Category: General

Now, for a socially aspiring middle class family, it wasn’t quite the thing to have a truck parked in front of their house marked “Kensington W.C. Cleaning” or “Brompton Crapper Swabout,” broadcasting the messages: (a) we don’t have staff, and (b) our W.C. is dirty. So some enterprising toilet cleaner stencilled “Telephone Sanitizing” on the side of his truck. Carrying positive associations of modernity (telephones were new and expensive) and of fastidious cleanliness (even our telephones are sanitary) the discreetly marked trucks were well-received by housewives and the euphemism quickly became universal in the trade. – Trevor Blackwell

“They are the un-Apple or un-Amazon, two companies who never say anything without offering something to buy.” – Dave Winer

This is the most important and prescient thing I’ve read in quite a while.

Speak When You Have Something to Sell.

If memory serves – this point is why my favorite Evil Genius hasn’t published as much as he once has.

Same is true – to a degree – here.

After a decade with Speakeasy, I switched to Qwest for my DSL.

From what I understand, Qwest has fiber running to the my block with copper the house. Additionally as I understand – this switch from copper to fiber means Qwest is no longer compelled to make bandwidth available to resellers like Speakeasy.

The copper turns into WiFi once it gets inside my house, then down the basement to me. I’ve got sneaking suspicion that I could squeak out a few more Mbs and shorten the ping times by moving the phone jack downstairs and running ethernet to my primary machine.

The first few days, the throughputs were highly erratic but everything seems to have stabilized quite nicely.

– John Scalzi

– Shmuel

I’ve got a long bet that WiFi will take over our telecom. Voice, video, everything.

It’s cheap, it’s unlicensed, it’s nearly ubiquitious and both 802.11[a-z] and the wired broadband to those wireless points is getting faster and faster.

For years now I’ve been a fan of T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home program where calls originating within a WiFi network don’t count against the monthly minute plan. I found this program to have an interesting side-effect:

“Additionally, if I’m not within a wifi network, I’m probably driving or otherwise not able to talk.”

Cringely says this mixed network technology is why AT&T acquired T-Mobile.

“Clever use of other people’s bandwidth can add an order of magnitude to AT&T’s connectivity and backhaul for no marginal price at all. Suddenly the network expands, coverage gaps go away, yet backhaul bandwidth actually drops. Look for it.” – Cringely

Emphasis mine.

“The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media program is expected to: Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million ‘likes’ on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi.“

“It achieved all the false goals and failed to achieve the only legitimate one.”– Bob Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman/Lewis Advertising

Hat tip Dan Woychick.

“In fact, to the extend that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use in trying to predict it – it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence” – Saras D. Sarasvathy

“The instant somebody goes from playing their guitar in the bedroom and at parties to wanting to make money off of it, they are no longer an artist, but an entrepreneur and a business owner. The same rules apply to them as to every other entrepreneur on the planet: They need to provide something which somebody else is prepared to pay for.” – Rick Falkvinge

Today, the NYTimes announced their digital subscription offering.

In reading through the 6 major bullet-points describing the subscription offering, my initial reactions as a reader are:

1. This sounds hard and complicated.
2. Can I become a home delivery subscriber and opt out of receiving the paper?

Earlier this week, Elko pointed me to NYTimes Chrome – a non-scrolling, HTML5 implementation of NYTimes’ top news…that looks just like the print edition. Only much, much smaller and harder to both read and navigate.

Take a look at this article: 2 columns spread across multiple pages. We solved this interaction problem thousands of years ago.

The problem I don’t see the NYTimes solving in either of these efforts is relevance, clarity, expertise, and guidance.

I don’t have time or inclination to read every section head, let alone every article. What would a presentation look like that only gave me the stories, coverage, and writers that I find most compelling.

Yes – let me filter and block stories from ever being shown to me.

Today, here’s how I solve this problem:

1. Not read NYTimes.
2. Wait for someone I trust and respect to point me to a NYTimes story.

“if it’s important, it will find me.”

What if the NYTimes knew me well enough to be that trusted and respected link source – by not giving me everything – just the most compelling & relevant.

For example – take a look at amazon.com, I’m assuming the sections below the big Kindle ad don’t look much like this to you.

I’m assuming our pages look different because Amazon discovered that promoting different items to different individuals increased overall sales.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ve grown weary of the Fukushima story.

To me that sounds like a compelling, useful, differentiating, chargeable news offering.

Elsewhere:

“They’re not offering anything to readers other than the Times’ survival, and they’re not even explicit about that”. – Dave Winer

“This paywall is anything but simple, with dozens of different variables for consumers to try to understand… If you’re already paying $15 every four weeks to have full access to the website, why on earth would you pay extra just to be able to read the paper on its own dedicated app rather than in Safari? I, for one, prefer the experience of reading nytimes.com on the web on my iPad, rather than reading an iPad app which has no search, no links, no archives, no social recommendations, etc etc. If the NYT wanted to kill any incentive to read and develop its iPad app, it’s going about it the right way.” – Felix Salmon

“Now, there are those who will tell you that your business model couldn’t be more doomed if you opened a chain of in-temple money changers, which is no doubt why you wanted to try it out on Canadians before attempting any human testing.” – Marcus Carab

“The NYT arguably will be running fewer cliched or predictable or easily substitutable articles. It should make the paper less comprehensive, but sharper at the edges..” – Tyler Cowen

“I don’t have the patience for convoluted overpriced schemes like this. I’ve had it with ultimatums. This is just one more lopsided End User License Agreement. And it’s one that I can walk away from, so I’m walkin’.” – Richard Fink

Update 19 Mar 2011:
I’m intrigued with this notion of charging those whose world-view requires the NYTimes and no one else. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the incentives to migrate into that world-view don’t seem very strong.

“It should be as easy-to-install and easy-to-use as WordPress — easier, actually, would be better. Not-requiring a database at all would be awesome. To be successful, like WordPress it would probably have to be done in PHP, since PHP remains the commonly-installed scripting system on shared webservers.” – Brent Simmons

I’m still using WordPress personally, and I still recommend it professionally. I do great deal of new site prototyping in WordPress (even if the final site isn’t). Even with the flexibility of custom post types, a fairly robust plug-in architecture, and the option of the multi-user network – I long for the lean, mean WordPress of 2004.

Or at least a viable competitor for a simple weblog in 2011.

I agree with Brent Simmons that this hypothetical system needs to have a 5-minute or less setup time. I don’t believe it should be in PHP.

I think client-side Javascript – it’s even more prevalent than PHP

For a while now I’ve been tracking Aaron Quint’s work on using sammy.js & CouchDB to build out web applications. While it’s not as technically mature as I’d like (nor do I have a sandbox up) it’s very compelling. Especially with CouchDB’s baked in versioning, feeds, and replication.