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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
How's the prophesy holding up? 
| | - As more customers come into direct contact with suppliers, markets for suppliers will change from target populations to conversations.
- Travel, ticket, advertising and PR agencies will all find new ways to add value, or they will be subtracted from market relationships that no longer require them.
- Within companies, marketing communications will change from peripheral activities to core competencies. New media will flourish on the Web, and old media will learn to live with the Web and take advantage of it.
- Retail space will complement cyber space. Customer and technical service will change dramatically, as 800 numbers yield to URLs and hard copy documents yield to soft copy versions of the same thing... but in browsable, searchable forms.
- Shipping services of all kinds will bloom. So will fulfillment services. So will ticket and entertainment sales services.
- The web's search engines will become the new yellow pages for the whole world. Your fingers will still do the walking, but they won't get stained with ink. Same goes for the white pages. Also the blue ones.
- The scope of the first person plural will enlarge to include the whole world. "We" may mean everybody on the globe, or any coherent group that inhabits it, regardless of location. Each of us will swing from group to group like monkeys through trees.
- National borders will change from barricades and toll booths into speed bumps and welcome mats.
- The game will be over for what teacher John Taylor Gatto labels "the narcotic we call television." Also for the industrial relic of compulsory education. Both will be as dead as the mainframe business. In other words: still trucking, but not as the anchoring norms they used to be.
- Big Business will become as anachronistic as Big Government, because institutional mass will lose leverage without losing inertia. Domination will fail where partnering succeeds, simply because partners with positive sums will combine to outproduce winners and losers with zero sums.
- Right will make might.
- And might will be mighty different.
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| | Got some distance to go, but I think we're still on track. |
One two-fer for all
| | Paper can¹t compete with pixels on serving up small bites of information to people hungry for information that¹s newnow! |
| | Text on a computer screen can¹t compete with printed take-anywhere pages that you savor slowly anywhere you want themfrom deep in your favorite chair or on a beach blanket. |
| | Nice pitch, in two sentences for both AND logic and The Live Web. That "AND logic" link goes back to a short essay I wrote in 1995 and published on the Web (before there was blogging), because I couldn't get magazines to publish my stuff. The closing line from that one: |
| | The Web is a product of relationships, not of victors and victims. Not one dime Netscape makes is at Microsoft's expense. And Netscape won't bleed to death if Microsoft produces a worthy browser. The Web as we know it won't be the same in six weeks, much less six months or six years. As a "breed of life," it is original, crazy and already immense. It is not like anything. To describe it with cheap-shot war and sports metaphors is worse than wrong — it is bad journalism. |
Perhaps also the box they came in
| | Geronimo's family call on Bush to help return his skeleton, the headline says. I assume the antecedent of "his" is Geronimo, and not Bush. The request alleges that the skeleton was stolen two generations ago by Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandpa), among other members of Yale's Skull & Bones club. |
Challenge for your conservatives
| | Compare how long it takes to make a natural resource, and how long it takes humans to use it up. Examples: |
| | Oil: Make ______. Consume _______. |
| | Diamonds: Make _____. Consume ______. |
| | Iron: Make ______. Consume _______. |
| | Passenger pidgeons: Make — probably a million years or so. We consumed their entire population in less than a hundred years. Quite an achievement, considering... |
| | Their flocks, a mile wide and up to 300 miles long, were so dense that they darkened the sky for hours and days as the flock passed overhead. Population estimates from the 19th century ranged from 1 billion to close to 4 billion individuals. Total populations may have reached 5 billion individuals and comprised up to 40% of the total number of birds in North America (Schorger 1995). This may be the only species for which the exact time of extinction is known... |
| | The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo at about 1:00 pm on September 1, 1914. |
| | Iron is highly abundant in the universe in general, and in the core of the Earth, but has an interesting (and finite) provenance on the surface where we live. Here's how John McPhee puts it in Rising From the Plains: |
| | The surface expressed the great transition of twenty-five hundred million years ago in its own way. Although life had be gun in the form of anaerobic bacteria early in the Archean Eon, photosynthetic bacteria did not appear until the middle Archean and were not abundant until the start of the Proterozoic. The bacteria emitted oxygen. The atmosphere changed. The oceans changed. The oceans had been rich in dissolved ferrous iron, in large part put into the seas by extruding lavas of two billion years. Now with the added oxygen the iron became ferric, insoluble, and dense. Precipitating out, it sank to the bottom as ferric sludge, where it joined the lime muds and silica muds and other seafloor sediments to form, worldwide, the banded-iron formations that were destined to become rivits, motorcars and cannons. The is was the iron of the Mesabi Range, the Australian iron of the Hammerslee Basin, the iron of Michigan, Wisconsin, Brazil. More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations. Their ages date broadly from twenty-five hundred to two thousand million years before the present. The transition that produced them — from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere and the associated radical change in the chemistry of the oceans — would be unique. It would never repeat itself. The earth would not go through that experience twice. |
| | How long before we're mining for iron in landfills? |
Scattered States of Elsewhere
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