Apparently no one really wants to reboot their socks

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Thomas Purves

Bruce sterling used to regale us with stories of ubicomp that one day everything would be connected and aware. Computation everywhere “in the morning I won’t have to look for my shoes, I’ll just google them”. It’s been argued (I’ve argued it) that, one day, even your socks will have IP addresses. Of course, the more complicated technology gets the more ways it can be brittle (rebooted your blackberry yet today?).

Anyway, fast forward to the trough of disillusionment, and a funny post today from uber-hacker Julian Bleeker:

Seriously. Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday. Ferchrissake.

Apparently, in the ubicomp future, we should look forward to force-quitting and reboot our socks a lot.

enjoy: Ubicomp is like a 5 year old wishing for a pink pony

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The long slow death of Media

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Thomas Purves

Internet usage isn’t killing TV; in fact, TV watching has hit record levels in the US. So why aren’t broadcasters rolling in fat autumn piles of cash?

“An audience member was confused about how viewership could be up but ad revenue could be significantly reduced; top network execs patiently explained that just having eyeballs wasn’t much good in a major economic downturn.”

And by “TV” you could substitute… newspapers, magazines, print media, radio, social network page views, fiction, stock photography, analyst reports, movies, music, journalism in general. Did I miss any?

Boy it’s a tough millennium for anyone to be in the content creation business.

Like all new media shifts the beginning of time, digial media, you has a flavor. And by flavor I mean side effects both good, bad and unintended.

It’s not new news that we are moving to an attention scarcity economy. These days we are all consuming more media than ever. Nonetheless, attention is a fixed commodity and fundamentally puts a limit on how much content we can meaningfully demand in a given day. But supply of new media has exploded and there is just isn’t enough attention – which is linked to revenue potential – to go around. Sadly, the falling cost of media production and distribution has not been enough to offset. If anything falling costs, and web2.0 make things worse by flooding the media market with a lot of “cheap” content. Not in all cases is this “cheap” content a perfect substitute for what came before.

It’s time for us all to start thinking of new models in a post digital world.

In the meantime, there is some good news dear content creators and media titans.

At least you are not in the car making business.

link: Americans hugely addicted to TV, but money doesn’t follow

photo credit: Jose_armas

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Where is the “app store” for the greater internet?

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Thomas Purves

A few recent observations:

1. Boy the iphone has a really slick/easy interface for buying little chunks of apps and content that are not only super easy to find yourself buying, and also don’t even cost that much. (Blackberry just announced one too)

2. On the web, ad revenues are out of whack with the value of content. I get a ton of value out of a lot of web apps like gmail or web content through my feeds and so forth. If there was an easy enough, low-friction enough way, I’d be happy to pay some amount for a lot of this stuff. At least more than the nano-cents worth of ads I’ve ever never clicked on.

3. The long tail is getting killed by ads. You need a sick amount of traffic to make sense as an ad-supported business model. Um, whatever happened to the long tail, or at least the whole middle of that tail?

3b. Optimizing for ad revenue makes for for crappier content (celebrities, gimmicky top-ten lists, link-jacking and other attention mongering cheap tricks) and crappier user experience (superfluous page views, popusp, sites plastered like nascars).

4. There’s a recession coming. This fits in somewhere.

5. Only the valley is crazy enough to still be funding the get-the-eyeballs-first-we’ll-figure-out-the-business-model later

6. If you’re not in the valley and you want to monetize digital content, what’s your plan exactly?

7. Where is our app store for the greater interenet? who will make it happen?

Link: Woe to Web 2.0 Start-Ups: Too Few Ads to Go Around

Epilogue/Spoiler alert: You know that worlds are converging right? Cloud/web computing has far-reaching implications that may make this question the answer to it’s own question. We are moving to a world where regular folks will may many screens large and small and one seamless web environment. But that’s a subject for another post.

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