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1. Enterprise software backlash. After being a temporarily fashionable haven from the dotcom collapse, enterprise software takes a beating
2. Hybrid social networking and blogging services emerge
3. VOIP makes the music industry
“In principle blogging promises us something close to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a writeable web because anyone can create their own constantly-updated site.”
It seems that even the mainstream press are now saying that weblogging constitutes something more important than personal online diaries. Weblog tools are how you publish online and are as important for publishing on the Internet as the browser was for, well, browsing. Perhaps just like the word browsing effectively means reading things on the Internet (or we’d be gophering), blogging will mean publishing on the web, publishing anything, not just a diary.
Apple Music Store is out. Three years after Napster there is finally a pay-per-song, jukebox-style application and, like everything Apple do, it looks beautifully executed. But is this a good deal?
Each song costs 99c.
An average CD has 10 tracks.
CD list price: $19
CD wholesale price: c $12
Ave. cost of pressing and shipping: $2
Looking at these numbers, the music industry has only been prepared to discount the music by the actual cost of manufacturing and shipping the CD.
In other words the arrogance and stupidity of the music labels is unabated, they still refuse to admit that online music changes the economics and mechanics of the marketing and distribution of music beyond removing the costs of a physical storage medium.
Perhaps this isn’t so much the death of the CD, but another step towards their own suicide.
Steve Hall points out that because links to individual postings often produce the traffic to weblogs, there needs to be an advertising system for weblogs adaptable to variable traffic to individual permalinked items. The notion of advertising at the ‘page’ level is meaningless for weblogs.
I believe the permalink model will inevitably extend to all web publishing - a web page is a virtual rendering of one or more items, individual postings have self contained meaning and therefore value.
To put it another way, the web is a web because of links. Links point to information elsewhere, and information exists within content, not pages. If there are no permalinks to individual pieces of content, then the advertising model of the web will never be able to fully take advantage of linking. Eventually everthing on the web will have a permalink.
“Slate wrote an article about a post on Gawker that then linked to a post on Adrants about the PUMA Ad Sensation. Traffic to Adrants sky rocketed. Ten thousand visitors, in fact, yesterday and 3,000 so far today. Normal daily traffic is between 500-800 visitors a day. If Adrants had an ad program up and running that placed ads only at the top of the page, the advertiser, and Adrants, would have lost out big time on that bonus traffic. Worse, those ads would be counted as served impressions when, in fact, they would never be seen. Not a good ad strategy. What is needed is the ability to “embed” ads (graphic and/or text) dynamically within individual posts based on traffic level so that any ad is always “served” to the most highly viewed area of the site.”
Microdocs
suggests that Microsoft must compete with ‘the Google Operating System’.
From a technical perspective it would be very easy for Google to become closer to the features offered by an OS. Previously I suggested that Google could start immediately with a much better ‘Find’ facility than the terrible Windows version, which is painfully slow and doesn’t do full text search over documents on your hard drive.
From a business perspective, however, Google is unlikely to anything obviously hostile to Microsoft. Nobody wants to repeat the mistake that Netscape made when they tried to take on Microsoft and lost spectacularly.
The Gulf War made CNN, it was the cable news covered war. Since that war, the web has emerged: this is the web covered war, from moblogged war protests to webloggers in Iraq, the channels of choice are weblogs.
The independant reports: “The internet has democratised everything - including being a war correspondent.”
Here’s a prediction: someone will say something overtly political at tonight’s next week’s Oscars causing a huge outburst of feigned surprise. Here’s another prediction, if nobody says anything political tonight, calls of conspiracy and much thespian flapping will follow. It’s a bit like the celebrity Catch-22 below:
“Daniel Day-Lewis, Best Actor nominee for ‘Gangs of New York,’ described the Catch-22 that celebrities find themselves in — as they are constantly quizzed by reporters about their political views.
‘The media are sick and tired of people in my profession giving their opinion, and yet you’re asking me my opinion,’ said Day-Lewis. ‘And when I give it you’ll say, ‘Why doesn’t he shut up?””
United Press International: Analysis: Is a Hollywood blacklist coming?
There is renewed optimism about the potential of the Internet and digital technologies. My prediction: its a good time to invest in innovative technology, but for the Telecoms and Media companies investors haven’t yet faced up to the fact that they are companies that are based on business models stemming from the world of fixed circuit phone calls and analog media. This is gone forever.
“most dotcoms have failed, and the telecommunications industry, which raced to build the infrastructure for cyberspace, is staggering under $1 trillion of debt. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that this is the end of the internet revolution. Boom and bust often follow the introduction of radically new technologies. In the 1870s America’s railroad industry boomed in much the same way as the world’s telecoms industry in the late 1990s, only to collapse in a similar heap of bankruptcies, accounting scandals, stockmarket losses and enormous debts. America’s economy fell into recession.
A few years later, a reviving economy together with advances in railway engineering triggered a new wave of investment. Railroads quickly revived, changing American business forever.”
A predictably excellent essay by Clay Shirky on the threat to phone companies from Voice Over IP and WiFi networks.
“they’ve [the Telcos] digitized their entire network up to the last mile, but are still charging the high and confusing rates established when the network was analog.”
Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail
Clay describes Fed Ex’s failed fax service - where they supplied a network of faxes and charged less than physical delivery of documents. This failed because people bought faxes themselves. Clay asserts that charging existing rates for telephone calls is a scam that can only be pulled off if the Telcos keep control of the last mile. If people buy products like SIP phones (Internet phones) and use the Internet then they have taken control of the last mile.
Whilst this is great stuff, there is an addendum to the argument.
The problem is that this assumes that no-one owns the Internet as a network, and this is only partially true. A large portion of Internet traffic flows over networks controlled by the Telcos. As they lose the battle for the last mile they will be able to use the leverage they have over the backbone. To do this they will need to be able to differentiate the type of traffic (web browsing, phone calls etc.) flowing over the network. True, costs will crumble, but what we are seeing is a convergence of the all you can eat Internet access model and the pay-per-use voice network model.
The analogy here is the road network versus the rail network. Existing telephone companies run rail networks (and some of the roads). Buying a product like a VOIP hub to use over the free Internet is buying a car to save on monopolistic rail fares. But someone needs to maintain the roads, and there are taxes for their usage and tolls for the bridges.
I suspect that the short term outcome will be much as Clay describes - a revolt against expensive land lines and effectively free phone calls - but nothing is free for ever and in the long term there will be payment. Perhaps network usage will be based upon a bandwidth per datatype fee (text messaging will be more expensive per bit than video) and the Internet will replace private switched networks for most uses other than point to point or mission critical uses such as bank transactions and EDI.
Although not very well known in the US, Espotting has search engine paid placement sewn up in Europe.
As Overture faces pressure from Wall St. to maintain growth to justify its current valuation, Espotting looks like an obvious acquisition target to improve Overture’s position in Europe.
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