Month: March 2003

Categories
News

Raging irony

How’s this for an ironic sequence of events:

  • A big consumer products company announces they plan to market their latest concoction by using “blogs.”
  • Newsweek runs a story, quoting a top blogifier: “It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” says alpha blogger Doc Searls. “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.”
  • He blogs it at 4pm on Sunday, March 2.
  • More bloggers decry the cluelessness of said marketers. By 4pm on Monday, March 3, it’s number 19 on popdex. I’m already sick of hearing about it.

Boy, were they stupid to think they could manipulate us into promoting their stupid product.

Categories
Analysis

Being realistic about content management software

Gerry McGovern has some advice to the content management industry, in response to the recent Jupiter Research report on the failure of content management systems:

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

He goes on to prescribe some changes for software companies (starting with telling the truth) and their customers (such as being realistic about what content management is going to do for you).

This is strong stuff and a good starting place for companies thinking about content management, or thinking about abandoning it.

Categories
Analysis

New thinking about old phone lines

Dim copper is a useful new meme from Bob Frankston.

He points out telephone calls use a lot less than one percent of the carrying capacity of the copper lines that already come into our homes. We’re nowhere near using them to the extent that we should. Why are we worrying about lighting dark fiber or deploying even more fiber?

Bob’s analysis sheds some light on why the telephone access monopolies are unhappy with the FCC’s decision to deregulate new lines, but insure competitive access to existing lines. In the two years since they last thought that was a good idea, they’ve probably realized that the future belongs to copper.

Categories
Research

Broadband users adopt audio, orphan video

The share of Americans who use Internet audio monthly has tracked closely the share who have broadband access, but the share using Internet video has not.

Here’s a chart I created from the data in the report. The blue line is broadband adoption, the red line is audio and the green line is broadband. Click the chart for a larger view.

This extraordinarily clear message can be found in the Arbitron/Edison survey released last week. It puts the lie to the idea coming from Los Angeles that potential broadband users are waiting around for copy-protected video content before they sign up.

Categories
News

FT.com is breaking even

The web site of the Financial Times, FT.com is breaking even.

Of course, that’s an operating profit, not a net profit. Pearson has invested a staggering £200 million in this site. FT.com has struggled with changes in organization and business model since the beginning. It has evolved from a decentralized free site to an integrated paid site. Despite the subscription barrier on much of the site’s content, the number of people using the site has grown 30% to 3.5 million.

Meanwhile, the FT itself is losing money, which raises some question about whether the site, which gets its content free from its parent, can be said to be profitable.