|
| Thursday, October 24, 2002 |
 |
Blog underboard 
| | It's still dark here, off the North coast of Jamaica, which is a slope of lights under a starry sky off the starboard side of the ship. Very pretty. After I woke up a few minutes ago, I stepped out onto the little balcony outside our cabin and looked up at the stars. Orion and Canis Major were high overhead. Canopus, a beacon of the Southern skies, was well above the horizon. The air was warm and balmy, a relief from the room's refrigerator-like air conditioning. I played with the radio. Quite a range of music on FM. I was expecting mostly reggae, I guess. There was plenty of that, of course. Oddly, nothing on AM. I noticed that the Cayman Islands seemed to have no AM stations at all. Interesting. (At least to me.) |
| | Listened to some American stations on AM, where signals bounce off the ionosphere at night. Caught news over WBT/1110 from Charlotte that somebody has been arrested in the sniper case. Hope this puts an end to the madness. |
| | Yesterday evening when we were leaving Grand Cayman I sat on a deck outside, trolling for news on the radio. None of the Cayman stations had anything (I was hoping for a BBC repeater station, but no soap). I finally heard a newscast over WWCR, a Christain shortwave station from Nashville. They talked about how Muslim extremists from Chechnya were holding 700 people hostage in a Moscow theater, wiring some of the hostages with explosives, and making some kind of demands. When I went down to the cabin and checked CNN, there was no news about he subject at all, even on the crawling headlines that ran under Larry King, who was fully occupied by the sniper story, which at the time involved removing a stump from a yard in Tacoma. |
| | This seems to be a much less bloggy cruise than the last one. Several reasons, I think. One is that metered wi-fi discourages use. I'm hyper-aware of paying $.30/ minute for Net time, which is sold in 100, 500 and 1000 minute blocks. The system kindly kicks you off after five minutes of idle time, but that tends to create situations where you find yourself looking at a login screen when you try to surf off the last page you had up in the browser. My recommendation: charge a flat fee for the week. Much less complicated. |
| | In general my experience with fee-based wi-fi suggests that the most welcoming and useful systems are the least complicated. Wayport, for example, charges $6.95/day at most airports where I've found it. It intercepts you one time, asks you to pay the fee with a credit card, and you're on for the duration. The T-Mobile system at Starbucks is more flexible but also more complicated and therefore more aversive. Others are complicated in different ways. One I encountered in Munich involved buying time in the form of a credit card with a concealed ID and password. You buy the card, rub off the black paint (as with a lottery card) that conceals an ID and password, and ran for as many hours as the card represents. It's a way to commodify a given number of hours. The new system at the airport in Denver is almost totally aversive. My own experience with it was the similar to Denise Howell's, which she describes here. The difference was that I utterly failed to get on. |
| | The Net wants to be free, once you're on it. So if you're a gatekeeper and your business is charging for access, make access work like a gate. Charge a gate fee. A cover chage. Admission. And then let customers roam free once they're inside. And if you're in an airport, make it low enough so folks with only 20 minutes to get on can rationalize the cost. $6.95 is easy to rationalize. $9.95 is harder. In my case, way too hard. |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
