Category: Technology

AOL – Last of the Garden Walls Comes Down

Todd Borglund, our head of production at CXO, is fond of showing two sites to me, over and over again. One is ESPN, the other is the new AOL homepage, the "free" version that represents the end of AOL’s long-running battle to tuck content behind the walls that brought down Prodigy, CompuServe and the other proprietary online services of the 80s.

AOL has been bleeding subscribers to its ISP business at a rapid clip — I recall one news squib last winter that estimated 500,000 suscribers per month were cancelling their service and moving their business to their telco’s DSL offerings or cable company’s cable modem plan. AOL was built on racks and racks of modems, and now, with dial-up hanging on in the rural areas, something had to give in the demographic model to get people back in front of the content.

So the walls have come down.

Skip back to the late 90s, when AOL was the Google of its day, commanding massive marketing muscle during the dot.com nuttiness, asking for, and receiving $20 million marketing packages for high-velocity startups trying to amass, at all costs, all the eyes they could. Was there any more powerful force in new media? Could anyone have foreseen a time when AOL — as much a part as the cultural gestalt as any digital phenomena ever was or will be — would be replaced by something that was free? Having suffered in the land of Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994, my allergy to walled gardens hoped and prayed that the dumbing down of the Internet that AOL represented would be replaced by something less expensive, more standard, and more open. (Remember the idiotic Instant Messaging interoperability battles between AOL, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo? That towel got tossed last week.)

Then came the big  step-in-it-with-both-feet move by Time Warner in January 2000, the peak of the insanity, when Levin took off the suit, pulled off the tie, and committed one of the biggest M&A blunders of all time.

Today one wonders as Google and Yahoo and Microsoft circle AOL if they are suitors wooing a bride or vultures circling a crawling man in the desert, waiting for the inevitable? Whatever the state of AOL’s health, I agree with Todd, at least they have a nice homepage and some credible blogs after stealing Weblogs for $25 m.

NYT – Carr “Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod”

Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod – New York Times

David Carr reaches for the futurist’s bong and take a big hit before exhaling the perennial b.s. that some ultra-portable, disposable, fold-it-and-stick-it-your-pocket device — aka Digital Ink, Digital Paper — will save the beleagured world of print.

In today’s (Monday’s) New York Times — my favorite day of the week because it’s when the Times devotes a few column inches to new media — the obituary is written for the newspaper business. Carr says that if there were only the equivalent of an iPod-like device for print, something so intuitively fantastic that one out of ten Americans would rush out and buy one, then voila!, the industry would be saved the way the iPod saved the neo-Jurassic music industry from a lifetime of lawsuits against bewildered parents who’s kids were siphoning off the entire Sony Music catalogue on the home Dell.

Carr misses the point but comes close to it. Early in the column he correctly talks about "companion media", stuff that you can half-way tune into while consuming other media.

The reason the iPod and podcasting and satellite radio and other aural media are surviving is the fact that you can listen to something while you do something else. I can listen to the Gillmor Gang on my Nano while driving to work on Route 128 and still operate a motor vehicle. I can read a good-old-fashioned book while listening to music. I can’t read a book while driving, so I’d have to consider an audio book. Can’t read and watch TV (but I can keep a little attention on something like CNN or C-Span). Actually, I can’t do email and listen to a podcast — if my attention is on writing replies I can’t exactly process what the speakers are saying. I can listen to Johnny Cash when writing email.

The fixed commodity is time and print is a 100% focused medium. You can’t read and operate heavy machinery. Sorry, but the most portable, inexpensive, battery-efficient piece of "digital paper" — even with a heads-up display or neural-cerebral-cortext plug is not going to save newspapers.

"Consider if the line between the Web and print matter were erased by a device for data consumption, not data entry – all screen, no baggage – that was uplinked and updated constantly: a digital player for the eyes, with an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price."

 Sorry, there is an iPod for print and it is called RSS. The time-shifting, "push" delivery of syndicated content to the reader of your choice is where the shift in text has occurred and will accelerate. Putting a micro-payment system in front of it isn’t going to change anything. The print industry needs to wake up to the disturbing news that it ain’t about moving off of paper to glass anymore, that their own web efforts are severely threatened by a fast shift away from the decade old page-view, eyeball model to one of attention, distribution, mark-up, mash-up, tagging and manipulation.

 

Ning Developer Documentation

Ning Developer Documentation

Marc Andreesen’s new thing, Ning, has opened its doors. I played around for a while and liked the concept — essentially a Php, CSS, XHTML playground for building social apps. "Hike Around the Bay Area" sort of things. I signed on for a developer’s account and will mess around with importing the open-source bike ride format off of this blog.

Tim O’Reilly profiled by Steven Levy in Wired

Wired 13.10: The Trend Spotter

 

 Great profile of tech book publisher Tim O’Reilly.

 

 

"Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O’Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often- naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."

 

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » What is Web 2.0?

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » What is Web 2.0?

Om attempts to tackle the burning question. WTF is a Web 2.0?

I say you know it when you see it. "Dave Winer says, “Web 2.0 is a marketing concept used by venture capitalists and conference promoters to try to call another bubble into existence.”"

Happy birthday to Om.

iPod Nano Paranoia

Macworld: News: Apple responds to iPod nano screen concerns

So the little piece of electronica bling-bling arrived on Monday and it seemed so … little, so frail. I have fingers the size of Nathan’s hot dogs, big sausages and I didn’t want to touch the obsidian-black case and smear it up with finger grease ….

 I got over that, but still, the thing is very frail. No way it gets dumped into my overloaded knapsacks and scratched to death like the rest of my gear. Today I get a Denison Ice-Link for the car so I can finally listen to its through the speakers and get rid of the accursed Belkin radio gizmo.

I love how iPod owners just put up a website and start ragging on Apple until their demands are met. Remember the infamous Neistat Brothers taking on the batteries that resulted in a class action suit and settlement offer? (I like the Neistat Bros. other films too.)

Now I’m convinced that unless I buy my nano some cushioned shock case that its going to get trashed. Off to Best Buy to drop $30 on a case. 

Matt McAlister :: How changes in supply and demand for important content made RSS so relevant

Matt McAlister :: How changes in supply and demand for important content made RSS so relevant

"It’s no surprise then that people jumped to RSS to control information flow. We are telling the creators of information that we want filters, we want flow control, and we want those controls in our own hands. It’s the era of syndication and subscriptions. I’ll tell you what information I want, and then you come find me with the right data in the right place at the right time."

 

If you don’t read Matt and you obsess about publishing models, then you’re missing one of the smartest voices out there. 

ObjectGraph Dictionary – AJAX in action

ObjectGraph Dictionary

objectgraph 

This is an excellent demonstration of the power of AJAX coding for web services. (AJAX – for you sub-rock dwellers, is  Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and the au courant technology du jour of 2005).

 Essentially, it’s an online dictionary that kicks the stuffing out of Dictionary.com. I stuck a quick launch link on my 11-year old son’s new laptop and within two days ObjectGraph passed the ultimate test when he said, "Dad, this dictionary thing rules."

So, next time you’re stuck trying to demo what Ajax is all about, and don’t want to quote the following explanation from the Wikipedia, show ’em Objectgraph:

From WikiPedia:

"Ajax applications look almost as if they reside on the user’s machine, rather than across the Internet on a server. The reason: pages get updated, not entirely refreshed.

“Every user action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead”, wrote Jesse James Garrett, in the essay that first defined the term. “Any response to a user action that doesn’t require a trip back to the server — such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation — the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond — if it’s submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data — the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user’s interaction with the application.”

Traditional web applications essentially submit forms, completed by a user, to a web server. The web server responds back by sending a new web page. Because the server must submit a new page each time, applications run more slowly and awkwardly than their native counterparts.

Ajax applications, on the other hand, can send requests to the web server to retrieve only the data that is needed, usually using SOAP or some other XML-based web services dialect. On the client, JavaScript processes the web server response. The result is a more responsive interface, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced. Web server processing time is also saved, since much of it is done on the client."

 

A sucker for a good gadget …

There are two drawers at home that are clogged with the technical detritus of my life. Misfit electronic toys that are dead, forgotten, and expensive reminders of the insanity that compels me to squander my cash on the latest, smallest, coolest gizmo. Aside from the usual morass of cell phone chargers, docks, spare batteries, and gordian knot of firewire, USB, ethernet, crossover, printer, and optical cables, those drawers contain such relics as the first Logitech digital camera, which had an appalling resolution on the order of an old newspaper photo, at least three Palm Pilots, an HP Portable PC, weird TV graphic convertors, WebTV wireless keyboards, old Sony video camera (analog), and power blocks that have lost their way.

What’s in my pocket these days?

Well, there’s the Treo 650 — which isn’t as good as the Treo 600, but I killed that by profusely sweating into the ear speaker after taking a phone call during a bike ride during a July Heat Wave. Trying to sync the thing with Lotus Notes …. well, let’s just say doing anything with Lotus Notes involved is like trying to put cosmetics on a bad skin disease.

In the audio department, I’ve been playing around with an iRiver 799 for podcast recording. That just went to the crew here at CXO so they can have a device for remote recording. My Sony headphones, my two digital sony microphones, and my Sony minidisc recorder have all been donated to the cause. Then there is the Sony voice recorder which I never use and which, like most Sony products, has its own insanely incompatible memory stick with its very own usb dock for importing into the proprietary Sony voice management software. File that one under: "What was I thinking."

I’ve been listening to podcasts on an iPod mini — nice thing, but earlier this week I once again felt the power of gadgets compel me to piss away $250 on a black Nano, spending $11 for Apple to rush the thing to me to assuage my jones, but alas, the store says the order is still being "processed" which is a leading indicator that it will be backordered until Halloween.

Other than that, my life is remarkably gadget free.