MediaSavvy

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

I loved this talk by Howard Rheingold: “The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn’t know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses — they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation.”
This is important to remember at this moment, another inflection point in the history of the Net. The intellectual property hoarders, the computer industry and the government are trying to find common ground in restricting our access to and ability to build on what we have already created.

I just saw an ad for Barbara Walters’ to-be-broadcast interview with Carol Burnett.
In the ad, Barbara asks Carol about the death of her daughter. You can see Carol’s eyes welling up before she answers the question. What a moment.
We, as a nation licking our wounds for the ninth consecutive month, cannot miss this. One National Treasure interviews another–and brings her to tears. Carol is unashamed to weep on national television, and ABC News is unashamed to put it there.
Barbara Walters has brought others to tears–Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul I, J.D. Salinger, Slobodon Milosevic–but each time it happens again it is more transcendent than the last.
Once again, Barbara makes it clear that these beings we call celebrities are all too human.
Until Internet news can do that, it’s not worthy of being called “journalism”.