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| Monday, September 25, 2006 |
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Los Padres and Sespe Wilderness, 9 months before the Day Fire 
| | I've flown over the Sespe Wilderness and the Los Padres National Forest many times, usually en route from a Bay Area airport (SFO, OAK, SJC) to Los Angeles (LAX, BUR). The mountains here run up to 8,000 feet and more; and the plane on approach isn't much higher than that. The view is spectacular. |
Yesss!
| | There¹s a huge body of economic literature on vertical integration of industries, and Coase did his seminal work on the structure of the firm based on analysis of internal and external transaction costs. This horizontal federation of adjacent businesses is not so well studied. The crashing co-ordination costs driven by hyper-abundant and cheap technology and communications is fairly new. It shouldn¹t come as a surprise to find it confusing and hard to react to: they don¹t teach it in business school yet. |
| | So, what are the because of businesses that you should be considering as a network operator? |
| | .... offers three suggestions, just as starters. Well done. |
Citizens 4 Journalism
| | Yesterday I attended a rally supporting current and former employees of the Santa Barbara News-Press, who will be holding a vote tomorrow for union representation. I took a pile of pictures. It was fun to perform, in a (literally) free lance way, the newspaper photography job that was one of the first I had out of college. |
| | Here's the photoset. And here too is permission for anybody — with any news organization, from blogs to newspapers to the News-Press itself — to use any way they want. |
| | Local folks with Flickr privileges please feel free to tag and comment on the photos, providing names I don't have. |
| | Here's a tabblo of the same set: |
| | The shot at the top is particularly important. It's of Teena Grant, a Unitarian minister reading her own response to News-Press publisher Arthur von Wiesenberger's surrreal response to an earlier letter from Rev. Grant and nineteen other local clergypeople, urging the paper to behave in an ethical fashion. In his response von Wiesenberger not only accused (on no evidence) the reverends of being tools of the Teamsters Union, but posited such oddities as "there is nothing a journalist likes more than writing about themselves". Rev. Grant said the authors of the original letter had no contact with any union, and pointed out the irony of a newspaper publisher who puts down journalists. (And, I might add, fails to appreciate his own need for a copy editor.) |
| | Anyway, there ya go. A little citizen journalism for ya. Mash it up any way you like. |
Toward a new relation ship
| | Techmeme has a new advertising system that's simple and straightforward and bringing in customers. That is, advertisers. Because advertisers are the customers of Gabe's new system. Readers are the consumers. Unless they pay Gabe for something, and I don't think they do yet. (Do they? I can't follow everything that goes on.) In any case, it's not a trivial distinction. |
| | But is it an advance on what BlogAds has been doing as an agency for the duration? Or what advertising itself has been doing for the last 150 years? It provides a way for advertisers to put messages in spaces (or time blocks) in media. That it uses RSS is cool and modern and all; but hey, it's still advertising. It's still a media game that works entirely on the supply side. And it's still ineffecient. However appropriate it may be, most of its messages are still wasted. Sure, you can ignore them, and they do move the inefficiency to servers of pixels, which bring their actual costs as close to zero as possible. To be clear: I'm not knocking it. I am pointing out that advertising, as a system, has always involved massive inefficiencies. Anything that reduces inefficiences is a Good Thing. |
| | Meanwhile, advertising still doesn't answer demand. Not directly. Not in a way that says "You, the user or customer, demand exactly this". Nor should it. Because then it wouldnt be advertising any more. It would be Something Else. |
| | I've been thinking about Something Else for a long time. I put several decades or more of my life into the supply side of advertising and marketing, and the whole time I've wanted to create something that routes around all that inefficiency. But not from the supply side. Instead, from the demand side. From the user or customer. |
| | We need an instrument of demand that works from the demand side, outside of any of the media's own systems. We need something that works in a free-range way, by and for individuals. Something independent. We need something that expresses the user's or the customer's intentions. |
| | It's vigin territory. And you can't get to it from the sell side. You have to approach it from the buy side. From the customer's, or the user's, side of the relationship. |
| | Obviously, this is a development project. In fact, it's the project I'll be working on with the Berkman Center over the next year. I was thinking in that direction during this interview, but we made a lot more progress in just the last few days. I'll be writing more about it this week, mostly in Linux Journal and IT Garage. Naturally, I'll be looking for help. (I'm no developer, myself. The only code I know is Morse. And I'd need help even if I was a developer.) |
| | Meanwhile, kudos to Gabe, and to everybody else working on improvements to advertising. Listen to your customers and you'll make lots of progress together. |
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