Category: Analysis

There have been many times in my life when Usenet answered questions I couldn’t get answered any other way: where can I get a copy of Benny Goodman’s recording of Bolero, what’s that song on Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and how do I set the date on a particular vintage wristwatch?
I just got the wristwatch question answered yesterday by a netizen who took some extra effort to get the answer right, and it saved me a lot of trouble.
I love how smart and helpful people are on Usenet. I love how communities continue to thrive there despite trolls, spammers, and now big company Astroturf marketing.
Usenet may be on its way to being useful again specifically because AOL and the mainstream ISP’s aren’t pointing newbies and trolls in that direction any more, or even offering access to newsfeeds.

How much information is too much? WebSense notes that CBS MarketWatch’s links to meta-information (symbol, news, chart, profile) make the stories hard to read and aren’t really all that useful. A lot of this falls under the heading of something we do because we can and not because anyone uses it. Why not single link to a page with all that information and more? (Thank you, Jeremy Zawodny)

AOL/TW is remaking AOL in the image of HBO.
Their thinking goes something like this: (1) AOL’s long-term success depends on moving from the doomed dial-up business to the hip and happening broadband business. (2) AOL’s broadband business depends on relationships with the cable companies who control broadband access to most American homes. (3) AOL must offer cable companies the kind of deal they’re used to from premium channels (like HBO) if they’re to cooperate. (4) AOL must develop premium AOL-only content if it’s going to be able to add value to basic high-speed access.
Every link in this chain of reasoning is weak.
The dial-up business is going to be around a lot longer than anyone thought because the access monopolies control the pipes into our homes. Besides, if AOL feels it needs to move beyond dial-up, it should be exploring wireless infrastructure with IBM, AT&T, and Intel.
InStyle Online is not premium content. AOL’s premium content is its software and its network of users–not its content. AOL has neglected its software and its users for too long. Especially insulting is its tag line for AOL 8.0 (“It’s more than an new version, it’s a whole new vision” — it’s barely a new version).
HBO’s success is not based on TV versions of Time Inc magazines–CNN gets those. It is based on access to movies that are available from lots of other sources, and original content that is available nowhere else.

Mamading Ceesay on the U.K. Patent Office site says HTTP defeated Ted Nelson’s Xanadu because it was a publicly available protocol, and Xanadu was a deep secret. That’s an interesting thesis, but it seems to me that HTTP defeated Xanadu because it was dirt-simple and (not coincidentally) it was an actual working protocol.
Xanadu, like Charles Foster Kane’s mansion, was never finished.

Kuro5hin is not only running text advertising, but allowing its readers to comment on the ads. Hypergene MediaBlog has an interview with Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin on the most innovative Web advertising I’ve seen since the invention of the banner ad.
While other sites are trying to make the Web advertising more like TV, or radio, or billboards, or telemarketing, Rusty is making it more like the Web.

AOL is forcing its customers to listen to AOL/TW recording artists while they’re on hold. This tactic reminds me of one that Wells Fargo uses: you must listen to an ad for one of their overpriced services as a condition for activating your credit card.
Big-name companies are continuing to erase the line that divides them from spammers.

The NY Times has a good article about how high prices are stifling “broadband” adoption, following AOL’s announcement of its approach to broadband.
Apparently it’s doubtful that any providers can make money at $40 to $55/month in charges to the user:

[AOL] has developed a new approach to these deals that includes the brand of the network provider along with AOL’s. That makes things clearer for consumers and less of a threat to the cable and phone companies.
In the first of those deals, with Comcast, AOL will price the bundled service at $55 a month, $6 less than the combined price of Comcast’s broadband service and AOL’s bring-your-own-access plan.
Still, that is about $10 a month more than other providers are charging. That premium is how AOL actually makes a profit on its broadband service when Earthlink loses money charging $42 to $50 a month.

Clearly the access monopolies (cable and ILEC’s) are raking it it at these rates. Their profits are near 100% because their costs are near zero. AOL and Earthlink can’t sell broadband access because they don’t own any.

Wired News brings us a telling quote from John Sculley, former president of Apple Computer:

It’s no coincidence that during the late 1980s and early 1990s it was a marketing executive from Pepsi, John Sculley, who turned Apple into the biggest single computer company in the world, with $11 billion in annual sales. Sculley marketed Apple like crazy, boosting the advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million.
“People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company,” Sculley told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. “It was the marketing company of the decade.”

Does he really believe that?
Sculley squandered Apple’s lead over Microsoft (and billions of dollars) through a combination of a high-margin strategy when the PC market was becoming commoditized and an utter failure to deliver new technology.
Great marketing is worthless if you don’t deliver the goods.

Connectivity monopolies should have no more control over our computers than the electricity monopolies power them.
Mitch Ratcliffe is toying with the motto “asynchrony is slavery” and says maybe we should forge our own connections to the Internet.
Connectivity is a natural monopoly.
If you want to plug into the Internet from your home you’ve got two choices (if you’re lucky): a copper wire through the central office of your local telephone monopoly, or a coaxial cable through the headend of your local cable monopoly. Each of these is part of a national telephone or cable oligopoly. Satellite (which requires a dial-up connection for outbound traffic) is not an option for a real two-way connection to the Net.
There are good reasons why connectivity is a monopoly. Most of the cost of setting up a utility is fixed and once the pipe is laid, it’s pretty much impossible for a competitor to make the investment a second time.
Cable companies and telco’s will continue to act as only monopolies know how to act. As long as you’re buying access to the Internet from a local mono/duopoly, you’re at the mercy of what passes for strategy at their home office: creating false bandwidth scarcity, so they can charge you more for what you’re using.
This “strategy” leads to arbitrary limits on the number of bytes you can move in a month, what networks and servers you can connect to, what software and hardware you can use, and the amount of bandwidth you can use at any moment. Each of these arbitrary limits comes with additional charges, based on their estimate of its value to you and not on their costs.
Ultimately, we wind up in a world where arbitrary bandwidth limits are enforced by Federal cops, who will break down your door and nationalize your property if you circumvent your local Internet monopoly.
We know how to regulate natural monopolies.
Fortunately, we already know how to regulate natural monopolies. We’ve been doing it for a hundred years.
Connectivity is a commodity. Unless we treat it as a commodity and don’t permit the local monopolist to “add value” to the plug in the wall and the wire in the ground and the router in the central office, we’re at their mercy and at the mercy of the government agencies who control them (and vice versa).
Connectivity monopolies should be required to do business with anyone in their service area and should not be permitted to discriminate on the basis of how you use the wire or the content of your communications. They should be guaranteed a reasonable return on their capital. If their stockholders don’t like this predictable revenue stream, they are free to invest their money in a different industry. It’s a free market, after all.
We must separate connectivity from content.
If we don’t keep the connectivity monopolies out of our business, they will exercise control over us not simply to maximize our profits. Their self-interest, monitoring of our behavior, and cozy relationship with the government whence flows their profits makes them the ideal instruments of censors, intellectual property cartels, Scientologists, software monopolists, and anyone else who thinks they have a better idea than you do about what you should be doing in the privacy of your home…and in the publicity of the Internet.
The monopolies who control our access to the Internet must be made transparent to us, and our communication with the Net must be transparent to them.

I’ve been saying that readers should be able to guess URL’s of pages they’re looking for. It never occured to me that URL itself should be able to guess what you’re looking for.
Mark Pilgrim pointed me to “php.net’s incredible URL-based search engine“. If the URL you request from php.net is not on the site, the 404 error page is smart enough to make a good guess about what you’re looking for. It looks at what follows the domain name (e.g. http://php.net/searchterm) to see if there is an appropriate page on the site, then for an appropriate page in the online PHP manual, and finally it uses your URL as a keyword for a search.
This approach should have a lot of great applications for publishers. It allows you to remap requests for sections (sports, business, technology), topics (raiders, ual, cisco), or administrative pages (help, contact, careers) to the appropriate pages on your site or to give your readers a page of search results that meets their needs right away.
This technique is ideal for news sites and other with lots of information in lots of different sections.
The challenge would be educating readers to take advantage of this technique, until they learn to expect it — as they should.
But the benefit should be a stronger bond between readers and any site that uses this technique.