With all of the newspaper industry’s huffing and puffing over Google and other news aggregators, you’d hardly suspect that print journalism has another major problem on its hands.

New research (PDF) from the Pew Internet and American Life Project solidifies what I’ve been hearing for a long time: It’s the classifieds, silly.

Over the last four years, use of online classified services such as Craigslist has more than doubled, Pew’s research found. Almost half of Internet users go online for classifieds now, compared to 22 percent in 2005. Every day, 9 percent of Internet users hit up Craigslist and other online classifieds, compared to four percent in 2005.

The cost to newspapers is immense. After reaching peak revenues of $19.5 billion in 2000, classifieds in American newspapers pulled in less than $10 billion last year. In other words, newspapers have lost half their classified revenue in the last eight years, while online classified use has doubled in half that time.

This begs the question of whether there’s any way for newspapers to stop the bleeding. Last month, I read a stirring essay by Jeff Jarvis about how the industry blew its chance to become a major player in the Internet age. Even if newspaper companies could somehow find a way to keep practicing journalism — Jarvis argues that it’s too late for that, even — I’m not sure the same could be said for classifieds. What could a newspaper offer that Craigslist cannot?

Missing from Pew’s research is any explanation for why online classifieds seem to be cannibalizing newspapers’ business, but it’s got to be that deadly mixture of (mostly) free and immediate. Want to get rid of that dresser today? No need to wait for tomorrow’s paper, and no one else will ask for a cut of the sales. Maybe hyperlocal papers could offer robust classifieds in markets too small for Craigslist to cover, but for cities, the opportunity was lost years ago.

To preface, on a whim I searched the above phrase in Google and was surprised by how many results came up, verbatim (minus the “duh”). There’s even a T-shirt. I guess it can never be said enough.

In an article that hits close to home, the Chronicle of Higher Education notes how former writers for their college newspapers are shocked and chagrined to see their past words coming back to haunt them. The most telling anecdotes come from an education reporter whose old essay on college hookup culture was used against her by white supremacists and a Marine who feared his comrades would discover his essays on war, politics and economic policy.

In both cases, the editors refused to take down the old articles. They also would not “hide” the essays from search engines.

Coincidentally, The Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes that a fellow Medill alumnus is circulating a petition to “darken” offending stories.

This is not the same situation as, say, when someone posts pictures of you without your knowledge or when you get arrested and turn up in the police blotter for all to see. These people wrote for an outlet which they knew appeared online, but failed to realize that their writing would stick around forever.

I’m not totally unsympathetic. Elementary school parents reading an education reporter probably don’t want to hear her opinions on sex. Having never served in the military, I can’t comment on the culture there, but I take the Marine’s word that he potentially faces some awkward situations.

In the end, though, the Internet is far too vast for people to demand retractions for everything that doesn’t sit well in retrospect. If someone really wants to dig up dirt on you, they’ll find it anyway.

Bottom line? Whether you’re a professional writer, commenter or occasional forum poster who doesn’t use an alias, be willing to stand by your writing for as long as the Internet exists, or be ready to explain why those words are no longer relevant. Otherwise, don’t write.

The other day, I was browsing through my Twitter feed and spotted a link to a free meal coupon from KFC. Needing dinner, I printed out the coupon and took it to my local restaurant for some free grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit. I also retweeted the link and told some friends through e-mail.

To put it another way, I helped the offer go viral. As demand soared, KFC began experiencing difficulties. Not everyone was getting their chicken, and some angry would-be diners went so far as to protest en masse.

It didn’t help that the Internet made it easy to exploit the system. Getting the coupon required downloading and installing a program that ensures you’re only printing one, but it didn’t take long for people to find the PDF version, which was offered to viewers of Oprah on the night of the show. I believe this is how the promotion started, but it certainly wasn’t how it ended.

A variation on this theme occurred earlier this year, when Quizno’s decided to give away one million subs for free. Not more than a two days after the promotion began, customers reported being turned away or subjected to bait-and-switch from franchise owners. In a memo, Quizno’s corporate noted the impressive speed with which the campaign spread and increased the reimbursement level to each franchise as a result.

That information spreads quickly over the Internet is no revelation, but these examples show how quickly the Web can motivate people to get their free lunch. That leads to store owners getting overwhelmed, which leads to backlash. Fast food chains, consider yourselves warned.

Last week, The Times created a minor panic by reporting that we’re on track to run out of bandwidth by 2012, pointing to a study that blames greater demand than supply.

Unfortunately, the story is peppered with inaccuracies and sensationalizes the problem, according to one of the study’s researchers who spoke with me. Let’s start with the fact that the study by Nemertes Research isn’t “to be published later this year,” as The Times says, but rather dates to late 2008. More importantly, the claim that “cyberspace is filling up” is based on faulty assumptions about the research.

So if you picked up the story via Engadget, CrunchGear or even Broadband Reports, perhaps a bit of clarification is in order.

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Over at Cnet, Charles Cooper has a nice post on a meaningful historical tidbit: Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, submitted a proposal to his bosses on how the organization could do a better job of keeping track of information. It involved publishing documents online with links to tie everything together, and it was the idea which eventually turned into the World Wide Web.

If you were trying to determine the twentieth anniversary of the Web, you probably wouldn’t decide it was today. (Another possibility would be August 6th, 2011–the day that marks two decades since Berners-Lee’s first Web site went live on the Internet.)  But his 1989 memo remains good reading, and the fact that his plan to change how CERN used information turned out to change how the world uses information is as inspiring as stories about technology get.

I’m about to board an airplane to go to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, and have been brooding about the fact that I’ll be deprived of the Web for just a few hours while we’re in flight. It’s startling to remember that something as essential as the Web is so new–and that the guy who came up with it is not only still with us but very much involved in shaping its future.

Thanks, Sir Tim! I feel like I owe you my career–because if there weren’t a Web, there sure wouldn’t be a Technologizer…

It might not be subspace communications, but NASA has successfully tested a deep space communications network that it says is the first step toward the creation of an interplanetary Internet.

Today, NASA announced that engineers from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had transmitted images to a NASA science spacecraft that was located more than 20 million miles away. The engineers used the Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, which was co-developed with Internet co-founder Vint Cerf, to transmit the data.

I’m always happy to learn of instances of the U.S. government giving scientists the time and resources to focus on their work. Research, while not always something that can be ‘productized,’ drives innovation. An interplanetary Internet might not be a practical venture yet, but neither was the original Internet when Cerf and others got it going forty years ago..

On this celestial body, DTN could be useful in situations where network connectivity is spotty. I’m not an expert, but it sounds like it could be useful for bringing the Internet to rural areas, and that is a good thing.

Back on December 31st, I asked the Technologizer community to make technology-related predictions for the year ahead. You made scads of them–from ones that seem like sure bets for 2009 to ones that might never come to be. Highlights follow after the jump–thanks to everyone who contributed. Once 2010 rolls around, let’s rate the accuracy of these predictions, then start prognosticating all over again. 

Oh, and we have a winner for the Seagate FreeAgent XTreme external desktop hard drive I promised to give away in a random drawing. It goes to Dave Moyer–congratulations!

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Well it looks like it has happened again, and nobody knows why just yet — another undersea cable — this time three of them — that run between Asia and North America have been cut. Only one cable remains, which is causing big problems for the Internet worldwide, and in some cases, cutting countries off altogether.

These cables handle about 75 percent of the traffic between Europe, Asia, and North America. They are located in the Medittereanean Sea between Sicily and Tunisia. Companies that own the cables can currently not give any time frame for restoration of service, however service could be back to normal by the end of the year.

Sabotage is possible, but it appears that officials are believing that a boat anchor may have been the ultimate cause. The worst effects seem to be in traffic passing from the European continent to the Middle East.

Traffic in the meantime will need to be rerouted, which could close slowdowns in Internet connections worldwide as the increased traffic could cause so-called “bottlenecks” to occur.

We’ll update this as more details come out.

Us longtime Conan O’Brien fans know that one of the signature skits of his late night show was “In the Year 2000,” which made predictions — however ridiculous — of what life would be like in the future. Well, Pew Internet and American Life project did something similar, but they took a serious look at life in the year 2020.

In order to come up with their predictions, Pew surveyed Internet leaders, activists, and analysts to see what they thought the net would be like a little over a decade from now. One of the most notable findings is that a general consensus believe that the mobile phone will become the primary access point to the Internet.

Voice recognition and touch screen interfaces will also become more prevalent in use of the Internet, and efforts to improve the Internet would continue. Rather than a full “reboot” of the Internet, where it is rebuilt from scratch, future enhancements would build on the current architecture.

More connectivity mean the lines between work and play as well as the real and virtual world would further disappear. This is bad news for Internet critics who say the ‘Net is destroying inter-personal communication, because it appears as if that will only get worse.

Sick of the ongoing piracy battles? Better get some earplugs. Pew says respondents expect the copyright fight to continue as pirators continue to attempt to circumvent the restrictions placed on digital content.

What are my predictions for the Internet in the year 2020? I don’t know, but I’m much more progressive than what Pew has listed here. I fully expect the Internet to be much more immersive. Everything we own will be connected, from our clothing that will know when we are sick and will call for help on its own, to our cars that will use the Internet to avoid traffic, to our lives themselves which could nearly be lived 100 percent digitally if we so desire. Matrix anyone?

All the things I have listed above aren’t far fetched. In fact, every single one of them are in development to some extent. While we won’t be plugging in like Neo, It will be pretty god darn close. It’s unbelievable how fast technology is moving these days.

I’m interested what you think will happen. What do you see in the Year 2020?

(Pew’s full study can be found here.)

The lame duck Bush administration is flapping its wings in opposition to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) free, national wireless Internet plan. Meanwhile, U.S. President- elect Obama is assembling a team to execute a plan to broaden the availability of high speed Internet access in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the White House stands in opposition to the FCC’s proposal to auction off the U.S. airwaves (formerly used for terrestrial television) for a nationwide wireless broadband service. Under the plan, the winner of the auction would be required to roll out a nationwide service on a dedicated portion of those airwaves within a specified number of years. Outgoing FCC chairman Kevin Martin, appointed by President Bush, is an advocate of the plan.

But the Journal says that the administration is at odds with its FCC appointee: It believes that the winner of the spectrum auction should not be beholden to a price or product mandate. Given the failure of other municipal Wi-Fi projects, I would hope that the FCC has does its homework and has come up with a model that works. But I hope the plan doesn’t die because it falls short of perfection.

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