eWeb Applications

It is de rigueur to pay attention to what your contemporaries, colleagues, friends and relatives are consuming when it comes to media. The result is eclectic, cross-genre, multicultural, multinational, and intelligent programming. For years we have come, without realizing it, to accept the programming offered at the schedule time of broadcast and pay-tv television networks, the packaging of songs into record albums by the labels, and the rotation of only bestsellers in book, record, movie, and game retail stores, and even the hits/talk programming defaults of the consolidated radio broadcasters. It is a breath of fresh air, that realization my friend Mark Fitzsimmons described of being in a room full of stale air that deteriorated so gradually you didn’t realize how little oxygen was left until somebody opened a window.

It is one of the most fascinating outcomes of the ultimate community information network, the visions of Vannevar Bush in Memex, Ted Nelson in Xanadu, Doug Englebart in NLS, Alan “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” Kay in Dynabook and Tim Berners-Lee in the World Wide Web. It echoes the spirit of Friendster and the bubbling up of social and business networking groups.
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Rock star David Bowie and carmaker Audi have announced a contest: mash-up (mix together) two Bowie songs to win an MP3 recording of your remix and an Audi TT. How progressive, really, inviting fans to compete for violating your copyrights. Of course, it doesn’t say you can publish the remix, like Endless Noise did on its site with the two segments it created from the old “Rebel, Rebel” and the new ‘Never Get Old” for an Audi TV commercial.

But hang on, “David Bowie is a copyright terrorist”, says Canadian poster Max Keiser and author of the forthcoming novel “Buy Love, Sell Fear”, writing on Digital Rights on the blog KarmaBanque, the anti-American-corporate-culture-and-capitalism site. (more…)

The world just loves a good love-hate relationship. Here’s the wonk’s-eye-view of Epic Drama Number 1, content v. technology. Sure you can say it is a gross oversimplification, but I prefer to regard it as a value-added crystallization.

There are several forces battling for survival and prosperity in the coming decade, and they can be summarized as follows:

Epic Drama Number 1: Those Impassioned Lovers, Content and Technology.
“No, please, you be the razor blade and I’ll be the razor this time, I insist.”
“Oh no, it’s my turn to bundle a discount coupon for your latest HD-DVD player with my next trilogy release, oh, say 50% off? Your turn to do the tech support, of course.”
“Now, now, have another cosmopolitan, and be reasonable. We’ll bundle a limited edition version with…w-where do you think you’re going? Come back! You can’t leave me. You need me more than I need you! You’re nothing without me!!!”
“HA! I’m leaving you and going somewhere where content is appreciated.”
“Oh yeah? Like where?”
“Like, um, wireless broadband. Yeah, that’s it!” (more…)

I am just a lousy conspiracy theorist, or else I would surely accuse organizations like IFPI and now IIPA with planting research on their sites to make them look objective because it conflicts with the basis for their lobbying for regulatory relief. The RIAA is a member of both umbrella organizations, but they are governed differently. I like both organizations because they are systematic supply-side data collectors of record for the industries they represent, their data attempts to represent the total economic value of the sector not just the part their members contribute, and they release their data to the public, not just to their members.

Right on the main page of the IIPA site is a link to a press release detailing a study apparently commissioned by the IIPA released in 2002 showing that the industries which sell copyrighted intellectual property, including motion pictures, recorded music, entertainment software, business software and books, grew more than twice as fast (7%) as the U.S. economy (3%) over the last twenty years, and continued that rate of growth as recently as the study was conducted in 2001, to reach $535 billion or 5.25% of the entire GDP, and representing 6% of total employment. You can read the whole thing here. (more…)

HDTV, DVD-Audio, 3G, FTTH, nanoscale processors, blade servers, HDVD/BD…what do these have in common? They are big, they are fast, they are expensive to commercialize, and they are hungry…what are they hungry for? Information, in some combination of communications, computations, and/or content. The future of these and hundreds of similar products and their components, systems and applications softwares, and distribution channels, and the future of all the companies that make them, and the future of the workers that make up those companies, and the future of the communities in which those workers live, depends in no small part on creating and/or facilitating the demand for information in all of those forms.

I don’t pretend to know much about the technology that supports communications and computations except tangentially as it relates to the technology I am passionate about, that which supports content. Over the more than 20 years I have been researching the trends and futures for content and delivery technology, I have been drawn to the consumer sector because of it’s, well, turmoil, for lack of a better short explanation, but sometimes my attention is drawn back to the business information sector. On the Red Herring Blog today is a post about Reuters’ new information delivery strategy, in which they are looking for subscription revenue from consumers and advertising revenue from institutions, and therefore are cutting off their feeds to Yahoo, the Motley Fool and other licensed sites. I am not close enough to these decisions to render any judgment as to why they are attempting to do the reverse of the revenue model in which they and companies like them in the professional information space have pursued. It makes me very uncomfortable, like floundering tends to do. (more…)

Writer Don Labriola gave me an idea when he told an insider’s listserv of tech experts he bookmarked my blog. I was flattered, of course, and I wondered what company I was in, i.e. what other blogs he had bookmarked that I’d like to see. Sort of like social networking of people’s blogs. The thing is, if it’s anything like my bookmarks for favorite websites, no one but me and my staff know what the bookmarks represent because they are cryptic and are organized by an internal hierarchy of our research subjects…unless I tagged them with descriptors. Or would it be enough just to know they were Don’s favorites, that his discretion alone spoke volumes, and the rest was my discovery?

I picked up on something from a blog (sorry, I forgot to note whose) about Webjay, a non-profit site that had formed to let people recommend and link free MP3s on the web. There was no bio of the recommender or even real names, no review like on Amazon, just a list with links and a genre tag. Unencumbered by any recording contracts with any labels, major or indie, I listed a couple songs Wes Garner recorded of my first jazz vocalist gig in 2002 that were sitting on my diva website so I could see in a week if that boosted traffic at the site. It works for Janis Ian, so who knows. Unlike those highly posed, touched-up studio pics that make it impossible for you to not disappoint anyone seeing you in person, people could like me even more in real life after given how much my sound has improved since then. (more…)

I am in macro mode this week as I revise the entertainment market model taxonomy for the new edition of Forecast 2020. I am in The Big Picture.

I had the occasion to write Esther Dyson today, with good wishes on the recent acquisition of her publishing firm EDventure Holdings by CNET. I ribbed her that a postcard in pearls was in order. Years ago I recalled her announcing a change of address (after buying her first newsletter business?) with a photo of her in an elegant evening dress complete with a long strand of pearls, perched on a stack of moving boxes. For those of you not old enough (or too old?) to remember, Esther was one of the few women experts at early computer industry conferences, but always noticeable as the girlish figure in t-shirt and jeans sitting cross-legged on the edge of some stage fielding the most important questions of the day from 1980s cognescenti and wannabees. She is also credited with originating the idea in my mind that content wants to be free.

I recalled CNET founder Halsey Minor and his coinage of the great term disaggrenomics, whereby vertically integrated online companies would be out-competed by horizontal players. (more…)

Scientists funded by the Ministry of Culture and private foundations have released a report showing what they claim is irrefutable evidence that information content can be extracted from media entering the digestive system. Before and after tests have shown that in a high proportion of subjects, portions of the ingested knowledge were stored directly in the brain that were not present before they were consumed.

The report further reveals the manufacturing process which entails encoding of the content on small, flat doughnut shapes in spiral patterns which are then stamped into a substrate of corn starch mixed with nutrients, coated with a layer of sweeteners, artificial flavors and food dyes and mass produced. Dr. Hiro Shimura and Dr. Suh Osari of Tokyo College were quoted in the morning edition of the major Japanese evening newspaper, the Daily Yumitumi. They reported that the breakthrough in content absorbtion rates came after they hit upon a formula for their media, which they have named InfoMaize ™, that was chewed long enough to be activated by enzymes in the saliva. When asked how they achieved that, they stated it was because the corn substrate stayed crispy, even in milk. (more…)

Recently, I connected with James Burke and his KnowledgeWeb project. This project seeks to overcome the blindsided pursuit of specialization that loses credibility because it lacks context. The idea of tapping into a database of research and intelligent connections is straightforward, but the execution is almost inconceivable. I envision this like a cultural databank, a memory bank of the human race, but instead of happening, it is created. It must be mind-boggling to create a model of part of the mind that works as a partner with knowledge workers. I first heard James Burke speak at the first Microsoft CD-ROM conference. When I met him, almost 20 years ago, I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I didn’t know it. Now at least I know it.

Back then I was an expert in an industry so new I had to start my own company to work in it. I began to compile a database of CD-ROM sales. For many years, I knew everyone who sold anything on CD-ROM, as well as everyone who made the discs and drives. That changed when CD-ROM intersected with the advent of A/V-capable personal computers, GUIs, search software and digitized data, but I kept on top of the sales, building the data until the mid-1990’s. (more…)