Author: Barry Parr

Jason Kottke’s pretty happy with his recently lobotomized cell phone. It lost its display, but it’s actually still useful as a phone and he doesn’t have to buy a new one.

When my Startac died last year, I bought another, used one from somebody on Craigslist for $50. Now, the Startac is a modern marvel of boneheaded UI design, but it works pretty well and I can find the buttons without trying too hard. The last couple of times I visited my local cell phone store I couldn’t find one that didn’t just plain suck. They all seemed to be designed for Japanese schoolgirls or Norwegian Starbucks clerks. And even the expensive ones feel cheap.

Simplicity and quality enhance our experience more than features. They’re why I bought an iPod. Simplicity and quality are also a lot more expensive than they need to be, probably because they’re not what most buyers are looking for. But sometimes you can get them for practically nothing, which is why I love my $10 cast-iron frying pan.

Cross-media advertising hasn’t been a big success in the markets where it has been tried already. There are a few markets where TV stations and newspapers are owned by the same company, but this doesn’t confer much advantage in selling advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Tribune has been a firm believer in owning and integrating media properties in the same market. The call sign WGN is a nod to the days when Tribune’s Chicago paper billed itself as the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Aside from its Chicago and New York interests, Tribune owns newspapers or stations in Los Angeles, Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Hartford, Conn.

After acquiring Times Mirror Co. in 2000, Tribune set up a special division, Tribune Media Net, to sell ad packages for its stations and publications. At Tribune’s annual meeting in Chicago last week, Chief Executive Dennis FitzSimons gave a progress report for the cross-media division. Its grand total of revenue for 2002: more than $60 million. While that was about double the division’s revenue for the year before, it is still a tiny sum compared with Tribune’s overall revenue for 2002 of $5.4 billion.

The punch line? It turns out that if you want to reach an audience with multiple media, it makes a lot more sense just to buy advertising from more than one company. D’oh!

Or maybe the real advantage is that it will allow you to cut the size of your newsroom. The story concludes with an ominous quote from cheapskate Dean Singleton: “It is a big plus. It gives a newspaper company, which has a very high cost of gathering news, another platform to distribute news and information.”

Back in the day, Minitel represented the online future. France built a nationwide online network back in the early eighties, when very few people had PC’s and 300 baud modems cost $300.

I was surprised to find out that Minitel still exists and can be accessed over the Net with an emulator.

The BBC story above points out some important lessons we learned (and are still learning) from Minitel: social applications of networks are far more powerful than “information at your fingertips”, a ubiquitous low-overhead infrastructure for small payments is essential if you want to sell information, communication revolutions may not always translate from one country to another, and it’s hard for mere obsolescence to kill a successful network

IDC says that the market for content management services will grow from $4 billion to $7.5 billion in next five years. To keep that in perspective, it’s about three times the size of the most optimistic estimate of the online content industry and about ten times that of a more realistic estimate.

Now, most of that content being managed by these services will never been seen by real people. It’s mostly corporate dross that’s now stored in Word, Excel, Notes, PDF, Quark, and other document and database files.

The current IT doldrums will keep this idea from gaining too much traction in the next year or so. But the problems of content management make customer relationship management look simple by comparison.

Content management may find itself caught between the database-oriented filesystem of Microsoft’s Longhorn OS at the low end and the infinite recursion of turning knowledge into data at the high end.

In his new, 24-page book, Ed Tufte takes on PowerPoint:

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

I pretty much hate PowerPoint. My previous employer required me to use it, along with some pretty awful templates and it made me miserable.

It’s great for showing graphs of data (although PowerPoint’s default graph styles suck audibly), illustrations (although its clip art appears to be scanned from Pennysaver), and the occasional Big Idea to large audiences. But the typical cascade of bullet points and long sentences in tiny type are mind-numbing.

PowerPoint also comes with a set of templates that are staggeringly amateurish, ugly, and distracting. Apple Keynote’s biggest advantage over Powerpoint is its simple, attractive templates that force presenters to focus on the content and not on dissolves and animations. I’m not sure that Presentations.com understands the core problems that plague Powerpoint when it says,

For presenters who need only basic slideshow-building functionality, Keynote is a nice program and a good alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint X. But advanced users will feel restricted. Apple does not offer much in its stock photo library, there are no interactivity features, such as buttons or links, and there are many nice-to-have features missing from the text, chart and multimedia areas – features that PowerPoint users have come to expect.

In the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, PowerPoint can produce great results. I’ve seen wonderful PowerPoint presentations by Paul Saffo and Larry Lessig. But these guys are brilliant and could get great results with a whiteboard. The rest of us are more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot.

I haven’t been enthusiastic about challenge-response spam blocking because I think that it’s an unreasonable burden to put on strangers and friends of friends who want to do talk to me but don’t plan to sell me something. This is also a major annoyance to strangers who reply to a message I sent them. Others have raised the concern that the challenges Mailblocks generate look a lot like spam themselves.

But my current spam filters have been failing lately because a lot more spam is personally addressed to me. So, I wrote filter that looks up the sender and if they’re not in my address book it flags them as “spam?” and moves them to a folder where I can check them out later.

It seems to work pretty well, and it keeps the burden off spam enforcement off my correspondents, where it never belonged. I’m not saying it’s sufficient. It’s just a better solution to the specific problem addressed by challenge-response.

Here’s my stupid question: If this is a better, cheaper (free), unpatentable, and far-simpler solution than challenge-response spam filters, is challenge-response a business at all?

Brad Templeton asks Why does it make sense to penalize ISP’s for hosting spammers when most of us would recoil from penalizing them for cutting off users for any of the following

a) Run Gnutella or other P2P software
b) Have a NAT box
c) Have an open wireless LAN
d) Host a web site with indecent material
e) Host a web site with unpleasant political views
f) Host a file which is allegedly a copyright infringement
g) Post messages allegedly violating the copyrights of the Church of Scientology

I’m not entirely sure I agree with Brad about this, but he made me think.

It’s important to make distinctions. One is that copyright holders like the RIAA and the Church of Scientology already have the law on their side and don’t need the help of ISP’s. Another is that there’s a difference between arbitrarily limiting customer’s access to the Net to squeeze more profit out of them and another to refuse to profit from spam.

There’s also a distinction between enforcing limits on the content of a message and the manner in which it is delivered. Sending a message to millions of people who didn’t ask for it and didn’t want it is wrong regardless of the content of the message.