CARPing

If you care about the future of Internet radio, hie yourself over to Mary Lu’s site for information on some International Webcasting Association webcasts to rally support.

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Downplaying the Internet

Andrew Orlowski points us to an excellent column by Larry Elliot, economics editor of the Guardian, reflecting on the demise of ITV Digital in the UK. After a standard opening mocking the exaggerated claims of Net enthusiasts, he writes:

The demise of ITV Digital is a sign that we are now well into the endgame of the technology miracle. Outside the hi-tech sector, the impact will be minimal. When the boom in railway shares came to an end in the 19th century, it did not mean the trains stopped running; what it did mean was that investors came to their senses and realised that many of the lines built when the markets were at their most manic would never be profitable.

Eliot is concerned mainly with the effect on the hardware industry — PCs, mobile phones, etc. He says the recovery won’t be fast because the technology is already good enough to discourage upgrading, over-production is lowering prices, and “there are signs that the passion for the new technology is cooling.” For instance:

In the City, dress-down Friday is being replaced by no-email Friday. Workers are being told that they should rediscover the art of face to face communication rather than firing off electronic messages to someone in the next office.

And, he says, RW encounters provide a richness of nuance the Web can’t. We like being with one another in person. It’s human nature, he concludes.

If Elliot’s argument is that the Web isn’t going to replace RW interaction, then he’s arguing against a strawperson. If he’s saying that the Internet has hit us with the brunt of its blow, we have absorbed the impact and not much has changed, I disagree on all three counts:

1. We’re only at the beginning of the Age of the Net. My daughter’s high school hasn’t even yet figured out that all the kids are just “naturally” doing their homework collaboratively via IM. And at the other end of the spectrum, NPR today had a story about an attempt to wire remote Chinese villages so they can enter the world economy without forcing the inhabitants to move to one of the major cities. Not to mention the effect of the Internet on our basic self-understanding, but I’m trying (unsuccessfully) not to plug my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

2. We have absorbed much of the impact of the Internet, but our confusion about basic issues such as privacy, copying of content, and how to market indicate that we are at least as confused as we are complacent.

3. The Internet has already changed many of the basics. It just feels like normal already. Consider what would happen if you shut off email not just on Fridays but everyday. Consider what would happen simply within a single process such as recruitment and hiring. Think about the effect email has had on meetings. Not to mention the effect it is having on universities, government, journalism…and — to switch to another level — its effect on the role of authority and expertise.

Yes, the economic effect of the Internet may be in a lull, but it is precisely because human nature is social that the deeper effect of the Internet should not be underestimated, no matter what happens to cellphone shares. You can’t hook up 500,000,000 people in a new persistent public place across cultural boundaries and think that the changes will be anything short of long-term and socially transformative.

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Why I Hate Content

It’s taken me this long to figure out why I usually get uncomfortable when people talk about the Web in terms of “content.” I start out am uncomfortable for the same reasons as Doc Searls. The Web is more about conversation than content. And with content comes a whole template of metaphors about ownership, delivery and distribution, and consumption.

But there’s another reason my hackles go up when the Web is hailed as a treasure trove of content. Content sits there all pleased with itself for being valuable. It’s smug because it’s an asset. Yeah, well it’d be content-in-itself if it weren’t for the fact that someone cares enough about it to link to. And it’s merely content unless it can get over itself enough to point us to some other places worth going.

Links not only literally make the Web a web, but the nature of those links determines almost everything that is interesting and important about it. Content is to the Web as zombies are to human culture.

Halley nails it in her response to the above when she says “Content is a pimp’s word.”

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Auto Link Trail

Jim Bassett at Digital Media Tree has come up with a way to include at the bottom of a blog entry a list of all sites that refer to that entry. Well, “all” is too strong; for a linking site to make it onto the list, someone somewhere has to actually follow the link. But there’s a certain unintended Google-like effect of this limitation since it excludes links no one has ever bothered to click on.

You can see this running at Jim’s weblog. At the end of the article, next to the “[link]” button, there is a link to “[ref]” (with the number of references noted). Click on that link and you’ll go to a page that repeats the original post and appends, in a gray box, a list of all the pages that have linked to that entry. (You can go straight to the page with the gray box here.) If all works as planned, this blog entry — mine, the one you’re now reading — should be on that list also.

Cool! And a useful step towards reifying blogthreads.

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Peru and Beijing in Daring Escape from Kidnappers

Michael O’Connor Clarke has blogged a Peruvian congressperson’s reasons why his government should go open source whenever possible.

And did I mention that when I was in China I learned that the the government of Beijing is going with Linux now that the Chinese central government is seriously cracking down on software pirates?

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Nantucket Conference Report

For most of the first day of the 1.5 day-long Nantucket Conference, it felt as if we were in a post-Internet culture. The Internet hardly came up in the panel discussions. That’s because this conference is mainly about the business climate for investors. The investors tried the Net and they got burned, so they’re back to business-as-usual having learned the lesson that the Internet didn’t really change anything. And of course that’s true within this domain of discourse because the basics of venture capitalism are so primitive: I give you money now so you can pay me back a lot more money later. Here are two rocks; now, go bang them together the way your Powerpoints described. This is the process whether the dinosaurs are dying or we’re about to colonize the planets of Alpha Centauri. For me, the backgrounding of the Internet at this conference marks a milestone.

The post-Internet feel certainly wasn’t because the participants don’t understand what’s happening. Not hardly. There was an impressively high percentage of senior uber-geeks and industry heavyweights such as Dan Bricklin, Mitch Kapor, Dan Gillmor, George Colony and Bob Metcalfe, as well as CEOs of some forward-looking companies, press folks, and lead VCs. This is a group that “gets” the Internet. In fact, the Net savviness of the group helps explain why the Net barely came up yesterday. It did make for some amazing schmoozing: it’s more than a little bit of a kick to be able to eavesdrop as Mitch Kapor arrives and embraces Dan Bricklin.

The one way the Net came up repeatedly was in the form of Web services. Web services appeal to the technologists because it promises to make hard things easy through a change in software architecture, and it appeals to financial types because it’s big and obscure enough to enable smart investors to make more money than stupid, lucky ones. But, as John Benditt, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, said at the beginning of his excellent panel on biotech, if the most exciting trend you can point to is back office automation via Web services, then you are on the descending slope of the technology curve.

I actually view it a little differently. Yes, we are between major tech innovations on the Web, but there are transformational technologies on the horizon and undoubtedly ones we don’t yet know about. For example: 1. Ubiquitous access; 2. True group-forming software that mirrors our social networks; 3. True healing of the gap between the desktop and the Web (while retaining the desktop as our primary digital abode); 4. Truly useful, cheap portable electronic reading devices. Also, of course, I think we haven’t really begun to understand the most important effect of the Web: how it’s transforming our bedrock understanding of what it means to be a human sharing a world with others.

For me, the highlight of the first day was a “fireside chat” between George Colony and Kapor (moderated by CIO editor McCreary). These are two hard-headed, soft-hearted techno-humanists. Kapor continues to lead his role-model life and concluded by reminding us that working with two or three people whose life you change deeply is as important as writing software that improves the life of a million people. Kapor is currently working on open-source end-user software to challenge Outlook in the manage-your-life application space.

For the record: The first mention of Linux occurred at 11:34 in the morning in a passing remark by Dan Bricklin.

Would I come back next year? I’m less interested in the investor side of life than the agenda is, but the collection of industry folks by itself made this a really worthwhile Conference Experience for me.

(Dan Bricklin has posted photos from the conference.)

(BTW, I got through my presentation — my first focused on trying to explain what my book is about — without getting pied or pantsed.)

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Mind/Body

John Benditt’s panel on biotechnology at the Nantucket Conference was about how this new technology is going to alter what it means to be human. Since that’s the question that seems to draw me with regard to the Internet, it struck me that I’m stuck in my own mind/body dualism, not paying sufficient attention to the precipice of change on which our corporeal selves stand.

I have to learn more about this. I got to spend some Quality Time with Jonathan Rosen and his daughter Samantha yesterday. Jonathan built and runs the CIMIT Consortium that encourages tech innovation to advance patient care that is engaged in some really interesting projects. (And by mentioning him in my weblog, I’m holding my own feet to the blog fire, forcing myself to follow up with him.)

It’s more than a little humbling to listen to a panel of people who are set on curing cancer and enabling the lame to walk. I mean, the body is the ultimate user interface.

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Creepy Pillow

A generous relative gave me a $100 Tempurpedic pillow a few months ago made of the space-age Swedish foam that conforms to your body’s shape. I came to it expecting neck comfort. Instead…

First, it drains all the heat from your body as your head vainly tries to come to tempramental homeostasis with it. It is like sleeping in wet cement.

Second, it has the consistence of a fairly firm part of the human body, so I’ll wake up thinking that I’ve been wrapped in my wife’s left arm only to find that I’ve spent the night snuggling into space-age Swedish foam. This flashes me back to when I was in college and a coed who was out of my league put her foot up against mine under a lunch table. She didn’t move it, so I wiggled mine and soon we were playing footsie, me smiling knowingly — is “leering” the word I want? — at her as she played it real cool amidst all of our friends.

Then my pal Jeff left and I discovered I’d become sexually aroused by his knapsack.

Just think, for $1500 we could have a full mattress of the stuff.

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Matrullo Explained

Tom explains the odd capitalization of his blog’s title, “IMproPRieTies”:

Actually, if the outer edges of the NONcap letters (trebuchet font, of
course) are examined, they will be found to mirror a segment of the night sky on Oct. 16th, 1617, as viewed from Arcetri.

This is one of the few suggestions less plausible than the one several of you suggested, namely that Tom is trying to tell us “I am pretty” (IM PR T). True, Tom is unusually beautiful, but it somehow doesn’t seem his style to say so himself.

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Nantucket Conference Placeholder

Not much time to blog today because I’m at the Nantucket Conference. I only have a few minutes now, so here’s the briefest overview I can give: The forum topics tend to be more focused on finance than is to my particular taste, but the set of technologists here is fantastic. Dan Gillmor has a blogged a summary of what’s being discussed.

BTW, I ended up not using the ending I outlined in yesterday’s blog. Not enough time. But the talk went better than I’d feared.

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