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Sunday, January 14, 2007
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 Sunday, January 14, 2007
started 1/14/2007; 10:05:15 AM - last post 1/14/2007; 10:05:15 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, January 14, 2007 
1/14/2007; 2:05:15 PM (reads: 3761, responses: 0)
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Honk 
Demanding better connectivity supply
| | Kevin Barron: Why are so many communities looking to do something that is bound to get them in hot water with their incumbent Net providers? Could it be that despite all the claims to the contrary, the network services being provided are too little for too much (and too late)? Could it also be that communities do not want to wait only to find they have been left out of their incumbents' upgrade plans? |
| | The long answer requires recognizing that the marketplace for Net connectivity is something larger than the choice of closed silos provided by your local carrier duopoly. |
| | Because, while the carriers complain about "governent competing with business", they ignore what's behind governments — all local and regional — moving to offer what the carriers can or will not. It's customer demand. |
| | What the market needs is to open up — with more, and better, competion. With more, and better, services to customers. Services that can only grow on infrastructure that's built for anything and everything, and not just for telephony and television, with a little Internet on the side. Because that's what's being offered, right now. Even where Verizon is deploying FiOS (fiber optic connections), it's mostly about television. |
| | How many businesses, and of what variety, can thrive on a fiber and wireless infrastructure that's optimized to support everybody and everything, rather than just digitized versions of the old phone and cable TV systems? There's no limit. That's what the munis are thinking, because that's what their constituents are demanding. They want to build infrastructure that's good for every kind of business — not just for two incumbent monopolies that continue to make using the Internet for business as expensive as possible. (Ask your cable or phone company how much more it costs to get "business" Internet service. The answer will tell you why there's not more use of it, and why their defense of "business" — meaning their own, exclusively — against government "competition" is hollow and hypocritical.) |
| | Right now we live in a connectivity market that has been rigged by regulation that goes back to the 1934 Communications Act that put the FCC in business. The result is a practical choice, in most locations in the U.S., of just two carriers for access to the Net. And for both of those the Net is a third-priority source of revenue, after cable TV and telephone service. Today the telcos and cablecos care far more about getting into each other's legacy businesses than they do about getting better Internet connectivity to customers who demand it. |
| | All efforts to improve the Net connectivity market need to start with recognizing the way the market has been rigged, and the difference between that rigging and the open and free market that customers are just starting to demand. |
Meta ownership
| | Seems to me that the "you own your own data" principle should apply to your own metadata as well. Thomas has one way of asserting that (by embedding it in the photo's own datafile); but we need a more comprehensive and well-understood approach, within whole categories. |
Relating
| | There will come a time, in short, when the raw pleasure of sorting through an interesting and challenging problem will be mixed with the inevitable work required to create anything of value ‹ sometimes frustrating, occasionally tedious, often difficult work. |
| | As with the end of any honeymoon, what comes of that frustrating, tedious, difficult work will likely be even better than the honeymoon itself, and I¹m even looking forward to it in a masochistic sort of way, butŠwell, it¹s still nice to have the honeymoon, you know? |
| | I do know, and I have that same feeling. |
| | So, a note to Philipp and Adam: Please join us at the January 25th VRM meeting in Redwood City, California. This is critical stuff. |
| | Note: This is a developers meeting: a chance for people working on VRM-related stuff to get together, talk about it, and maybe start collaborating as well. Look forward to seeing some of ya'll there. |
Speaking of messes
| | If the News-Press mess (below) is a tempest in a teapot (though I like to think of Santa Barbara as something a bit bigger than that), President Bush's plans for more of the same (but with more troops exposed to more of the same) in Iraq suggests visiting John Robb, whos says this: |
| | Of course, the failure of these periodic efforts may be due to an inability to revisit a key assumption upon which the present US effort is based: that strong states tend to form naturally if provided the right minimalist conditions. I believe the opposite is true: that states, once broken, tend to remain hollow and in perpetual failure. The reason is that in the current environment minimalist conditions yield social disintegration (we see will this minimalist/disintegration paradigm repeated world-wide, even in the absence of war, as globalization continues to rapidly grow and spread -- which fatally undermines any argument that the success of globalization means that "we win," if "we" means the US and nation-states in general) and the ascendent military power (copiously documented on this weblog) is in the hands of those would disrupt the state rather than form it. If this revised assumption is correct, it is safe to conclude that building a stable Iraq would require a level of effort that is beyond our ability to provide (see the brief "Playing with War" for more). |
| | Note: every US action in Iraq should also be analyzed within the context of a war with Iran (see the April 2006 brief "Collapsing Iran" for why). |
The story behind the story
| | I'm back in Santa Barbara after a week and a half on the road, catching up on the shameless mess that the formerly excellent Santa Barbara News Press has become. |
| | As usual, local law professor Craig Smith has excellent coverage of the NLRB hearings in which the newspaper's attorneys take on both the Teamsters and the paper's employees, which voted overwhelmingly last summer for representation by the union. It's rather clear from Craig's coverage that the paper doesn't have a case and will surely lose. |
| | On Friday he also also unpacked some apparent inaccuracies spread by "Wendy McCaw's faforite intimidator", Barry Cappello (a high-powered attorney who, among other things, writes threatening letters to local retailers who post anti-McCaw bumper stickers in their windows): |
| | In a letter to the editor published in both the print edition of this week's Santa Barbara Independent, and online, Cappello says in part: "When Mrs. McCaw acquired the News-Press, she saved it from the disgrace of insolvency. After years of losing money, the paper was going to be closed or sold off to a national chain with no local input or control." Au contraire. Both the New York Times and the American Journalism Review have reported that when McCaw bought the paper it had a profit percentage of 11%, which is higher than most Fortune 500 companies. The New York Times distributed a "bid book" as part of its selling effort in 2000. The book showed that the News-Press was far from the "disgrace of insolvency," In fact, it was enjoying record profits. Which is probably why McCaw might have paid as much as $150 million for the paper. |
| | Craig also points to Wendy's Posse, an LA Weekly story that provides background on the anti-defamation suit by the paper against stand-alone journalist Susan Paterno, who published Santa Barbara Smackdown, an investigative piece in the American Journalism Review. (Aside: Here are AJR's search results for Susan Paterno, but clicks on any of them currently lead to stuff like "Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e09' EXECUTE permission denied on object 'stp_article_category', database 'ajrorg', schema 'dbo'. /Article.asp, line 47". I am sure the reason for that is technical rather than editorial.) |
| | Taking the high road, BlogaBarbara recently followed a suggestion by a reader and called for "constructive suggestions" about how Wendy could "turn around her continuing mess". Twenty-three comments have followed so far. |
| | On the whole I've been taking the most contructive (if not the highest) road I can on this thing, starting with these two posts in April 2005, following an editorial by Travis Armstrong of the News-Press titled Where are the great S.B. blogs? (I include the link for historical purposes only... thanks to the News-Press' lock-it-up approach even to daily editorial, the link hits a dead end.) In A Way for Wendy, published last September, I kindly suggested that Armstrong — who in July had been called " a growing cancer" on the paper by Barney Brantingham, a columnist who left the paper after 46 years working there — be fired. I still can't think of a more constructive way to start turning things around. |
| | Well, for what it's worth, I do take pleasure in writing about a subject that doesn't interest approximately 100% of the world outside our city. Especially when it involves a subject that should interest everybody: the fate of local daily newspapers. Because this is a story about something more than a golden goose throwing rotten eggs. It's about how to keep and build institutions by which citizens and journalists inform one another. That's a much tougher construction job. |
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