"Punch the monkey" ads relegated to the hinterlands of the internet

So says the Los Angeles Times:

But the monkey -- indeed, a whole class of flashy, shaky, maddening advertising collectively known as "punch the monkey" ads -- is going away, or at least slinking off to some forgotten cavern of the Internet where few will ever see it. Like MySpace.

Like, if there were ads on this site, this site.

Pew: Men use YouTube more than Women

World says: Duh.

But, yeah, you can read all about it if you're into that sorta thing.

Many popular web stories start with traditional media, move to blogs

From the New York Times:

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

I wouldn't be surprised if that time between the traditional media reporting on the story and the time it appears on blogs has gone down since Twitter made such huge gains in popularity; nearly every successful blogger and many journalists that I can think of use Twitter to learn about new stories and promote their own stories.

Google may be developing an operating system (updated)

Oh, it's apparently already announced. Carry on...

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Internet giant Google may be developing an operating system, according to the New York Times. The Times says that Google is expected to announce it tomorrow.

So what will it look like?

In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on Wednesday that it is developing an operating system for a personal computer based on its Chrome browser, according to two people briefed on Google’s plans.

The details of the technology could not be learned, but Google plans to make the announcement on a company blog on Wednesday afternoon, this person said.

Firefox 3.5 downloads

Wonder how many times a new version of Firefox gets downloaded?

Well for Firefox 3.5 right now you can see at a website that Firefox makers Mozilla set up how many people have downloaded it total and per country.

As of this writing, at 9:12 PM mountain time, 2.62 million downloads total, 868,000 in the United States

Iran monitoring all internet activity in the country

People have asked why Iran hasn't simply shut off the internet in their country. Well, it turns out they are analyzing all the internet activity using something called "deep packet inspection."

From the Wall Street Journal:

Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran's case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country's system. It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.

All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function -- and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest.

This probably means that changing your Twitter location to "Tehran, Iran" does about as much as turning your avatar green.