Category: Random, But Interesting

Bruce Sterling, a prolific sci-fi author who I’ve had the honor to know since the birth of Wired, has a great riff on being a teenager in a rather dim future in the current print edition of New Scientist. It’s online, but only for a while, as the magazine seems hell bent on a subscription model. (Memo to New Scientist: Join the Point to Economy). From it:

It’s not that we can’t do it: it’s that all our social relations have been reified with a clunky intensity. They’re digitized! And the networking hardware and software that pervasively surround us are built and owned by evil, old, rich corporate people! Social-networking systems aren’t teenagers! These machines are METHODICALLY KILLING OUR SOULS! If you don’t count wall-graffiti (good old spray paint), we have no means to spontaneously express ourselves. We can’t “find ourselves” – the market’s already found us and filled us with map pins.

At our local mall, events-management sub-engines emit floods of locative data. So if Debbie and me sneak in there, looking for some private place to get horizontal, all the vidcams swivel our way. Then a rent-a-cop shows up. What next?

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I used to love reading Fortune magazine, back when I was a magazine guy trying (and failing) to build a business magazine empire. But while I still get the paper edition on my doorstep every two weeks, I’ve found the thing increasingly irritating. Why? Today, for no particular reason, it struck me. The content is gone, or more specifically, it’s buried under a blizzard of ads, and most irritatingly, “advertising features.” If this is the future of magazines, the future is bleak. From my experience in the business, these “features” are never welcomed by editors, they are pushed by sales people who are worried about making quota. Furthermore, the net per page on them is well below what traditional ads yield – like calla lilies choking a silt-shallowed lake, they are a sign of a permanent change in the landscape.

Of the 256 pages in last week’s Fortune (including the cover, but not including the ad-driven mini insert “bonus section”, which I didn’t bother to count (or read)), 108 or so were “normal ads” – full, half, or spread ads. But another 47 or so were advertorials – editorial material I really could care less about, written not by influential editors, but by marketing departments. If you add the two together – 108 plus 47 – you get 155. That leaves 101 pages for actual editorial. In other words, Fortune’s ad/edit ratio is 155/100, or roughly 40% edit to 60% ads. Of course, the magazine doesn’t look that crowded with ads, because a third of them are masquerading as editorial.

This stuff is nearly 50 pages – half again the amount as the real editorial. For every two pages of edit, I’m getting a page of marketing edit. Who reads this stuff? Why do people pay to run it? I looked back at a few recent issues of Fortune, and the same is true – it’s crammed with bad editorial.

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Mark Cuban likes to toss bombs, and this one I am sure has the PR folks at YouTube in full battle mode.

Udpate: YouTube has some counter news of its own, B2 reports.

I’ve been a follower of David Byrne’s site for quite some time, but it took a recent weekend jaunt to Vegas with an old pal to jar me into re-reading his stuff. And check this out – his prognostications on the future of music search:

Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks you want, wherever they live, on whomever’s site. Consumers don’t care who they buy them from if the interface is easy and intuitive. Soon enough iTunes consumers will find they have reached the 5th authorized player on their tracks and the frustration will set in when they can’t listen to the music they paid for. They’ll start to look elsewhere.

Byrne is riffing on SpiralFrog, an ad-supported model for free (but rather DRM crippled) downloads of music. In general, I find his site refreshing and worth the journey.

Wonder what the Picasa team is thinking? Chris, who’s a nice fellow, likes PhotoBucket.

Link.

With Base, Video, Mail, and other hosted services, it already feels like Google is in the hosting business, but Gary notes that Google has reserved http://www.googlehostedservices.com/. Innaresting.

WebWorkerDaily will track the world of working the way, well, most of us work these days. Congrats, Om.

Over on Om’s site, contributor Robert Young mulls the Fat Belly. I like the idea, it sums up nicely the space I think where businesses like FM live. I call it “mid tail” when pressed, but hey, Fat Belly is catchy. I’m going to guess this is a top Digg today….