Great Ideas Dept.: Build at RR Stations; Auerbach as manager

(My recent posts in The Heart of Innovation; I notice there happens to be one each from New York and Boston.)

"Building 'Living Space' around Railroad Stations" (August 21)

"Imagine that at each major stop along the Long Island Rail Road, communities of housing, dining and shopping were built above existing parking lots. Parking garages would be underneath the new buildings.

"Given the location, generally within walking distance of an existing shopping area, residents would have little need for a car. A railroad station would no longer be a stop along a route, but a destination in itself. Even better, each of these hubs would be connected along the main arteries of the line." John Patrick Winberry, in Newsday.


"How the great Celtics teams won: by Keeping It Simple" (August 10)

With the supercharged Celts in the news, we go back some for Bob Cousy's view of Red Auerbach's managerial style. "Red wasn't worried about X's and O's. He seldom is. His approach is to go to the heart of the problem and try to solve it."

Half of all media will be created by consumers?

The Boston Globe's "Business Filter" recently ran an item on the (perhaps slightly self-serving) prediction of an ambitious podcaster that soon, "50% of all media consumed will be created by other consumers."

Naaaaah! IMHO, I just don't believe that most people have enough of the time and skill necessary to create stuff that's good enough to interest anyone beyond their family and friends. It takes a Huge amount of the former and a pretty fair amount of the latter to produce something that might appeal to any meaningful chunk of the Public, doesn't it?

The Filter's Maura Welch printed another ratio a while back that sounded a lot more accurate, which, to roughly paraphrase -- meaning, if I remember correctly -- was that out of 100 websurfers, one creates content, nine comment or add to it somehow, and the other 90 watch. (Hunting around for this link, which was a good one...)

Just look at any message board, a mature technology that should be trusted to show long-term behavior, that shows the ratio of messengers to lurkers, or the number of replies to a topic vs. the number of views. This may be the bottom of the ladder content-wise, but the root is usually a good place to start looking at something. (Yes, ladders have roots, too, so there's nothing wrong with that metaphor.)

I got involved in a discussion somewhere recently that showed 5 entries to over 1000 views of that topic. And that's in a medium where it's possible to create and post a message real quick-like, not like the development time required for anything more evolved, like videos, blogs, etc.

(Of course, I'll admit I still have some trouble relating to the term "podcasting" -- to me, "pods" first reminds me of what the Body Snatchers invaded in. And this is no laughing matter: look what they did to poor Donald Sutherland!)

Gehry, Bricklin, Prototyping; & "Repurposing Content"

The idea of recycling material, if you think about it, is as old as the human habit of telling stories. So I'm hoping that's a good enough explanation for why I'm basically republishing this post I wrote recently for the Heart of Innovation. : - )

That's the new blog I've been managing and writing in for Idea Champions, and frankly my attention has been primarily there lately, which is how it should be. So I'll be cross-posting bits that seem appropriate here, after giving them a week or some decent interlude from their original publication.

Frank Gehry's Designing By Prototype

Columnist Dale Dauten wrote recently about some of the insights on creative thinking gained from observing the revolutionary architect in "The Sketches of Frank Gehry," Director Sydney Pollack's first documentary, new on DVD. "We get to learn how a genius works," he writes.

"Frank Gehry is the architect who did the curving, soaring metal walls of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, as well as Disney Hall in Los Angeles. He is the one who lets us walk into 'out of the box.'

"During his early Gehry spent his time hanging out with artists rather than fellow architects.

"He works by taking sheets of heavy paper and making models out of them. Not blocks, not wood or Styrofoam, but paper. When one of the models becomes an idea worth pursuing, it goes through an evolution, a series of models of increasing sophistication."

Dauten, taking the dare, as it were, starts creatively cross-referencing:

"If we wanted to apply his style to, say, working on a new sales presentation, we wouldn't use other sales presentations for ideas, we'd use novels or plays, movies, paintings . . . maybe even, I don't know, zoos, or airports. And not just one, but dozens. Some would become rough models, several going at once."

"Inside the brain of a genius lies lessons on generating & implementing ideas" by Dale Dauten, 5/6/07. (Gehry's "Dancing Building" in Prague. Uploaded on Flickr by astilly.)

Rapid Prototyping, Dan Bricklin, & "Serious Play"

This reminded me of another recent read on the power of creating with the method of "rapid prototyping," from Dan Bricklin's blog. Bricklin is of course the co-inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc (the original Excel, and the first "killer app" on what were then "personal computers"), among other programming breakthroughs in simplification.

(Continued...)

Delivering A Bouncing Baby Blog

I've recently had the ideal, exciting opportunity to manage a blog into existence for a company that I've been working with for a number of years. Talk about learning experiences, and on the more engaging end of the spectrum…

Idea Champions trains and consults on innovation, teamwork, etc., for companies like, GE, AT&T, and numerous other impressively-acronymed firms, and they'd wanted to start blogging for some time. But when your plate is too full some good food's bound to fall off, and then you usually wait until that dish is served again at a future meal.

Knowing they needed a little extra energy focused on a blog to get it over the top, I suggested I could author some pieces, but more importantly, spend regular time travelling the related roads of the blogosphere and Web to leave that all-important trail of linked breadcrumbs. Instead, they hired me to drive its creation and launch, too, and last week "The Heart of Innovation" had its debut.

Man, have I ever learned a lot -- both adding to what I'd already learned about blogging, and naturally, scads more. Software, especially in the interconnected world of online software, is practically infinite in its possibilities. So, especially with a new submedium like this, you wind up feeling like you're starting from scratch every single day.

Then there's the Team Startup factor: when five authors, including the company President, and a Web design-and-hosting firm are involved, you know it's going to take some time to get everyone on the same, frequently updated page.

Meanwhile, in my own little post factory here, it's inevitable that I'll talk more on a couple topics, and much to my delight because they're old favorites. The only difference is that now I have a further Legitimate Business Reason to write about the harnessing the practical power of innovation/ creativity/ ideation, and to write about writing, and publishing, via the always new "pushdown stack" of web-logging.

Related, here:
Planting Seeds of Synergy

The Voice & Videocams of the People

Having recently carped about the limitations of user-generated content, I gotta give it up for the phenomenon of all those Real People asking the Democratic candidates their questions in the "CNN/YouTube debates" the other night. (That YouTube link is to a page with the entire debate, clip by clip, featuring tiny, animated thumbnails of the questioners, and the candidates full-frame; and some might say, full of it in general.)

It was exciting, and you got the feeling that this is what democracy was really supposed to be about. If you missed it, the candidates were asked to raise their hands only once, unlike previous rounds where they were set up to look like schoolchildren.

Jon Stewart was complaining last night that the answers were the same old pablum, but I thought it looked like the too-many, too-soon candidates reacted differently than they do to the usual Respected TV Journalist. After all, the RTJ delivers his questons with this tremendous gravitas, his mighty brow furrowed, and, being human, the candidates respond in kind. (I’ll yield to the temptation to say Monkey See, Monkey Do, but I’m scratching my side as I do. After all, this is how humans learn.)

So, yes, this was a genuine Voice (and grainy image) of the People, and will probably set the mark for televised debates from here on. But my point’s never been that there’s anything wrong with giving us commoners a direct voice; it’s simply that you can’t build a website just with free content.

Note that the user-generated debate still had the Gatekeeper: CNN picked which of the thousands of video questions submitted actually got on the air (or rather, on the cable). It’s a good thing, too – can you imagine what kinds of amazing incomprehensibilities would have been heard if they’d picked the questions at random? Kind of like the variety of comments one finds in unmoderated forums.

And, of course, they also had 360 degrees of Anderson Cooper repeating, “Time… time,” all night, attempting to corral the gathering winds of the Looking Presidentials. Now there’s a tough job.

Small-time Internet radio granted reprieve @ 11th hour

Hopefully the imminent wiping out of small-time Internet radio will be avoided: while Sunday (7/15) is the deadine, with the emphasis on the “dead” part, for payments under the new and preposterous rates, Wired reports Thursday night that SoundExchange told Congress they “will not enforce the new royalty rates.”

“Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out,” Eliot Van Buskirk writes, while concluding the “news qualifies as a reprieve, but internet radio won't be truly saved until negotiations result in a workable royalty rate.”

Earlier (with the RAIN newsletter quoting the Hollywood Reporter), the House Commerce Committee formally called on the webcast and recording industries to meet “to discuss a settlement “that would provide Internet radio operators with a workable alternative to the proposed CRB rates scheduled to go into effect Sunday,” July 15th. Encouragingly, the Reporter reports that “the Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over the Internet.”

RAIN credits Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Commerce Committee's Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee. He “actively voiced concerns in Congress regarding the CRB's disastrous effects on the webcast industry,” calling Copyright Review Board’s damning decision “"a body blow to many nascent Internet radio broadcasters.”

I know from having lived in the Boston area for the last 10 years that Ed Markey is a Good Guy, a genuine champion for fairness and people’s rights. He’s been crusading for privacy rights for a long time, which is pretty forward-thinking.


Isn’t it unfortunate that these kinds of concerns seem “forward” thinking? Those are just the kind of conditions that you need laws for, you see; so this makes him a good “lawmaker.”

Ed Markey has “global warming” in his meta-tags, for cryin' out loud, and a YouTube video of him applauding “the expected passage of legislation that will make the most sweeping safety and regulatory changes to the Food and Drug Administration in years,” including a bill he helped write “to establish public databases of clinical trials and their results.” Need I say more?

Let’s hope he can work something out that’ll allow Web radio’s Lone Rangers, duos and other small partnerships a level playing field and a fair shot at a loyal following.

Valuing Trees, In Dollars and Sense

Appreciating the value of trees is not something I’m generally moved to assign a dollar value to.
This being mid-summer in New York’s verdant mid-Hudson valley, it’s usually because I’m looking for some shade, or just enjoying the wonderful effect on the human nervous system of the subtle sights and sounds when they interact with the wind.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see this post in the Boston Globe’s Business Filter, where that blog’s evergreen Maura Welch pointed to an Economist story, "Green Gold," on this particular branch of cost/benefit analysis.

“Following the trend of putting the 'eco' into economics,” she writes, “New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently did a tree census. The value of the city's nearly 600,000 trees? $122 million.”

Hizzoner the Mayor arrived at that number by adding up estimates for filtering pollution, saving on air conditioning, stemming storm-water run-off, and even for “aesthetic benefits” (which I think would be expressed more convincingly by my proposed "nervous system relief quotient," above. In order to get that one to fly, though, I should really acronymize it, i.e., as "the NSRQ"… but I won’t).

More “shady” numbers are offered in The Economist’s story: a sign spotted at a University of Texas construction site announces,

“The replacement value of this oak tree is $90,000.” The Economist writes, “The trees in American backyards may be worth far more than the cars in the front drive,” and that, “the Forest Service values the urban canopy in all of America at $14.3 billion.”

They summarize the value of these price-per-leaf exercises with, “By claiming that every $1 put into New York's trees returns $5.60 in benefits, (Bloomberg) may find it easier to galvanise New Yorkers to plant more and chop down fewer.”

You know, if that’s what it takes to get people to understand the truly incalculable worth of trees, then by all means, fire up that spreadsheet!

===
Ironically, I saw this Associated Press story on the same day, in the same "paper" (since this was online Globe) --

“Man disguised as tree robs bank”

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP), 7/8/07 --A weekend bank robbery involved multiple branches -- of the leafy variety.

According to police, a man with tree branches duct-taped to his head and torso walked into a Citizens Bank just as it opened Saturday morning and demanded cash from a teller. Police said the disguise was the most bizarre they'd ever seen.

"He really went out on a limb," Sgt. Ernie Goodno said Sunday.

Related, here:
15 Houseplants Can Reduce Indoor Pollution

The "Greenest" Cities

The Limitations of "Free" Content

So much of what you read about businesses and sites in the brave new world of Web 2.0/social media, etc., is about how great it is to get the faceless (or even the Facebooked) millions to create all your content for free. Here in this corner, though, it is still considered to be true that "you get what you pay for."

I was blog-surfing this morning and came across a small example -- a very small one -- of the drawbacks of purely user-generated content: in this case, the lack of simple proofreading, which brings down the perceived level of quality of the writing. That may not sound like any kind of big deal, but the point is it's one of those elements that gives your readers wings -- inducing them to fly away from your site.

The overall point here is that user-generated content requires an editorial layer, to make sure your featured material has a reasonably consistent level of quality.

I wrote the author in question, in this case in the blog of the Social Media Club, which otherwise seems to be a pretty smart commentator on the scene. The post was a live-blogged report from last Friday at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, where it is claimed a set of movers and shakers joined "a provocative new program to debate the future of the connected world."

I'm going to save* (see the comments) myself some time by pasting in here the related comment I made to them. To wit:

As a perfect illustration of this quote of Andrew Keen's in the piece:
>> “it is the job of mainstream media to find raw talent and polish it up”

...you might want to go back and do a copy edit of your live-blogged post. As of this writing, strange, misshapen artifacts lurk within, such as, "ologarchy," "acknolwedges," and "deomcratization."

Obviously just slips of the finger and still recognizable words, but just a couple of those have the power to distract a reader enough to lure them into taking off. It causes the reader to subconsciously question the intelligence of the author, blowing the equivalent of the theatrical "willing suspension of disbelief." (Not that I'm entertaining such judgmental thoughts, mind you -- since why else would I take the time to write you about it?)

Here's the main point: user-generated content is not free, because you've got to have editorial oversight, and that still means humans who are hopefully(!) being paid a living wage to make the user's stuff Ready For Primetime.

This is a significant but underreported issue with building social media based sites.

(That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Interface or Face To Face?

A long, slow wave of understanding has been coming on to me lately, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that the world has moved online. It’s a hunch that my own focus has to be on meeting, being engaged and working with people face to face -- even, and maybe especially, where the subject is the Internet or tech applications in general.

I love the Internet as the meta-tool, and as an evolving art form. It’s the printing press, the mailbox, the soapbox, the radio station, the portfolio, the demo, the business card you can open up and look inside, the jukebox, the movie theatre… I’ve been infatuated with computers and software for over 20 years, and still get that charge of enthusiasm from what they enable me to do.

But the real world is still like the whole grain: it's only full, complete and really works right when all the naturally occurring parts are there. In communicating with people, that includes tone of voice, touch, body language, hundreds of facial muscles that each convey meaning, scent, and there'll probably even turn out to be some other subtle facility that science will chance across in due time.

Web videoconferencing, etc., hasn't changed this, and media truly never will. (Although, as now, lots of people won't know or care about the difference.)

Not that this concept negates the value of the Web; it only puts it in its proper place, which is the printing press, the mailbox, the soapbox, the radio station…

The point is, that with this awesome Swiss Army knife of a tool being utilized to the fullest, there’s still an essential place for meeting and talking with people “in person” -- looking them in the eye, listening to and responding to what they say, on the spot. All in the service of being able to get a gut-level impression of the people, still the most reliable indicator when deciding if you want to work with them.

One meeting is worth a thousand e-mails.

(Okay, or a hundred Webcam video conferences.)

The peaceful, Human-powered lawn mower

Just in time for Spring: here’s one for the “appropriate tech” and “common sense” categories, specifically for the owners of “lawns”:

If you’re concerned about potentially catastrophic, globally-local climate change and your input to it, or if you’d just like a more peaceful “lawn solution” with the added benefit of light, invigorating exercise in the fresh air and sunlight (Nature’s own anti-depressants), consider the hand-powered mower.

I thought this would be the perfect time to say a few words in its praise, do a quickie search on it, and pop a couple relevant links in here for your mowing pleasure.

Search results for “hand powered mowers” (Google)

The persons at People Powered Machines have models by two or three different makers, comparison charts and all that. They say the new models are lightweight and easy to push, not like your grandfather’s models, and the simplest is well under $200. They're even upfront enough to admit this is a smaller-acreage solution, recommended "for lawns of 8000 square feet or less."

A list there makes for a strong array of selling points:

"What you can hear while mowing with a Reel Mower :"

• birds
• your children playing alongside you
• conversation
• phone ring
• phone not ring
• music
• books on tape
• your children fighting inside the house (ok, so the power mower might have it on ths one)
• your neighbors dinner party which you are not interrupting
• the ice cream truck!

(From ‘Why we only carry reel mowers’ on peoplepoweredmachines.com)
===
Related, on Rosswriting.com/FunPart :

It's a Loud, Loud World
Where the essayist asks why our space-age technology can’t deliver ‘’no-sweat, no-motor’ tools,‘ described as, ‘professional, hand-powered gardening tools that were so finally machined that they matched or bettered their fuel-driven counterparts? ’

Ernie Johnson wins another Emmy

Congratulations to Ernie Johnson, a real stand-up guy who, we just heard (on the teevee), has won another Emmy award, along with the whole TNT NBA halftime show. As we have previously noted, here is another example of when Nice Guys Finish First.

They've got some hard-working young fella filling in for him in the studio tonight with Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley (from left to right,) since Ernie's in New York getting the statue, and the veterans are not exactly making it easy on the kid. Hang in there, though, buddy -- I'd be intimidated, but you're doing jes' fine.

Related here:

TNT's NBA broadcast focuses on New Orleans today

Even The Young 'Get' Focus, It Turns Out

Finally, reassuring proof that even the currently reigning young generation, people in their twenties, understand the value of focus. All we ever hear is how in-the-moment and up-to-the-minute and always On and utterly distracted they all are, their attention flitting from one soundbite to the next and don’t stop but shop til they drop. But there are some encouraging signs that, of course, there's more to them.

Tracy McGrady, one of the two all-stars on the Houston Rockets, is 27 and a phenomenal player. He told the TV sideline reporter that in preparation for this first game of the playoffs, he’d turned everything Off.

No e-mail, no Blackberry, no texting, no phone calls, no ticket requests. His wife handled everything. He just wanted to completely focus on the game.

(In the game, he caught fire in the second half and the Rockets won; last night he had 31 points and 10 rebounds, and they won again. The picture's from NBA.com's story.)

Then there’s that great commercial where a video game version of a famous driver suddenly barks at the two kids on a couch playing the game, “C’mon, ya think I got where I am playing video games!?”

Okay, that's just one 20-something and one commercial; but the individual in question is an icon, and the other is a commercial on television -- in other words, practically scripture. So there’s some reason to hope.

And let’s hope so, because nothing of value is ever produced without someone willing to buckle down and focus on what's required to get it done. Sooner or later, the smart ones in every generation figure that out.

Crackberry Down!

Regarding last week’s post questioning the readiness of the Internet and it’s related ecosystems for Web-only applications:

I thought the 12-hour Blackberry outage Tuesday night illustrated my point in a perfect and timely fashion, although I’ll concede that its users/fans/chattels may find it difficult to find any redeeming qualities in the blackout. Blackberry users had comments (in the Reuters article in eWeek) like, “"I felt like my left arm had been amputated," and the story says that “one Wall Street analyst said she kept hitting her BlackBerry's version of a ‘refresh’ button in disbelief that the system could fail.”

It's looking like I won’t be able to resist quoting a criminal defense lawyer in New York named Charles Ross (though no relation), who said the outage left him feeling "vulnerable and uncomfortable," and that is caused him to miss breakfast! (Okay, “a breakfast appointment.” It only sounded like these people were being denied basic sustenance.)

Now it turns out that all it took was an insufficiently tested routine system upgrade (“to provide better optimization of the system's cache," according to RIM. Appropriate, perhaps, since that upgrade's sure to cost them some extra cash). That’s great – I’m sure if it was an all out criminal-hacker assault, they would have handled it much better.

So, now how do we feel about depending on the Web for even more of our most basic applications? Let me hasten to note that Web apps are a great idea in theory, and probably an inevitable evolution, but that we are (i.e., the Internet is) just not ready for it yet.

“RIM explains its BlackBerry outage
Cascading software and system problems caused interruption”
April 20, 2007

“A Night Without 'CrackBerry': Curse or Blessing?”
Reuters, by Franklin Paul, via eWeek - April 18

Related, here:
"Baaack it up!" * (Before the Botnets get it) 1/15/07

(...which featured this quote from a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist:
‘The war to make the Internet safe was lost long ago, and we need to figure out what to do now.”)

"A Working Simple System" - John Gall

Web-based apps vs. Verizon customer service

Lots of updated buzz recently on the newly dubbed “Webtop,” claimed to be the natural evolutionary successor to the electronic “desktop.” (In quotes because, remember, the original "desktop" is the one that your computer now covers.)

Google, Microsoft and many others imagine that you’d rather use a word processor running on their server farms than one installed on your own, once-“personal” computer. But as of this point in history, the highly touted promise of web-based applications just sounds like a Really Bad Idea (RBI).

(Excuse the interruption, but I’m informed that, especially since it’s the first week of the baseball season, we need to find another HTA -- High Tech Acronym -- for that.)

Think you’re dependent on an Internet connection now? What if you’ve got a thought that you want to get down right away, or a string of numbers you want to add up? Better lay in a supply of pens and yellow pads. If your thinking is as connected to words on paper/screens as mine is, you’re surely going to need them. We're just not there yet, or even very close.

Why, just take the recent case of injured blogger (and NBA hoop artist) Gilbert Arenas, who recently wrote about the hardships of being on the bench during his team’s stretch run to the playoffs. "I think the worst part was that my Internet connection wasn't acting right, so my video game session wasn't working. It kept kicking me offline. So, when you're injured, and video games [are] your life and you can't play, it just makes the injury that much worse."

This guy is a jillionaire, but he was as helpless as you or I when his Internet connection was down. What if he needed to do something important?

But let’s move on to more serious examples. Exhibit B: As it happens, this provides me with the perfect opportunity to rant about… I mean, comment, with oodles of cool, rational objectivity, on the truly dreadful state of Verizon’s DSL customer service.

In my recurring sideline as an indie tech support troubleshooter, I’ve had the delightful chance to spend hours on the phone with Verizon’s woefully under-trained and otherwise unprepared customer service people. And I mean sometimes hours per customer.

It is simply a nightmare. And I want to make it plain that I don’t blame the individual support reps; I’m sure they’re very bright people. Nor do I consider it a reflection on the country these folks are obviously sitting in, in the middle of the night on the other side of the world.

But it really does appear that Verizon, like other solely cost-conscious companies, is trying to do way too much too fast, following the custom of the software industry of working out all the bugs on the general population. One customer was given the most astonishing array of conflicting answers in a series of phone calls that you couldn’t believe they could possibly be from the same company. But sadly, they were.

Then there’s the language problem. I had one conversation where I explained the problem over and over, as clearly and slowly as I could (a no-connection error message dialog that would not go away, interpreting the Cancel button as meaning, “Try again!”), whereupon the support lady’s repeated response was, “Okay, can you explain what problem you are having?”

It was over a half an hour, what with on-hold time and all, before she decided the error message was coming from another department’s turf, and transferred me to someone else. That next rep was a very competent, clever person – her name was Rita, who I believe was sitting in Mexico – who I spent another hour on the line with, as she talked me through a series of command-line exercises.

When we were done, an hour and a half later, all was good – until the next time I rebooted, whereupon the exact same problem reappeared.

The New York Times’ David Pogue recently reprinted a surrealistic transcribed conversation from a Dell customer support call to that same country that I don’t want to blame, but where the people speak a version of English that most Americans find pretty much inscrutable. (That single post attracted 153 "yeah, me too, dammit!" comments.)

I really do feel sorry for those people, because for them this surely must qualify as the High-Paying Job From Hell. Because even when they probably only receive the same dollars per hour as someone starting at Borders Books in the U.S., (where, last I heard, they generously offer the minimum wage,) apparently that’s a lot of money over there. But imagine what they say about us when they’re released from their cube-farm stalls in the morning.

These travesties all come from companies that make their decisions based solely on the short term cost. But they are seriously failing to consider the Total Cost of (customer) Ownership. If the cable companies came up with a competitively priced offering, Verizon would be out of broadband contention in very short order, and deservedly so.

Time Out (for a good laugh)

(Okay, it may be a bit out of context for a tech/media/business 'blog, but this was just too good not to share, and easily linkable to boot.)
From funnytimes.com, "America's ad-free cartoon and humor newspaper," where they unfortunately don't give any further info on the artist; but the name looks like "horacek."

...but this is the Internet, isn't it?, and sure enough a quick search reveals that indeed the artist's name is Judy Horacek, she's Australian, and here's her own site.

Web apps: Are manageable expectations possible?

The people over at Virtual Ubiquity, an early-stage startup hard at work on a Web word processor, are demonstrating their baby at the Web Innovators Group event tonight, and I found their new blog while browsing the various presenters’ sites.

They say they’re “building the first real word processor for the web,” and as a longtime, fulltime user, trainer and envelope-pusher with such software, I had to leave them a comment on it. Never one to pass up a chance to “repurpose” some “content,” I thought I’d just quickly copy my comment here.

What got me going was this, from their blog (the product’s named Buzzword) --

“The development of a real word-processor - whether on the web or on a desktop - is obviously a much bigger task than just deploying a simple rich text editor. Buzzword goes beyond the basic rich formatting available in HTML or AJAX word-processors - we’re doing real-time pagination and layout, so that you will always know what your document will look like when printed. The result is what we think this is the first WYSIWYG word-processor on the web.

So I offered --
Good luck, and remember to deal sternly with Creeping Featureitis. Given that word processing has been widely used for 20 years means there are multimillions of what the clothing store Syms never fails to call “educated consumers.”

And each one of them (I’ll be as guilty as anybody, I’m sure,) will expect all their particular favorite functions to be there, and with the same keyboard shortcuts, too! When you consider how many hundreds of commands have been out there in WP, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Obviously, the biggest job will be deciding what Not to put in.

~~~
Although this is wicked-late notice, considering that it starts in four hours, the Web Innovators Group get-together is always quite the hot ticket; hosted by David Beisel of Masthead Venture Partners, it's even free. It's at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge at 6:30 (dir's).

I wouldn't even bring it up now if it wasn't for the fact that David generally puts one on every other month, so look for the next around May.

'The Internet Can't Handle Full-blown TV'

(Ed. Note: This is old "news" -- now backdated over a month! -- but it's stuck in the back of the mind as being one of the issues of larger import heard in the intervening time.)

The top man for TV technology with Google, which acquired YouTube last year, told a European cable group that the Internet was not designed for TV. Companies working on putting broadcast quality TV shows and movies through the Internet were told to rethink their plans.

"'The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,' Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress."

Because (to put it in a few nutshells that I gathered from the article):

"The data involved in one hour of video can equal the total in one year's worth of emails. ISPs are already investing heavily every year just to keep up. YouTube et al may bring the global network to its knees."

("One cable boss in Belgium said it was 'the best news of the day' to hear that Google could not scale for video.")

So, it's looking like we should expect the no-longer "coming" but very much happening TV-Internet convergence to ride on the rails of cable television for the near future, not on just the Internet as is. It'll be a blend, certainly, but with cable companies carrying a lot more of the load than you usually hear. Until the telcos invest heavily enough in fiber optic, that is, at which point all bets are again off.

And, of course, cable's particular capability for this job won't become apparent until worsening response time on the Net starts scoring prominently on the society wide Pain-In-The-Neck Register. Because it does seem, unfortunately, the little ever happens without things first going wrong in dramatic ways.

Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV
By Lucas van Grinsven, Reuters, Wed. Feb 7, 2007

Starbucks Hears the Music

Naturally, there’s no shortage of opinions that Starbucks has waded in over its head in the wrong pond by starting a record label.

From the AP story (3/13):
“Now, rather than basically lending the Starbucks brand to an album, the Los Angeles-based Hear Music label will sign its own artists and sell records through Starbucks stores and other retailers.”

Makes perfect sense to me: not only has sophisticated music been an essential ingredient in their presentation from the start, but they’ve been pushing individual artists and recordings in their stores for years, and, it’s always seemed, very successfully. (They're quoted as claiming music to be only 1% of their business.)

Of course it’s in character for them: the first part of their name, the leadoff sound, has always been "Star." And success in the music biz has always been about stars and hits – the money’s made with them, which supports the rest of the bets you place in constant search for winners.

Hear Music says they won’t build in any advantage over other retailers in distribution or prices. Music stores had better start serving top-drawer coffee, though: the coffeeshops put their product in front of 44 million customers per week. This should certainly expand their role as another Oprah.

(Thank goodness they seemed to have leveled off from the frenzy of store openings of years past – one of the funniest bits I ever saw in the Onion was about a Starbucks that opened in the restroom of an existing Starbucks. And it is true that a drive down Harvard Ave in Boston, for example, will make you feel like Bill Murray’s Groundhogged newsman. Sure smells good, though.)

Starbucks Launches Record Label
By CURT WOODWARD, AP, 3/13/07

Related, here:
Brick and mortar e-music & bookstores (2/12/07)

Payola settlement with Big Radio to boost indie artists

Ironically, on the same day as the bad news for smalltime music webcasters, the news that the FCC is going to force the four major radio broadcasters to play more indie labels and local artists, plus fine the broadcasting co.'s a few mil each.

Well, aah'll be! Never thought I'd see the day. It's not quite the Berlin Wall being torn down, but a bit similar in spirit.

The broadcasting companies involved are CBS Radio, Clear Channel, Entercom, and Citadel.

FCC Settles Payola Case with Giant Radio Firms
broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered, March 5, 2007, by Neda Ulaby

This being National Public Radio, you can also listen to the story, which I heard on my "terrestrial radio" (on WNYE) while driving to Kingston, NY, to meet with a couple companies.

The New York Times' article (by Jeff Leeds) makes the point that it was New York now-Governer Eliot Spitzer who got the ball rolling when he was Attorney General, which, along with his other taking on of the Bigs, got him his new job. The confessed Payolists are now paying "to resolve claims that they accepted cash and other incentives in exchange for playing songs," that they were "auctioning off the airwaves."

(See? They still are called "the airwaves.")

U.S. Copyright Royalty Board deep-6's music Webcasts?

from Wired yesterday, Sunday 3/4. Extracted, tinkered-with quotes (because it's more fun to take the extra step,) of the article in their Listening Post blogcolumn:

The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board (the who?) announced new royalty rates for webcasts, effective from 2006 to 2010. The board apparently simply endorsed the RIAA's proposal, which would force webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, estimated at over a penny an hour for each pair of receiving ears.

The Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN)'s math indicates the rate would render Internet radio unsustainable, or at the very least, more ad-laden than terrestrial radio(!) -- and that's before the songwriters' licenses are figured in. Even tiny sites would owe the minimum of $500 per channel per year...

Webcasters have a 15-day period to ask the CRB to rehear arguments.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/03/us_copyright_ro.html

Here, hear! Easy prediction: besides pulling the plug on smalltime and amateur webcasters, ciao to Web streams of so-called "terrestrial radio" (again, quite a misnomer since you don't stick a radio antenna in the ground; they transmit through what used to be called "the airwaves"). There was a period some years back when some similarly bone-headed ruling made many radio stations decide to take down their Web streams, which then went back up when whoever changed their mind.

"...more ad-laden than terrestrial radio"? Is that even possible? I can't listen to much commercial radio for its oversaturation of ads, a disproportional amount being loud rude ones.

But what'll happen to all those neat stations in iTunes?

Wired's article even has a picture of said Board being sworn in; starting today they'll be sworn at.

Update on the Webcast royalty decision

RAIN (the Radio And Internet Newsletter) quoted in the Wired article says the most successful medium-sized webcaster, Radio Paradise, would owe over 125% of total income. They and the littler guys are toast.

They figure AOL radio would owe $20 million for 2006 -- not only is it retroactive, but increases in each of the five years the ruling will cover.

But -- big surprise -- Clear Channel and the other bigs get off the hook with manageable dues, due to a wrinkle in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the infamous DMCA. (Folklore has it that there were some politics involved).

from the RAIN newsletter

(...Because here in America-As-Texas, we like everything BIG. And only big.)

===
The Radio Paradise people started a very passionate Save Internet Radio site, apparently over the weekend.