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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
5/20/2001; 8:37:52 AM |
| Topic: |
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| Msg #: |
749 (top msg in thread) |
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Yes, I drank the kool-aid 
| | I just got back from the new Apple Store in Tyson's Corner — one of only two open in the country, so far. Here's the short of it: |
| | — There was a long line of people waiting to get in, and three police officers at the doorway. My sister said "This is as big as Beanie Babies." I said "Buy Apple stock." |
| | — It took 15 minutes to get in while one of the store workers walked up the line holding a new iBook open like it was a box of candies, which at first I thought it was. The unit was on the Net, so I immediately went to my blog and pointed out how I said I was heading over to the new store today. And here I was. People were impressed. |
| | — Dave called while I was there. Wish I could get over to Amsterdam. |
| | — But not as impressed as they were by that iBook. White as a cloud and solid as a rock, it actually makes the Titanium look ugly. Even the keyboard is white with black letters, which I've wanted as long as I've been typing. For older people like my mom, it's a godsend. The screen is 1040x768, but only around 13" from corner to corner, I think. Very compact, but appealing for use in a plane. The top model also featured a CD/RW, which the Titanium doesnt. Far as I could tell its only sin was the lack of an infrared port. Before coming to the store, I wanted a Titanium. Now I'm not so sure. |
| | — The help folks were really helpful, a quality I measure by a willingness to not adhere to the corporate BS line, whatever it is. When I said I thought it sucked that the the Radio Tuner in iTunes wouldn't let the user add stations, the sales guy not only agreed but said he'd make a note of it. For the first time I can recall there seemed to be some expression of willingness to let customers influence engineering. |
| | — There was a kids station. One of the kids was playing a game with a bug running around. Even I wanted to play it, and I'm not a gamer. |
| | — They do an outstanding job of showing how to make movies and burn CDs and DVDs with their editing software. The response from customers was gotta-have-it (along with the Sony and Canon camcorders and cameras used in the demonstrations). This stuff is all beautiful, and it does beautiful stuff. |
| | — Somebody (one of the customers?) said Apple's store is the "opposite of a Gateway Country Store." But in fact it's more of a highest-common-denominator move. Like Targets's "cheap chic" and Costco's high-quality wines and fresh-baked goods. |
| | — The bad? Well, it's terribly self-referential. A whole theater in the back is mostly devoted to showing Apple ads. I wanted to see a tutorial on GoLive or DreamWeaver. The product selection is also intentionally small, so a lot of stuff just wasn't there. But I did have the sense that what I saw was best-of-breed or close. I wouldn't have added that "close" qualifier if they carried the Sony DCR-PC110 camcorder, which also serves as a megapixel still camera, which I've been wanting to see. But they only had a few models above and below that one (six each of video and still cameras). Finally I counted three computers that were down. I restarted all of them. |
| | The afternoon's damage? A $199 Canon scanner for my sister and a $39 wireless controller for me (and the talk I'm giving on Tuesday, if nothing crashes). Not bad. |
Giving CW a new meaning
We won't bring up how portals did as a business
| | In November 1999, Altavista found 1,020,690 sites with the word "portal" and 9,178 sites with the word "weblog." I just checked again and "portal" is now at 4,094,875 while "weblog" is at 624,240. That's a 4x increase for "portal" and a 68x increase for "weblog." Way to go. |
| | Meanwhile all the Userland-hosted sites still aren't visible on Google, which is a far better search engine. Hope they work that out soon. |
Journalism 2.0
| | A few years back Larry Josephson told me this about radio: "It's personal. That's my whole philosophy." |
| | I'm an old radio guy. It's what I wanted to do as a kid, what I enjoyed doing for a while as an adult, and what I'm doing again with this very blog -- which I write, not coincidentally, with a tool called Radio Userland. |
| | The irony for Larry is that he was right as rain and now he's hardly ever on the radio any more. That's because somewhere along the way even noncommercial radio — where Larry spent his whole career — became little more personal than a billboard. |
| | Yesterday I was listening to one of those audio channels on the airplane. Somebody was interviewing great soul music composers like Lamont Dozier of Holland-Dozier-Holland, who wrote a pile of Motown classics. At one point an interviewee said something like "Frankie Crocker loved the record, and it broke through when he started to play it." (O shit: Frankie's dead. What a bummer. See what happens when you go looking for links?) |
| | With the near-singular exception of KPIG, disc jockeys no longer pick the music they play on the radio. That's now done by a machine comprised of record companies, consultants, group owners and a shrinking number of professional broadcasters who remember what their medium was like before its blood was replaced by money. Is it any wonder why Napster was an all-listener phenomenon before it got strangled by the same machine? |
| | Anyway, I'm thinking about all this because in a couple hours I'm going to be interviewed by USC Annenberg's Online Journalism Review, which has lately taken an interest in blogs. Specifically, journalistic ones like Dan's, Joe's, Deborah's, Dave's and Glenn's — where I discover an excellent little discourse on how we're all thinking and talking about this stuff together. |
| | And how personal it all is. |
| | Blogs are radio's fantasy made real. I discovered that myself when this blog began. I called it The Cluetrain Weblog (subtitled "The continuing end of business as usual"). I assumed that all four of Cluetrain's co-authors would be equally interested and able to contribute. Soon it became apparent that this was my station, not theirs. And in the process we discovered something new about a subject that we already made a big deal about in The Cluetrain Manifesto. That subject was voice. |
| | Voice is personal. All attempts to make it plural compromise its literal meaning. |
| | So blogs are re-personalizing journalism. And because they are expressed in a place where the absence of links looks like the presence of clothes on an emperor best seen naked, they are socializing journalism in the literal sense of the verb. Dan's e-journal is improved by its links to other journalists' journals, and to every source that makes sense. It increases his authority along with everybody else who turns Dan's words blue. |
| | It's important not to think about blogs — or the Net, or the Web — as "media." We're not moving goods here. What you witness here are voices. They will no longer be fashioned by meaning borrowed from corporate distribution systems. But those systems will be refashioned by the real voices of the people who comprise them. |
| | See? It's happening already. |
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