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.
heheh, balthaser is like skipintro turned into a whole site. i think the equation is:
(gabocorp + 2 year of special effects) * lots of time – common sense
sure it looks impressive (for the most part), but, the whole thing strikes me as wrong. (ie, way overdone, can not be serious). besides, even marketoids know that you can’t make a flash ebusiness site if you break the back button and bookmarks. see, jakob neilsen is good for something.
more than you ever wanted to know about mpeg 4
using png2html, i was able to convert a picture of myself (vertical compressed to compensate for character height) i had to colored ascii. weeee.
