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With a bullet I see that this weblog is #50 among Userland-hosted Manila sites, with 34,211 "reads." That's ten points behind Ham Radio Online Daily Updates and five ahead of A Curmudgeon Teaches Statistics. In spite of the marginal whimsy of those titles, I just found both to be extremely interesting. Which is a pisser, because I'm too busy to write anything about them. (For now.) I do want to write something about the #1 site, which is MattyG's TV and Movie Music Themesongs. One theme song I loved when I heard it and haven't heard since is the one for The Sicilian Clan, a terrific French cop & robber story (with Jean Gabin in his last role and Alain Delon in one of his best) that was a minor hit in 1969. I see by Online Movie Facts that the movie has completely disappeared. It isn't available on tape, film, TV or DVD (although the reader can be reminded by email when E! spots it coming along). A darn shame. Anyway, for folks in the Bay Area, Robert Emmett puts on an extraordinarily authoritative themesong radio show every Saturday morning on KFJC/89.7fm. It's titled "The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show," and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Here's hoping, since the show has almost no profile on the Web, that there might be some conversational connection between that show and MattyG's Weblog (if there isn't already).
Knocked out of the top slot is the everything-for-everybody Amazon.com, which has become way too slow and complicated. (Speaking of which, I tried to order the new GoLive 5.0 from Adobe yesterday, and it was flat-out impossible. What a hideous, broken-as-hell system that is. Arrg.) The evidence suggests it Steve Jobs nailed Microsoft — and himself — perfectly with just four words: they have no taste. Steve, of course, has nothing but. That's his genius. He's no less an original than any of the Different Thinkers in his advertising. But some works are more original than others. Or derivative in a more original way. One of the best things that ever happened to Cobalt was when Dave was over at my office, spotted the Qube II Cobalt had sent over for review, and insisted on taking it. "I have to have that," he said. He was right. Dave not only flattered the hell out of the thing, but made room for Luke Tymnowski to obsess about it in Luke's QubeQuorner weblog. The image of that Qube (right) is also on the front page of every Scripting News, Dave's own Weblog. Last I looked, Scripting News was the 727th most-linked-to site on the Web. Cobalt.com was #231,211 (their old site, Cobaltnet.com was #17,519).
So here's my question: Why aren't there more Steves out there in Hardwareland? IBM did some major innovating with its ThinkPad. Sony did with the Viao, too. But the iBook, the iMac, this Cube thing, the displays, the strange little half-ball speakers... these are more than pretty boxes. They are major steps forward in industrial design. The Cube is, get this: air cooled. The Qube II's fan was so loud I was glad, frankly, to get rid of it. My daughter has an iBook about which I find much to dislike (size, weight, inexcusable 800x600 display, too-small hard drive and maximum memory limit...). But she loves it. The thing gets noticed. Its battries last forever. When it sleeps the little light thobs like a pulse. Even the power cord is a thing of beauty as well as practicality. It's exceptionally rugged (you can stand on it) and easy to service. Again, why not more of these? Is the PC business such a low-margin affair that aesthetic innovation just isn't a concern for anybody? Or was Steve talking about more than just Microsoft? Was he perhaps talking about nearly everybody in the business other than himself? Step 4: Remove toast Don Marti and I were talking the other day about the history and future of marketing. Here are my notes about Don's view on the matter, which I think are pretty durn interesting — Step 1: Mass Marketing. Technology is expensive for everybody, so only big industries can afford it. The only way to get feedback is from limited testing. The only way you can deal is to print up one big catalog that everybody will buy out of. Think Sears Roebuck. Then think TV. You spend a lot of money to reach everybody. Lots of it is wasted, but lots of people know about you and enough people buy stuff to justify the expense. This goes on for a long time. Step 2: Database Marketing. Information technology gets affordable for producers, but not for customers. This gives us the catalog explosion of the 80s & 90s. Late in that period, the threshold of publication gets low, and desktop publishing takes off. DTP was necessaryto make the diversity of catalogs really possible.Databases were concenred with the targetting system. This was good for marketing many, many different things. And mass marketing hasn't gone away, either. So naturally you try the same thing — both these things — with the next generation of technology. But any machine that's powerful enough to look at an overproduded markting web site is more than powrful enough to run the Napster of marketing. Which brings us to... Step 3. Personal Marketing. Or just: markets. We're talking about markets where the customer, the user, has enormous power. Because today information technology is affordable for pretty much everybody. The result, inevitably, is a development which is to marketing what Napster is to a record company. If Napster has done nothing esle it's to give us an analogy about what an end user can do with a technology that the supply side thought was under corporate control. The result: mass and database marketing are toast. I stopped taking notes after that. But the dude is onto something here. For years I have wondered if there can ever be what we might call a "demand market" for advertising — i.e. advertising that involves an direct economic relationshiip between demand and supply, not between media and supply. In simple terms, advertising you would be willing to pay for — that adds value when you see it on TV, that deserves the opposite of a MUTE button. I'm still wondering. Thoughts, anyone? Is there a patent on fear? Here's how a Patents in Europe piece in Advogato starts — You might think the US patent situation is a disaster. You might not be aware the european one is in danger of moving from sanity to being even worse than the US situation.... Total Patentability is the new EPO buzzword... And you thought shit was bad here?
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