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Sunday, November 17, 2002 |
What Kind of Content is Worth Buying?. If we are ever going to find ways for content providers on the Internet to make money, we're going to have to figure out what it is about information that people will pay for. I'm not sure there's much there, but we owe it to ourselves to try to dope this out.
Content consists essentially of news, opinion/commentary on the news, in-depth information of a practical (how-to) nature, focused research, and entertainment. None of these categories is entirely self-describing nor are they mutuallly exclusive. There are, for example, databases of focused research designed to entertain (a la Internet Movie Database.
News is too freely available to entice many people to pay for it. Opinion is a trust issue: sources of viewpoints who are deemed trustworthy might be able to get someone to pay for it, but probably only devout followers. In-depth how-to stuff might draw a payment, but it's a one-time thing and probably narrowly focused and therefore of limited total market potential. Focused research has some winning players (Meta, Giga, and others) but their Internet revenue tends to be a tiny fraction of their off-line revenue. And entertainment is highly competitive; breaking in new is hard.
As I contemplate this, I'm reminded of a bold venture I thought would take off like gangbusters a few years ago. A daily sports newspaper was launched with much fanfare. I was an immediate devotee. But you had to go to the newsstand every day to buy it. No home delivery. It didn't last long.
Then I remembered a New York Times piece I read several years ago. The basic message was simple: Americans will not pay for information or education but they will seriously overpay for convenience. How else explain bottled water, bottled tea, individually wrapped portions of peanut butter (I'm not making that one up)?
So what we need to do is to figure out how to make Internet-based content so easily accessible that consumers will pay us for the convenience of the packaging.
I have no clue what that is, but it seems to me to be the right direction. Anyone know of any successes in this area?
10:38:36 PM 
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Saturday, November 16, 2002 |
Will Al Gore Carry the Standard Again? Daniel Schorr, in a brief think piece in the Christian Science Monitor, suggests that former VP Al Gore will decide within a few weeks that he'll face Bush in 2004. Gore, who won the election only to have it stolen out from under him in one of the rankest-smelling political sewer moves in American history, isn't my first choice. He's not liberal enough. But he's better than most other candidates who come quickly to mind.
I was encouraged to note that Schorr points out that centrist moves by the Dems didn't do the trick in 2002. "Postelection analysis indicates that Gore may have had a point. 'Me-tooism,' such as Mr. Gephardt's embrace of the war powers resolution, and other Democrats' ambiguity on the subject did not help candidates very much." Exactly what I've been saying. Those who criticize the selection of Nancy Pelosi as minority leader in the House because she's too liberal cite her refusal to give in to Bush's maniacal demand for near-dictatorial powers. Seems those of us who think she was not only voting her conscience but also happened to be right, had some clue what we were talking about after all.
I'd love to see Gore -- whom I thought in 2002 and continue to believe has the potential to be one of the best presidents in our history -- take clearer, staked-out positions on some issues. But there's time.
9:19:46 PM
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Aggregator cum Editor...Good Idea. I like the new tack Brent Simmons is taking with NetNewsWire Lite. A seamless news browsing, commentary, blog publishing kind of tool would be way cool. (Actually, Radio already has that set of features; I'm talking about a tool that is independent of the blog technology or server.) Weblog Editing and NetNewsWire
I’ve got the basics of weblog editing in NetNewsWire pro working—I’ve been using a Manila site initially, since Manila supports both the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs.
[inessential.com]
12:26:51 PM
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The Famous Archeological Ruins of...Detroit?. Wow. This was an amazing photographic tour and tour de force. It made me sick. Words fail me. Take a look. Detroit's Ruins
While searching for information about the new Eminem movie '8 Mile', I discovered this site: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. This photo-essay of urban devastation defies words. Observe the current state of the original Ford Model T plant, the former luxury car maker Packard Motors plant, and the Studebaker plant. [Kuro5hin]
12:20:16 PM
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The Economist is Dead Wrong; Pelosi Will Be Good for Dems. I generally respect the coverage of American politics in the British-published The Economist. But they screwed this one up big time. John Robb repeated their mistake because, well, he seems to believe that the way to Democratic resurgence is by out-Republicaning the Republicans. I disagree.
The Economist. Pelosi gets the nod. "This is a disaster for the Democrats." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
To demonstrate the lack of understanding of the true political reality, The Economist reports, completely incorrectly, that, " In 1996, she voted against welfare reform in the name of the poor (however, it has since helped to slash welfare rolls and reduce black poverty to historic lows)." The last part of this observation is patently absurd. The only way this so-called "welfare reform" had the described effect was by the usual government trickery of redefining "poverty." And of course it slashed welfare roles, but not, as the article implies, by improving the lot of the poor. Rather, it simply declared the poorest of the poor ineligible for welfare. Poof. Rolls reduced. Problem solved. Where do you think many of the homeless who are now America's disgrace came from?
The Democrats took a tiny but important step toward winning back the "lunatic fringe left wing San Francisco liberals" whose abandonment of the increasingly centrist party has had more to do with its demise than any other single factor. Us liberals are staying away from the polls or, in cases like mine, voting for real liberal candidates wherever they can be found.
Go, Nancy!
10:24:02 AM
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AbiWord Gets Some Well-Deserved Attention. Salon's Andrew Leonard looks at the AbiWord phenomenon and has some useful comments about Open Source and M$ alternatives along the way. AbiWord up. Booms come and busts go, but open-source developers keep improving the alternatives to Microsoft's "standards." [Salon.com]
10:14:59 AM
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The Culture of Free Must Die? One of the weirdest and in some ways most unfortunate side effects of the way the Web evolved is what has been dubbed the "Culture of Free." Web users have rightly come to expect that anything they want should be available for free, including being free of the "scourge" of advertising. But in the aftermath of the Dot Bomb, it has become increasingly clear that only those services that are sustained somehow by cash flow and those run purely as labors of love by very small (often one-person) teams are likely to survive.
One approach that has shown some success is two-tier access. This is a situation where some basic services remain free but limiting so that you are encouraged to "upgrade" to a more usable service for which you pay a premium fee. It's not always successful, but it's a way of moving from free and unprofitable undertakings to those that have at least some possibility of success.
Yahoo! mail takes such a tack, as seen in this piece:
Charging Does Help Yahoo Make A Profit. Meshach writes "The globe and mail has an article about how yahoo is starting to charge for their email service. Payment is not mandatory but if you don't pay ... [Slashdot]
]
At the end of the day, this hybrid approach may prove broadly successful. One thing is clear. Surviving online services will fall into one of three categories, if they don't already:
- Those that operate deliberately for no tangible profit. These include labors of love, information sites run increasingly by folks with an agenda, and commercial branding sites that don't intend to sell you anything.
- Subscriber or membership sites which generate revenue streams without ads. (As the article above points out, it's really alright to have fewer people in your user base if they're paying. Eyeballs don't write checks.)
- Ad-supported sites. Contrary to popular belief, Internet advertising is far from dead. It has definitely declined but there are still tens of millions of dollars being spent on online ads and smart folks are figuring out how to make this approach work better. It's definitely here to stay.
10:10:37 AM
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Friday, November 15, 2002 |
Salon Does Mysteries. I love this. Salon Magazine, the place I began my Web career lo these many eons back, has started a new column focusing on mysteries. I am shamelessly addicted to mysteries, trial novels, and non-military spy adventures, so I am looking forward to this new column with much relish. And a dab of mustard. Brown, of course.
11:09:33 AM
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Keats Says it More Poetically Than Edison. Same message as Edison's characterization of his thousands of failed efforts to create the light bulb ("I now know lots of ways that don't work" in paraphrase), but a tad more poetic. John Keats. "Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
10:59:33 AM
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Color Me Unsurprised as Bush Blocks Yet Another Popular Treaty. For a country that criticizes Iraq for failing to uphold international treaties and laws, the United States Under Selected President Bush has certainly developed a similar reputation among other world's nations. That latest? U.S. won't support Net "hate speech" ban. The Bush administration says it won't support a proposed treaty to restrict "hate speech" on the Internet. [CNET News.com]
10:55:14 AM
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Thursday, November 14, 2002 |
A Thoughtful and Penetrating Analysis of the Morality of War on Iraq. Would this be a "just war"?. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' statement on Iraq.
[Salon.com]
9:58:08 PM
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Who Knew? I Grew Up Near '8 Mile'. I was interested to read in this article that the hot new film definitely not aimed at my demographic was shot along 8 Mile Road in Detroit, on the border with Warren. I grew up in the 8 Mile-9 Mile Rd. area. What I remember most is that there were no minorities there in the 50's and early 60's at all. None. I went to a lily-white high school a couple of miles from downtown Detroit and the only blacks we saw were when we played other teams on the court or the field.
Still, I think I'll skip the flick.
Along Detroit's Eight Mile Road, a stark racial split
Film based on white rapper tells a tale of two cities. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]
3:16:22 PM
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Good Reminder from Aristotle
Aristotle. "We are what we repeatedly do." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
I was reminded of a parallel quotation. "A working definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Don't remind me.
11:37:35 AM
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This is Scary Shit. It may already be too late, but pay attention to this, folks! Civil liberty is about to become an arcane concept in America. That's not hyperbole.
William Safire's must-read column today reprises the reporting John Markoff did last week on the government's plans for a master database of personal information. You thought online marketers were bad? Admiral John Poindexter (of Iran-contra scandal fame) is spearheading a plan -- it's currently a part of the Homeland Security Act, which is seemingly on the verge of passage into law -- for "Total Information Awareness," a centralized federal spy database with dossiers on every U.S. citizen.
It's significant that the outcry against this plan is hailing not just from the left but from civil-libertarian conservatives like Safire. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
11:33:57 AM
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$2 Billion Lighting Company Moves from Windows to Linux Servers. Red Hat wins over Windows convert. The Linux seller says its new customer will move from Microsoft Windows to its open-source software for database systems--a tougher proposition than a Unix-to-Linux switch. [CNET News.com]
Good news for those of us interested in at least loosening M$ grip on the computing world. Of course, I'd feel a lot happier if they'd switched their users' desktops, but it's a start.
11:26:59 AM
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002 |
How Blogs Change Site Traffic Patterns. This is an important piece for everyone interested in, involved with or affected by Web site construction and publishing, including all bloggers. Matt Haughey gives in. Matt Haughey: “I don’t keep track of post titles, I don’t think the syndication file is all that useful without HTML, and I’ve never personally found much use for a RSS reader. That all changed when a friend said she wasn’t reading my site anymore, or any sites for that matter that didn’t carry RSS feeds.”
Brent’s Law of Weblogs: If you’re not syndicating, you’re not publishing.
This law is descriptive, not prescriptive.
RSS, or something like it, was inevitable. I used to read a couple dozen sites regularly—now I read about a hundred sites. Far more than I could ever follow in my browser. And I do actually visit the sites I subscribe to: when there’s something interesting in their feed, and it links back to the site, I go to the site.
Traffic patterns are changing, definitely. But RSS is a chance for webloggers to reach an even wider audience. It doesn’t mean that the HTML version of one’s site is now irrelevant—in fact, because of RSS and newsreaders I now visit lots of sites I never used to visit. [inessential.com]
8:08:55 PM
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One More Reason Not to be a Republican.
Proposed bill could jail hackers for life. A last-minute addition to a proposal for a Department of Homeland Security bill would punish malicious computer hackers with life in prison. [CNET News.com]
Not only that, here's a really salient paragraph from that story:
During closed-door negotiations before the debate began, the House Republican leadership inserted the 16-page Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) into the Homeland Security bill. CSEA expands the ability of police to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, and offers Internet providers more latitude to disclose information to police.
Deceit and dishonor of a seriously malodorous order. These guys are so power-hungry that it is downright scary.
The American people got what they asked for. More's the pity.
7:57:51 PM
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I Think Your View is Too Short-Horizon, Robert.
Steven MacLaughlin is talking about the TabletPC today. Yeah, I agree. However, he asks manufacturers to hand them out to evangelists so they can help get the word out. I totally agree that'd be a great marketing technique, there's one problem with that: margins are non-existent.
What does that mean? It means that return on investment for such an act would not be there. How many Tablets would some company sell by giving even a highly-trafficed Weblogger a free Tablet? I doubt we'd sell more than a couple. Our margins on hardware sales are way less than 10%. See the problem? Now, if you can guarantee me you'll sell 100 units or more, let's talk! [The Scobleizer Weblog]
Interesting to hear the thin margins, Robert, but I think you're selling short the impact of market influencers. One guy who has 10 friends who ask him what to buy and who recommends a Tablet PC may only spawn two sales directly. But some of those folks who don't buy one will want to act like they have insider knowledge at the next kegger they have (do people still do keggers?) and influence another couple of buyers. Etc. Etc.
Steven is right. Besides, with all of NEC's money, they couldn't afford to be wrong by a couple hundred Tablets? They'll piss away 10 times that in one bad ad campaign, I guarantee it.
7:54:27 PM
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Keep a Close Eye. The Internet faces a free-speech test. The Supreme Court hears challenges to a pair of sex-offender laws and enters a debate that could set new rules for access to online information. [CNET News.com]
Privacy, as my colleague Dan Gillmor continually points out, is one of the two or three most crucial issues of this generation. These cases could result in significant rulings. You can't afford to ignore the Supremes.
11:30:12 AM
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I'm Trying Another New Blogging Tool. I've become so enchanted with blogging that I have been spending way too much time blogging and exploring the space. My old buddy Tim Lundeen of Web Crossing fame and my son-in-law Jeff Soule, who works for Tim, have been nudging me lately to check out WebX 5.0, a product that is still in pre-release. It incorporates blogging into a full-blown discussion board system, one that I've admired for many years. In addition to being a community server, WebX has always been a full-blown development platform.
The new Version 5 is a major leap forward for the product I chose for discussion boards at Salon.com and later at CNET's Builder.com. It is eminently more customizable, supports a full-blown object model on the server side, is scriptable in JavaScript and now supports a plug-in architecture that will spawn new models for making money in community.
But IT BLOGS!. And does so very nicely, including creation of RSS feed, categories, mutliple blog editors and two features I've really wanted in blogging: email signup by readers and email notification of the blog owner when comments get posted. I'm transitioning a couple of my categories over to WebX5 so I can do a legit comparison of the blogging experience between Radio and WebX. Here's the temporary home of my WebX Blog. I'll be interested in your comments.
(If you go there and you really want to try this new tool before it's released, shoot me an email. I can only set up blogs for a small handful of folks on this test server, but I'd love to share the experience and get more feedback.)
10:56:44 AM
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Clearly, We Need to Make Spam More Expensive Somehow. The Economics of Spam. higgins writes "The Wall Street Jorurnal has the best story I've ever seen on the economics of spam. A self-described "spam queen" (Clean link; should work for ... [Slashdot]
If you read that article, you'll find that where direct-mail folks anticipate responses in the 2% range, spammers can make money -- and lots of it -- with tiny fractions of that figure. The cost of sending the spam is just too low.
So one way to stop spam -- no an original idea -- is to raise the price of spam somehow. What ideas have you seen on this subject?
9:16:23 AM
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002 |
Enter Key Deletes in Radio News Aggregator. Argh!. I just found out the hard way that the news aggregator page of my Radio Web log site responds to the Enter key (which I struck accidentall while reaching for a pretzel) by deleting all checked items on the page. Bad move. I think this is browser behavior because there's a form with no text entry field, so the Enter key is doing what it's expected to do. But it just cost me about five items I had planned to write blog entries about. Gotta find a way around that one.
6:10:34 PM
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Gates Giveth, Gates Taketh Away. This morning's San Jose Mercury-News carried a front-page story on Bill Gates' private foundation plans to pour $100 million into India to curtail and elimiante AIDS and HIV in that country. Then today, CNET reports that Gates' fiefdom, Micro$oft, will spend four times that much essentially trying to kill off Open Source in an economy that could greatly benefit from the success of open platforms.
2:14:39 PM
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A Penetrating Piece on M$ and the Future. The Economist. ...Microsoft's failure can also be attributed in part to the antitrust trial. Its rivals in other industries have been alerted to its tactics: having seen PC makers reduced to mere box-shifters while Microsoft makes a fortune, they do not want the same to happen to them. Microsoft has thus been unable to make much progress....Microsoft's ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust. Even more than IBM in the 1980s, the firm must rebuild its reputation. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
My good friend Laurence Rozier, one of the smartest guys I know, has been saying similar things for a couple of years at least. The Internet, P2P networks, informal communities of leaders such as blogging has created, all pose potential threats to the M$ monopoly. Clearly we can't beat them at their own game. Equally clearly, the game and the arena are shifting.
2:04:10 PM
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W3C XForms Standard Edges Toward Finalization. W3C recommends online forms standard. The Web's leading standards organization reaches a critical stage in a new standard that governs how developers use forms on the Internet. [CNET News.com]
XForms sets up another standards clash between M$ and the rest of the world. Microsoft recently announced XDocs, designed to deal with some, but not all, of the same issues. I'm not sure the two are entirely mutually exclusive, but my guess is they'll be perceived that way, which is 90% of the problem as a rule.
Why can't we just all get along?
1:58:56 PM
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News.com Says Supremes Will Hear Key Censorship Case. Supreme Court to hear filtering case. The U.S. Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it would hear a challenge to a controversial law placing filtering software in public libraries. In May, a three-judge panel in Philadelphia ruled that a federal law designed to encourage the use of filtering software violated library patrons' rights to access legitimate, non-pornographic Web sites. [Tomalak's Realm]
12:09:40 PM
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Monday, November 11, 2002 |
Salon Premium's Alternative 'Payment' Play. I've long been a believer that two-tier approaches to content-centric Web sites would be a good way for them to stay afloat and even become profitable. Back in early 1996 when I was Director of Technology at Salon.com, I advocated a premium membership approach loudly and often. After I left, the idea was implemented (though not the way I had recommended and not in a way I necessarily support). However, I decline to link to premium-content articles from my Web log or my Web site because I don't think it's fair to my readers to send them off to read a teaser on an article that they then can't read without paying something.
Today, I saw a link in my News Aggregator to a Salon piece interviewing Bob Kerry on the subject of why liberals (like myself) should back a war on Iraq. I respect Kerry and I wanted to see how he made his argument.
When I got to the article, I found it was a premium piece. But I noted for the first time that I could choose to watch a Mercedes-Benz commercial rather than paying for the content. Nifty idea. So I decided to try that.
It worked pretty well. The commercial stopped loading at the third page for some reason and I thought I was in a sort of catch-22. But if you drill down a couple of links from there, you actually get a "day pass" to all of Salon's premium content even if the commercial didn't for some reason work for you. Sterling idea. I'm sure some people will claim the commercial wasn't viewable and get the free day pass anyway, but in the process they will see Mercedes' name a few times and then the premium content displays Mercedes ads, so it seems a fair trade.
9:54:21 AM
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Hey, Macromedia! You Didn't START This!. In an undated essay, Macromedia's President of Products Norm Meyrowitz describes the vision behind his company's Contribute. He's a bright guy and he's right in most of what he says. I think Contribute will be a good...er...contribution to the evolution of Web editing and maintenance.
But when Norm says, "We believe that Macromedia Contribute starts the next wave of the web[~]the low-maintenance, read/write web[~]where each user can participate actively in what's out there, rather than be a passive recipient," he's just wrong. Zope has been enabling Web builders to create sites their users can maintain without fear of breaking things for a long time. I suspect other CMS solutions including Manila have also been allowing non-professional Web users to be Web writers for some time.
So while I have no doubt Contribute will be cool, well-designed, and highly functional software that will move this important marker along, I think Norm and Macromedia should acknowledge the shoulders on which they stand.
9:24:43 AM
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A Veteran's Thoughts on Veterans' Day. Today, Monday, Nov. 11, is Veterans' Day in the United States. It's a day when we honor the boys and girls, men and women, who served their country in the Armed Forces. While there is certainly mindfulness of those who died in that service, this holiday is more about those like me who, thankfully, were not called to give the last full measure.
I did back-to-back tours in Vietnam in 1964-66. I am not always proud of that service. Following my five years in the Army, I became a peace activist and I remain to this day a pacifist at heart.
Vietnam was not a glory war. It was a gory war, a war of mistakes and attrition, a war with no clear goal, and as such frustrating to fight and to try to understand from any perspective. I had many friends who left the U.S. for Canada to escape the draft. I respected their moral choice then and I continue to do so. I had lots of friends who were part of the anti-war movement. I respected their moral choice then and I continue to do so. I had many friends who chose to go to Vietnam and fight. I respected their moral choice then and I continue to do so. It was clear to me when I returned to the United States and remains clear since then that most Americans are embarrassed at Vietnam, don't want to talk about it, and certainly don't respect the moral choice my brothers and sisters made then and don't understand it today.
It's all good. The war wasn't a choice any of us made lightly. It wasn't even a choice most of us made wisely. It tore this country apart and it brought it together again in a new era. As with all historical events, it was purely neither good nor bad because it wasn't pure. It was messy and nasty and confusing and ugly and painful and uniting and cleansing. Ultimately, it didn't really conclude, it just sort of fizzled out. God has used it for peace.
Those of us who are veterans who served in the belief -- mistaken or otherwise -- that we were preserving peace did so in good faith. Those who saw their role not as preserving peace but as wreaking havoc had their own agendas. At the end of it all, the qustion is what kind of men and women we became as a result of the crucible of that experience.
I do not of course presume to speak for anyone else. But the Vietnam experience shaped me at a deep level and has given rise in later life to my pacifist and spiritualist nature. And for that I am grateful. Not proud, but grateful.
12:18:47 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.
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