NOTE: This is the lead item from the most recent issue of my free e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. Subscribe here. Glad to have you. Always free. Who wants to revisit electronic commerce? God knows I do. Let’s review our problem set, shall we? There’s no valid business model for Web content. Every bit on a mobile […]
Mallory is a Dursley, a caricature of a Muggle. She accepts the magic of her time as a given, she cares little for the complexity of the real world. She stuffs her face with the products of magic -- computer networks, fast food, miracle drugs, SUVs -- with no thought for her responsibility to maintain that world, or raise children to maintain it.
This is what makes blogging such a threat to all hierarchies. It gives power to those who would otherwise be readily destroyed by the Right Wing Noise Machine and its allies in the Corporate Press. Blogging is the open source ethos applied to journalism. The Wall Street Journal is the proprietary ethos.
It’s the links. Doc Searls sort of hits it on the head. It’s the giving of links that makes blogging so dangerous to journalism. The room with the most exits wins by letting in the most light. I found this to be the case in launching voic.us over the last few months. It’s designed as […]
A floor price. Plenty of energy sources are ready to come onstream right now if the producers could be assured of long-term profits. Tar sands. Coal. Wind. Geothermal. Solar. It’s all there for the taking, but only if the producers can be assured of a market. The problem with oil, as we learned 25 years […]
The more I read about MySpace, its success in getting users, and its problems, the more one word keeps coming to mind. Pointcast. I know you’ve got to be pretty old in Internet years to remember the PointCast fiasco. It was an early "push" system. You would sign up for news stories and get them […]
The real political divide in America is between the ascendent open source view on the one side and the proprietary view on the other. Right now, the proprietary view holds absolute power. This is partly because open source is not organized. In fact, many with an open source view see what they’re doing as merely […]
Just as Republicans split 40 years ago, between those who would accomodate the Democratic majority and those who rejected it, so Democrats are now splitting in a similar way. On the one side we have accomodationists, or "Clintonistas." On the other we have the Netroots, who identify first with DNC chair Howard Dean but have […]
Lately the Web has been filled with stories of conflict. The Attorney General wants to ban pornography from the Web, not just child pornography but even depictions of adults doing their biological part. The government’s new abstinence education programs extend even to adults. Anyone who is unmarried (and only male-female unions are recognized) may have […]
When the political pack is shuffled, the phone companies and cable companies are going to find they have won nothing but emnity from the coming votes. They will have seen millions of customers educated on the issues, and they will likely have Democratic majorities ready, willing, and able to jump down their throats.
