RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Housing pinch?

Housing pinch?

Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, may need a "substantial" capital injection to move past its accounting problems after a multi-billion dollar restatement of earnings. Basically, the company, which packages Federally backed mortgages into financial portfolios (which is not to say that the Feds back Freddie Mac), has a lot less money than we thought and, therefore, a lot less financial flexibility, which could reduce liquidity in the mortgage industry. Here is the full report.

As I've written before, this is the kind of prick that could take the steam out of the housing market. If people see the value of their homes stop rising, they'll be less inclined to borrow, which is all that keeps the economy growing at this point.

Platforms and strategy

Platforms and strategy

Scott Loftesness makes an astute comment about the marketing of "platforms" in the age of Net services:

Companies that envision themselves as platforms have to evangelize very effectively. It's not about constructing moats around castles, it's about throwing great parties and inviting the brightest you can find!

The party is an apt analogy, because making a platform, like the PayPal services, the Google API, Amazon services or other tools that can be used to plug into a constellation of services, is about engagement of the intellect. You have to think about what you can do with these tools. They don't simply function, they have to be put into context to be useful, and that requires a lot of give and take with creative folks.

*200 words on the Net*

200 words on the Net

Copydesk asked me a simple question and gave me two hundred words to answer. Good question: "What do you think is wrong with the Internet, and what can be done to make it better?" I took a bit more than 200 words....

The IRS does advertising....

The IRS does advertising....

We received a letter today from the Internal Revenue Service, informing us that thanks to Congress and President George W. Bush, "We are pleased to inform you.... This new law provides broad-based tax relief, including a $400 increase in the child tax credit for 2003...."

This is another example of malfeasance by the Bush Administration, not because the Federal government is borrowing from future generations (more about that in a moment), but because the letter is a political advertisement for the Bush campaign. It doesn't simply inform taxpayers about a change in rates, it spins the very debatable point that this is a "broad-based" form of tax relief.

See my whole posting at Correspondences.org.

Writing Day....

Writing Day....

I've been working all week to squeeze out a day for working on my Emergentism essay, so little to post today other than:

President Bush is running the country like Enron. Fiscal responsibility, my ass. Deficits are bad, constantly raising them is worse. Any "fiscal stimulus" resulting from the tax cuts is going to be pocketed and protected, not reinvested.

Yahoo! must look like Enron from the inside, what with the CEO selling every share he exercised this week.

*Looking for a lawyer....*

Looking for a lawyer....

I've received email from a spammer with an interesting twist. Claiming to have recieved a "Word-of-Mouth Report" from someone about me, the site is fulfilling its "moral obligation" to inform me that they are collecting this information. Clicking through to the site reveals nothing about the nature of this report, but I can pay to see it. Even though the site is ostensibly located in the Philippines, the site is directed to users in the United States.

If you try to have your email address removed, the company says it will still collect these reports about you and that you have to agree to forfeit "any rights that you may or may not have to be informed by us via email in the event that a report is submitted about you or a user searches for reports about you."

The spirit of privacy and data collection laws in the United States is that people should have the right to review information collected about them and contest incorrect information. We should not be required to sacrifice any rights to get off a mailing list.

This is reprehensible abuse of identity and I'd like to find a lawyer to help take the guy behind it to court. His name is Peter Kestler and here is what Whois tells us about him:

Domain ID:D96742797-LROR
Domain Name:WORD-OF-MOUTH.ORG
Created On:19-Apr-2003 07:12:03 UTC
Last Updated On:17-Jul-2003 12:03:06 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Apr-2004 07:12:03 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:R86-LROR
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:DDDD-0001016963
Registrant Name:PETER KESTLER
Registrant Organization:WORD-OF-MOUTH.ORG
Registrant Street1:SIVERANO MIRABUENO, STO. NINO
Registrant City:UPPER PIEDAD, TORIL, DAVAO CITY
Registrant State/Province:DAVAO DEL NORTE
Registrant Postal Code:8000
Registrant Country:PH
Registrant Phone:+1.639185653118
Registrant Email:WORD-OF-MOUTH.ORG@ATTGLOBAL.NET

Prison for fileswappers -- Dumbest...

Prison for fileswappers -- Dumbest idea ever

As though the prisons aren't already full of poor schlubs who had a small amount of marijuana and aren't rehabilitated but made into hardened criminals, now Rep. John Conyers (D. - Mich.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D. - Calif.) have introduced legislation that would make fileswapping a felony punishable by up to five years prison time and a quarter-million dollar fine. Stupid. Criminal. I'm not saying that P2P users are criminally stupid, but that these Congressmen are. They've taken the Recording Industry Association of America's private crusade against fileswappers, which at least has the slim virtue of not criminalizing filesharing, and made it an issue of state police power. The problem is that the media industry is not adapting to changing market conditions, not that illegal copying is destroying the industry. Jail time for fileswapping? Pure damned idiocy.

IT recovery -- I just...

IT recovery -- I just don't see it

As I've written here before, most managers I talk to in IT are saying that they are planning for 2003 to be another down year and that, when it returns, growth will never be the same as it was in the 1990s because the market is largely saturated in the United States, Europe and developed parts of Asia. Future growth in IT will come at the low-end, as it did in the automotive industry after most Americans had one or two cars in their household. When Datsun (now Nissan) and Toyota came along, it transformed an industry into a tightly bound margin that is largely about replacement sales based on style. Apple gets this intuitively, as it is clearly the Porsche of PCs. Dell is the monster of the industry, like General Motors, etc., etc.

I'm a Porsche guy when it comes to PCs. I've spent more on IT in the past eight years than I have on the car I bought eight years ago. Of course, I only have 46,000 miles on a 1995 Mustang GT convertible while I have put many thousands of hours in on my PCs and the broadband networks I use.

Yesterday's earnings news bears this out. Intel sales were up, but only eight percent (compared to the late 1990s when 20+ percent growth was "normal") its earnings were the result of earlier cost-cutting much more than increased sales. Yet, Intel CFO Andy Bryant went out of his way to say he saw no evidence of an IT recovery.

Motorola's semiconductor sales were down 11 percent year over year. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, the handset alliance, had better sales, but its losses widened and it cautioned there will be no profits this year. It shipped 34 percent more phones, but basically it is giving them away because revenues rose by only 18 percent.

No, I just don't see anything like a recovery to old levels. Instead, we'll see a recovery to a new low level of growth. Based on that, the current P/E ratios, which are still well above historic averages, are unsupportable.

Joining the Lessig/Dean debate

Joining the Lessig/Dean debate

Here's my posting to the comments on Larry Lessig's blog, which is being guest-blogged by presidential candidate Howard Dean....

I'm pleased to see the Governor Dean and his campaign engaged so deeply in dialog, albeit Richard Bennett can be reductive and annoying. The debate here is incredibly productive.

The problem with media conglomeration isn't that there is a black and white choice between being ridden rough-shod by Rupert Murdoch or shutting down the "Murdoch empire," but that we find a way to create balance in the media so that different voices can be heard. Fox News doesn't just deliver facts we decide on, it preaches constantly about the right way to think. The same it true with every publication, though many media folks don't want to believe that. Chris Hedges' book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, talks accurately about how in every war people make the mistake of taking sides instead of looking at war for what it is -- horrible -- and judging whether war and the attendant suffering is necessary.

Governor Dean clearly does not wish to neuter the United States military, but he also doesn't want to put young Americans in harm's way without very good reasons. The Iraq threat was blown out of proportion all along to create a war psychology in the United States. It was portrayed as another "quick war" even though it was clear all along that entering the Middle East is a long-term and probably losing proposition if military force is your major bargaining chit. The question of buying uranium was just one exaggeration and we should continue to explore the extent of the lies presented to the public to justify this action, as well as the constant blurring of the lines between civilian and military action by the Bush Administration.

Liberia, on the other hand, is a relatively simple question, since even small forces have stopped violence in many African conflicts, such as Cote d' Ivoire (about 1,500 French commandos, who took few or no casualties), which is right next door to Liberia. Simply raising the stakes in Liberia so that the thugs are confronted with superior firepower is a proven solution to gang violence in Africa. That doesn't make the question of sending American troops any easier, especially in light of the Somalian campaign, but it does expose the calculation the Bush Administration made in Iraq as plainly political and opportunistic.

The really important question for me in this act of political blogging by Governor Dean is whether it is a sustained effort that will continue after the election is over? A dialog like this, trolls and all, is a hell of a lot more important to democracy than whether any of us, including the Governor, is right or wrong on a particular subject. We're supposed to disagree and find compromises we can all live with; if we all lived according to one party's rules it would not be the United States anymore. It's important that we are talking as Americans with a would-be president and it will be refreshing if a President Dean, should it work out that way, be engaged with us throughout his administration. Transparency in American politics has vanished in a cloud of 9/11-inspired secrecy and we need it back.

Goodbye, Good Riddance

Goodbye, Good Riddance

 
"I conned your ass," an unapologetic Fleischer taunted on his final day as President Bush' press secretary.

Who can make a decision about anything, business or civic, when the chief communicator for the president says things like this: "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

This is like saying: "The Tooth Fairy? You say she doesn't exist -- show her to me and I'll agree she doesn't exist." Good riddance, Ari. See you on Fox News.

Greenspan, the confusing Oracle

Greenspan, the confusing Oracle

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is making his semiannual appearance before Congress. On the one hand, he says he'll keep rates low for a long time, if necessary, indicating that he has no fear of inflation (and this guy is an inflation hawk), while simultaneously dismissing fears of deflation in the face of increasing business activity.

Here's the Chairman on the general state of things (see if you can find the good news the market guy I'll quote in a moment is crowing about): "To be sure, industrial production does appear to have stabilized in recent weeks after months of declines. Consumer spending has held up reasonably well, and activity in housing markets continues strong. But incoming data on employment and aggregate output remain mixed. A pervasive sense of caution reflecting, in part, the aftermath of corporate governance scandals appears to have left businesses focused on strengthening their balance sheets and, to date, reluctant to ramp up significantly their hiring and spending."

A few weeks of stability do not a recovery make, yet according to this CBS Marketwatch article: "Greenspan sees economy on cusp of breakout," said Tony Crescenzi, chief bond market analyst for Miller Tabak. [Let me hasten to remind you that crack-smoking weasels are everywhere.]

Greenspan goes on to say nothing about deflation, even though he's keep rates low to shore up the fact that prices are falling generally, lowering the incentive for business to make capital investments. He does mention deflation in the context of Japan, but only says Japan and Europe will benefit from a global recovery -- if Japan and Europe aren't part of the recovery, what "global" recovery is he talking about? Is there a Martian economy that is recovering across the board.

It's all very confusing. But, like the oracle at Delphi, you always have to wait and see wait the indistinct codes uttered by Greenspan really mean -- and then, only in retrospect.

I think that what Greenspan is doing is hedging, because the record deficits being run up by the Bush Administration are anti-Keynesian, flowing not to the consumer who might spend some of the projected trillion dollar hole Bush will dig between now and the 2003 election, but to the rich, who are playing it safe, just like the rest of us and pocketing the boondoggle. The economy is poised for higher "normal" unemployment and ever-tightening budgets for the poorest third of the population, which is bad for consumer spending in the short term and long run.

Low Rates, Usually Good for...

Low Rates, Usually Good for Banks, May Hurt This Time

The Financial Times is reporting that, despite good performance this quarter by Citigroup and Bank of America, low interest rates may hurt the commercial banking business in coming quarters. Consumer banking has been driving a large part of the recovery in financial services. This could take the verve out of the bulls, since financial services is one of the bright spots in the economy right now. From the FT (which is subscription protected):

"It wouldn't surprise me to see companies start talking about some pressure on the net interest margins," said Henry McVey, who follows large banks for Morgan Stanley. In other areas, Mr McVey said: "We think trading results will be robust again this quarter and we should continue to see some improvement in commercial credit [quality], particularly at names such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase."

What Good Does Overture Do...

What Good Does Overture Do Yahoo?

Yahoo! is shelling out $1.63 billion to buy Overture, the search listing placement broker that competes profitably with Google's search listing business. It also bought Inktomi recently. Now, supposedly all this makes some competitive sense for Yahoo! which is feeling threatened by Google. But, except for Google News, which is not a customized home page

Yet, one must wonder how Overture customers MSN, Lycos, AltaVista and InfoSpace are going to feel about subsidizing the business of their largest portal rival. It looks to me like Yahoo! may soon have an unprofitable search listing business. It's overseas business serves sites that, among other things, compete with Yahoo!. It seems like a great way to drive your customers into the arms of your competition, because Google is sticking with search and only search. All this really does, if you ask me, is set Google up for a successful IPO. And that's the last thing it needs, as it already prints money every quarter.

Terrestrial TV on your handset

Terrestrial TV on your handset

NEC has begun talking about a handset that combines telephone capabilities with the ability to receive the same signals in the UHF band a television set does. The service is slated to appear in Tokyo at the end of the year.

In related news SK Telecom of South Korea is introducing a ring tone that drives away mosquitos for just $2.55 cents (about three times the usual price of a ring tone, but presumably you don't get tired of this one because it is inaudible to humans). Which begs the line: "Will this phone be buggy?" The Financial Times reports the idea may not work in practice, making this a "phony" offer in the truest sense.

The TV idea is a sort of no-brainer from a technical perspective -- phones simply haven't had a screen before. But it also poses an interesting question that will be answered in consumer usage about whether anyone really wants to watch TV anymore. I have no doubt that in times of crisis, people will tune their phones to broadcast news, or that sports will be a draw, but regular viewing of the same old crap on TV? Who knows?

When mascots collide

When mascots collide

If this hall of shame describing the antics of sports mascots doesn't make you laugh you have no soul. My favorite moment:

September 1997 -- While waiting inside a zamboni machine as part of an unveiling ceremony before the Carolina Hurricanes' first preseason game, the person playing the mascot Stormy has a major anxiety attack, never comes out and is taken to the hospital.

Don't mess with the intelligence...

Don't mess with the intelligence guys

When the president starts blaming the CIA, the tables start to turn. It is a grave mistake for politicians, who clearly made a political decision to pursue a war with Iraq, to try to shunt the blame off onto career spooks, who take such things badly. We're at the point where, during Watergate, the Nixon Administration imploded as the FBI and CIA began their own defensive tactics. Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, may have instigated the Deep Throat leaks that allowed the truth about Watergate to come out in The Washington Post. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

*Sitting in a conference: OSCon...

Sitting in a conference: OSCon -- Tim O'Reilly Keynote

Here at hardcore geek central, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Microsoft is sponsoring lunches -- Tim O'Reilly had a nice quip from Slashdot: there will a click-wrap license on the lunches.

Tim starts by asking us to think of a paradigm shift, as though we haven't heard that idea enough. I think it's over used, this shift idea. While it comes from Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it has been trivialized.

Tim says think of the ways the rules changed with the IBM PC. First IBM introduced the PC in 1982, based on standard parts and released the spec, changing all the rules of the computer industry. Before that you had to build your own integrated OS and hardware (not quite -- UNIX demonstrates otherwise). Says Apple is the last survivor of the proprietary model -- what about Darwin? -- but IBM/Microsoft still own 95 percent of the market (leaving, by extension to this statement, Linux with all of two percent, which is low).

Michael Dell's innovation was making a better process for building standardized PCs. This is a shift in power in the personal computer space from Apple to IBM to Dell.... The branding of components, like "Intel Inside" will point to the way to a successful Open Source strategy.

He moves on to the decoupling of hardware from software, leaving the market open for Microsoft to become the most important company in the PC industry.

On to Linux: All these people argue about Linux. It's hard to use, geeks make the claim that Open Office getting better, Gnome is great -- but all this is lost on the front end. Killer apps, like Google, Amazon, PayPal and Yahoo, run on Linux. So, what is the meaning of the shift that is going on?

Several things are wrong with this picture from the Open Source perspective. Most companies that use Open Source are fiercely proprietary. Google doesn't expose its source, nor does Amazon; and there is little difference in the code -- it's in the data and customer critical mass they've accumulated (very 1999 thinking, which is true, but not financeable anymore.) William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." And that's where we are today.

In the same way that the PC led to open hardware architectures (even at Apple, where memory and PCI and so forth are standardize now -- yes I am typing on a Mac). Now the move is to open softwarte architectures. The era of proprietary APIs as a key to advantage is ending, Tim says. He's suggesting that the Intel Inside and Cisco Inside approach ends up being the most powerful approach -- but this is integrated hw/sw and in a way, I think, there aren't many steps from the old paradigm here. It is a difference in what is collected around remaining defensible proprietary architectures.

Software as Commidity: Software is driving down margins and increasing competition and Linux delivers order of magnitude cost savings. Apache has eliminated Web serving as a business model and MySQL is doing the same in databases -- though he says it's still being debated.

In this environment, software is deeply componentized and no one can tell when an OS on a server is changed. The proprietary options are bundled with added value components to keep a price advantage.

Customizability at Work: Upgrade cycles are maniacally accelerated, even to daily releases. You need dynamic languages to prevent the need to recompile. This is why Perl, PHP and Python -- higher level languages -- are the answer and are being adopted everywhere.

Interesting idea: There are people inside the software we use (Tim takes this from the story of Van Kempelen's Mechanical Turk) and if the folks at Amazon or Google stopped working, the services would fail. In fact, this is interesting in terms of employment and the value of labor -- but I'll deal with that at another time.

Communications is critical: The distributed teams that have built Open Source software are the new work paradigm. (I agree, see my story about InnovationWorld here). Network-enabled collaboration is breaking out everywhere.

He goes on to the rise of ASP.net at Microsoft. The creators were told they couldn't make ASP XML aware because it would break backward compatibility by the bosses. Went on vacation and hacked on a version -- when they cam back to work and people said they wanted pieces. Bill Gates calls a half year later and, after reviewing, made it a flagship product for Microsoft. Networking is happening everywhere. Tim says "If it is happening inside Microsoft, it is happening everywhere." I think this is underestimating the intelligence of Microsoft. They've been doing this for decades, albeit they force people into labyrintine buildings to work.

Collaboration at the data layer -- if you set up a network that is a byproduct of selfish action, it yields a huge result. This is true, but moving from uncoordinated to coordinated action is more difficult than Tim is letting on. Google is a reflection of this huge collective work, Tim says. But Google is famously secretive about what they do, adding a secret sauce to all the searches. We are all contributing, as Tim says, but we're not giving away our effort to Google. Google is mapping our usage, so it isn't that we're volunteering, but that we're being described -- the collective intelligence of the world is finally being described. In this context, architectures become critical, a kind of public space like physical world architects work with, an intellectual act about how we should flow together in the dataspace.

So, Tim says, we're just discovering the business model. It's about bundling. When is someone going to come along and really figure out the Dell model for Open Source, Tim wonders? (I think the issue is not that large -- how will small pieces of function be assembled.) Tim says "It's about building Linux as a process." Yes, absolutely.

There are many "chokepoints" that are possible "Intel Inside" plays: J2EE, .Net, Digital Identity, and the Web services business will be aggregated into packages people subscribe to. It's the updated software business we've been talking about for a decade, I think. Not paradigm shifting, but realizing a long process of convenience from the packaged to the networked application.

So, it's about services delivered to users, not "professional services." Tim says UUNet is the greatest Open Source business yet, and so is BIND, the DNS system is operated on (and which is a pain in the ass, if you ask me). Sendmail and Apache are hosting plays and look to the networked apps like PayPal and Google as being indicative of the changes ahead.

"I believe we're building an Internet operating system," Tim says. Here are the parts of the puzzle:

* P2P and ad-hoc networking
* Wireless
* Social Software
* Cell phones and mobile devices

Increase standardization while expanding user's ability to customize their experience. Marc Canter would be hooting with delight at this statement. Developers need to leverage the collaborative opportunity.

Tim says we should watch the "Alpha Geeks" as hackers prefigure future movements. Two examples: Screen-scraping described web services; wireless community networks predicted Wi-Fi market adoption.

Open Source needs to be rethought in terms of proprietary components.; Google and Amazon APIs are available to anyone, but proprietary: Who owns the data relationships?

Open Source is a bill of rights for software developers. (This is a mistake -- it must be a bill of rights for the end user.)

"We have to think more about where it is all going. Where is this paradigm going to take us?" Tim exhorts. History is where the answers lie, not in total breaks with the past, if you ask me.

Cross-ranting on data/attention issues

Cross-ranting on data/attention issues

Doc has posted a series of follow-ups to his comments about the New York Times piece on how we're suffering from data exposure. Jon Lebkowsky has a nice turn of phrase: attention deficit disorder. Susannah Breslin, aka The Reverse Cowgirl, has a really great screed on how some folks think art and blogging is theirs to define. I'm tired of the A-List claims. Keeping lists is a disorder when it is imposed on others.

Must get on road for Portland. Will try not to ignore driving part of the morning and become an ugly statistic of data distraction for future Times stories. "He was killed by his daydreaming."

Off to OSCon....

Off to OSCon....

I'll be at OSCon in Portland on Wednesday. See you from there, here and here.

Round up that information and...

Round up that information and shut the gate

A George Mason University graduate student's geomapping dissertation that analyzes infrastructure weaknesses in the United States is a threat to national security, says Richard Clarke, who was George Bush's cybersecurity pointman. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?" the grad student said. "They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree."

Don't classify, publicize, so that business and government have to address the weaknesses. Open source systems are debugged faster than proprietary ones.

Stuff I'm reading about today

Stuff I'm reading about today

Maybe the White House should have used the Internet, where the truth was widely available. Relied on flawed information, my ass. Worst president and worst constitutional manipulations ever. But, look, over there: Liberian crisis! Doh!

Deflation goes on, or does it. Japanese steel companies are cutting steel exports to China to stave off falling prices. Chinese steel capacity (and most other industries, too) are rising. But Indian steel companies are set to benefit from rising steel prices. Same story, three different views.

Steal $11 billion in value from investors, pay $750 million in penalties. The judge says his decision "''undoubtedly the settlement will be criticized'' by wiped-out investors and ''those professed pundits and ideologues for whom anything less than a corporate death penalty constitutes an `outrage.' '' The judge says throwing 50,000 people out of work by shutting the company down would be bad -- it would, but taking the assets of the company away from the people who perpetrated the fraud and allowing those honest and dedicated employees to work for others or themselves using those assets after they were sold and paid off a realistic fine would be a good move. Instead, we have a large competitor that has gained unfair advantages in the market place while criminals pocketed billions. Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said: ''The point is that these guys committed the gravest corporate fraud in history. They make Enron look like pikers by comparison." With Verizon set to take a $3 billion charge as it changes accounting methods and recognizes several failed ventures, one wonders if Rabe's perspective isn't a bit skewed. 

Redback Networks to investors: Thanks for all the fish, now don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Shares were down 45 percent yesterday and another 15 percent at midday today.

Recovery underway in tech? Really? Cisco closed a deal to sell optical switching equipmen to BellSouth. Taiwan Semiconductor's sales were up 14 percent in June. EMC picks up Legato for $1.3 billion, which has been worth as much as $9.5 billion. BMC Software falls on warnings its sales will be weaker than expected and that it will cut jobs.

Abduction, not addiction

Abduction, not addiction

Doc Searls has a nicely wrought rant about a silly New York Times piece that opens with a vignette of a former colleague of mine at SoftBank. Charley Lax, still a venture capitalist is "sitting in a conference for telecommunications executives at a hotel near Los Angeles, but he is not all here. Out of one ear, he listens to a live presentation about cable television technology; simultaneously, he surfs the Net on a laptop with a wireless connection, while occasionally checking his mobile device — part phone, part pager and part Internet gadget — for e-mail."

The writer says that it is odd that Charley paid $2,000 to be at the event and ignore it, at least in part, then goes on to insert a plug for Tony Perkins' Always On site by branding the culture Charley Lax represents as "Always On," which is the name of Tony's new site. The writer, Matt Richel, must be angling for an assignment.

Charley says: "It's hard to concentrate on one thing," he said, adding: "I think I have a condition."

I like Charley, but basically he's always had a condition. I remember him once saying he'd closed 17 funding agreements in 15 days -- which crosses into the insanely overactive, both financially and intellectually. It's that condition that makes Charely good at what he does. The rest of the article is silly puffery about data addiction creating a kind of condition like Attention Deficit Disorder. And Doc, who is not a doctor, is right to dismiss most of the piece as mass media anguishing over new competitors for people's attention. Granted, I suffer from the multiple attention compulsion, too, but so does any news junky, whether they have five TVs running simultaneously or surf Web sites while sitting in $2,000 conferences. I find you don't have to go many places to be connected these days and rather wonder at the conference jockeys who travel from place to place to stay connected.

Anyway, I don't entirely agree with Doc's assessment of the media:

Here's what's on TV right now: Nothing. Trust me. You can store it for later suckage off your TiVo, but it'll still be Nothing.

Here's what's in your magazines right now: Lots of stuff you're not interested in. Same with your newspapers.

As for radio: Forget it, unless you're an amen-corner conservative, a sports junkie, an NPR addict, or in need of a traffic report in the next fifteen minutes.

Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you'll like or use. Hell, you probably depend on a lot of it, in the best sense of that verb. But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. More importantly, you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Yes, Even if They are NPR and the New York Times. They are The Media. Information is a form of "content" that moves from Them to you, on an almost entirely one-way basis.

The Web is ours, not theirs.

In fact, the Web is everyone's and the media companies are only one more constituent of the collective flow. That's the change -- it's not ownership of a place, but ownership of our will and attention on an end-to-end network that points everywhere, depending how you look at it. We look at what we want to, as long or briefly as we like, not according to the day parts of the broadcast world. But the broadcast world is still there and we can blend bits into our attention at will, TiVo and DSL allowing us to do so. I want to know what the scores in Major League Baseball are during the day--I have baseball on with the sound turned down whenever a game is on. Does that mean I am sucking at the teat of mindlessness? Does it mean I have a baseball problem? Fuck no. It means I take control of the media and point it where I want to look. There is something on TV for me at those times. I use radio content selectively and rely on Audible to time-shift what I want to listen to, wherever I want to listen. And then there is the Net. We own our attention, but we contribute to a rich fabric of stuff--some content, some conversation, some conflagration and flame-fest. And, amazingly, we have a voice as large as any media company Right Now, while someone is paying attention. The only thought crime is to assume that attention may be abducted and forced onto something it doesn't want to attend to.

There was a moment during a staff call for InnovationWorld the other day when I mentioned that Boston was up a run on the Yankees and one of the writers said, "Yeah, I know, isn't that great?" Was he not paying attention to me? Of course not, he was splitting his attention and what should I do, fire his ass for not conforming to rules of corporate employment? No -- I had the game on, too. In fact, I've never met him in person, having relied entirely on the Net and telephone calls to find and interview him, but I hired him and he's working out great. We are all mutants, thank the gods.

An end-to-end Internet

An end-to-end Internet

Doc Searls has challenged the presidential candidates to come out in support of an end-to-end Internet that is free from carrier control of what flows over the connections they offer. This based on a Lawrence Lessig article, A Threat To Innovation On the Web. In December 2002, Vermont's Public Service Board led the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners to endorse a call for open neutral access to the Internet. Nice to see the state that Howard Dean governed for 11 years leading the way, but the important point is that there will be an important policy battle over whether carriers can control what people use their networks to do and learn.

I think this is critically important, but the discussion is unnecessarily limited to the wired or broadband Internet. As handsets evolve, we're getting more and more information through our mobile phones and in that industry, almost everything is controlled by the carrier, because they often set the stage for what is easily accessible in that tiny little screen. I moderated a panel on this topic for the Washington Software Association last month and whenthe article about this event is posted, I'll point to it.

We need open networks between all people for our polity and our economy to grow and evolve.

Five Business Stories...

Five Business Stories...

Here are my five business stories that merit a read today:

Samsung is adding to the growing LCD screen manufacturing capacity around the world to the tune of $16.7 billion. With 19- and 20-inch flat panels already selling as low as $695, based on my perusal over the weekend, we'll be seeing sub-$500 prices within 10 months. Samsung's latest quarterly earnings were off 10.1 percent compared to the previous quarter.

Microsoft is going to dole out $10 billion to shareholders -- about a buck apiece. I guess it's hard to make earnings appear at an acceptable percentage rate when you have $46 billion in the bank.

RealNetworks released its SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) implementation as open source today -- this is good for developers of content, like myself, who want to start synching events in video to other media. So, for example, if one had a "happening" a la the Emergent Democracy happening and recorded the audio call, the happening could be played back in Real format while the chat scrolled out as it did during the call. And, if the programmer is clever, new participants could annotate the record with their own comments, agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker or the chatters for viewing by others, later.

Chinese graft is a $2.8 billion business in just one city. But the Chinese government, which controls the Bank of China, recently cleared several Bank of China officials of fraud and then sacked them.

That link may be sponsored. Like an actor drinking a Coke on screen, MSNBC will place advertising links contextually. Describing a deal with About.com's Sprinks unit that will place ads along side stories about related topics, MSNBC president Scott Moore said it is "a relevant extension of our editorial content."