Author: Barry Parr

Here’s a cardboard tag I found attached to the neck of a bottle of “Mystic Cliffs White Merlot”.
What caught my eye, even before the novel notion of white merlot, was the large “88” on the tag, which looks a lot like a Wine Spectator score.
You look a little closer and you see that “88 percent of consumers prefer…” Aha! They conducted a taste test and determined that the average shopping mall patron prefers it to…what?
Take another look: “88 percent of consumers prefer the color of White Merlot to White Zinfandel”.
Admit it: some days you’re ashamed to say you make your living in marketing.

Don’t confuse the future of news with the future of newspapers
It’s not a foregone conclusion that newspapers will dominate online news, unless you believe that the future of online news will be repurposed from other media. There’s a reason that newspaper experiments with television and radio have failed and their web sites will fail — media don’t converge, they diverge.
Read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” again. The news of the future probably won’t be copyrighted by Belo or Gannett or Knight-Ridder — or Disney or Microsoft or AOL/TW for that matter. The cost structures and margins are so much lower in online publishing that newspapers are constitutionally incapable of adapting. Someone else will do it for them. Just because this didn’t happen in 1999, that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
What percentage of newspapers’ budgets are spent gathering and editing local news? When you subtract production, distribution, advertising sales, world/national news and feature syndication fees, and all the editing and overhead allocated to these functions, what share of a newspaper’s budget is spent on the one thing they do that no one else does better?
Now, give that budget to a much smaller company with no unions, no corporate parent/stockholders demanding a 25% profit margin, zero marginal costs, and a drive to deep link promiscuously.
Smells like the future of news to me.

Recently A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News and Rodale’s Runner’s World have sent cease-and-desist letters to indepedent web sites to make them stop linking to stories on their sites (“deep-linking”) instead of to their home pages. [Thanks to Chilling Effects for posting the letters.]
Rodale and Belo are trying to exploit the Web while conducting their business so as to decrease its value for everyone else. They are strip-mining the commons.
They have three options:
1. Allow (or encourage) deep linking and take advantage of the network effect to increase their business and improve the value of their product to their customers.
2. Use simple technical means to prevent unauthorized deep linking. This is boneheaded and self-destructive, but it is legal, moral, and ethical.
3. Use lawyers to assert their unproven right to prevent deep linking. This is not only less effective than (2), but also has a chilling effect on linking globally, decreasing the value of the Web for people who have never heard of Belo or Rodale and have no interest in their products.
I have no problem with the media making money on the Web. My livelihood depends on it. But the Web doesn’t owe them a business model. If publishers want to move their product on the Web, it’s up to them to make the numbers work, and not up to everyone else to turn the Web into a “virtual newsstand”.
Belo and Rodale are pillaging the Web by trying to make it more like print so they can make a buck. The tragic irony is that they will fail. But the damage they do could be permanent.

It’s a cliche that “New media don’t replace old media”. However, this ignores the massive disruption new media do cause.
Think about what TV (and then FM) did to AM radio. The movies were changed profoundly by television–twice. First, they moved to big screen production in the fifties and then to action in the eighties. Cable pretty much made the broadcast TV networks irrelevant and set them up for acquisition.
This kind of disruption may preserve media, but destroys the companies that control them.
The next media scheduled for disruption are compact disks and newspapers.

I agree with Vint Cerf that The Internet is for Everyone — but it won’t be if it is based on proprietary protocols that are protected by intellectual property laws. We must based the Net on protocols, business processes, file formats, markup tags, and display technologies are that are free for anyone to use.

The mobile telecom industry is cutting its own throat.
They’re trying to cover their capital expenditures and spectrum costs by increasing revenue per customer, rather than gross revenue. This results in counterproductive behavior by the carriers:
* increasing customer acquisition costs, feeding a retail distribution system that is comparable to that of the automobile dealers in its dishonesty, sleaziness, and customer unfriendliness.
* relying on proprietary handsets and services, so they can sell more stuff to their customers.
* creating pricing plans that are incomprehensible to their customers and to their sales force. I recently went phone shopping and found that neither my local AT&T dealer nor his company rep understood the plan he wanted to sell me.
The mobile industry needs a makeover if it’s to be saved.
* Open the network. Allow ISP’s and others to provide competitive services on mobile networks. Allow any device with the correct protocols and an account (or a credit card) to use the network. Support hardware, software, and service developers who want to use your net to sell to your customers. This will increase service to your customers and their switching costs at no cost to you.
* Rationalize pricing. Provide a simple, usage-based pricing model that lowers price per minute as use increases and treats all minutes (local, long distance, roaming, data) equally.
* Move to a direct-sales model. If pricing were rationalized and equipment were opened, customers would come to the carriers and cost per sale would be lower. We’d also be spared the current tedious branding advertising for mobile carriers that promise dubious benefits to consumers.

It’s important to keep things simple. One of the keys to the success of the Web is its simplicity. That’s one reason Apache is still a great server, it’s the reason why some many people have web pages, and it’s the reason the Web spread so quickly.
Clearly, any large-scale Internet project is going to be complex at the back end, but there are plenty of reasons to keep it simple at the front:
* It’s easier to debug your work and to maintain it.
* Your pages will display faster on slow connections.
* More people will be able to use your site the way it was intended on a wider variety of devices and browsers.
* You site won’t become obsolete as quickly.
* You will be less beholden to Microsoft, Sun, Macromedia, and others.
Don’t use Java on the client side. It’s slow to load, leads to nonstandard interfaces, and the current war between Microsoft is problematic. I have no opinion on whether you should use it on your servers.
Don’t use Javascript, except in the simplest of cases: automating dropdown menus, opening new windows (with the user’s permission), and the like. In my experience, the resulting code is comples, slow, buggy and inconsistently rendered. Don’t require it for forms, for example.
Don’t use Dynamic HTML. It’s nonstandard and is guaranteed to lock you in to Microsoft’s word. It’s almost never the right solution to the problem.
Don’t use Flash for anything other than entertaining animations and explanatory graphics when nothing else will do. Don’t open your website with a flash animation. Why on earth burden your home page with something that requires a “skip intro” button? Why not skip the Intro for your users and save yourself some time and money?
Make Cascading Style Sheets optional. I love the way you can make your pages look with CSS. But it’s important to create pages that display attractively on browsers that don’t support CSS or support it poorly. That’s most of the browsers out there.
What’s left? Plain Jane HTML, the technology that started it all. Clean, minimally-nested tables, text, graphics and links. HTML is the NTSC of the Web, a primitive technology that gets the job done and isn’t going away for 50 years. What could be sweeter?

I wrote Notes on Notes a while back for a company that will remain nameless. The gist of the document was that Lotus Notes, while it may be a fine piece of groupware, was being used primarily for email within the organization. And Notes could be the world’s worst email client.
I mailed this rant to the company CIO, and he told me: (1) he couldn’t defend Notes as an email client, (2) lots of users were perfectly happy with Notes, (3) it was still being used for groupware applications, (4) his top priority was “customer-facing” applications, and (5) if he started to move away from Notes, he’d lose all the skilled Notes techies who were keeping the system running.
This seems reasonable, until you consider that Notes servers also support POP clients. That means that their employees could use any POP client if they wanted to, or keep using Notes if they were perfectly happy.
Meanwhile, inside the IT, department, they’re using POP.
What’s really going on here? It goes beyond the practical rationalizations cited by the CIO. It’s about the cost of support. Support is a real cost, of course. But the company is full of power users who are using email to create the company’s product and to sell it. And the IT department doesn’t want to support the best tool for the job. They prefer the cheapest possible tool for the IT department. And the ultimate rationalization is that email isn’t a customer-facing application.

It should be obvious that the future of online publishing is bright. In the future, people will get a larger and larger proportion of their news and information from online sources, and many of these sources will be profitable. Some could be be extremely profitable.
Some of the audience will come from television viewership, but most of it will come from print.
Newspapers are about to lose half their revenue — the most profitable half. Classified advertising is going away and never coming back. This meanst that in the near future newspapers are going to be thinner and more focused. They’re going to have to make some incredibly difficult choices between hard news and features, local coverage and US and world coverage. I expect newspapers to become a lot more locally oriented. They may look a lot more like the (free) Palo Alto Daily than their owners (or newsrooms) are comfortable with today.
Specialty magazines could lose a lot of their audience (especially at the newsstand) over a somewhat longer period of time as more and more readers discover their needs are met by sites like CNET and dpreview. Also, there are external changes going on in the newsstand market, which is consolidating and squeezing out smaller titles and publishers. Fashion and celebrity titles will dominate magazine readership and advertising even more than they do now.
Book publishing is more complex, but reference, how-to, and other ephemeral non-fiction seem to be the most challenged by the Net. It’s going to be a while before bestselling fiction or non-fiction, literary fiction, or novelty and gift titles are threatened by online media. But, why buy a cookbook if you can get recipes off the Net?
The time the people aren’t spending with newspapers and magazines for news, information, or diversion is going right to the Net. The sources there will be more varied, entertaining, up-to-date, and individualized.
Later:
* How will the business be structured?
* Where does the money come from?
* Who are the winners and losers?
* What do these new sites look like?

I just read a great column by Dale Dougherty about the early days of Web advertising that reminded me of my own dubious contrbution. I was one of the “inventors” of the banner ad.
You may have heard that Wired magazine’s web site HotWired invented the banner. While HotWired was still a secet, we were developing a site of our own at the San Jose Mercury News and looking for a way to sell advertising on the site.
I created the ad format for Mercury Center, based on two models: The banner ads on Times Mirror Videotex’s Gateway service (where I had worked) provided the form factor and O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator provided the conceptual model of a linked graphic on the page. Once we had come up with a price, I called my friend Dick Peck at O’Reilly to get an idea if our planned price was in the ballpark. Because we didn’t know how many ads we were going to be able to deliver, and because we were still a lilttle stuck in the print/tv model, we sold ads by the month, but designed the price to work out to a cost of $35 per thousand deliveries. This turned out to be pretty close to the pricing that ultimately prevailed.
We have the opportunity to unveil this model at a New Media get-together sponsored by an ad agency in New York in the summer of 1994. HotWired was there and they were contemptuous of the cost per thousand model of pricing, prefering to sell section sponsorships for a (high) fixed price.
Who invented the banner ad? Like a lot of things it had a lot of parents. It goes back to unlikely keyword banners in teletext, Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder videotex, and later Prodigy (pre-internet) videotex. The linked banner that we all know today owes its origins to these early models combined with O’Reilly’s linked ads which appeared on HotWired and Mercury Center in late 1994. I’m not certain if these appeared on The Gate or Nando which were also lauched that year.
But I do know that it wasn’t HotWired.