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Articles (22):
Does Free Content - Sell?
October 02, 2003
The answer is: no one knows. Many self-styled "gurus" and "pundits" - authors of voluminous tomes they sell to the gullible - pretend to know. But their "expertise" is an admixture of guesswork, superstitions, anecdotal "evidence" and hearsay.
Invasion of the Amazons
September 30, 2003
The last few months have witnessed a bloodbath in tech stocks coupled with a frantic re-definition of the web and of every player in it (as far as content is concerned). This effort is three pronged: Some companies are gambling on content distribution and the possession of the attendant digital infrastructure.
The Disintermediation of Content
September 29, 2003
Are content brokers - publishers, distributors, and record companies - a thing of the past? In one word: disintermediation. The gradual removal of layers of content brokering and intermediation - mainly in manufacturing marketing - is the continuation of a long term trend. Consider music for instance.
E(merging) books
September 02, 2003
A novel re-definition through experimentation of the classical format of the book is emerging. Consider the now defunct BookTailor. It used to sell its book customization software mainly to travel agents - but this technology is likely to conquer other niches (such as the legal and medical professions).
The Miraculous Conversion
August 19, 2003
The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site.
Seamless Web
August 18, 2003
The Internet started off as a purely American phenomenon and seemed to perpetuate the fast-emerging dominance of the English language. A negligible minority of web sites were in other languages.
Bright Planet, Deep Web
August 18, 2003
www.allwatchers.com and www.allreaders.com are web sites in the sense that a file is downloaded to the user's browser when he or she surfs to these addresses.
The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine
August 17, 2003
The circulation of print magazines has declined precipitously in the last 24 months. This dissolution of subscriber bases has accelerated dramatically as economic recession set in. But a diminishing wealth effect is only partly to blame.
The Idea of Reference
August 16, 2003
There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768.
The Affair of the Vanishing Content
August 16, 2003
"Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem properly."
Jamaican OverDrive - LCD's i LDC's
August 15, 2003
OverDrive - an e-commerce, software conversion and e-publishing applications leader - has just expanded an e-book technology centre by adding 200 e-book editors.
Deja Googled
August 14, 2003
The Internet may have started as the fervent brainchild of DARPA, the US defence agency - but it quickly evolved into a network of computers at the service of a community.
The Future of Electronic Publishing
August 14, 2003
UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is: "Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the last few months.
The In-Credible Web
August 14, 2003
People are conditioned to trust written words, not to mention images. "I read it in the paper" or "As seen on TV" are worn out but still effective clichÙs. The Internet combines both the written and the seen. It is both a textual and a visual (and audio) medium. Do people trust Internet content? Is the incredible Internet - credible?
The Economics of Spam
August 13, 2003
Tennessee resident K. C."Khan" Smith owes the internet service provider EarthLink $24 million. According to the CNN, last August he was slapped with a lawsuit accusing him of violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and numerous other state laws.
Maps of Cyberspace
August 13, 2003
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...
The Case of the Compressed Image
August 12, 2003
Forgent Networks from Texas wants to collect a royalty every time someone compresses an image using the JPEG algorithm. It urges third parties to negotiate with it separate licensing agreements.
The Universal Intuitive Interface
August 12, 2003
The history of technology is the history of interfaces - their successes and failures. The GUI (the Graphic User Interface) - which replaced cumbersome and unwieldy text-based interfaces (DOS) - became an integral part of the astounding success of the PC.
The Future of the Book
August 11, 2003
One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to issue this declaration:"The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely.
The Kidnapping Of Content
July 16, 2003
Latin kidnapped the word "plagion" from ancient Greek and it ended up in English as "plagiarism". It literally means "to kidnap" - most commonly, to misappropriate content and wrongly attribute it to oneself.
The Medium and the Message
July 15, 2003
A debate is raging in e-publishing circles: should content be encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods model) - or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a form of viral marketing (Seth Godin's "ideavirus")?
Internet Advertising - What Went Wrong?
Spielberg's new blockbuster, "Minority Report", is set in the year 2054. The future - at least according to a team of MIT futurologists, hired by the cinematic genius - is the captive of embarrassingly personalized and disturbingly intrusive, mostly outdoor, interactive advertising. |
