Here's a sample Blog

Hi there! I'm adding a new post as a demo. This is really cool!

Stupidity

From http://www.gandalf.it/stupid/stupid2.htm
Stupidity is brainless – it doesn’t need to think, get organized or plan ahead to generate a combined effect. The transfer and combination of intelligence is a much more complex process.

Stupid people can combine instantly into a super-stupid group or mass, while intelligent people are effective as a group only when they know each other well and are experienced in working together. The creation of well-tuned groups of people sharing intelligence can generate fairly powerful anti-stupidity forces, but (unlike stupidity bundling) they need organized planning and upkeep; and can lose a large part of their effectiveness by the infiltration of stupid people or unexpected bursts of stupidity in otherwise intelligent people.

“Save the Internet” is truly, truly, a big deal!

“Save the Internet” is truly, truly, a big deal!

http://www.myspace.com/savetheinternet

This is what it means to you:

Who owns the airwaves, that is to say, the bandwidth of broadcast-able frequencies for radio and TV? Not you and not me. How hard is it to start your own radio station, or get music that *you wrote* played on the air by an existing one, or even influence a radio station to simply play music that you like? The answer is: “it’s very hard”. The airwaves are sliced up and sold to businesses owned by investors, and the investors are exclusively out to increase their bank accounts (it’s the nature of investing). The “bosses” are basically non-human stock portfolios and such overseen by financial managers who only have to answer for their actions with numbers.

Who owns the cable broadcast space? Not you and not me. How hard is it to get a comment or program that *you wrote* out on the cable wire? The answer is: “it’s very hard”. Like radio and broadcast TV, the cable space is sliced up and sold to the highest bidders, and the bidder’s buying power comes from packaged blocks of money, impersonal entities managed for one reason: to get bigger (no matter what the cultural cost, within reason and regulation).

Who owns the printing presses? Who owns the newspaper, magazine, and book distribution channels (the hard copy bandwidth)? Not you and not me. Though not exactly sliced up and licensed like cable and airwaves, which are limited by physics, the hard copy “bandwidth” is controlled, or constrained, by economics and shipping logistics (in the free world, anyway). These constraints make it hard to publish on a large scale, and solving hard problems takes money. So, how hard is it to get something that *you wrote* into a world wide hard copy distribution? The answer is: “it’s very hard”. All major publishers are owned by the same type of impersonal chucks of money that drive radio and TV, and the chucks of money pressure the CEO’s into what content to print and distribute.

The reason I keep looking at these things from the angle of control through impersonal chucks of money is simple. The bigger the money chunk, the more impersonal it becomes, and the less it can be concerned with supporting diversity. The bottom line is that we end up with spoon fed, mass consumption, consultant based programming and publishing: a Wonder Bread like menu of choices and side dishes. Now that statement may be a little extreme, I admit, but my point is that the traditional broadcast arenas are constrained as far as what content is delivered. It can’t be denied. It’s the natural outcome of market pressures. There’s too much to risk, and too much to gain if a narrow and market tested road is followed. But the risk is money and the gain is money, not culture and not the exchange of ideas. It does not matter that your TV show was only viewed by one hundred people, but it touched each of those people to the very core. It doesn’t matter because your TV show never has had the chance to air in the first place.

So what? Maybe you don’t mind the limited programming we get from the traditional broadcast and publishing channels. Maybe you don’t mind the way it all works with the payola or whatever else is done that gets one show or book or song out there. Who cares? Well, we’re talking about the Internet here. The traditional broadcasting and publishing channels are lost. They have been carved up, regulated, lobbied and owned for some time. Though different owners may come and go, and the overall content and flavor may drift with the times, the basic business structure and driving forces remain constant. I’ve used these for contrast, and because that is what can become of the Internet if we don’t understand it.

The Internet has not yet been sold to the highest bidders. The government, universities, cable, and telephone companies have built the infrastructure, dug the ditches and laid the wire that it all zips around on, but they did not build the Internet. The content built the Internet. The surfers built the Internet. Because there were authors and surfers, and so many of them, the infrastructure was built to support them. And it was not one or two far-sighted companies that build the infrastructure, it was, and is, a business war zone, with companies getting eaten and born. There are no heroes here but the little people: the surfers and universities and techno-geeks that lay awake in the night as the possibilities unfolded in their minds and became reality. Certainly the large telecom/cable companies did not look up one day and say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be real cool if we built this thing where anyone can publish their ideas, opinions, art, and music to the whole world instantaneously? And why not let a few mom and pop businesses sell stuff world wide if they think they can? And why not also let them can keep in touch with the kids out it Wisconsin through free email?”

No, they looked up one day and said, “Holy Cow, we seem to own all the wires that this Internet thing runs on (through hostile takeovers or whatever other means). How can we get more control of the actual content and make more money?”

One last example: The early days of cable TV. When cable TV first became available, it was commercial free, and proudly so. There were no advertisers, and therefore the programming was free to offer “what the people wanted to watch” and pay for directly through subscription. The FCC could not regulate the content either, because it was not broadcast “over the air”. You could cuss and deliver R-rated content if you wanted, and never see a commercial. Wow. MTV played all the cool music regular radio ignored, and had no commercials. Wow. This is the way the Internet is now: it’s truly supported through subscription, by each one of us who pays a little chunk of money to an ISP. That’s the way cable TV was, until the infrastructure was big and solid enough and the market pressures big enough that the providers realized the subscription money model was small potatoes compared to the money that could be made with a commercial driven revenue model. Commercials appeared, and programming went the way of mass media. Niche programming virtually ceased. What does MTV play now? It plays exactly what you hear on the radio every single hour, whenever there is a break from the almost endless commercials.

Well, all that moralistic and qualitative jibber aside, there is a true bottom line here that we must not ignore. This bottom line needs to be protected by whatever means. This bottom line needs to be foremost in the minds of the masses, and a vigil set to keep watch. The bottom line applies exclusively and uniquely to the Internet, which makes it very special compared to the traditional broadcast and publishing venues.

That bottom line is this: As of now, *you* are able to publish, all by yourself, to the whole world. This is a BIG BIG BIG freedom. BIG. If the Internet is sliced up into fast lanes and sold, you will not be able to do that. It will disappear. It’s simple and inevitable. And you won’t be able to search out and surf to the little eclectic website you love, because it will no longer be there. It is the nature of the beast. And it will go down, it will be gone.

So fight to keep the subscription revenue model. Don’t let a big commercial revenue model slice up and kill what we have, because it will: it can’t help it. Keep the freedom of expression and free exchange of ideas that made the Internet what it is.

Support diversity and freedom in the Internet by whatever means.

~Keith
khollingshead@gmail.com

Blog about Blog

Blog. Interesting term. For this first blog, I think I will talk about my thoughts about blogs.

Living day to day in the internet publishing business, I get to think about electronic publishing quite a bit. Sometimes even philosophically. And truthfully, this blog is really more about publishing, or the access to it, than about the history or some other view of blogs, per se.

I remember when one of my friends bought one of the very first Apple Macintosh computers. I never even saw the machine, but I did see his weekly self-published newsletter, The Fayetteville Free Press. In it, he wrote all the content, made the graphics, gathered his own news, expressed his views in editorials. His disclaimer: "If you don't like it, get your own damn press". It was very popular, and he printed off a one or two page issue every so often, and dropped them off near the newspaper racks around town. We all loved it. It looked professional (Mac graphics as opposed to hand layouts like the rest of us would have to do if we wanted to do the same thing).

One thing that amazed me was that this looked like freedom. Compared to the hassle of actually getting a -real- newspaper press run, which kept all of us from being able to cost effectively express ourselves, this was amazing to me. I could see the potential of unlimited artistic and journalistic expression, and a new era about to unfold. If I was to be a writer, and I was debating that as a career, I was now unbridled, and my outlet of expression endless.

What more could you want, professional looking press and you didn't have to sell advertising if you didn't want to! Of course, my friend was a witty writer, which made people actually read the thing. That is something I think about these days: content. But back to the story. It seemed that the limits on getting creative writing published had just been broken wide open, all because of a little Macintosh.

And all of this when the ARPANET was still a little experiment linking a few university mainframes. IP addresses had not been invented. The phrase "Internet" had yet to be coined. I was impressed by the fact that my buddy could publish his thoughts in a few days of running around town with a backseat full of paper. Now, you can publish to the entire world in less than one second. Back then I may have dreamed of such a thing, but I certainly forgot about it before morning came. If my friend could have somehow miraculously dropped of his little paper in very town in the United States, he would have been famous! Most everyone would have at least heard of him and the paper. If only there was some way to do that! As it was, he was locally famous, and didn't seem to mind a bit.

Well, here we all are now, with the ability to publish our brains out, and all we have to do is get someone anywhere in the world to read it, because we can put it out there. I have to think, why would anyone read -my- little ranting, when there is so much out there? Well, I suppose it better be some interesting ranting. So we come back to content. My friend with the Mac would have had some readers even if his writing sucked for one simple reason: that's all that was out there to read. Tonight, I could search and read on the Internet all night long and never click the same link twice, and never leave my chair.

But I could miss that one (or more realistically, those million) articles out there that would really knock my socks off, simply because there is so much out there. So it seems to me that the freedom of unlimited publishing has a very hard and sad limit after all. There is only so much a guy or gal can sift through. Some of the best guerilla writers may still go unnoticed by the masses they seek to contact. Some aspiring genius talent will still take a look at this mess and give up before they start. We're back were we started, unable to publish because of the complexity of the process.

So what will be the "Macintosh", the new idea or technical thingy, that breaks these limits wide open for the next generation of expression?

As always, good content (aka writing) can get you a readership, if folks can find you in or on the net. And perhaps now there are less politics involved, meaning you may be able to get worldwide attention without the resources of a real publisher (or learning how to trick search engines to put your pages at the beginning of result lists). But the bottom line is we are still restrained, and life hasn't really changed all that much. In a way, we just have more tv channels all tuned in and turned on at the same time. And as humans, we are growing to cope and live with the noise.