Talk about innovation! Lee Felsenstein — industry legend and sometime Salon blogger — is working with the Jhai foundation to bring a bicycle-pedal-powered Internet system to remote Laotian villages. There’s more info here, and you can read Lee’s own blog post about the project, or a brief New York Times magazine piece. Like many good things, the project needs money — read Lee’s e-mail appeal.
Patent nonsense
As AOL pursues its patent on instant messaging, people all over the Net are assembling examples of “prior art” — instant-messaging-like systems that long predated AOL’s. Rafe Colburn recalls one from a company he once worked for. Brian Dear writes in to point out that the PLATO system had IM functionality back in 1973.
Hell, I remember when I was a teenager goofing around in 1974 or so with BASIC game programs on a free “high schoolers” account at the NYU Physics Department’s minicomputer (I think it was an HP-2000 but memory is dim), we could IM each other from teletype to teletype — the messages would pop up in the middle of whatever you were doing; god forbid you were trying to get a clean printout of a 1000-line program and some “friend” had just sent you something like “J052.HS: YOU ARE A DUD.” The AOL patent seems to depend on the particular issue of being able to check who else is online; well, I’m pretty sure we could do that in 1974, too.
Free the research papers!
Today’s NY Times has a piece by Amy Harmon about a new project by leading scientists to create free, online, peer-reviewed journals that get research widely disseminated without the delays and fees associated with the more traditional print-journal approach.
Bravo. Isn’t this what the Internet, and the Web, were created for in the first place?
Commons ground
Creative Commons launches today with an innovative approach to creating machine-readable copyright licenses that encourage creative reuse and redistribution:
| The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses — but only on certain conditions. You’re probably familiar with the phrase “All rights reserved” and the little icon that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: “Some rights reserved” and our “CC Creative Commons” logo. |
Roger McGuinn and O’Reilly & Associates are both going to participate.
Attack of the slashing dots
Well, my column on Supernova just got Slashdotted. Not sure why (and the little intro doesn’t exactly explain what it’s about besides quoting my lead); but it’s always an exciting opportunity to read that mixture of smart commentary and careless drive-by ignorance directed at one’s writing. The weird thing is, 98 percent of the comments seem to be directed only at the couple of sentences quoted from my lead — as though they were intended as a stand-alone philosophical statement rather than the lead-in to a much more specific piece of commentary. Virtually no one seems to have bothered to click through and read my piece. Oh well.
Geek heaven
My column on Supernova is now up, here. A taste:
| The danger here is that the dynamo of the Silicon Valley boom-bust cycle, in its hunger for Next Big Thing fuel, will seize upon Wi-Fi, blogs and Web services and then spit them out, chewed-up and spent — before they’ve ever had a chance to mature and show off their potential. |
Pirates ahoy
Tim O’Reilly’s new essay on piracy offers much wisdom. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” “Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say “may” because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.” Read the whole thing here.
More AOL blues
There’s a valuable conversation in the comments on the AOL story just below.
“This is the HBO strategy,” John Robb writes. Hmmm. To me, the HBO strategy is a matter of putting must-have shows (“content”) like “The Sopranos” in a “you can’t get it anywhere else” basket. If you want your “Sopranos,” you have no choice but to become an HBO subscriber, or wait for the DVDs (or borrow a friend’s tapes — which points to the way file-sharing and P2P ultimately undermine the HBO model, but that’s another argument). And I guess I don’t see where AOL has, or has announced plans to have, that sort of must-have content. Locking Time Warner magazines away from the Web and into proprietary AOL spaces isn’t really the same, since if you want your Entertainment Weekly all you have to do is buy it at the newsstand or subscribe. Maybe that benefits AOL Time Warner as a whole (since one way or another you’re spending some money on their content), but it hardly seems to make AOL a “must have” service.
In posting my comment I knew people would bring up Salon’s own for-pay services, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Why would anyone pay *anything* for any content on the web?,” Todd asks. We have roughly 45,000 people paying for Salon Premium now, and while that isn’t the kind of number that will mean anything in an AOL-scaled universe, we think it’s pretty successful for Salon, and it’s certainly been a key part of helping keep us afloat in the rough waters of the last two years. I’m sure each Salon subscriber has a slightly different answer to Todd’s question, but I think many of them are variations on a simple theme: Readers value whatever we do here at Salon that is unique and independent.
The better we fulfill that role — and there are days we do it better and days we don’t — the better we’re serving our subscribers. So as a business, it seems to me, we’re in a fundamentally different universe — in scale and in appeal — from AOL. As a giant media conglomerate , AOL can’t possibly sell itself as “independent”; and it is now very publicly struggling to figure out what it can offer in the way of “unique.”
That’s why I think Pat Powers’ generally astute comment — “Salon and AOL are attempting to make this work with large staffs and expenses, but then, you both have a lot of content. The question is, how compelling is your content?” — asks the right question but works from the wrong data. Salon’s sixty-or-so employees may be “large” compared to the one-person business Pat refers to, but we’re minuscule compared to AOL. And purely by quantity, we have very little content compared to AOL; but everything we publish (except for our AP wires and a couple of syndicated columns) is completely unique to us. There’s just no comparison. Pick your simile: it’s like the difference between your corner coffeehouse and Starbucks, or between your independent bookseller and Barnes and Noble, or between…
(As to Doug Wiken’s question about Table Talk: We converted TT to a pay service to save it. We faced a simple choice — shut Table Talk down, since it was a cash drain on the company that brought in no revenue of its own, or turn it into a break-even proposition. We know we changed Table Talk by making it a for-pay service, but at least we saved it from a total shut-down. I don’t expect anyone to be thrilled by that, but I think the last two years of Web-industry armageddon might put it in some context.)
Gavin Becker writes, “It’s time for AOL to adapt and evolve just like the rest of us. ” I think we can agree on that!
PS Dave Winer posts on what a truly bold move on AOL’s part might have sounded like.
And John Robb has a more extensive explanation for what an HBO strategy for AOL could look like.
AOL blues
It’s always seemed clear to me that AOL acquired its gajillions of members because, in an era when connecting to the Internet seemed to require a computer science degree, the ubiquitous AOL disk provided a no-hassle connection path. That business isn’t growing the way it used to, though. And meanwhile, AOL’s ad revenue is declining too, as the company reaches the end of big contracts entered into during the bubble years. (What’s astonishing is that AOL might still have any deals in place from that era that its partners haven’t pulled out of or renegotiated.)
So today AOL held a big dog-and-pony show in New York to try to convince Wall Street that it still has a future, and to try to tell the world what it will do next. I wasn’t there, but I’ve now read several press accounts, and all I can say is, huh? It appears that AOL wants to back off from its role as ISP and instead become a provider of premium content and services — so that you’d pay a cable company or phone company for broadband at probably $40 a month, and then you’d pay AOL another $15 a month for its service.
Why on earth would one do so? I suppose there are plenty of people willing to pay that much to keep their beloved screen names and maintain their AOL e-mail addresses. And AOL appears to be seizing a variety of Time Warner properties and removing them from general Web access, making them only available via AOL — according to the New York Times, “the online editions of Entertainment Weekly, People, Teen People, InStyle, Time for Kids and Sports Illustrated for Kids.”
Well, maybe that will be attractive to several million of AOL’s current subscribers. But it hardly seems like a “growth business” — which may be why AOL also plans, according to accounts, on trying to find innovative ways to squeeze more money from each subscriber each month.
All of this carries with it a whiff of desperation and, really, a lack of imagination. Surely the company that connects more people to the Internet than anyone else — 34 million or so — must have more up its sleeve.
Why we hate our computers, installment no. 3742
Lee Gomes had a funny column in today’s Wall Street Journal about how his Windows XP system mysteriously crashed and then — after hours of consultation with Microsoft support failed to figure out the problem — mysteriously returned to working order. With the bug refusing to reproduce itself so the support team could diagnose it, they had to close the case on Gomes: “An intermittent error,” the Microsofties concluded, not too encouragingly.
We’ve all been there. I was doubly amused since I wrote a similar column almost a decade ago, about difficulties getting my then advanced Windows 3.1 computer to play Myst properly. That computer would be an antique today, and Windows XP is enormously better than Windows 3.1 in all sorts of ways. But our operating systems still stall out on us, leaving us perplexed and paralyzed.
Gomes gently rejects the idea that this is a Microsoft-specific issue: “Some anti-Microsoft partisans might say Windows itself was the bug. Maybe. But maybe the reason Windows seems to break more than Linux or Macintosh is simply that more people use it for more things.”
Maybe. It’s a fair point. (Though I have years of experience of Macs crashing too.) But at least with Linux, there’s a clear, open, public process for identifying and fixing known bugs. You don’t have to wait around for Redmond to issue the New, Improved, Higher-Priced Windows — Still With Intermittent Errors!