i can see wha al ries is saying about internet business, but i have to say that there are two choices you can make. buy the lowest price, where branding doesn’t matter, because you’re finding that low price from a search engine like pricewatch, or buy from a site consistently because it is able to offer you personalized service that is impossible to get offline, and that becomes more useful as you use it more.

also, ries (or the author ochman, it’s not clear) talks about shoppers using the internet for research but making purchases traditionally, which may be true when your talking about large purchases (cars), but doesn’t make sense for small things that you buy regularly consumer goods (electronics, media, etc) – which you buy a heck of a lot more often than a car.

epitonic has a good eclectic mix of quality music. currently streaming some breakbeat, but i’ll probably be checking out the indie rock stuff later on.

electric sheep web comics.issue2.contents

ooh, scripts, including an early draft of the x-men. i recall reading the magneto and scott summers prologues elsewhere, but not the rest i think. either that, or my memory is failing me…

i had forgotten that i have a more or less permanent forwarding email account at leonard@acm.org

dan gillmor makes some interesting comments on the long-term effects of free media, particularly on how it’s affected the newpaper industry thus far.

i’ve been mulling over this a bit. in the net environment, it’s hard, and most likely counterproductive to try to control the bits, whereas previously, controlling distribution was the most logical way to do it. but if you think about it, if someone wanted to, they could have taped / photocopied, hand transcribed a copy if they wanted to, it was just a pain in the butt. hmm, is this going anywhere? anyway, since people don’t feel it’s worth paying for news, what are the options (for monetizing): advertising supported model (journalistic integrity gets blurred if this is the only revenue stream), wait for micropayments and hope something works out (people are too used to getting free stuff, and it will flow as long as the large competition has money to burn), or offer a non-piratable value add. the last one involves offering a service, which can be controlled easier server-side. as long as it’s sufficiently convenient, people will use, enjoy and pay for it.

so, my theory is that people may not pay for news, but people probably would pay for personalized service, like aggregation, searching, possibly even community features, umm. maybe

depressing corporatism, reported from the front lines.

besides having a kickass site, 37signals prove themselves to be uberkool by also having a kickass blog.

i just got an ad in my icq window while sending an url. that sucks. it was an annoying blinky nsi ad too. grr

along the lines of ascii art, i haveta mention that FIGlet is awesome.

   __  __    _                    __

  / /_/ /_  (_)____   _______  __/ /__  _____

 / __/ __ / / ___/  / ___/ / / / / _ / ___/

/ /_/ / / / (__  )  / /  / /_/ / /  __(__  )

\__/_/ /_/_/____/  /_/   \__,_/_/\___/____/

vignette btw, has trouble with this because the backslash is an escape character. also, the square brackets are reserved characters for the tcl interpreter, which is a real bitch if you include javascript in your template.