Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Note: I may not be around much today. My new lenses are in for my glasses and I need to go pick them up in LA.   4:16:24 AM

Why Collaboration? Because It Makes Sense Today nearly everyone on Planet Blog was mentioning Ray Ozzie's article on Collaboration and Community. Because my back was acting up, I passed on reading it until I was able to give the topic my attention tonight after a doze of prescription drugs kicked in about 11 PM and I could sit long enough to read. Dave mentioned Ray Ozzie's article "Why collaboration?" inwhich Ray said, "If you can get people to work in the open, it can be quite valuable to others." [Scripting News] Even Jon Udell and Scott Loftesness have commented on Ray's thoughts. I've always considered collaboration a vital part of the development process, especially in the software world. Programmers without direct feedback from customers become highly disconnected. The result is programming that works well in the programmers mind, but lacks something the customers really need or want.  Userland has done a good job on this in the development of Radio, but at times I know there are features and things I've discussed with other Radio Bloggers we'd like to see... may be we should just speak up? However in the past several years the business world has begun to inquire and be more aware of how internal collaboration can be positive to their operations. For me this concept was nothing new-- I've been working remotely with various people around the world for years on CompuServe. Rarely would our group of business partners or content creators gather face2face in one place to iron out thing, or plan for a new year. [The other reason we figured CompuServe wouldn't let us gather in-mass was because we might plot a takeover of the Hillard Control Room ;-)]  Any way... The tools I've used and sat in on the invention process have been always on the bleeding edge. IM made it possible for anyone to connect with me (with permission) to work on a project, shoot code to one another in real time and collaborate on projects increasing productivity dramatically. Notes and other Forum collaboration tools allowed us to gather volumes of valuable information and toolsets necessary to maintain our productivity. This was on top of email, faxes and long distance telephone calls-- all of which went by the near wayside because IM was so immediate. Over the past several years I have worked with several Fortune 100 & 500 companies creating and recreating several types of collabrative communities and environments in order to aid companies in productivity and to gain a toehold on the valuable "braintrust" of a companies employees and management, as well as open a conduit between the companies and their customers. The major hurdle was to break through with tools people could use functionally, and establish a place of trust. Too bad many of the dotcomer's didn't understand that clue. Without honestly and trust-- no one in hell is going to ever buy or sign up for your goods, services  and pay you.  The Beast explains it well in his article "Krispy Kreme: New World Order."  This one's a keeper. 3:40:43 AM

Why HDTV is Not Rolling Out On Time or On Budget John Robb's Radio Weblog sites the story n Wired. and says  "The government says that the failure of Digital TV to deploy will result in an $18 b budgetary shortfall.  They cite a slow roll-out as the cause.  This begs the question:  why should all of this bandwidth be wasted on DTV at all?  Only a small segment of the US, uses broadcast signals at all.  Additionally, it's likely that the TV industry will claim poverty when it comes time to pay for the licenses.  So, let's cut our loses on this and make this open bandwidth." There are other reasons why HDTV isn't rolling out as planned-- and it isn't the license cost. Most people are clueless the FCC told local television stations, either convert to digital-- or lose your position in the spectrum. In essense they would be out of business. So the FCC put a gun to the station owners heads. In order for a station to comply with the FCC mandate, one must understand the total cost of converting a local television station to run digital high-def television. To be blunt-- it's a nightmare. Local stations must completely retool their entire operation from the ground up and buy expensive new antennas and transmitter equipment. (Antenna builders and their jockey's don't come cheap.) Then they must buy new cameras and recable/network their stations to offer local programming in hi-def. The average cost of a high-def camera without the lens is $150,000. Most stations need at least three to four of these cameras to originate local programming and news. Then there are the cost of the editing stations, new audio equipment, decks, switchers and new cabling to the control room. ENG and remote trucks also need converted to HDTV as well for on scene reporting. And finally news and public programming sets must be retooled to deal with the 16:9 perspective. By the time a station gets finished, the average station has spent at least $10 million and the number of American consumers who can watch HDTV is less than 1% of their total viewership. Sounds like a real bargain, doesn't it? This is why stations are still broadcasting analogue at the same time, where 99% of their viewers are watching on their cheap NTSC televisions, because the cost of a reasonable but decent HDTV is at least $5000-6000. It's not in the budget of most families in America. Also this is why the FCC is mandating that the digital signal be airborne where any one with a HDTV antenna be able to recieve it. They're trying to move the public along into the digital world. 1:53:05 AM

© Copyright 2002 Mary Wehmeier. Last update: 9/3/02; 2:01:57 AM. Comments by: YACCS