of the public in open, honest and constructive discussion. Says ASCB’s Shugart, “It is up to scientific societies and other organizations to help harness this energy to be a force for good in our communities.” Several organizations make it easy to participate, as we choose, in the democratization of science. Visit the PLOS Stand Up for Science pageto learn how; email communications@plos.org if your professional association or society is taking action and wants to be listed on Stand Up for Science.
Effects of developments in electronic media on Entertainment
Globalisation
By the second half of the 20th century, developments in electronic media made possible the delivery of entertainment products to mass audiences across the globe. The technology enabled people to see, hear and participate in all the familiar forms – stories, theatre, music, dance – wherever they live. The rapid development of entertainment technology was assisted by improvements in data storage devices such as cassette tapes or compact discs, along with increasing miniaturisation. Computerisation and the development of barcodes also made ticketing easier, faster and global.
Obsolescence
In the 1940s, radio was the electronic medium for family entertainment and information. In the 1950s, it was television that was the new medium and it rapidly became global, bringing visual entertainment, first in black and white, then in colour, to the world. By the 1970s, games could be played electronically, then hand-held devices provided mobile entertainment, and by the last decade of the 20th century, via networked play. In combination with products from the entertainment industry, all the traditional forms of entertainment became available personally. People could not only select an entertainment product such as a piece of music, film or game, they could choose the time and place to use it. The "proliferation of portable media players and the emphasis on the computer as a site for film consumption" together have significantly changed how audiences encounter films. One of the most notable consequences of the rise of electronic entertainment has been the rapid obsolescence of the various recording and storage methods. As an example of speed of change driven by electronic media, over the course of one generation, television as a medium for receiving standardised entertainment products went from unknown, to novel, to ubiquitous and finally to superseded. One estimate was that by 2011 over 30 percent of households in the US would own a Wii console, "about the same percentage that owned a television in 1953". It is expected that halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, television will be completely replaced by online entertainment. The so-called "digital revolution" has resulted in an increasingly transnational marketplace that has caused difficulties for governments, business, industries and individuals as they all try to keep up. Even the sports stadium of the future will increasingly become a competitor with television viewing "in terms of comfort, safety and the constant flow of audio-visual information and entertainment available". Other flow on effects of the shift are likely to include those on public architecture such as hospitals and nursing homes, where television, regarded as an essential entertainment service for patients and residents, will need to be replaced by access to the internet. At the same time, the ongoing need for entertainers as "professional engagers" shows the continuity of traditional entertainment.
Convergence
By the second decade of the 21st century, analogue recording was being replaced by digital recording and all forms of electronic entertainment began to converge. For example, convergence is challenging standard practices in the film industry: whereas "success or failure used to be determined by the first weekend of its run. Today, … a series of exhibition 'windows', such as DVD, pay-per-view, and fibre-optic video-on-demand are used to maximise profits." Part of the industry's adjustment is its release of new commercial product directly via video hosting services. Media convergence is said to be more than technological: the convergence is cultural as well. It is also "the result of a deliberate effort to protect the interests of business entities, policy institutions and other groups". Globalisation and cultural imperialism are two of the cultural consequences of convergence. Others include fandom and interactive storytelling as well as the way that single franchises are distributed through and impact on a range of delivery methods. The "greater diversity in the ways that signals may be received and packaged for the viewer, via terrestrial, satellite or cable television, and of course, via the Internet" also affects entertainment venues, such as sports stadia, which now need to be designed so that both live and remote audiences can interact in increasingly sophisticated ways – for example, audiences can "watch highlights, call up statistics", "order tickets and merchandise" and generally "tap into the stadium's resources at any time of the day or night".
The introduction of television altered the availability, cost, variety and quality of entertainment products for the public and the convergence of online entertainment is having a similar effect. For example, the possibility and popularity of user-generated content, as distinct from commercial product, creates a "networked audience model that makes programming obsolete". Individuals and corporations use video hosting services to broadcast content that is equally accepted by the public as legitimate entertainment.
While technology increases demand for entertainment products and offers increased speed of delivery, the forms that make up the content are in themselves, relatively stable. Storytelling, music, theatre, dance and games are recognisably the same as in earlier centuries.
AdMob – Mobile advertising network.
Google AdSense – Offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers, and delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages.
Google Ad Planner
Google AdWords – advertise with Google AdWords ads in the Sponsored Links section next to search results to boost website traffic and sales.
Adwords Express – Local online advertising made easy
Google Certification Program – Google AdWords partner certification program, providing AdWords qualifications to agencies that pass exams and other criteria. Replaced Google Advertising Professionals in April 2010.
DoubleClick – ad management and ad serving technology foundation for buyers, creators and sellers of digital media.
DoubleClick for Publishers by Google – Set of tools for driving direct sales revenue and maximizing yield on non-guaranteed inventory.
Google Grants – in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations.
Google Think Insights
Wildfire by Google – Social media marketing software.
