|
| Tuesday, May 15, 2001 |
 |
I need to wave my arms and annoy people. You can help.
| | I'm off to Seattle for three days, then to D.C. to give a keynote at Media Relations 2001. I'll be there to smite PR as Usual. Here's what the promo says I'll say: |
| | Doc maintains that we need a new set of rules for PR---rules that elevate our message from the morass of spin that's standard in our industry. This means marketing is no longer about "delivering messages." It's about talking in a real human voice with all who play a role in the marketplace. There is almost nothing in PR today, he insists, that will survive as "strategy" in conversational markets. Searls' iconoclastic message is guaranteed to make you rethink your mission over the coming year. |
| | So help me put this thing together. I've got stories, but I'd like some new ones that I haven't told before. Yours, perhaps. Write me here. |
Eazy go
| | CNet reports the end of Eazel. I feel bad about it. I had a long, real good talk with Andy Hertzfeld and other guys at the company a couple months a go and never got around to transcribing the tapes. I may do it yet. Much of what they had to say wasn't about the company but rather about thinking-edge UI design. Very creative stuff. |
| | Which is all open source. Will the community carry it forward, I wonder? |
| | The word around the Linux community for some time has been that Eazel was terminal. When their VCs didn't re-commit, other VCs stayed away. The business model was unproven, and that meant the company, like so many other dot-coms, was a financial candle. All it could do was burn out. Bummer. |
Now that's branding
| | A British student has designed an Net-connected toaster that serves as a kind of yeast-matrix printer, imprinting the morning's weather forecast onto your slice. The link comes courtesy of Jim Sterne, who now has his whole Full Sterne Ahead archive on line. Check the back issues. To say Jim gets it is an understatement. He's also been here in Santa Barbara about a generation longer than I have, which proves my point. |
Our channel's clearer than their channel
| | At the beginning of today I gave Clear Channel some shit for cancelling their webcasts. So I'll close with this clarification from a reader: |
| | The reason that Clear Channel and a lot of other broadcast/webcasters stopped broadcasting in the last few weeks, is the payable amount for commercials broadcast over the internet just sky rocketed. |
| | Apparently there is an Actor's Union that sets the amount that an actor gets paid every time there is a broadcast commercial using his/her voice. Any time that same voice is sent over the internet the fee goes up by 300%. |
| | The contract went into place in the last month and the bills just invoiced in the last week or so. A lot of people panicked and killed their webcasts. |
| | Here's what KPIG says about it in its Webcast Q&A: |
| | Q: Why are you running those lame 'fillers' on so many ads? |
| | A: We were already setting up the deal with Hiwire when the union that represents those BIG VOICES that sell you burgers and mini-vans on the commercials produced by the big national ad agencies (AFTRA) decided that they too ought to find a way to 'monetize' this Internet thing. They slipped a provision into the standard contract between the 'talent' and the ad agencies that says that if ads produced for the radio are also used on the Internet, then the union members get a bonus equal to 300% (!!!) of their fee. Naturally the ad agencies don't want to pay that, so they've told all of the radio stations that these ads can't run on the Internet. At this point, most radio stations have been forced to stop webcasting in order to comply. Fortunately, we've been able to continue. As time goes on, you'll hear more ads & less filler - and the quality of the filler will increase. That part of the setup was put together by Wild Bill at the last minute in order to save the webcast. Believe me, nobody in the radio biz saw this AFTRA thing coming. |
| | Q: Isn't the whole AFTRA mess about the lamest thing a union has ever done? |
| | I should add that KPIG is simply the best commercial radio station in the world, one of the best radio stations, of any breed, in all of human history, and one of the biggest on the Web — with not one but two separate 128kbps MP3 streams that sound about as good as webio can get. And yes, I will continue to flog them shamelessly as long as their quality continues to shame the flood of artless sewage into which most commercial radio has devolved — as well as the boring politically correct drone that constitutes the bulk of public radio. |
What about General Motors?
| | My friend Bruce, a source of hard-boiled marketing sense (among other things), is trucking along in his new blog. His latest: The Rule of 50. Goes like this — |
| | For every 50 employees you have, you can do one product for one marketplace. If you have 100 employess you can do two things. |
Eat my bits
| | My landlord, a fine ISP, just stopped by to see how the T1 was doing. Clocked in at over 1mb/sec. on all three live machines. Can't complain. |
Add "dog" to "dwarf," "gambler" and "Elmer Fudd"
| | Check out the story of yet another Doc, whose attorney companion, the blogeur of Bad Hair Days, might as well be writing about me — |
| | ....Doc was in particularly bad shape at that point, having trouble walking and basically creeping around like an old man. He couldn't move very quickly, so for a few days, he got humped a lot... |
| | ....he seemed to have something wrong with him besides his worn-out joints... |
| | ....and then he drained Doc's inflamed ass and charged me thirty bucks. I told him he didn't charge enough, professed my eternal gratitude, and took a very happy and relieved Doc to the park for a walk... |
| | ....he's back to his old self now. He was briefly on anti-inflammatories, but for the last few weeks he's been fine without them. He doesn't limp, he doesn't tire out, and he plays as hard as he did a year ago... |
| | Doc loves to fetch, but he never wants to bring back the ball. |
It's like high school all over again
| | A few days ago, this blog was listed among Yahoo's "most popular" online journals and diaries. Now it's just in the alphabetical listing. Anybody know what's up with that? |
Then why can't the technology meet the market?
| | Says here that certain big boys are giving up on providing live Net access on airplanes. |
| | That brings up a big hmmm for me. I'd gladly pay an extra $10 to connect to the Net on an airplane — a sum I'd hate to pay for a phone call. What about you? |
| | Guess it's time to test the Survey. It's around here somewhere... |
What if all we want is some @#$%& information?
| | Here's Leon Erlanger of InternetWorld on .Net. His bottom line: Above all, it is a vision of a new user experience. You know what? I don't want an "experience." I go to Six Flags for that. |
| | Most of the time I just want some information. I'll bet that's exactly what most other people on the web want, most of the time. But that's not what the info-pumps of the world want to deliver. And that's exactly what we're fighting here: the "delivery" of anything other than the opporutunity to find stuff out. Especially from each other. |
| | I trust human beings who are trying to inform me. I don't trust "information delivery" organizations, or anybody trying to give me an "experience." Unless I'm looking for some fun on the Web, which is about .001% of the time. |
| | Speaking of which, I just stood in line for 16 seconds while my browser (Microsoft's IE5) tried to get Microsoft's home page to appear. Now I'm searching for ".Net" (to put a link in the first paragraph above) and I'm getting nothing (maybe because the "." throws off the search software) but a reload of the home page with this URL: http://www.microsoft.com/?qu=.Net . Ah, but when I search on Microsoft's Search page, I do get a list with the .Net Home page just second from the top. Clearly Microsoft has been listening to the complaints about .Net definitions, because "Net Defined" is right at the top, in the largest type. It says, |
| | What is .NET? It's Microsoft's platform for XML Web services. But what exactly are "XML Web services" you ask? The future of computing. Find out more in this article that explains what XML Web services deliver and what they mean for you. |
| | Pretty good. One of the things I like about Microsoft is that large hunks of the company apparently do have their ears to the ground. A definition is perhaps a small favor, but one worth appreciating. |
And the ugly get uglier
| | If the first link above disappears, it's because I found it in the Mercury News' seven day archive. I'm curious: how much money do the newspapers and magazines get selling old "content?" I'll bet it rounds down do zip. And how much authority do they sacrifice by denying others the ability to link to the same content as reference sources for current content? Lots. |
| | Here's a clue — News that isn't new is worthless except for archival purposes, where it only adds to the authority of the publication and to the value of what's new. Why isn't this obvious to so many publishers? Because they (and, frankly, all of us) still think about business in shipping terms (content that we address and load into a channel, etc.). But even in those terms, what's an eight-day old paper worth? Less than the paper it's printed on. It's fishwrap. Bird cage liner. Out in the recycling bin. Meanwhiile it's worth far more than the same sum's weight in pixels. Unless, of course, those pixels can only be bought. |
Attention revolutionary cadres...
| | Just got this from Declan by way of Don. It means you need a good excuse not to figure out where Building 380 Mathematics is at Stanford, and go there tomorrow night to hear Dr. Felten talk about A Fight That Matters. Motivation: |
| | The music industry has proposed a range of "security technologies" designed to prevent the unauthorized copying of recorded music. Recently a group of researchers, including the speaker Prof. Edward Felten, was forced to withdraw from publication a paper analyzing several of these technologies, due to threats of litigation by the music industry. |
| | This talk will discuss what happened: |
| | - the status of anti-copying technology, |
| | - how the music industry is trying to prevent copying |
| | - an overview of the technical analysis |
| | - how and why the authors were threatened, |
| | - and the effect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on computer security researchers. |
| | Here's more from Rob Fixmer of InteractiveWeek. The dateline says April 7, but that's a typo: it's his May 7 editorial. |
discuss
Copyright 2010 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
