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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
5/11/2001; 11:08:58 AM |
| Topic: |
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| Msg #: |
727 (top msg in thread) |
| Prev/Next: |
726/728 |
| Reads: |
1923 |
Sounds sorta like what we've been saying around here
| | While Web communications are conducted via the exchange of pages, the new software model will use executables (programs). What's the difference? Think of pages versus executables as the difference between reading a book and talking to a friend. Yes, all of those pages in the book are interesting and instructive. But you can't converse with a book the way you can with a friend. You can't cooperate with a book to perform a task. A book won't answer an unexpected question. The Web is like reading a book. An executable-powered Internet is like a two-way conversation. |
| | When you go to a site in the future, the server will send you a program that will load onto your PC (or Palm, or cell phone). Now you've got brains at both ends of the wire, resulting in a high-IQ, interactive, valuable conversation. Work is performed at both places, greatly increasing the richness of experience, the relevancy of content, and the amount that can get done. |
| | I call this the "executable Internet," or X Internet, for short. X Internet offers several important advantages over the Web: 1) It rides Moore's Law -- the wide availability of cheap, powerful, low real-estate processing; 2) it leverages ever dear bandwidth -- once the connection is made, a small number of bits will be exchanged, unlike the Web where lots of pages are shuttled out to the client; and 3) X Internet will be far more peer-to-peer -- unlike the server-centric Web. |
Found in nature
Why I thank Walt Whitman for God every day
| | Interesting Salon piece on opposition to Bush the Younger's plan to submit schoolkids to even more testing than they already endure. |
| | Testing sucks. If my parents allowed the school to believe my 8th grade test scores, I would have been shunted to a "vocational" high school where the curriculum prepared the lower intellectual castes for "trades." On the Iowa achievement tests, my reading and vocabulary percentiles were something like 2 and 10. |
| | I'd like to say I didn't give a shit, but I did. It was nasty to be "found" dumb when all I ever did was agree with Walt Whitman. As do all kids, by the way. Read that linked Whitman passage and ask how much your own soul agrees. Then ask how much that same soul agrees with whatever measures your own schools laid on you. |
| | And no, I didn't always do that badly. But I did that badly often enough, and for long enough, that I know the caste system of compulsory education a helluva lot better than most adults who tested well as students. |
| | Name every social bias you can think of. The idea that some kids are born dumb — are bound by nature to be "bad" students — is no different, except in one sense: nearly all of us still believe it. Parents, teachers, peers — even presidents. They all form a crushing ring of judgement that rewards one end of the bell curve while it punishes the other. And leaves everybody else feeling like they don't measure up. Which they don't. Very few do. |
| | I was lucky to have parents who believed in me more than my scores. Most other dumb kids aren't so lucky. |
The continuing end of radio as usual
| | Missed a call yesterday from another Mercury News columnist: my friend Brad Kava. Brad and I bonded many years over radio, which has always been a passion for both of us. Brad's weekly radio column in the Mercury's Ear section is one of the last columns of its type in the country, having survived the rising tide of suckage that is commercial broadcasting. |
| | Speaking of which, after I got to Santa Barbara a couple months back, I got to like an oldies station on 1340am. It wasn't love, but I liked it. Then one day it was replaced by THE GAME — an all-sports station. Then after a few days it was all-business, mixed with Dodgers broadcasts. I have no idea what it's called now, or even what it's about. Sometimes it's sports, sometimes it's business. Who knows. Or cares. The radio dial used to be a Main Street. Now it's mostly a bunch of plastic-wrapped packages near the checkout counter at the 7-11. Not much room for connoisseurship there. |
| | One of the first people I ran into here was a former program director at a whole heap of Santa Barbara stations, now mostly replaced by corporatized replicants. He quit the business when, after helping drive one of those stations to unprecedented popularity, Clear Channel or one of those other mega-owners came in and replaced everybody with a "more music, less talk" robot. |
| | Dig this for grooving with the Grain of the Web: Clear Channel has a link on its home page titled "Clear Channel Internet Group To Temporarily Cease Audio Streaming." Click on it and you'll get a downloaded press release in Microsoft Word. It reads: |
| | Tuesday, April 10, 2001, Los Angeles, CA Clear Channel Internet Group (CCIG), a division of Clear Channel Communications, Inc. (CCU) today officially announced that they have temporarily ceased audio streaming on all of their radio station web-sites. |
| | ³This was a corporate decision.² said Kevin Mayer, CEO of CCIG. ³We are working hard to resolve outstanding issues with all concerned parties. It is our intention to put the streams back up when it makes legal and financial sense. We are also in the process of selecting and deploying technology that automatically inserts and removes commercial messages and making other changes that will insure the financial and legal viability of the product.² |
| | Mayer went on to say, ³I expect that the negotiations now under way will be resolved in a manner favorable to all concerned. Once the outstanding issues are resolved, CCIG will move rapidly to evaluate restoring our streams.² |
| | Who the hell are the "concerned parties?" Negotiations about what? Do you ask your telephones to make "legal and financial sense"? |
| | By the way, I just clicked on Clear Channel's home page Radio link and the browser siezed up. Lovely. |
Fans, 1, hype, 0
| | The XFL died today. I heard one of the league's marketing guys on NPR this morning, saying that the league had underestimated the sophistication of the audience. Once again the obvious dawns. |
| | The XFL was all hype. Worse, it was an insult to pro football, including its fans. The creators could have just asked the fans, "Hey, do we need another football league? One with bigger boobs, including Jesse Ventura?" Woulda saveda buncha money. |
Stop. Put down your marketing and step away from the customer. That's it. Nice and easy.
| | When the selling gets tough, the marketing gets nasty. Eric Norlin: |
| | I'm sorry to say it has come to this. Modern marketers have realized that no one pays attention anymore. And, instead of trying to think about how to fix this problem for the long term, they have decided to produce the numbers for the short term - and treat the customer like an enemy in the process. |
I'd yell Yahoo! but it's been done
| | Hey man, I hope everything's okay for you, and that my crack squad or mercenaries have waxed that bitch English teacher of yours by now. If she eventually turns up, you don't know me, right? |
| | Not speaking of which, the #1 blog is Dan Gillmor's, where today we are treated to some truth about the California energy thing. A sample: |
| | Don't take seriously the scare stories that droves of businesses will load up their trucks and flee Silicon Valley. Still, you have to ask if the PUC really thinks businesses will just eat the rate increases. Do these regulators think the higher business rates won't come out in lost jobs and higher prices? |
| | And lost businesses. I recently heard about one L.A. company, a manufacturer with slim margins and huge obligations at contracted prices, that simply folded when the price increases went through the roof the first time. And this wasn't in the news. It came up in a conversation with an engineering firm that did business with the doomed company. What happens to businesses that have been treating electicity as a relatively fixed predictable and cost? That's the case with many, perhaps most, of the quiet industrial companies out there. These companies don't have PR agencies. They aren't politically involved. They just do their work quietly in the midst of the economy. Makes them real easy to shaft. |
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