Musings From Scott Converse

When I look at what's happening to the old media world (disintermediation, collapse of classified ad cash cows, loss of editorial control, erosion of readers/viewers/listeners under 30 etc., etc.) and think to myself, why is this? What's the base cause for it.. I come up with alot of possible answers. Things like low cost high speed internet connection, opensource software making it reasonably easy (and cheap) to start new businesses but, more than anything, I think it's Cheap Gear my mom can use.

I know this sounds simplistic, but I like to get to base causes. What's the one thing that we had to have before all the Web 2.0 magical poofy things that sucked in millions of average people with a computer was possible? My conjecture: It's Cheap Gear.

It's that hardware interface that takes life and turns it a mishmash of words, pictures, sounds and videos.

I'm looking at around my office and I have what's really a recording and video production studio. Noth…

I have friend who's a 24 (the TV show) fanatic. He just posted that it got boring.
The Day 24 got boring. April 23, 2007. Another 24 fanatic just came in my office and announced that to me. Unfortunately I agree. I watched it last night with Amy, Jason, David, and Jill and we all had that ho-hum look on our face when it ended. Oh well – it’s rare that a show makes it six years anyway before it loses it.I think this is a great example of how being in a state of constant tension, regardless of how thrilling the tension is, eventually, gets old.

That's what's happening in America's political climate right now. You can say 'terrorist!' only so many times before it stops working and, man, has it stopped working. Interestingly, he infers that 6 years' is a good run. Isn't that about how long Bush has been beating a story line very much like 24?

I agree with him, it's getting old. Time for a new story.

Apologies for using his blog post as a political…

I never thought I'd be saying this but I've decided that all my computer purchases in the future are likely to be Mac's. The reason isn't intuitively obvious either because it's DRM.

From The Inquirer article: Avoid the Vista Badge, it means DRM inside.
He who controls the DRM infection controls the market. DRM is about preventing you from doing anything with the devices without paying the gatekeeper a fee. This is what MS wants, nothing less than a slice of everything watched, listened to or discussed from now on. DRM prevents others from playing there, thanks to the DMCA and other anti-consumer laws.The article goes on to reflect on just some of the evils of DRM built into hardware. I suspect we'll see more (and more) compatibility and ease of use issues as more people buy a new PC with Vista enabled hardware over the coming years.

Oddly, Apple, a company I used to work for and adore, then lost respect for and who I've bashed more than a few times here, …

And the battle begins. Sam Zell is buying the Tribune Company (16 newspapers including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun). In a recent Washington Post story. From the WP story:
In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.


"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very."Wow. I wonder if he knows the demographics of the newspapers he just bought very well? Has he asked any of his under 30 (hell, under 40) grandkids if they subscribe to a newspaper? Just one? I doubt it.

Now would be a very good time to start putting together a web based locally focused online me…

I just read a great essay by Paul Graham that made me stop dead in my mental tracks and go oh yea... damn! I love Paul's writing. He's generally dead on with his observations and this one's right in line with that trend.

His claim? Microsoft died in 2005.

How?

1) Google. Need I say more?

2) XmlHttpRequest- Created by MS for Outlook, Mixed with JavaScript you get AJAX and that was the beginning of the end for desktop applications. This made it possible to move applications to the web. One of the first was Gmail. Now you can get photoshop functionality on a webpage.

3) Broadband internet. The faster your connection, the less you need the desktop.

4) Apple. Ever check out anyone working on what's next? Chances are he or she's on a Mac. Windows? For grandma.

Read the whole thing. It's here and by Paul Graham standards, fairly short. Anyone who's been around for awhile will go.. oh, yea... that's it. Damn!

So, I finally cleaned up my domain name/URL act procured the www.scottconverse.org URL and pointed it at this blog. From now on, even though blogger is where I'll keep my blog for now, when I change my platform, the URL will stay the same. So, if you care about stuff like this, take out the blogger URL for this blog and put in http://www.scottconverse.org