| Date: | 2003-07-09 15:17 |
| Subject: | Testing Testing |
| Security: | Public |
I am doing some beta testing on the new Typepad Blogging tools. (Maybe they heard that if it ain't broke you send for Earl)
So for the interim anyway, you can find my stuff here
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| Earl Mardle's Journal 20 most recent entries |
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I am doing some beta testing on the new Typepad Blogging tools. (Maybe they heard that if it ain't broke you send for Earl)
Just sat through an excellent presentation by John Wroclawski of MIT looking at some of the high level thinking about negotiating the future of the net with the people who are participating while trying to retain its ability to adapt and change in the face of powerful vested interests.
A couple of years ago I saw a chart that showed the demand for revenue from 3G systems rising steadily over the next five years as the networks were rolled out and put into operation. What it also showed was the cost of a voice call on a 3G network falling steeply, and the expected revenue from voice forming an ever smaller component of the revenue total over the same period. The first 3G sales experiences - from "3" Even worse for the business, they are conditioning the market as a whole to see the low cost of calls as the primary, perhaps the only justification for 3G as a technology. Not a good sign. 2 comments | post a comment
Shirky is one of the more subtle and thoughtful people publishing anywhere, and especially with his thinking about the application of IT to things in the world. His latest musing on the new US FCC ruling on media ownership is worth the read, and tells us a great deal more about the reality that the Internet is NOT a media environment. Weblogs are the freest media the world has ever known. Within the universe of Internet users, the costs of setting up a weblog are minor, and perhaps more importantly, require no financial investment, only time, thus greatly weakening the "freedom of the press for those who can afford one" effect. Furthermore, there is no Weblog Central -- you do not need to incorporate your weblog, you do not need to register your weblog, you do not need to clear your posts with anyone. Weblogs are the best attempt we've seen to date of making freedom of speech and freedom of the press the same freedom, in Mike Godwin's famous phrase. The telling paragraph however, is this one. The third coherent position is advocacy of diverse and free media, which requires abandonment of equality as a goal. For this camp, the removal of regulation is desirable in and of itself, whatever the outcome. Given the evidence that diverse and free systems migrate to unequal distributions, the fact of inequality is a necessarily acceptable outcome to this group. However, in truly diverse systems, with millions of choices rather than hundreds, the imbalance between popular and average media outlets is tempered by the imbalance between the most popular outlets and the size of the system as a whole. As popular as Glenn Reynolds may be, InstaPundit is no Gunsmoke; no one weblog is going to reach 45% of the audience. In large diverse systems, freedom increases the inequality between outlets, but the overall size and growth weakens the effects of concentration. And now we are testing that proposition in the Blogosphere, and it appears to be true. With trivial barriers to entry and the enablement of massive diversity, although massive inequality occurs, the distribution of the remaining "audience" among all the remaining channels guarantees that massive dominance in the sphere becomes all but impossible. The cynic in me says that there is exactly the reason that the big media people don't want a bar of it; that would ensure that there was no scarcity to parcel out and profit from and we haven't yet learned the economics of abundance. 1 comment | post a comment
There's a great discussion going on at "Information Society: Voices from the South" is@dgroups.org, covering education, access and application of Internet tools in developing communities. One of the questions that most interests me is the one about how much the local language and the place matters.
This story on the BBC shows that the localisation process is a growing factor in internet use among those with good access. Perhaps we could shortcut the process for poor countries by not forcing them to follow the same, frequently dead-ended road that the rich ones have been down. Online communities get real Weblogs, e-mail and instant messaging are enabling people to maintain relationships and pass information in unexpected ways, say researchers. A study of online communities by UK think-tank The Work Foundation has found that the web is much more localised, more honest and less chaotic than original predictions thought. So-called social software - e-mail, messaging systems, weblogs and shared online diaries - is allowing people to make the net work for them and bring the virtual world home. New phenomena such as weblogs have allowed people to share their interest and passions with a wider audience but often provide a quite mundane and honest view of life. "Increasingly technologies allow people to find out about others in the real world and keep in touch with their day-to- day lives," said the report's author Will Davies. The longer we do this, the more I suspect we will discover that this technology will expand our horizons, of course, but also intensify our local communities and their interactions. 1 comment | post a comment
This piece by John Naughton in the Guardian has some interesting and cogent points about the way the Internet works and why Big media still doesn't seem to get it and, like Big Music and Big Movies and Big Software, can only seem to whine and moan when it doesn't work the way they want it to. Samples I would sooner pay attention to particular Blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many Blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison. The last of these is the most important. The structure of the Internet is an information economy, links are the currency and knowledge is the capital and Google is the Standard and Poors, rating the participants by the Internet criteria. Because Blogs are, almost by definition, intimately and fiercely linked both to each other and to their sources, they will attract and capture the attention. It will of course, lead to pressure on Google to exclude Blogs and that would be fatal because Blogs represent the next phase of what the net is going to do. Watch this space. BTW, Naughton has published a book called A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet and demonstrates his grasp of it by linking to all the reviews of the book he can find, and commenting on the reviews in the process. Yes, this is what it is about. 2 comments | post a comment
Korean and How Language Conditions What We CAN Think Emergence With Even More Vengeance? ROTFL This is Too Funny For Words Latest on My favourite Newsreader Jared Diamond Looks At How Societies Blow It What Happens When EVERYONE Has a Wireless Web Cam? To Start with the End - The Blogosphere is NOT a Media Story It Is Never Right to Shoot the Messenger Trust the Porn Merchants to Get It First Have the Telcos Woken Up To the New Century? Broadband: Its the Price and the Speed 3G Continues to Knock 'em Down
Open Source Claims a Microsoft OS Westerners are the King Kongs of the breeding race post a comment
When Emergence Turns to Catastrophe No No No, EVERYONE Is Supposed to Have One The Internet Changes Everything - Europeans' Life Online Europe Hacker Laws Could Make Protest a Crime A Reality Check for Electronic Media Oh Yess, Here Comes the Next Shift Interactive TV - A Bogey Man in the Living Room? A Gig, and Thoughts On ICT and Education I Think David Weinberger is Being VERY Rude Altruism and Revenge - Only One Makes sense Stupid Network Outsmarts Copyright Police Getting the Cart Before the Horse post a comment
I'll stick these in forward date order one day. Emerging from the Insurance Haze Space Shuttles and group Behaviour The Music Industry Not Only Doesn't Get IT, Its trying to Commit Suicide What if Economic Integration Was the Problem? If You Want a Great Newsfeed Reader From My Friend Lee Thorn in Laos Google Buy Blogger - Of Course The Internet HAS Changed Everything - And the Old Controllers of Information REALLY Don't Get AOL Bales At Last from TV - Cessation Of Stupidity Beauty Emerging from Functionality When Something Finally "Gets It" - A Purple Cow - 6 replies Story Telling and Its place in Running a Project Emergence - Even the NY Times is Getting the Bug Another Step on the Road to Genuinely New Media Complexity Theory and Co-opetition at 190 MPH - Finally a Use for NASCAR David Reed's Group Forming Networks - In Action - 1 reply Online Knowledge Management Tool for the Voices of Dissent post a comment
Here are the Postings for January, 2003.
Remember in the heady days of the Dotcom bubble when "new media" and "old media" were supposed to converge, creating and explosion of, well something, mostly profits? "There is still a wait-and-see attitude about the merger paying off the way it was supposed to do," UBS Warburg analyst Christopher Dixon told the E-Commerce Times. "They've done more in terms of cross-platform work lately, but the question is still out there, and it's a matter of time before AOL has to show progress or admit it might need to rethink where it's headed." I still say that the main reason for this failure is that AOL is not at all a content business. because it attempts to be not only the source of connectivity, but also to keep its users on its own networks (many AOL users have never used the Internet, only AOL services and content) it has had to develop those services and that content itself or through commercial partnerships. It flies in the face of what the Internet actually is, a vast source of information, content, services, all built on its End to End structure. Unfortunately AOL, and many others, thinks that End to End means that they have to own the process "from one end to the other". They couldn't have been more wrong. Merging AOL and TW made about as much sense a merging a trucking firm and a cake shop because the cake shop does deliveries. The media business model is this "I sell my audience's wallets to my advertising customers", the ISP business is "I sell ends of connectivity". The first sucks up human resources like crazy, the second is rapidly becoming a commodity business. There is no point of connection. In Australia, Telstra is moving out of the content business because its expensive and doesn't attract enough new customers looking for "high quality content" on their network. Big surprise. Education is occurring. post a comment
This story in the Guardian looks at the process, and the ethics, of the British (and other European) allocation of 3G licenses. 3G fiasco - only the porn barons win How are the mighty fallen. MMO2's announcement of the second biggest loss in British corporate history brings back some memories. You'll have to check the porn reference yourself, but as a rundown of the insanity of the IT revolution, the piece sums it all pretty well. As the various flavours of WiFi continue to proliferate in the wireless space, as we all come to realise that while most of us require only voice communications while on the move and that ubiquitous hotspots will suffice for our "momentary at rest" times when we have time to open the laptop or fire up the PDA, being vastly cheaper (try free, like a footpath) and much faster and MUCH easier to deploy. There is a loong way to go in putting to bed the excesses of the dotcom boom and the Telcos really haven't started to pay the price yet. The question is not so much how they will survive as businesses, but whether their industry will survive at all. The days of excessive charges for doled-out bandwidth are coming to an end and anyone who doubts that is welcome to invest in these failing models. meanwhile BT and others are selling home hotspots that encourage you to share your bandwidth with the neighbours, pretty soon domestic WiFi Mesh networks will be sprouting up all over and David reed's idea that each new user will add more bandwidth than they consume will make a total mockery of those who want to squeeze it out like toothpaste, while his work on the failed hypothesis of "interference" will mean that WiFi spectrum will be all we need, and much more, to meet all our communication requirements. Life is only just starting to get interesting. post a comment
This snippet from Forrester is interesting.
Have lit up the eyes of those who think they "get" the Internet, but there have been a lot of close calls too. The email campaign that shut down the UN mail servers when East Timor exploded into violence was an early sign of a global smart mob getting up a head of steam. With access to America's mainstream media becoming increasingly difficult for Liberal candidates, maybe the net is the charm THIS time. Check this. When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for [Joe] Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal Blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as "the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party." And his efforts might actually be paying off: While many predicted that Dean would fade away once the war was no longer a salient issue, there is little evidence that the former Vermont governor's supporters—originally drawn to Dean when he was forcefully speaking out against war in Iraq—are deserting him. In fact, the Internet might account for Dean's staying power. Maybe it is. post a comment
From the NY Times Phone Companies See Their Future in Flat-Rate Plans Why would this be a surprise? Our expectation is that the technology should enable this, we are not stupid, we know what the installed capacity is, and how many billions were spent installing it, and how little of it is actually used. They can either give it to us at the market price now, or wait till they go broke, someone buys it for 10c on the $ and does it later. Now, we'll know they are really waking up when we get universal logins. That's when I get on a plane and fly to Sweden, login to the phone sytem there and anyopne calling me gets to me where I am, cell or wireline, and my voicemail automatically redirects. Say "Telco = Commodity Business" post a comment
I'm in the midst of reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal which is, in itself an interesting book and raises the valid questions about how different we are from other animals on the planet, and where those differences might be taking us.
Throughout the recent history of information technologies, the porn merchants have always been the first to "get" the idea. Video uptake and business development was largely driven by porn, the Internet proved another godsend as they adapted their models and adopted the technologies.
Once again the Australian Government, in league this time with a website filtering company, has revealed a lack of understanding about information and how it works. Print this article | Close this window. John, its not just the research staff who need to know this stuff, its everyone. The so-called flattened structure of modern organisations means that everyone, at any time, can be called on to fund out something, for themselves, for their bosses, for a client. The net does that better, and faster, than any previous system. Filters, managed and controlled by people whose political, social and psychological agendas are not up for review, and who refuse to allow others to double check their work, are stupid, and dangerous. post a comment
Microdocs has a summary of some research they have done on the way waves of attention flood through the Blogosphere, exchanging vital fluids with the mainstream media, bouncing off it, feeding back into it and often being put to bed at last within it. Perhaps the last conclusions we came to in this study is that Blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared.post a comment |
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