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| Friday, November 2, 2001 |
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'Dre! 
From the mouths of babes and their Grandmas
| | It seems simplistic -- to be brave when confronted with a threatening situation. But it works! At times, the only way to get through is to be brave. I think I had a misconception about bravery. I had an idea it was an aggressive position. When I heard my grandson say, "be brave," it occurred to me; that is all there is to it-- just be brave. |
| | What I do find curious is watching the body language of the bureaucrat interviewees. There is not much doubt when each one is being authentic or when one is hiding something. |
| | Being a guy, I just assume they're all fulla shit. But I've got a feeling that if I watched more closely I wouldn't notice anything different. |
Giddiyap!
Resistance will be futile
| | Any nominees for this here Technical Committee? |
Speaking as one, are the spleenless among us safe from Anthrax?
| | Thanks to Kottke for introducing us to Nubbin, BTW. It's an A-1 blog by Ariana French. |
Home security starts at your mailbox
I sort of agree with both of them
| | Mike Sanders visits the gray areas that discredit our certitudes, and the need by journalists (incuding bloggers, for indeed, blogs are journals in the most literal sense) to express those certitudes anyway. |
Talk along the road to Enough Already
| | TiVo chose to cozy up with the TV Networks early on to get capital, awareness, and to amass market share. The price they paid was equity and agreeing not to roll-out a button/feature that allowed viewers to skip commercials automatically. A small price to pay for getting to roll a Trojan Horse through the city gates. ReplayTV chose to thumb their noses at the TV Networks, and has now included this feature as part of their new product. They chose the wrong strategy... |
| | In other words, TiVo chose not to include something it knew its customers would demand. This was a faustian bargain right from the start. I've written about this before, in Which Side is TiVo on? Go there for a full response. And for a better sense of what's happening on the demand side, read Kevin Werbach's The Webification of TV is Happening. |
| | About advertising, Steve writes: |
| | It's not that people don't want ads. People just don't want ads that have no relevance to their lives. When ads have no relevance they become an annoying interruption. When ads have relevance we can make a judgment about the product/service. |
| | This is true. Some ads are so categorically relevant that people demand them. Those ads come in two breeds: classifieds and yellow pages. Then there are ads readers demand because they augment editorial content. That's what we find in those free weekly entertainment rags, in the purposeful sections of newspapers and in trade publications. The editorial contents of publications like Linux Journal for example, are made more valuable by the advertising that surrounds them. On the Web, Google has been experimenting with a version of classifieds that seems to be proving successful, perhaps because it's just as artless and human as printed classifieds have always been. |
| | What's proving very, very hard is creating anything like a mass market for advertising people actually demand rather than avoid. With the exception of the home shopping channels, the beer+sports relationship on televised games, and the showcase advertising on Superbowls, there is little advertising viewers of television would go out of their way to see. What happens when instruments of choice, like TiVo and RePlay, come into use by a majority of viewers? The economic model of television falls down. Maybe not for all of TV (sports least of all), but for a lot of it. |
| | I've said it before: There is no demand for messages. And the only reason Big Media keep pumping them out is that those media's consumers (viewers) are still not in conversation with those media's customers (advertisers). When that happens, the funders of Big Media will get the Big Message they've been ignoring for decades. And the whole system will change. |
| | Steve goes on to credit the "simple economics" of television, in which massive quantities advertising money pay for all the shows we love to watch, and how an a la carte system of paying for TV might give us 24/7 PBS-style pledge drives. "Assuming you could get such a system up and running, the revenue generated still wouldn't come close to matching the dollars (from advertising)." But what Steve is also saying is that commercial TV's content really isn't worth much to its viewers. Once they have the means to express that, and the funders of TV look for more efficient ways to relate to their customers, the commercial broadcasting system starts to fail. |
| | By the way, the only big problems with public broadcasting's system are: 1) the absence of a profit motive on the part of its vendors and 2) an inefficient system for soliciting and collecting revenues. It turns out that in some narrow categories, public broadcasting can actually bring in more money, rather than less, than commercial broadcasting. I am told that KCSM, the noncommercial jazz station for the Bay Area, takes in many more dollars from listeners than its commercial predecessor, the much-loved KJAZ, took in from advertisers. |
It also keeps you safe from evil spores
| | By the way, it is my intention to follow Brent's example and start using Pine or Mutt or something to access mail on a server. That's after I finish understanding how to do that on Linux, OS X or both (and getting the damn machines to actually work in my new office). |
Huh for the day
| | Ever notice that the term "business model" didn't get popular until the economy briefly let you live without one? |
Argublogeury
| | Trying to think of a word for friendly argument among blogs. |
| | I'll respond in the morning. |
Penguins go Hollywood
| | It's old news in the Linux world (Linux Journal had a cover story on it months ago), but still fun to read that the hacker's OS is finding a role in The Industry, as Hollywood calls itself. Nice piece by Michael Hammell. |
discuss
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