MediaSavvy

I love Dave Winer’s site and I believe he’s major force for good and progress on the Web, but Jeffrey Zeldman is right, Dave’s sniping at cascading style sheets is baffling and unhelpful:

In his latest anti-CSS mini-rant, published this morning, Mr Winer gripes about being locked in a trunk with people who want to smear ketchup on his tie. We have no idea what that means or why Mr Winer, who is first and foremost a programmer, has such trouble grasping the benefits of a lean, cache-able, standardized visual formatting language for the web.

Dave’s tremendously influential and Userland is one of the largest distributors of Web site templates. He also rails against what he (appropriately) calls “stop energy“. He’s a big generator of stop energy when it comes to CSS

Mobile carriers apparently take “almost 50-60 percent of any mobile content/data sold” on the networks, reports Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org from the “Making M-Commerce a Reality” conference in London. Presumably, he’s talking about European carriers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the starting point in the US as well.

If you want to use their networks and their handsets and their customers, you’ll pay them well for the privilege. Rafat Ali reports one participant saying, “Each partner you talk to, they don’t see the entire value chain…all they want to take their chunk out of the business.” Partners? Actually, it’s an insult to the Mob to call these kinds of charges vigorish — the operation’s of an illegal bet. The vig is seldom more than 5%

Alan Reiter rants about the greed of the carriers on his site:

The dolts who make these decisions think they understand the dynamics of the Internet. The cellular industry for years has studied the Internet and have been desperately trying to copy what has been successful in order to transfer the successes to wireless data. But it boggles the mind how clueless cellular data executives truly are.

It certainly is possible to create a model where the cellular operator receives revenues from preferred applications vendors while, at the same time, allowing subscribers to download any application.

He points to the too-closed for my taste I-mode system, where content and applications companies pay to be listed on the phone, but not to participate in the network.

If you listen hard, you can hear the broadband internet access duopolies muttering about these kinds of “partnerships”.

Gerry McGovern written a useful mediation on the nature of content and content management. His point is that most organizations think of Web content as a static thing and not something dynamic and interactive.

Words and numbers are not the act; they are rather a record of the act. An invoice is a record of the sale. It is not the sale. It comes after the sale. That’s where the Web is different. If commerce is selling with people, then ecommerce is selling with content.

I’ve been struggling with defining the online content market myself and he has given me something to think about.

I certainly believe that most current definitions of content are too inclusive, and that a lot of current interactive content is ill-advised. But when we create content for online distribution, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we’re using the medium to full advantage or imposing a model from the print media.

Everyone talks about Open Source software, but outside the geekiest media there is little discussion of open standards.

Jonathan Schwartz’s column in News.com last week makes the excellent point that open standards are a bigger threat to Microsoft than open source.

Open standards make it possible for anyone to play on a platform, without using any particular software or paying licensing fees. Open standards like HTTP and HTML (and TCP/IP!) built the Web. RSS is one of the engines driving the blogging phenomenon. Open standards produce network effects for software.

Open standards are certainly more important to online publishers than open source, because its the standards that determine whether all those bits can be understood by people. If Microsoft (or Adobe or Macromedia or whoever) owns the file format, your content has no inaccessible unless you play by their rules.

Microsoft is struggling with open standards right now, trying to figure out how to move its Office documents to XML while keeping its own proprietary lock your information. It’s no surprise that Microsoft is bringing XML to Office slowly.

It makes you wonder why publishers are thinking about making PDF the standard for digital edtitions, and the publishing industry is looking to make PDF a standard for archiving.

Paging Nicholson Baker !