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What's going down Speaking of infrastructure, Craig answers the most common Novell question. He suggests that leadership causes alignment. Makes sense. Leadership is magnetic. It's a force field. It gets people and companies to look in the leader's direction, and to expect something worth following to happen, and keep happening. Back in the 80s Novell had it, big time. Then Craig left. Too bad the name is taken I was thinking more about what to call what we build together with tools like Radio Userland. The term infostructure came to mind. Google finds 4,300,000 Web pages with the word infrastructure. That's more than a third of the number of pages with the world "structure." The word "state" shows up on 67,000,000 pages. Tops is, of course, the state of Texas I'm writing this trivia because I've been writing about Linux all day and I won't finish tonight and I'm trying not to be pissed that I'll probably miss most of the opening day of the P2P thing tomorrow. But I won't miss Thursday. No way. Buy Apple stock Emmett (see below) and I, two Linux characters, on The Linux Show simultaneously disclosed that we covet Apple's Titanium flaptop. Because I'm on the radio with Emmett, who does BinaryFreedom.com A demand side economy emerges See it on your own browser! Today's episode: Amazon's Latest Tires! As kicked by Business 2.0, Dan, Ev and Ev. A valentine for all our relations
The other day Given the distance between so many of our relations — by blood, marriage or less conscious agreements — this seems like a good thing to share, especially on the eve of Valentine's day (and after getting a nice valentine from Dave this morning). I love you too, Dave. Flogrolling My pal Tom Steding just came out with By the way, you might notice the links go to Amazon. I'd rather send them to Wordsworth, but they don't seem to be carrying the book yet. And, for what it's worlth, I still haven't seen any evidence that I'm selling any books for Wordsworth. I'd say go figure, but it appears that Jakob Nielsen's accounting still stands (although Wordsworth told me several months back that they took Jakob's advice after the stuff he wrote in that last link). Hey, even if they can't compete with Amazon in this medium, they're still a great bookstore. If you're in Boston, go by and ask for Tom's book. Thought you'd wanna know Terrormisu is still an available domain name. So are Isobozo, Halfacat, Scrubadeer, Fishkitty and Rubadog. With all suffixes. How about aaaaREpub! Dave's vetting some slogans for Radio Userland. While I'm busy avoiding work here, I couldn't help coming up with a few more candidates:
Of course, all those play off the New York Times' All the news that's fit to print. I just swapped in a list of verbs that might do a better job than print of saying what Radio Userland does, which is actually a whole a bunch of things. I know, from having written slogans for way too much of my life, that it's better to say one thing clearly than many things vaguely. Or too precisely. Add enthusiasm to a roster of features and you start sound like, "It's a floor wax and a desert topping!" So it's not easy. But the hell with all that. Something much more important came to me while I was writing the last paragraph, and I think it may even be profound. This is it: Radio Userland is the first application that completely turns around the distribution model by which we've conceived business for the last century or two. For the first time, the power to distribute doesn't just belong to supply. Now it also belongs to Demand. The The whole dismal science of economics was developed in this odd stretch of history when unusual power was concentrated on one side of the supply/demand relationship. We can't talk about business without using shipping language — in other words, in the terms set by Supply. That's why we call our goods "content" that we "load" into a "channel" and "deliver" to an "end user." Nothing wrong with that, except that it has always tended to favor those who had the means to ship. Radio Userland gives The Rest of Us the means to ship as well. It enormously amplifies the power to share, partly by pairing it with increased power to originate. I hesitate to use the word "value" here, because it's part of the business-is-shipping conceptual lexicon. Think about it: the concept of adding value presupposes a supply chain in which quantities of stuff, valued in money, are added at each step in the distribution system between a few giant producers and millions of consumers. What we're doing with Radio Userland, however, isn't just "adding value." We're informing each other. Big difference. When you inform me, you literally form fresh knowledge in my mind. To the degree that knowledge is humanity, you make me larger as a human being. You are one of my authors. You are my authority, and you have made me more of an authority for others. When you pass along information from other sources that you value, you make them more valuable — to me and to everybody else you choose to share your information with. When you pass along a story from the New York Times, everybody involved — you, The Times and I — become more authoritative sources, and more valuable distributors of authority. The challenge for original authorities like The Times is to stop thinking themselves as sources of content, and to start thinking of themselves as sources of authority. And then to watch what happens when that authority gets increased by the form of distribution (is it syndication? I'm not even sure) that Radio Userland provides the Demand side for the first time. I guarantee that publications will sell more copies, and more advertisements, for the simple reason that their authority as an original source is only made more valuable by the vastly increased Word of Web that Radio Userland empowers. I dunno. Makes sense at 12:18 AM on a Tuesday. Okay, back to work.
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Built on Trust
Industrial Age was the Age of Supply. Supply was in charge. Supply wrote the laws and set the terms — including the prices "consumers" (that breed of customer too weak and faceless to be called "customers") would pay. For evidence, consider this one fact: the price tag is only about 130 years old. It was invented in the 1870s by John Wanamaker, who also opened the first department store in the U.S., turning retailing into the user interface for a vast and powerful distribution system.
