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MIT tech journal getting new publisher, overhaul – The Boston Globe

No surprise here. I disagree with the premise from "Mr. Magazine" — Samir Husni — that shifting the model off of print to online is a bad idea. MIT Technology Review has always had the potential to soar — and under Pontin it has scored some good covers — but  was screwed by its position as the MIT alumni magazine.

Dan Bricklin’s Software Garden series of podcasts on the legal aspects of open source and intellectual property are great, dense affairs with very smart people opining at length on the legal, moral, and practical issues surrounding IP, copyright, creative commons, and the other hot property issues of the day. Last night I listened to Dan talk with Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Press, publisher of the greatest library of technical titles ever.

O’Reilly made some very interesting insights, randomly, the one’s that stuck with me are:

• The web itself is the greatest open source platform ever
• The innovators don’t get rich — Tim Berners-Lee, Bricklin
• Open source components don’t make tons of money, but data sets do, e.g. Navtech provides the street maps behind Google Maps and Mapquest. Amazon the best database of information about books. Google is built on opensource components, so is Amazon, but both make their business on the data, not the tools per se
•  Piracy: yes, even books get pirated and O’Reilly’s titles especially. Tim doesn’t feel there’s a need to flip out over it though. He says a lot of the piracy happens in markets where the consumers couldn’t afford to buy the books anyway.
• Audience police — O’Reilly gets tipped off to pirate activity by its users
• The open economy pushes business growth.

I strongly recommend a listen to this one. Some good insights that explain a lot of the economic potential behind Open economics, the power of the niche, and how to be a for-profit in an open economy.

Finding myself with a 90-mile commute (each way) this week, I loaded up the iPod mini with some good stuff, popped new triple-As into the Belkin wireless thingy, and rolled down the fabled asphalt of Route 128 (aka Satan’s Highway) happy as could be.

Here’s what I listened to in the past 24 hours.

The Gillmor Gang: The August 18th edition, aka the "Silicon Valley Gang", guests were former-PC Week colleague Sam Whitmore, father of the Closet Deadhead podcast and editor of the Sam Whitmore Media Survey, along with Ron Bloom, the man (along with Adam Curry) behind Podshow, the startup best known for getting $8 million from Kleiner and Sequoia. Pretty good discussion on podcast revenue models, audience aggregation, the obligatory long-tail references, and snarkiness over MSM, incumbent publishers, and usual kvetching. Whitmore is most trenchant.

John Markoff: ITConversations presents a two-part show from the SDForum featuring John Markoff, NYT tech editor and author of "What the Dormouse Said", his excellent book about the origins of the PC industry and the confluence of pyschedelics, the counterculture, and geeks. Part one is John being John (funny, dry) and part two is a panel of the gods he profiles. Great cameo appearance in the audience by Doug Englebart. Read the book.

[random user insights: long commutes call for long podcasts. The three shows described above neatly fit the 90-mile drive time -- including the usual cell phone interruptions. I prefer stuff that fills the car for an hour or more. Two-minute podcasts suck. 15 minutes is fine. Diddling an iPod at 80 mph with bad eyesight is a recipe for an airbag in the face.]

[[second random user insight: someone needs to acquire The Learning Company, the guys who tape university professors and publish the results on CD and cassette, and move them to a podcast model. I would definitely pay for the right to listen to smart people. My radio is becoming more useless by the week. BBC World Update at 5 am may give me all I need to know about Darfur and Gaza, but every day? Please. Teach me something!]]

And further proof of the power of the medium colliding with the fetish of the niche — another great podcast I listened to recently was on the topic of "radonneuring" and "brevets" — the act of riding bicycles insanely long distances against the clock. Paul Guttenberg will tell you what you need to know about riding a cycle 1,200 kilometers (about 750 miles) in one go. This is my personal goal for 2006 – to complete the Boston-Montreal-Boston ride in order to qualify for the next Paris-Brest-Paris ride, the granddaddy of cycling events.

Fake Registration Push Draws Shrugs, Watchfulness

Understatement of the day department: "She says consumers seem to be upset both with the intrusiveness of registration questions and with the time it takes to register."

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Who wants to own content?

Great Jeff Jarvis posting ….

"In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution."

 

Hostway Blog Survey: Top-Line Results

 Constantine von Hoffman, blogger at Collateral Damage  points to this survey of what pisses off web users. Interestingly, it ain’t color and fonts, but registration, retarded navigation, pop-ups (really? shocking!), and the general annoyances which any rocket scientist with a copy of FrontPage figured out five years ago.

Pay for Play Is Already Here: Corante > Moore’s Lore >

Dana Blankenhorn takes exception to IDG CEO Pat Kenealy’s view of micropayments and paid content. 

Internet Advertiser Wakeup Day Petition

This ought to be fun — The Bugmenotters are calling for bogus registration at the top ten registered news sites:

"We … wish to demonstrate the pointless nature of forced web site registration schemes and the dubious demographic data they collect.

"On November 13th we will each register an account using fake details at one or more of these top 10 offending sites:  "

Via Boing Boing 

[note, Constantine von Hoffman points out the petition is "signed" by Tim Berners-Lee] 

Yesterday was the annual back-to-school IT day in my household. All laptops were called to the kitchen table for tuning and reconditioning before being sent off to college and prep school where they will decline and corrode into uselessness and entropy in the hands of their indifferent owners.

The infestation of my daughter’s Dell Latitude was breathtaking to behold. As I labored in regedit trying to hunt down some particularly pernicious trojan horse, I kept asking her: "What do you click on to get this stuff? Don’t you read anything? What are you downloading?"

An afternoon of Lavasoft and Norton Anti-Virus, turning off system restore, and booting into safe mode did nothing to improve my mood. Un-installing casinos, and such wonders as the ABI Direct Revenue network, Claria, and other "consumer advertising services" called into question the judgment, intelligence, and credulity of my teenagers.

The case of ABI — aka "A Better Internet", aka "Direct Revenue LLC" — is fascinating. Trying to uninstall this program from XP’s control panel popped open a … pop-up which directed me to a website (myPCtuneup.com)  where I could download the "uninstaller." There, with all expectations of having my pants pulled down, my bank account drained, and one of my kidney’s harvested, I was finally asked to comment on my reasons for ripping the thing out by the roots. My reply, unprintable of course, essentially wished on the company’s executive management team an infestation of colon cancer. Given their alleged penchant for filing cease-and-desist orders on anyone who characterizes them as malware, I should expect nothing less.

The saddest thing to read is a thread on a teen-ager site where ABI is discussed, and they too wonder if they are just going to descend into a further world of hurt by downloading the "uninstall" tool at myPCtuneup.com.

I checked out the biographies of the management team at Direct Revenue, wondering what type of people would run such a business. The resumes are a who’s who of dot.bomb all-stars. Razorfish, Dash, Agency.com, etc.. The company’s hiring of a privacy consultant and recently a Chief Privacy Officer belies some pressure on them to brush up their image. Perhaps the Gator->Claria renaming strategy is called for.

Well, at least I got some satisfaction out of the knowledge that other were so ticked off at Direct Revenue’s Aurora infestation that class action suits were being filed.

The bigger question is this: what marketer in their right mind would buy space on an adware network? Is there any calculation for the ill-will that accrues when someone like myself, in an afternoon of playing "whack-a-mole" sees a brand pop-up over and over? This mindless pursuit of impressions at all cost, even under the tenuous connection of "behavioral marketing" — the latest Orwellian spin by Claria et al over these types of networks — is the rotten core of advertising in general, the mindlessness that made Madison Avenue a synonym for venal deceit in the 60s, and is undermining the online publishing world at a rapid rate.

This targets the clueless, the trusting, and the helpless, gives rise to the phenomenon of people throwing away infested PCs rather than invest a day in restoring them back to purity.

This was the BBQ to end all BBQs

Cook’s Illustrated: Stirring up synergy to sell online food content

80,000 paid subscriptions at $24.94 per year …. $2 million in revenue and subs have doubled in the last year and a half. Given there is no advertising in Cook’s publishing model, there was no alternative.

Call this the Consumer Reports Model of paid content. So now we can add food to the magic triangle of Sex, Sports, and Stocks. Seems like the essential ur list of human needs.

Salon puts The Well on auction block | Tech News on ZDNet

Things were never the same at the WELL after the decline and fall of the "savage user interface", the command-line nav called "Picospan."

 Still the best "community" there ever was and will be.  Some of the personalities there were epic in their impact … Stewart Brand,

Tom Mandel, Howard Rheingold, Blair Newman, "Hinging," Jay Allison, Tex,  David Gans … and then figuring out a fellow Deadhead (John Lang Lorenz) lived only two floors above me in the same Boston apartment building …. The flaming of Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Time for his cyberporn scare story …

Moving to an HTML structure killed the place. Salon kept it propped up for a while, but I hung up on the WELL in 95 and never went back. I wonder if my old handle "dbuck" ever got scooped up.

Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits

Lots and lots of noise about paid models. Here Romensko notes the dropping of a paid model to the Atlanta Constitution’s sports section. (the old rule of thumb was only three types of content could thrive behind the cost wall: sports, sex, and stocks). Lots of grumbling among ESPN users about formerly free stuff vanishing behind the sub wall. Doug Kay at ITConversations  has a long essay about public radio and the donation-model.

venturewire exclusives

Colin Crawford notes with some awe the series A investment by Kleiner and Sequoia, the ne plus ultra names in "smart money"  in Adam Curry’s PodShow (which is producing Castblaster and putting together a blog ad network). Aggregator and downloader Odeo also getting some money from Charles River — also known for being smart money (and more or less allergic to dot.com frothiness).

I’ve been chipping away at a podcast business plan for CXO — a sponsor model. These are early days in podcast advertising — so far no light bulbs are going off over my head but the marketers seem eager to get aboard. 

TechTarget First-half Revenue Increases 58% on Strong Gains Throughout Business

Private but reporting results — an offering in the offing? 

PrintMedia (8/1/05): CMP Strengthens Its Brands

Case study of CMP’s webcasting business via ON24 

Online Ad Spend to Climb Through 2010

"Online advertising continues to grow. A forecast from JupiterResearch says online ad spending will reach $18.9 billion in 2010, double 2004′s expenditure.

"Each category of Internet advertising will see growth. Display will increase by seven percent in five years; classifieds will grow about 10 percent to $4.1 billion; and rich and streaming media spending will grow to nearly $4.5 billion by 2010.

"The forecast said search engine advertising will generate more revenue than standard display advertising by 2010. But David Card, VP and research director at JupiterResearch, doesn’t expect advertising in search to rob budgets from other categories. "I think a lot of it is incremental spending, there’s a lot of talk that people are shifting TV budgets, but that’s not search. If anything, it’s coming from direct marketing budgets," said Card. "[Search has] really proven itself as cost effective, measurable direct marketing,"

"Findings from the 2005 Online Advertising Forecast report were presented this week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2005."

KnowledgeStorm to Launch Vertical Search

[full disclosure, CXO is a KnowledgeStorm partner]

Lot of discussion over the past two years about vertical search — focusing search on a niche or market — I know of at least one effort to go after the IT search space, IT.com. Now Knowledgestorm and the Maynard Mass. SEO/SEM firm, Inceptor, launch KnowIT.com

My daughter’s godfather, Charlie Clapp, stopped by Saturday night, half-way through his annual bicycle ride across the state from Sturbridge to Provincetown, raising money to fight cancer as a rider in the Pan-Mass Challenge, the first and premier charity ride in the country.

I asked if I could escort him from Cotuit to the service roads where he could rejoin the riders on the second half of their ride, and he encouraged me to try to keep up (Charlie won a silver medal in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in the U.S. eight with coxswain). So we hit the road at 6:30 am and rode side by side chatting until the service roads, a roller-coaster route that parallels Route 6 – the Mid-Cape Highway. A few of the 3,500 cyclists were streaming by, so we tucked ourselves into the flow and began riding with a little more competitiveness — something about another bicyclist up the road just gets the competitive juices flowing.

Being 6’5", Charlie is a very good person to ride behind, sort of a human air-dam that just sucks along a nice envelope of air-resistance. Before long we were up to 35 kph (I normally ride alone at 29 to 30 kph) and flying past the other riders.

 The best part of the ride was on route 6A, a very scenic two-lane road along the northside of Cape Cod. Ordinarily this is a route to avoid at all costs during the summer, but with police waving us through intersections and the entire east-bound lane to ourselves, it was the closest I’ll ever come to the feeling of riding in the Tour de France when bicycles actually own the road and don’t have to fight for a tiny sliver of it along the pot-holed verge.

 We cranked through the villages of West Barnstable, Cummaquid, Yarmouthport and Dennis, flying just inside of the yellow line and drafting behind a support van from the PMC organization. I parted company with Charlie at Nickerson State Park in Brewster, stopping to wish him well, refill my water bottle and marvel at the sea of cyclists gathered to raise more than $21 million in a single day for the Dana Farber Cancer Insitute in Boston (an astonishing 95% of the funds raise are handed over, unencumbered, to the hospital, ever year).

With some regret I left the caravan and headed back another 50 km to Cotuit, by myself into a headwind. Next year I’ll get my act together early and register for the entire ride.

I didn’t feel sorry for myself during the ride home though. It was very humbling to ride behind Charlie, who did this year’s ride — his 15th — in memory of his mom, Eleanor Clapp, who passed away in June. Charlie rode wearing a t-shirt with his favorite picture of her on his back.

To support Charlie and the cause, you can click on https://www.pmc.org/egifts/ and enter his rider’s number  CC0005.

Ziff Davis Media : Press Release 

Internet Sites

* Increased total traffic more than 64% versus prior year

* Produced 45% more eSeminars versus year ago

* Announced the launch of the Ziff Davis Web Buyer’s Guide which provides IT buyers and sellers with complete product listings and decision-making tools to help users make the best purchasing decisions

* Held the first-ever Small/Medium Business (SMB) Solutions virtual trade show which focused on the most pressing IT issues facing the SMB market