Over the Edge

There's a piece in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, wherein J.D. Lasica interviews John Battelle (former publisher of The Industry Standard), David Talbot (founding editor of Salon) and Josh Quittner (former editor of The Netly News and current editor of Business 2.0). The subject at hand: how anything interesting in the media is happening a) on the West Coast and b) online.

The thing reeks of the attitude, "Well, we went bust but we were right, gosh darn it." Yeah right.

Lasica makes the perfect point: although the weight of the Internet Media World was in San Francisco, the subject of most of the media was technology itself. This may come as a shock, but most people don't care about technology. It's true that many people with computers care about technology, and that the proportion of people on the Net to people with computers is remarkably high. But in many ways, what the West Coast Internet Revolution produced was a Golden Age of Trade Journalism.

What's worse, they never demonstrated that anyone was willing to pay for it. Some commercial revolution.

 What did Battelle take away from the flame-out of The Standard? Stay small, stay focussed, stay personal. Pretty good advice, actually. Just not exactly new advice, if you get my drift.

Lyndon B. Johnson. "If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." [Quotes of the Day]
--------

There's some good news and not-so-good news today from Ziff Davis.

Ziff is the publisher of -- among other things -- PC Magazine, Yahoo Internet Life, and a bunch of gaming titles. I used to work there twice. I don't anymore. A lot of friends still do. It was a financial pawn for a few years during the boom, and it again (or maybe still) in deep financial trouble. In plain English, it's borrowed so much money -- $250 million at 12 percent -- and business is so bad that it doesn't have the cash to both make its payments and run the business. (Just to put the 12 percent in perspective, you probably are carrying credit cards that have a lower interest rate, though your credit line is probably less than $250 million. If it isn't, please call me ASAP to discuss some business dealings.)

The company made a fairly big deal yesterday out of saying that the holders of 60 percent of that $250 million in notes  have agreed to a deal. Willis Stein, the investment bank that Ziff's majority owner, is kicking in another $80 million in cash to Ziff. Of that, $30 million will go to bondholders. The bondholders are also being offered $95 million in what amounts to stock in the company. The theory, I guess, is that $95 million in equity is better than $250 million in debt that wouldn't be paid if the company goes belly-up.

All this moving around of deck chairs will free up $30 million a year in money that otherwise would have been interest payments.

There are a few rubs. First, the deal requires that 95 percent of the bondholders agree. Sixty percent is nice, but not nearly enough. And second, the company's banks have to agree to this scheme, and Ziff is already in default to them.

The stakes are high. In Ziff's SEC filing yesterday, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said that the company may not be able to continue as a going concern unless the finances are straightened out. And even after that $250 million goes away, Ziff still owes another $175 million-plus.

The National Research Council has released a study about protecting children from online pornography. As a congressionally chartered organization, one might expect the usual flaming about the evils of the Internet. Happily, one apparently would be wrong.

The full report -- 420 pages, so you probably won't want to read it all online -- is here. (You can buy it in print, too.) A New York Times story about it is here.

The nut grafs:

``Though some might wish otherwise, no single approach -- technical, legal, economic, or educational -- will be sufficient,'' wrote the authors of the report, ``Youth, Pornography and the Internet,'' which was released Thursday by the National Research Council. ``Rather, an effective framework for protecting our children from inappropriate materials and experiences on the Internet will require a balanced composite of all of these elements, and real progress will require forward movement on all of these fronts.''

What might seem to a rather bland conclusion to a massive effort of research and discussions with policymakers, educators, librarians, parents and children and others in visits to schools and libraries around the nation is actually a surprising stand, said Alan Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech policy organization in Washington.

``The report dares to be un-sexy,'' he said. ``It does not call for legislation to solve this problem,'' despite a strong push in Congress to pass laws requring such technology tools as pornography filters in schools and libraries. One such law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, is currently being challenged in federal court by a coalition of librarians and civil liberties groups; a decision in that case is expected this month.

Recommending a broad approach ``is not nearly as satisfying as passing a law or pointing to a technology,'' Mr. Davidson said, ``but it is probably, in the long run, the most effective way to protect children online.''

In other words, filters won't do the trick. Congress should take note.

The French company Vivendi Universal is one of the Big Six global entertainment companies. It's been having some trouble of late; among other things, the firing of the CEO of Canal Plus sparked demonstrations and protests, and shareholders have had their doubts about the French company buying the U.S.-based Universal Studios and its associated record labels.

Well, Vivendi held its annual meeting last week, and not everything went as planned. Two management proposals, including a lucrative stock option plan for management, were unexpectedly defeated.

Wait -- we're just getting to the techie part.

Management says that surely was a mistake of science fiction proportions, and has a science fiction reason: the company is blaming hackers for breaking into its wireless voting system and making mischief. Other experts are not so sure.

In any event, a French court today bought the excuse, and is allowing the company to re-run the annual meeting. All except the dividend vote; the dividend will be paid as agreed at the meeting, hackers or no hackers.

The TV industry has been lobbying against consumer freedom since the first VCR made its way into the first home. To its credit, the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that people were perfectly within their rights to tape programs off the air and watch them whenever they wanted to. (The music industry hasn't quite heard the news yet, but that's a rant for another day.)

In the last few years, the tape in some VCRs has been replaced with a hard drive, giving rise to the TiVO and Replay products. The improvements are essentially three-fold. The new DVRs (digital video recorders) let you pause live TV, provide an enhanced program guide, and can automatically recommend and record programs based on your viewing habits. Like a VCR, you can zip forward and back through a program, skipping whatever part you might want to skip. Like opening credits. Like commercials.

As does anyone who makes his living in the media, I am perfectly aware that my salary is paid by commercials. I even like commercials, because they are (sometimes) entertaining and (sometimes) provide interesting information that I would not ordinarily know. In a magazine, I can turn the page when I want. In the TV business, that prospect makes networks and broadcasters nuts.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, a federal magistrage in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue, which makes Replay, to write software that will track the every click of every user's remote control. Why? Because Replay is getting sued. There's a button on the Replay remote that lets its customers instantly jump over commercials (it's a little harder to do this with TiVO), and the networks and broadcasters say that's costing them money. They've persuaded the good judge that the way people use Replay products is germane, and the only way to track that is to invade the privacy of Replay's customers.

(I would say that Replay's hands are not entirely clean here. The Replay 4000 includes an Ethernet port that lets users transmit programming to other people over the Net. This strikes me as just begging for trouble.)

There's a federal law that says video store rental records must be kept confidential. The law was passed after the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who had some interesting viewing habits. Anyone know if Mr. Justice Thomas is a Replay customer?

OK, so Newsweek has a story in its current (May 13) edition about how Afghan military intelligence thinks Osama bin Laden is alive and living in Pakistan. This is in the next to last graf:

... bin Laden is likely to prove harder to catch. "He's kind of like Elvis," says Col. Wayland Parker, the U.S. military's liaison between coalition forces and the British-led international security force in Kabul. "He's here, he's dead, he's there, he's alive. The last time we felt sure about where, he was in Tora Bora. After that, he drops off the radar screen."

First of all, as far as I understand it, Elvis is not elusive. Elvis is dead.

Second of all, I've gotta think that someone who can be called "Col. Parker" shouldn't be making Elvis metaphors....

A propos my filing of 5/3, below, AdAge has a story today about Personal Video Recorders like TiVO and Replay, in which it reports that

1. there aren't nearly as many of these boxes around as analysts thought there'd be, and
   
2. owners aren't skipping ads as much as the networks feared.

Three years ago, Forrester Research projected 50 million PVRs in homes by 2005. The Yankee Group says 350,000 were sold last year, with 1 million in homes today and 20 million -- mostly in set-top boxes -- by 2005. (As an alumnus of The Yankee Group, I always take their numbers with a large grain of salt; I know how they used to be developed. In the intervening 15-plus years, I hope their methodology is improved. One inside baseball note: George Colony left Yankee in 1983 to found Forrester Research.)

The nut grafs from AdAge:

The latest annual PVR Monitor, produced by independent research firm NextResearch, provides evidence that viewers are not automatically using PVRs to zap ads and suggests a kind of creative Darwinism is emerging, where marketers who produce ads that resonate may be able to bypass PVR hurdles. For example, the study, which surveyed 358 people who used the services, shows 92% of respondents said they watch ads that are entertaining and 69% watch for products they are interested in.

The study also showed that viewers' likelihood of watching commercials when viewing programs with PVRs vs. live TV is nearly the same. Only 1% said they always watch the ads when using a PVR or watching live TV, while 60% said they occasionally watch them with PVRs and 62% with live TV.

In other words, people will pay attention to content that interests them, and skip over stuff that doesn't. No wonder the networks are upset. And notice that the same proportion of people skip ads whether they're watching live TV or on a PVR.

Someone tell the judge, OK?

Trust me on this. I have lots of equipment that isn't turning me into George Martin. Or Alan Parsons.

Jerry Garcia's guitars up for auction. After a long strange trip, two guitars once owned by the late Grateful Dead lead singer are put up for auction.

"I'm always grateful for whatever help I can get from the press, or a bunch of business-school students, whatever," Mr. Parsons said dismissively.

Those words yesterday from Dick Parsons, who is about to become CEO of AOL Time Warner. Thanks for asking, Dick. Here's some more of what you said:

"We're the No. 1 movie company, the No. 1 online company, the No. 1 premium cable network company, the No. 1 cable network company, No. 2 cable company, No. 2 music company. What am I missing? All of these businesses are roaring, with one exception, no question. What we've got to do is answer some serious questions around AOL. What is the future of narrowband? Is this a medium that has a long-term advertising future and if so, at what rate can we expect growth and how will it migrate to broadband?"

Here's the thing. People go broadband to consume information. From all reports, Napster drove broadband traffic. Record companies squealed like stuck pigs, but note a new report from Jupiter Research. Again, from the New York Times:

Disputing the position held by the major record companies, a report issued on Friday found that people who use file-sharing networks to obtain music at no charge over the Internet are more likely [italics mine] to have increased their spending on music than are average online music fans. The report ... also found that people who use high-speed Internet access and CD burners to make homemade compact discs ÷ a practice that has been criticized by the record industry as abetting piracy ÷ are as likely to increase their spending on music as to decrease it.

Wait -- it gets even better. Another Jupiter report finds considerable pent up demand for broadband service:

[W]hile only 16 percent of U.S. online households subscribe to broadband, more than 24 percent of dial-up consumers are considering signing up for a broadband service within the next 12 months.

Why?

[F]or the first time in years, the top motivator of dial-up users planning to switch to broadband is a persistent "always on" connection (59 percent). Less important are entertainment-related features such as the ability to view quality video (26 percent) and listen to audio (15 percent).

It's true: an always-on connection is lovely, though I have a not very sneaking suspicion that an always-on 56kbps connection would soon get old.  And those 26 percent and 15 percent figures feel anecdotally low. I could probably find you a ton of research that says that no one plays games or surfs porno -- and I could probably find server logs that demonstrate the exact opposite. As a friend of mine says, no one has ever traded for a slower connection.

So what does all this mean for Parsons' dilemma? I think it means that AOLTW should embrace broadband like a California tree-hugger embraces a redwood. Push the bandwidth, and push the content that drives demand. CNN? The Atlantic Records archive? Raw satellite feeds? The Wizard of Oz? Put it online. All of it. You want to put up a tollgate? I could get behind that; servers and server-side bandwidth are expensive.

But the cheaper you provide the broadband content, the more people will want broadband access, and the more people have access, the more they'll want content. I have no idea where the demand cycle tops off, but you know what? Neither does anyone else. And of all companies, only AOLTW has the power on both ends of the pump to find out.

Piracy? Well, what about it? You think people aren't already burning your records, your DVDs? Remember that study -- downloads drive demand, they don't satisfy it.

Get out of the narrowband business. All those modems that old management bought five years ago? Trash 'em. Get on cable systems, get on DSL lines. Jump on bandwidth, and show people how much they need it.

"Grateful," you said? Happy to help.

From The New York Times: U.S., in a Shift, Tells Justices Citizens Have a Right to Guns. The Justice Department told the Supreme Court for the first time late Monday that the Constitution "broadly protects the rights of individuals" to own firearms.

The law is a living thing. It isn't just what Legislatures enact (thank God). It's the sum total of legislative action, judicial ruling, and executive action. That's why it's so hard to get a straight answer out of a lawyer. It's also why it's so important to have Attorneys General who don't have ideological agendas -- or who are willing to put them aside.

The question came up in force during confirmation hearings for John Ashcroft, a conservative Republican from Missouri who is quite frank about his Pentacostal faith. From Ashcroft's confirmation testimony before the Judiciary Committee:

But, as I have explained this afternoon, I well understand that the role of the Attorney General is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it.

The late Charles Black (paid link), professor of Constitutional Law at The Yale Law School, taught many of the nation's political leaders. My wife, who fondly remembers taking Black's class, says that he would sometimes drawl -- mostly in jest -- "I don't see what all the fuss is about. Just read the Constituton and do what it says."

There's an excellent profile of Ashcroft in the April 15, 2002 issue of The New Yorker (not available online). The article talks at some length about Ashcroft's ties to the National Rifle Association. Yet since The Depression, the Supreme Court and the Justice Department has read the Second Amendment as requiring a militia. This has been settled law through the administrations of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

Now comes Ashcroft, enforcing the law "as it is," telling the Court that:

"The current position of the United States, however, is that the Second Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to possess and bear their own firearms, subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse."

What's next? This, too, is from Ashcroft's confirmation:

As is well known, consistent with Republican United States Attorneys General before me, I believe Roe v. Wade, as an original matter, was wrongly decided. I am personally opposed to abortion. But, as I have explained this afternoon, I well understand that the role of the Attorney General is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it.... If confirmed as Attorney General, I will follow the law in this area as in all other areas. The Supreme Court's decisions on this have been multiple, recent, and emphatic.

As opposed to the 1939 Miller decision, I suppose, which was neither multiple nor recent.

I can't help but wonder what Ashcroft has next on his list.

This is a Twilight Zone kind of coincidence -- or perhaps the subtle work of crafty writer. It turns out that the address Marvel Comics picked as the home of Spiderman is actually occupied by the Parker family. No one named Peter lives there, though, so knock off the junk mail.

The guy who invented Smell-o-Vision just died. Michael Todd Jr. was the son of the noted movie producer.

His legacy continues in dumb, futile attempts to bring aroma to the Web.

This explains so much....

Thanks to Amee Abel for alerting me to this, and Theresa Carey for finding the original.

From CNN:

An environmental group has sued to get warning labels slapped on chocolate products that caution sweet tooths about potentially hazardous levels of lead and cadmium.

As my wife says, "Well, we're screwed."

Jamie Kellner, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, apparently needs a better PR keeper. He gave an interview to Cableworld magazine in which he made some toweringly stupid comments. The original piece is behind Inside.com's tollbooth, but this link to the Yale Law School's excellent Lawmeme weblog copies much of the salient idiocy -- then lampoons it.

My two favorite quotes -- and these aren't the jokes:

[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.

... and ...

I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.

Gee, thanks, Jamie.

I remember that after Ronald Reagan was elected president how surprised people were when they discovered that he actually was going to do all the things he said he was going to do. I'm just afraid that not enough people will take Kellner and the movies's Jack Valenti seriously

A nice piece about PC voice recognition at Mitch Wagner's drive-thru.org: YOU'LL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SWEAR AT YOUR PC WHEN IT CRASHES. 

My friend Nat Polish was involved a few years ago in the launch of a company called Soliloquy. The basic idea was to create a voice interface to a database; you should be able to walk up to a computer or a kiosk and say, "I'm interested in a song by the Beatles," and have the database respond and carry on a (highly structured) conversation. They got it working well enough to sell some real-life demos before the company collapsed.

As the company was launching, I overheard Nat giving an interview to CNBC, I think it was. I couldn't catch the whole thing, but at one point Nat looked squarely into the camera and said from his considerably lofty technoperspective:

"You understand, of course, that the keyboard is a transitional device...."

The AP reports on University of Minnesota professor Jim Kakalios, who uses comic books to illustrate points of physics.

Very nice, innovative technique. The problems seem a little simple for college physics, but what do I know...

I wonder how the good professor would explain Wonder Woman?

Hey Kids: Did you know that some mail order companies inflate those packing material air cushions with helium? Turns out that the helium has so much buoyancy that the savings in shipping costs outweighs the price of the helium itself.

You read it here first.

From The New York Times:

Old Personal Computers Never Die; They Just Fade Into Deep Storage. It is estimated that three-quarters of all retired consumer PC's sit gathering dust in closets, garages and attics across the nation. By Andres Martinez.

Let's see. I've got a Mac SE and a Toshiba 1100 Plus sitting in the closet. I've given away an old Thinkpad and a Dell in the last couple of months and I sold a Gateway Handbook a few months ago. So those are three previously idle PCs that are (I believe) in current use, and I've got four more CPUs currently active around the house. That's not counting the many PDAs of various vintages hanging around. (Yo! Steven! Do you still have that Sony Magic Link? And where'd my Newton go?)

Then again, I never did get involved with Commodores or Timex Sinclairs. I had serious lust for an Osborne 1 and a Kaypro, but they were beyond a UPI reporter's salary. If I had come up with the scratch, though, I bet I'd still have them.

So -- how many computers do you have around *your* place, just sitting idle?

When I was in high school, I saw Tom Stoppard's play "Jumpers" on Broadway. Twice. It was amazing, opening up all kinds of vistas of language and showmanship and Oxbridgian hoopdeedoo. That's why I liked this story:

So God's Really in the Details?. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, invoked probability theory to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

I particularly loved this graf:

In plain English, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne's calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

I kind of thought that the whole point was to have faith in the face of what was surely impossible. But what the hey -- if you can prove it anyway, how bad could it be?

Global Village Idiocy. Tom Friedman continues his work for yet another well-deserved Pulitzer. The nut grafs:

... [T]hanks to the Internet and satellite TV, the world is being wired together technologically, but not socially, politically or culturally. We are now seeing and hearing one another faster and better, but with no corresponding improvement in our ability to learn from, or understand, one another. So integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else....

At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we've ever had.

This is nothing that net-wise pundits and journo haven't been saying for years. But Friedman adds an important data point, and adds it in his typically elegant and clear manner.

Matt Richtel in the NY Times reports on a Russian online market for stolen credit card numbers.

Among his data points is a finding from a market research firm that fraud rates are three times higher for online MasterCard and Visa transactions than in the real world. We're still talking about a quarter of one percent, but that means one out of every 400 online transactions is fradulent, and that feels like  rather a lot.

Susan Kitchens outpoints an L.A. Times story about an artist who altered a freeway roadsign so that people won't actually get lost following it. The job was so good that Caltrans didn't notice for nine months -- until the story hit the paper. And they may well leave things as they are.

Any chance we can get this guy to come to New York City? The road signs here are atrocious. Some of it is that the roads here are old and not up to contemporary spec. Some of it is that signs were designed to be driven at 40 mph.

Anyway, I have two fairly trivial examples. On an overpass where the New England Thruway crosses the Hutchinson River Parkway, a sign read New England Thurway and stayed that way for some years. Two signs across the street from each other near here call it alternately "Schermerhorn St." and "Schemerhorn St." (missing the first "r"). What's even worse is that they're both right outside the NYC Board of Education's personnel building. 

A 5-year-old is awarded a patent (6,368,227, if you're counting) on a technique for swinging on a swing. More evidence of a system out of control.

"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." -- Caron de Beaumarchais.

You probably know about Car Talk, the public radio talk show about cars and car repair. The hosts, Click and Clack (a/k/a Tom and Ray Magliozzi) once had a spirited conversation about whether two people who don't know anything about a subject know more or less the one person who doesn't know anything about that subject.

The answer, of course, is that two people know less. Two people arguing about something that neither knows anything about are capable of building an entire towering construct of ignorance and supposition, each particle of non- or mis-information building on the one previous.

An acquaintance on one of my mailing lists sends this link along.

I'm not sure, but didn't Bogart try this move in The African Queen?

Here in the Northeast, we can use something called E-ZPass to pay bridge and road tolls on most major highways. You set up and account with the E-ZPass folks, they send you a box that you attach to your car's windshield (or behind the grille), and roll slowly through toll barriers. It's really quite wonderful. The proper tolls are deducted automatically from your account. Or, at least, that's the theory.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that, convenience aside, there could be some privacy concerns. All your toll transactions are tracked, and you're sent a statement every month or so. I can see from my latest statement that I crossed the Bronx Whitestone Bridge once in each direction on February 23rd, northbound in lane 22 at 5:40pm, southbound in lane 17 at 11:20pm. Also listed is the number of the tag that was scanned. Someone with access to the database could presumably see the same thing.

So the latest statement came, and I found a transaction at Exit 10 of the Massachusetts Turnpike dated 7:45am on April 3. Ummm, no. I'd swapped my tag a few days before that (at E-ZPass's request), and mailed in the old tag, which is the one that hit in Massachusetts.

I called the service center, explained the situation, and the customer service rep said that within a few days, they would send me an inquiry form. This form would include a photo of the license plate of the car bearing the E-ZPass linked to my account, snapped as the car pulled away from the toll barrier. If it's not my car, they'll reverse the charge?

Say what?

It seems that E-ZPass photographs the license plates of all vehicles that pass through one of their toll barriers. Since I can't find any reference to that practice in their Terms and Conditions, I don't know how long they keep them. I also don't know what other use they're put to, and that worries me a bit. And the part about their not 'fessing up to the practice in any easy-to-find place actually worries me quite a lot.

Sears to Buy Lands' End for $1.9 Billion. Sears, Roebuck & Company, the nation's largest department store company, agreed to buy Lands' End the biggest specialty catalog and Internet retailer, for $1.9 billion in cash.

OK, let me get this straight. Sears has a catalog for 100 years. It pretty much invents direct marketing and mail order. It kills the catalog in 1993. Then, 10 years later, it spends $1.9 billion to buy a casual clothing company that pretty recently had revenues that didn't even amount to rounding error for Sears.

And if you're going to give me the hard goods/soft good argument about Sears stores and the catalog, you probably need to remember that Lands' End started by selling sailing equipment and attire.

I can't help but wonder how much it would have cost Sears to stick with the catalog for the intervening years. And I'd love to hear how Sears's management has been/will be punished for the expensive reversal of course.

I just hope Sears doesn't screw up Lands' End...

From Reuters:

A Canadian family had to flee for safety after their pet Siamese cat went on a rampage, tearing at clothes and skin and driving them out of the house... Another police officer said Cocoa was "a Siamese cat with an attitude problem."

From the New York Times:

Dazed by a Technical Knockout. The BMW 745i is a remarkable car with so many genuine technical advancements that it is surely the world's most advanced sedan.

I'm quite certain that I've never seen Niklaus Wirth quoted in a car review before. Hell, I don't think I've ever seen him quoted in a computer review.

The underlying point of the review is also sound. Why in God's name would you design a car so complex that you need a cheat sheet to give a parking valet? When you're hurtling down the freeway at 65 mph or better, you really don't want to have to think about how to tune the radio, do you?

Dave Winer, whose weblog software I use and who knows a thing or two about online community, is less impressed with Tom Friedman's column of this past weekend than I am. He says:

Now with all due respect, they shouldn't believe everything they read in the NY Times either.

Well, that's certainly true enough. The thing is, Dave, what the Net helps do is put random content on the same footing as The Times. This is what terrifies Big Media, which has invested bazillions of dollars into establishing a trust equation with readers. Here's what I wrote about that, nearly six years ago to the day (what -- you thought this was a new issue?), in NetGuide:

The camcorder approach to information has its place, and is where a lot of the excitement about the net comes from. Always be asking yourself about what you're reading and why it was put out there. And remember that good information always has a price.

What Friedman, Winer, and I are talking about is a subtle and complex issue. This is my full column, from the August 1996 issue of NetGuide, and I've seen no reason in the intervening years to change my mind.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, challenging all parts of the TV industry step off the curb and do their part to adopt digital television. He suggested, quite rightly, that all piece of the industry -- programming, transmission, and receivers -- have been unwilling to commit unless someone else goes first. Powell's suggestion: "for all the industries to link arms and take one step forward -- together."

How sweet. But what he left considerably less than explicit is what he plans to do to should the industry not be cajoled. After all, the broadcasters got public spectrum to broadcast DTV for free, and set manufacturers and transmission equipment builders stand to profit hugely from digital retrofits. Given all the merger-and-acquisition activity in the media industry over the last five years, maybe this is one more place where Wall Street is paying more attention to The Deal than The Product.

My colleague Mitch Wagner (who provided me the tools to program the e-mail dialog over on the right) has a good take on the collapse of RealNames -- a not-so-great idea that finally cratered.

Of particular interest is the CEO's weblog painting Microsoft as the villain. It's a role that Microsoft is particularly well suited for, and the weblog has been a huge instant hit over the last couple of days. But read Mitch's piece, which observes that not even Microsoft can save a bad idea.

William Grimes of The New York Times asks the right questions:

1. Why does espresso in New York City suck? and


2. Where can you get a good cup?

Good food writing is so much better than good technology writing, it makes me want to weep.

On this day, May 15, in 1911, Standard Oil is ordered to break up.

Moi? I have no point.

Jim McGee, an entrepreuneur and professor at the Kellogg School of Management, has some interesting comments about this item, which ran here on the 12th. The crux:

Certainly in learning settings it's nice if someone knows something to get the ball rolling, but it isn't necessary. I'd argue (naturally) that the scientific method is essentially a set of rules for how to argue about things you don't understand in order to understand them better.

Hard to disagree. Perhaps where we're getting hung up is in the interesting difference between "understanding" and "knowing something about." I'd suggest (argue? heavens, no!) that "understanding" proceeds from "knowledge," and it's damned near impossible to reach the former without first acquiring some of the latter.

The dumb bastards killed another one. PC Computing is finally dead. Ziff killed it yesterday.

PCC had been troubled from the start, about 10 years ago. It began as a technology magazine that was more about computing than computers -- a difficult distinction that company execs and advertisers didn't get. That iteration lasted not very long at all.

Lesson learned, PCC re-invented itself pretty much every year to 18 months, becoming the magazine for the latest buzzword. This required the circulation -- which eventually reached 1 million -- to constantly churn, since readers who cared about laptops may well not care about multimedia. As a place to catch excess ad dollars floating around the market, however, it worked brilliantly. Big circ, constantly changing market looking for visibility, perfect. Replacing the circulation was expensive, though, and the title never made much of a profit.

Editorially, it was quite good. Bright layouts, strong voice, the least geeky by far of all the major titles. But one was never entirely quite sure what the magazine was about.

Things reached a nadir about two years ago. Ziff Davis, which was then owned by Softbank, agreed to sell to the investment bank Willis Stein. Between the agreement and the actual sale, and apparently without consultation with the new owners, some genius decided to change the name and focus of the magazine. PC Computing became Smart Business, which was a problem because there already was a Smart Business magazine.

Instead, PCC became "Smart Business for a New Economy," and then "Ziff Davis's Smart Business." As the title might suggest, if you read that far, it was a New Economy magazine. Except it wasn't. Not really. It was sort of a cross between PC Magazine and Business 2.0, and may have turned out to be to techie for business types and too soft for techies.

But the real problem with the mag wasn't editorial. It was the lack of a core identity. There was, finally, no There there. Screw with a product enough and people will eventually turn away.