Category: Business

Stefan Sharkansky hosted a nice little Frisco Blog Bash last night at Perry’s Bar and Grill. Most of the regulars were there — Peter Pribik, Steve Happy Fun, the Weidners, and Joanne Jacobs, and we met new friends Stefan, William Quick, Mike Silverman, Andrew the Punning Pundit, Brian Tiemann, Wes Dabney, and Michael Bruce. It was great fun, and I think Stefan might have picked-up the bar tab, which is an act of true heroism with this bunch.

And no, Quick and I didn’t have a fistfight; he’s a bright and charming dude in person.

A few days ago I bemoaned the tech press and the poor job it did of reporting on the Great Internet Bubble, closing with an off-hand slap at Dan Gillmor, the lead tech journo at Silicon Valley’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor’s Sunday column was a critique of Apple that was reasonably good, but this entry from his blog illustrates exactly what I was talking about:

The cable and telephone companies now poised to dominate [broadband], thanks to a federal government that is pushing the idea of a new oligopoly in Internet connections, will let you download at a relatively high speed. They will not permit the converse.

There are several reasons, beyond the merely technical problems (which could be solved) of an old infrastructure. One is to prohibit unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials. The other is to ensure that competitive media have no chance of getting established.

It’s all about control. As usual.

That’s right – Gillmor says a conspiracy of government and communications companies has forced broadband into a one-way communications model in order to protect copyrights and a media monopoly. Wow.

This is so breathtakingly stupid, it’s hard to know where to start in taking it apart, but I’m going to try anyway, silly as I am.

In the first place, the companies that provide “broadband” connections to the home don’t have a stake in the media, publishing, or TV business. In Silicon Valley, your choices are AT&T Cable (which I use) and SBC DSL (which I used to use). Neither of these companies has holdings in Hollywood, and in fact, both would benefit financially from the transfer to more stuff over their networks, copyrighted or not. In fact, the only industry that has stood up and opposed the DMCA is telecom – Verizon in particular has had its lobbyists complain to Washington that the Act would be disruptive to its network. So Gillmor has the good guys confused with the bad guys from the start.

Second, while the “technical problems” preventing cable and DSL networks from offering as much upstream bandwidth as downstream bandwidth “could be solved”, they can’t be solved for free. So the issue for these businesses — and they are businesses, not charities — is whether they should spend money on providing something that people don’t want — high-bandwidth web servers in each and every home — or something they do want, inexpensive, high-speed downloads to each and every home.

The implications in terms of time, management, security, and utility of personal web servers dwarf the mere technical issues in the design of the network, even though the latter are far from trivial. Certainly, those of us who wish to publish personal web sites are able to do so for very little cash outlay through hosting companies, so there’s really very little consequence of the “one-way” nature of today’s broadband networks.

Gillmor, like so many other supposedly technical journalists, wades into an important topic with no understanding of the underlying technical or commercial issues and tries to bludgeon it to death with a cudgel of ignorance wielded from his position astride the Digital Rights hobbyhorse.

It doesn’t work.

UPDATE: Gillmor offers an explanation for why he wrote such lameness in the next entry to his blog: Dave Winer made him do it. That makes it all OK, I guess.

Dave Winer, a fellow who’s been blogging almost as long as I have, is on-target in his criticism of the Industry Standard’s behavior during the bubble:

Read this op-ed by former Industry Standard editor James Ledbetter to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom.

Which goes to show you that stopped clocks are right twice a day; in this case, Winer’s down on all journalists, all the time, so this criticism (link via Doc Searls) doesn’t stand out especially. Doc maintains that his Cluetrain Manifesto was an attempt to promote alternate mythologies to the Entrepreneur Hero, but I can’t say he succeeded, since the Cluetrain reads like so much snake oil to this disinterested observer.

That being said, a lot of us techies are circumspect about another bubble, especially the efforts of some to create one around WiFi, blogging, and related mobile computing and personal publishing stuff. The folks who create military tech feel an obligation to somehow ensure that it’s used responsibly, and those of us who create the civilian variety would at least like to see that it’s not used simply to fleece mom and pop out of their life savings, as it was during the Bubble when investment bankers touted tech stocks they were underwriting to their brokerage clients. New regulations in the securities industry will help keep this form of abuse to a minimum, but we also need a tech press that’s capable of delivering reasonable criticism of business models and technologies instead of just cheerleading everything that comes along.

I don’t see that sort of a press developing, and if it did, it would certainly start in Silicon Valley. The local paper, the Mercury News, is as clueless about technology as the Des Moines Register, touting the Allen-Boxer Broadband Bill as if it were actually worth the paper it’s written on.

Investors aren’t going back into the market until they’re confident, and a robust business press is key to developing this confidence. I suppose it will have to come from the blogs. The business press reads us — Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show invited me to appear based on these musings — but we’re going to have to do a lot better than cheerleading for WiFi or knee-jerk boosting Open Everything to win credibility.

This is going to take some time.

Speaking of AOL, media dude Michael Wolff explains why it’s losing money in this New York magazine article You’ve Got Sex:

Here’s the real rub: AOL’s fundamental business — which has always been a level or two down from the family-oriented opening screen — is dirty talk. But now there are better places to talk dirty.

The only convergence at AOL/Time Warner is that of one-hand typing and on-line shopping for dates. Wolff’s an insider, and the article fairly oozes insight.

via Arts and Letters.

For fans of The Amazing Race, here’s a couple of comments that the charming Flo posted on the Television Without Pity message board and subsequently deleted:

florinka
posted December 12,2002 11:36:11 AM EST

I have been trying not to read anymore but after last night’s episode I decided to register and respond to some of the cruel criticisms. I would just ask that you consider the stress of the race at this point and the fact that I am clearly a competitive woman who just wants to win this race. I am happy to explain and even apologize for certain behaviors but I have frankly had enough of reading this garbage and not standing up for myself.
florinka
posted December 12,2002 11:54:02 AM EST

Look-I did not go on a reality tv show not knowing that I would judged by a bunch of people without anything better to do – However, since you spend so much time watching and commenting on television programs did you consider that perhaps editing is involved here and while I concede to giving the editors some material to make me the “bitch” on the show- I may infact have redeeming qualities and moments that you do not have the pleasure of seeing. I understand that I put myself out there for all to critique- but unless you have been on the race you can’t really understand the impact that it can have on a person. I am really shocked to see myself reacting like I do in some situations- I am lucky that Zach and I were together 24 hrs a day and that I hopefully was able to make up to him for the times that I hurt his feelings. However I will say that regardless of how weak and whiny you all think I am I know how valuable of an experince this was for me and I look forward to defending myself to some extent in the near future.

It seems to me you can judge the impact of a show’s pressure by watching how all the contestants react to it — if one stands out as the most obnoxious person in the history of reality television, there’s your Vassar girl.

Asymmetrical Information’s stars are having Tivo troubles.

Anono-blogger D-squared Digest — A fat young man without a good word for anyone tore into Mr. den Beste and Eric Raymond recently:

But anyway, people like Stephen den Beste, author of the turgidly unreadable and unsettlingly technocratic attempts to recreate neoclassical economics without the benefit of reading a word of the literature which populate USS Clueless (he has a fine line of shite in talking about mobile phone standards too), regard the absence of moderate Muslims lining up to claim that numerically the majority of their religion is made up of horrendous halfwits and ogres, as a sign that Islam is an intrinsically warlike, barbaric and horrible religion. I’m using his piece on this subject as the example because I happen to have just read it, and as an associate of the dreadful Eric Raymond, he’s a target of opportunity.

The attack failed to get a rise out of den Beste, except in the comments section where he fairly well rips the anono-blogger to shreds. D-Squared, whoever it is, is a disciple of Max Sawicky, which tells you all you need to know.

Ken Layne and Dr. Frank are both blogging again. Hallelujah!

Nick Denton has discovered a blogger so vain and pedantic he makes Anil Dash look like a free-speech hero:

Tom Coates, a rather pedantic British blogger whom I met in person this week, is appalled by those he considers warbloggers. So, does he try to persuade them, and their readers? Nope. Coates’s latest contribution to web culture: he proposes blocking undesirable visitors to his site. I mean, if they got through, he might actually win them over. On second thoughts, no.

Coates moans about the role he fantasizes playing in enabling warbloggers:

I don’t know how to say it in any other way except to say that as an episode in web history, I personally believe that Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging. This whole media – a media which was supposed to be about freedom of expression, allowing everyone to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly – has turned increasingly into the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting and as a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists. And I’m afraid I feel partly responsible…

I don’t know what’s more hilarious, Coates’ attempt to smear everyone who’s not a simpering appeaser with the label of “violent warmonger and nationalist” or his fanciful belief that he had anything at all to do with creating any of the technology that’s made free speech on the web possible. Either way, the man’s directly responsible for the funniest excuse for soul-searching I’ve ever read.

Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing makes some cogent observations about the tendency of certain members of the blogging public to take themselves too seriously:

Then we have the good ole’ arguments. Person A says something on his blog, Person B rebuts and then it’s just rhetorical tricks and nonsense after that. In the middle of these arguments you will always find terms like “Straw Man”, “ad homonem”, “fallacy” and a host of other words no normal person ever uses. It’s like a debating match, and IIRC the debate club was populated by a bunch of geeks who argued over shit no one ever really cared about. It’s like the old maxim: There are two types of people. Those who go out and do shit, and those who sit around arguing about the people who are out doing shit. Bloggers are people who, when they aren’t arguing with each other, are just spouting off about people who are out doing shit. That’s rather pathetic on the face of it, but it only becomes sad when the parties involved become so damned humorless about it. We’re not exactly deciding the fates of nations here, people. I doubt Rumsfeld is loading up Daily Pundit for policy advice.

Daily responded to Sarge, and we’re off.

I never saw a pissing contest I didn’t like, well, with the possible exception of the one Tony Pierce started over the failure of War Bloggers to take Sean Penn seriously. Tony must have swallowed the worm if he thinks Madonna’s ex- has anything to offer the President. The moron is Barbara Lee’s biggest booster, after all.