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Wednesday, April 19, 2000
Unintended Clues: "One thing during another. That's how I keep all those balls on the floor at one time." That's me to my wife a few minutes ago, while preparing to drive up to Napa for Futurize West, where I speak Friday. "Just don't step on them," she replied. — Doc Searls
Dead White Guy Walking: We don't see this much anymore, so it's a real thrill when a company in a position to do Good Things for Everybody and Take Big Credit for its largesse, instead decides that its only hope is to gum up the works for everybody, just (of course) to shake a few bucks out of a hopeless situation, in blind oblivity to the suicidal nature of the deal. At issue is the familiar .GIF, the graphics format developed by Compuserve about a thousand years ago and still embodied in about fourteen zillion Web site visuals. Compuserve was killed then sold by H&R Block to AOL back in the late 90s, but somehow the GIF became property of Unisys, which stands in living refutation of Winer's Law, which goes "Ask not what the Internet can do for you; ask what you can do for the Internet." In a move we might call Weinbach's Refutation (after Unisys CEO Lawrence Weinbach), the company whose name masks unlikely persistence of Burroughs and Sperry Univac has decided to license its GIF technology to, well, everybody. Which means that if you have GIFs on your site, you may owe these dudes $5k or something. According to a current CNET piece, Unisys, led by one of its lawyers, is actually getting somewhere with Disney and other companies with whole buildings full of lawyers. Apparently licensing deals were struck with AOL and Microsoft a number of years ago. (And not you? Did you forget? Where was your attorney?)
And then let's raise the beer of his choice to Don Marti (right), the first class geeque provacateur whose Burn All GIFs site is a clearing furnace on this, well, burning issue. — Doc Searls
The Latest JOHO is out. Or up. Or here. Whatever, if the pixel fairy didn't leave it in your email, click here for the all-color Web version that's better anyway. Among other good editorial deeds, Dr. Weinberger asks one of the toughest questions about Geeks:
(Yes, but why split hairs?) Of course, there is deep stuff too. A teaser: The Web isn't a broadcast medium or a mall with shorter lines. It is (among other things) a new type of public. Nowhere is this clearer than in how it's rewriting the rules about strangers. Again, all here (in case you missed it up there). — Doc Searls There are responses to this message:
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