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We're back!
The consumers' connections to the Internet are controlled by companies who are in the business of delivering content and services funded by advertising. Consumers who wander the Internet represent lost revenue. Customers who use IP telephony no longer make phone calls. Customers who experiment with creating new services are called abusers. Later he says — There is a fundamental conflict between those who want to experiment with new ideas and those who need to retain their audiences. But the Internet connections are now controlled by companies who are trying to provide content and thus, are in competition with their users. His bottom line — We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity.. Great stuff. As for the business model of mass market advertising, I wrote this back in '97. Of course Bob had even more to say in February of this year. The situation remains no less urgent. Which is why Return to Bob remains a valid command. Speaking of radio David Weinberger's latest NPR commentary is about the Web's exemplary lack of management. (The link is to a RealAudio stream.) He explains more about the commentary in the Cluetrain list on Topica. A New Yawk state of blog I know this blog thing is Serious Business when two of my favorite New Yawk pals start up their own blogs in the same week. First Steve Lewis wrote me from Bulgaria (or Holland, or wherever he is), pointing me to Bubkes. Then Dean Landsman became a private god to Deanland. Steve pointed at Bubkes with an email that said only this: What a lovely antidote to expensive technology- and design-driven websites. The appearance of Bubkes, with its characteristically modest resume, sent me scrambling to find something I had written about Steve on bloglike page that went up in May, 1996. Far as I know, it never had more than two readers. Here it is: I had developed quite an envy of Stephen Lewis by the time I lost track of him, not long after we both graduated from college, back in (what even then we called) The Sixties. Steve was simply the smartest guy I knew. Also the best thinker. Also the best-informed. Also the most passionate. Also the funniest. He not only had character; he was a character. Steve looked like Raul Julia and told stories better than Lenny Bruce, whom he also resembled — only he was taller, and spoke with a deep, sonorous voice that still carried the urban inflections of his boyhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side. We reconnected again a couple of years ago, and I found him even more worthy of envy, because now he spoke six or seven languages, carried passports from two countries, and conversed -- as before -- with great authority, passion and humor about an enormous range of subjects. He had lived for long periods in Holland, Bulgaria and other places, all of which added immensely to his innate wisdom and humanity, not to mention his character. Steve had always been an excellent writer, but now I found he was also a first-rate photographer. In "Islam in Bulgaria," a piece he wrote and photographed* for Aramco World, I saw more of what I had always loved about Steve: his understanding, affection and compassion for people of all kinds. Remember how we're supposed to care about The Human Condition? Steve still does. Moreover, he knows more about what it is than most of us can even imagine. Maybe that's why several days ago he received a Fulbright grant to carry out a photographic and historical study of Bulgaria and Turkey's Ottoman architecture. Steve revels in the Real World. One of my most enjoyable afternoons in recent years was when Steve treated my wife and I to a walking tour of the Lower East Side, delighting us with entertaining stories about little ethnic and cultural sites that a less caring eye would never see. On a less interesting front, Steve supported himself mostly the same way I did: with various jobs in the borderless field of marketing communications, which has recently been enlarged by the Internet and its World Wide Web. Though (like most of us), Steve is still relatively new to the World Wide Web, I think he already understands more about it than any 25-year old HTML jock -- simply because he knows the kinds of stuff only experience can teach. So why am I writing all this? Because I think anybody who hires this guy is in for a treat. Steve has more skills in his pinky than most of us have in all our appendages, including the ones on the tops of our necks. And he learns on a curve that looks more like a steep line. You know how all those management gurus are always saying "hire someone who's smarter than you?" This is the guy. If you're in New York, Holland or Bulgaria, you have no excuse. If it helps, consider this: the bastard still looks like Raul Julia. I notice that Steve invites people to write to him in "English, Dutch, Bulgarian, German, or Spanish." Again, he's being modest here. Steve is one of those guys who denies speaking certain languages in which he is less than fluent. I discovered this one day when the two of us were walking around Paris, where I was working at the time. My joke about German is that I took three years of it in high school but gave them all back when I was done. That's the extent of my training in other languages. French would have been real handy, since it's the only foreign country in which I have spent more than a few days. But I knew Jacque Merde. So Steve did all the talking, including long conversations with people in museums and in cafés. "I thought you didn't speak French," I said. "I don't," he replied. Thus maintaining my envy.
I met Dean many years ago in the Broadcast Professionals Forum on Compuserve, where we were two of the most active voices. Dean was a broadcast consultant at the time, and an unusually good one. His clueful respect for listeners made him something of a voice in the wilderness of that sad profession. I need to look back through stacks of floppies to find some my archives from those days. His stories were funny and his ideas were often brilliant. I look forward to seeing more of the same out here in the wide open Web. Dean is also, to put it weakly, an extreme Yankee fan. I am sure he will use his newfound blogging powers to convince the rest of us that the Yankees have a philosophy. By the way, The Broadcast Professionals Forum is still alive and kicking (on what little is left of Compuserve), and I'm still a sysop on it. If the link in the last paragraph doesn't work, navigate to it through Compuserve's direcory maze, starting with Forums.
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