Category: Analysis

NetNewsWire has changed my thinking about RSS aggregation. Until now, I’ve been using HTML-based aggregators: Radio Userland, Amphetadesk, and Newsisfree. Although, I liked each of them, they seemed difficult, slow and clumsy; no better than visiting the original sites themselves.
NetNewsWire is stand-alone application, and it makes it far faster and easier to review news sites, looking for interesting stories. It’s so fast, it’s guaranteed to increase the amount of news I’m going to be able to review.
RSS still overwhelms me with the amount of available information, and I still prefer to visit some sites (Slashdot, News.com) to see stories in context. But it’s beginning to feel useful to me in a way that it didn’t before.
NetNewsWire also shows that HTML is not always the best way to deliver information, especially if speed and interaction are important.

Pat Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University, is looking for $20 million in foundation money to publish scientific papers on the web for free., instead of in print journals.
For those who aren’t familiar with the issue, most academic journals are owned by big media conglomerates, take articles and editorial labor for free, and charge tons of money for the result. This structure makes converts public information into a private resource, retards access to scientific information, and impoverishes university libraries. It’s a classic case of plundering the commons by creating artifical scarcity.
Creating the database and the peer review process is the easy part of this project. The hard part is changing human behavior when the stakes are so high.
It’s really difficult to disintermediate existing relationships. The prestige of being in certain journals has a direct impact on the careers of the authors. There is no advantage to an author to being in some big database.
Nothing will change without collective action on the part of academics.
It would help if the heavy-hitters in specific fields would agree to publish only in journals that allowed them to contribute their information to a public database, or if academics bargained collectively for a contracts that permitted online republication, or if academic departments based career evaluations on citations and not publications.
Probably, all this (and more) must happen. Until it does, the shame lies with academics and not with journal publishers who exploit them. [via Slashdot]

Using Moveable Type has given me a lot more insight into what I’m looking for in a content management system
I used to think that it ought to run on the Mac and be built into FileMaker, or even AppleWorks. While I still think Apple should bundle a good, simple CMS with Mac OS X; it seems a lot smarter to make it server-based and give it a web interface so that it can be installed on Macs, Unix hosts, or even Windows.
The idea CMS will be easy to install and users shouldn’t have to worry about a the Unix command line.
The ideal CMS should make it as easy to manage tables as it is in FileMaker. I don’t care what database it uses underneath, as long as it’s free, relational, and common.
The ideal CMS’s templates should be easy to create, and sets of default templates should be included for multiple applications (Weblog, database, magazine, and so on). The templates should be designed from the bottom up to use Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.
The ideal CMS should make entries as easy to create and maintain as they are in Moveable Type.
And it ought to be cheap. OK, free.

Business Week agrees with NewsCorp executive Peter Chernin that the Internet is a “moral-free (sic) zone”. In a too-long story, they let us in on a secret: the Internet makes “Drugs. Gambling. Terrorism. Child Pornography. ” more accessible than ever!
What’s weird is that they start with a gut-wrenching anecdote that has nothing to do with these issues, and for which they propose no solution:

It’s the kind of call everyone dreads. For Kristen Bonnett, the daughter of NASCAR race driver Neil Bonnett, it came on Feb. 11, 1994–the day her father crashed during a practice run at the Daytona International Speedway. A few hours later, he died. Bonnett was devastated, but she got on with her life. Then, seven years later, came a second call. This time, it was a reporter asking for comment on autopsy photos of her father that were posted on the Internet. Shocked, she quickly got online. “Forty-eight thumbnail pictures, basically of my Dad on the table, butt-naked, gutted like a deer, were staring me directly in the face,” says Bonnett. Now, when she thinks of her father, she pictures him lying atop an autopsy table.
Warning: You are about to enter the dark side of the Internet. It’s a place where crime is rampant and every twisted urge can be satisfied. Thousands of virtual streets are lined with casinos, porn shops, and drug dealers. Scam artists and terrorists skulk behind seemingly lawful Web sites. And cops wander through once in a while, mostly looking lost.

I’m not saying that terrorism and child pornography aren’t bad. But this story is the latest manifestation of the long tradition of Internet alarmism among print and TV journalists. The long-term effect is to create an atmosphere of anxiety in which citizens are willing to trade their rights in exchange for security from…what?

We seem to be entering into a golden age of pricing complexity:
Desperate airlines are adding or renewing fees for oversize bags and itinerary charges to their already desperately byzantine pricing schedule.
Cell phone companies are adding hidden fees to pricing schedules that already stink of deception. Sprint has one for talking to customer service.
Car rental firms continue to have the sleaziest pricing practices of any industry.
New mobile (GPRS) services are charging for something that even the geekiest users will have a hard time keeping track of: megabytes of web and email usage.
This may foreshadow what we’ll see when software becomes a service.
No one seems to have learned from two of the biggest business successes of the last twenty years: Southwest Airlines and America Online. They did a lot of things right, and one of them was reasonable, predictable pricing in industries where the incumbents were making things as confusing as possible for their customers.
And a year from now, the telecoms will be wondering why GPRS services failed in the market.

You can’t profitably sell news or information online unless you can profitably sell it on paper, excluding advertising revenue.
Here’s how I think this works: once you charge for content online, your usage will be reduced to the point that selling online advertising become an impractical annoyance to your paying readers. So, you should be able to make money selling it on paper as well, if only as a newsletter.
The only exceptions I can think of might be sites that clearly add value from being online, such as speed, interactivity, or use of multimedia. I’m not aware of any sites that do this now.
I believe this rule also applies to the online editions of print publications. Only print pubs that could make money without advertising (probably in a much smaller format) can sell their news/info online. So, the WSJ can sell content online, but the San Francisco Chronicle cannot. Consumer Reports can sell content online, but Time cannot. Salon can’t profitably sell content online, because Atlantic and Harper’s can’t do it in print.

I’ve spent more time messing around with Moveable Type. It’s not only a lot less confusing than Radio, it’s also much better-documented. I already feel at home with it and I’m messing around with the templates. The templates in Radio still baffle me from time to time.
Also, I’ve rebuilt the entire site dozens of times today. I can rebuild the site in seconds, because the MT software is on the server and I don’t have to upload dozens of pages each time I rebuild.
Here’s something cool: I’ve added a list of my most recent postings on MediaSavvy to the Parr.org navigation bar. All I had to do was create another template (something I couldn’t do with Radio), had MT save it to the Parr.org home directory (ditto), and insert it into the nav bar with a server-side include. This is fun.

For the second edition of my “beta blog”, I’ve switched to Moveable Type. I also plan to intensify my posting schedule and focus more tightly on Internet media.
I’ve been using Radio Userland for six months. It’s OK, but I was ready for something else. Radio is fragile, and broke several time. While I was able to get it back with the quick intervention of Lawrence Lee of Userland, I have no idea why it broke in the first place. It was awkward and scary to move my site data from the Applications folder to the Documents folder, where it belongs. I was continually confused by duality of managing my site in both an application and in a web page. I didn’t need Radio’s server farm and didn’t want to depend on software that had an annual fee. Radio uses its own web server on my Mac, which seems a little pointless on a computer that ships with Apache under the hood. This week, I was unable to publish for a day or so. Eventually, it worked, but I have no idea why. That’s when I decided to try MT.
So far, I love Moveable Type. It’s a lot easier to install than it appears from reading the documents. But you do need access to and comfort with the Unix command line. I can now maintain multiple blogs with multiple authors. I can now update my blog from any computer on the net.
I’m a lot happier. But MT isn’t my ideal content management system. More on that later.

What is the sound of one shoe dropping?
Yesterday’s announcement the Worldcom misreported $3.8 billion ($3,800,000,000!) in expenses as capital items is both astounding and expected.
Let’s face it, the sheer scale is astounding, stupefying. How do you “misreport” that much money?
It’s expected because of what’s going on the market and what led us to this pass.
In the Big Boom, if you weren’t showing a history-defying growth rate, you couldn’t justify your preposterous PE ratio. In the increasingly messed-up telecom market, this would make you an instant takeover candidate.
Consolidation of telecom is inevitable and whoever keeps their stock price up the longest will be one of the three winners. It would be misfeasance to accurately state your financials. That was AT&T’s mistake.
Enron and Worldcom followed the same logic that keeps a compulsive gambler embezzling, hoping for a big win so he can pay off his debts and return the money he stole.
This is the inevitable result of the incremental gutting of our post-1929 restraints on the markets: permitting accountants to sell other services to their clients, allowing investment banks to own retail brokerages, and helping the Baby Bells to use their monopolies to take over their competitors.
The good news is that a couple more Worldcoms might have an impact on the next congressional election and save the country from corporate takeover.
In the meantime, you’d be crazy to have your money in the stock market, whose very premise requires you have as much information as anyone else. Who believes that any more?

NYTimes.com, CBS MarketWatch.com, Weather.com, USAToday.com, and CNET have launched something called the “At Work Brand Network,” to jointly sell advertising across their collective sites.
This sounds to me like a smaller, less useful competitor to DoubleClick. The rationale is to cut out the middleman and get more attention from the sales force. I can see why this would be attractive to the sites participating, but my question is:
Does this solve any problems for the advertiser?
If not, it’s futile