To clarify -- yes, there are some markets where free content leads to paying customers, but they just won't be in the millions that VC's want -- merely the thousands. These are some of the more particular e-zines out there, that take 'net subscribers the way they'd take paper-delivery subscribers. The market will be small, but likely reliable provided your content maintains its quality. Main examples are, naturally enough, software development zines like JavaPro.
Why does it work that way in the adult internet? Because the people involved are running actual businesses that depend on cash flow and profitability.
And because "adult entertainment" is a sure bet -- people WILL pay for it, especially if its served up in a way that maintains their privacy. They have for centuries; and they have for every new media since radio.
Nothing else available on the 'net is stuff that people, personally, absolutely will pay for. All you can do is hope. Trouble is that everything else people buy, they aren't (necessarilly) ashamed to buy in public.
You can buy CDs and VHS/DVDs in a store, with the gratification of taking it with you; the 'net can't do that. You can buy software in a store, and have the books with you right away, as opposed to having to read on the screen or waste 100s of pages of paper to print them. Books are the same way -- if there's a store that carries what you like on a regular basis, then you hit that store, and take it with you. Ditto magazines, newspapers, etc...nothing they have you couldn't get some other way.
Yes, you could get "porn" the old fashioned way, but you'd rather do it in total privacy and not deal with the anxiety of funny looks from people in or outside the "shop", or the postman delivering your "descrete plain brown wrapped package". Porn on the 'net is value added -- the value added is privacy in a form never before seen. No other market needs that particular "value added". The only anxieties 1) your sig-other looks at your visa bill, 2) your company actually looks at its web-logs, or 3) you do it so much that you exceed the download limit of your ISP, and they start charging $1/meg (back to said visa bill).
So the problem is that e-commerce will not and never will be the internet's true "killer app". Shipping costs and times are prohibitive compared to the convenience and experience of walking into a store and walking out with product, regardless of the extra availability of items online.
The "killer app" of the 'net is what it was made for -- communication mechanisms like slashdot and groups.yahoo.com and stuff like that. Only that stuff is so easy to make (relatively speaking -- especially with so much free software to build it on), nobody thinks its really worth paying for.
Egroups, listbot, onelist all just finally (and cleanly) automated the process that majordomo and listservs have had (and that required a lot of "administration" for far too long) for years; my reaction was "about time".
The idea that free sites leads to pay sites in "information" sites just isn't going to work. People will too quickly content themselves with the free, because the "value added" from the pay site usually just isn't enough. As comment 19 states, most content out there isn't worth paying for.
"Net Taxes" won't work either, as it will create an entity like the ASCAP, which will unfairly redistribute its collected fees to the point that only a small portion of the sites out there will get a large portion of the cash, and most sites get nothing. ASCAP does exactly that with regards to all of its site-licensed based income like from broadcasting sites and stations, and public merchants. It goes to the top radio airplay artists, regardless of what the broadcaster is actually broadcasting.
You're missing the bottleneck. Text (html or plain) is rarely the hog, in and of itself. Sites are slow because 1) there's a lot of images or media being downloaded, and none of that is further compressable; 2) the generation of the text is taking time.
Slashdot, Ebay, Amazon all are 100% database driven sites. The entire "page" is constructed using data from a database query or two (or two dozen). If the database is being overloaded by too many requests, there's absolutely nothing that compressing the text coming out of it will achieve.
The trouble is two-fold -- one: yahoo needed to be the one-stop anywhere page (x.yahoo.com where x element-of everything) in order to hold enough "eyes" to even come close to making an internet profit. This incorporated building or buying whatever they needed (becoming the portal monolith that they are, out-lasting all others). In this, they succeeded; I consider yahoo the best of the horizontal portals, with (usually) the best integration model in terms of having access to personalized factors in the "my" portal section.
Now in buying they did what some consider to be a "good" thing: in acquiring a number of otherwise failing.coms (egroups being the biggest example).
Now we have problem two -- yahoo's own potential for failure (nothing they did distinguished themselves from any other "dot-com") takes out all those other acquisitions with it. If yahoo reaches a point of shutdown, egroups and many others go with it. THIS would greatly affect the public's perception of the internet. People have gotten used to certain services, and the loss of services that were regularly used is something that may end up devestating the 'net in the public eye (much less wall street); just look at how great the magnitude of complaints was when deja went.
So now we have our delimna -- how do these services (not the shopping stuff, but the stuff the 'net was made for -- communication and information exchange, via mailing lists) survive when there is no decent business model to pay for it? These things are too big to be run by "volunteers" anymore.
One successful model is O'Reilly's. Yes, their new "oreillynet.com" pages are advertising based, but for the most part the advertising is for products they know their audience wants -- O'Reilly's books. Their advertising is mostly internal, directing their "web" readers to become "paper" readers. The o'reillynet stuff becomes a donation, strictly for brand recognition.
IBM's developerworks and alphaworks function the same way -- show people IBM's coding quality and they'll come to IBM for commercial work as well. Sun wanted the same impact from Java, but early on, with "javasoft", they distanced the Java work a bit too much (for some; not enough for others).
Therefore, Yahoo's only ultimate form of survival is to get someone else to buy them out, and have the site supported by advertising that's mostly oriented to the buyer. This means the buyer can not, in themselves, be an advertising-based site. It has to be something "real", from the old-economy.
Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be utterly full of shit...;-)
Another problem with 'net documentation (the infamous "HOW-TO" pages and websites) is the age. A lot of the how-to and mini-howto pages are still meant for older (pre 2.2, much less 2.4) versions of linux; some involve kernel configuration/rebuilding (like the iomega zip howto) that you don't need to do for more recent/up-to-date kernels (zip support is standard in most distribution's binary kernels). Others involve applying patches that were written for the 2.0/2.1 trees, and have no place in the current kernel to be applied.
Musicians establishing a company to handle the distribution of all cd's sold on.music domains. (funded by a tiny fraction of all.music sales??) Further eliminates any influence of themiddle man...bootload of beauracracy...
Two problems with this. One -- the boatload of beauracracy to manage publishing rights (ASCAP, etc) still exists and can't be undone.
Two: the reason ASCAP exists in the first place is addressed by your suggestion I quoted. As Sting said in the trial of his ex- accountant (who embezzeled millions out of String, among others), "I read music, not figures".
Musicians don't want to be in business, as much as they may want to be in the business (not the same thing). They would find it far easier to attach themselves to another already existing company than set up their own (they just want to get on with playing music), and once that's done, you've got a beauracratic conglomerate, representing the goals of multiple artists, often without their direct input. You replace the labels with something worse: a second mega-"representative" like ASCAP. MP3.com had the potential to be that mega-rep, and that's why they were a threat (and remain one) to the RIAA. By making mp3.com pay (through the nose) for the distribution rights over the my.mp3.com service, the RIAA keeps mp3.com from making enough money to make this non-record-label-distribution scheme work.
Disk 3 goes on sale today. Supposedly, the bonus material is a "virtual tour" of the Argo/Yamato.
They aren't including all that much "cut" footage, and (un)?fortunately, they aren't including all of the "tune in next week" footage, either; the episodes mostly run into each other, with the occasional "recap" bits.
I wonder if when they do 3rd season, they might include some of the cut Yamato season two footage that shows exactly who got killed and how...;-)
Because (provided you're GPLing it) U.S. law still conflicts with the GPL. You can't give the sources away in a "generic" fashion once you have a copy within the u.s., because you couldn't allow your copy, or your modifications, to leave the country.
So somebody writes a P2P software package that's "anonymous". Yes, it means whoever wrote the damn thing will be an RIAA target (like the norwegian who wrote DeCSS is being targetted by the MPAA), but again -- the cat will be outta the bag...
Besides, when stream-monitoring for digital watermarks and stuff like that, how are they going to tell the difference between an "illegal download" and a legitmate listener listening to a legitimate internet-radio broadcast...unless they're going to restrict broadcast software (and again, its too damn late) to proprietary-only schemes and find some way to illegalize it.
They keep forgetting that mp3, xmms, icecast -- its all out of the bag. Even if they kill shoutcast, winamp, mp3.com, and live365.com, its too late. I can still set up my own little private internet-radio station all i want. I already have the tools and they can't (legally) take them away (yet).
to get the scheme described in the L.A. Times article to work. All you have to do is take open-source gnutella (or future opensource efforts to produce P2P packages) and build in automatic 40-bit encryption. It remains fully distributable (since 40bit is exportable, so code can still be covered under GPL), but no attempt at digital watermarking and stream-monitoring will be able to detect through it.
Basically, catching "napster pirates" is going to end up a lot like catching speeders. Every so often, to meet quotas, they'll pick on one or two here and there, and those will probably be given fines or penalties far out of proportion to their "crime"...and otherwise, they stick to going for the napster-pirate equiv of "aggressive drivers".
One word is missing in all of this. When something is creative, but not always (or necessarilly artistic), it becomes a Craft.
To me, programming is a craft, and relies on the same degree of discipline that craftsmen in "hardware" (carpentry, model making, etc) rely on.
Also, games design does have roles -- its just that in some cases the game implementor maybe taking on more than one role. One role is that of the progrmamer, who takes the 3-D models and designs how they will react to each other on the screen and what it "means" when one fires an anti-tank rocket at the other. The other is the artist who designs the 3d models and the texture maps and how they "move" within themselves, usually using software that some other programmer wrote. With either a really creative individual, or a really tight budget, game companies will overlap roles among their staff, but its still the staff member performing two separate roles -- programming or 3d art.
I asked this question earlier (I had at least discovered Icecast + xmms). See this discussion...
Basically, for a streaming radio station, you want icecast, and either set up playlists directly or use xmms + liveice. That discussion covers stream on demand, like my.mp3.com does.
CastlebayMusic.com is another one of those "made @ home 'cause its too easy to do it now" record labels, this one by Cape Breton (Nova Scotia) artists Tracey Dares and Paul MacNeil. To summarize, they recorded it in their kitchen, just the piano, bagpipes, and friends on various instruments like fiddles.
About the only thing with all-accoustic recording @home (even if you have great resonance in the room being used) is that it can still have difficulties in the mixdown -- instruments will tend to cross over from one mic to the next ("Drum microphones record everything" -- R.Fripp)...you can't get that isolation that modern studios do with plexglass and separated instruments where each is recording their own in a near sound-proof room, listening to the others on headphones...
Well, "Songwriters" may not always be the correct term. The people who get the money are the copyright holders, and they give the money to the artists (whether performer or songwriter) based on whatever contract they've negotiated. In the "pop" world of marketed & packaged teen idols, the songwriters are well experienced in this market (as opposed to the "group" that writes its own material). These songwriters are smart enough to remain copyright holders in the pop industry for the publishing rights, which they contract to ASCAP to manage and handle. Bug again, these songwriters are usually attached to either the producer or to the record label itself, and so each contract may be different...they may be slaves to the label just as much as the performer is...but not always...
This is quite unlike the "group" which often signs away the publishing rights to the label just as they do the copyright on the recording itself.
This still has the same problem. Hardware guys aren't going to negotiate rates with every single little label and individual artist out there -- they're going to negotiate blanket licenses with the umbrella firms : RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, SOCAN. And that's it. And those firms will distribute the royalty portion of the license fees as they see fit: it goes to the most played material on the radio.
That's not going to change until enough artists bitch about it. Robert Fripp and Courtney Love and Prince and a few rappers here and there aren't enough...especially not with Metallica being the spokespeople for the RIAA and ASCAP's position.
And its also a problem with my.mp3.com and any other service that negotiates to pay the RIAA or the publishing firms (ASCAP, etc...) for the right to exist:
Not everybody is covered under those organizations. Many smaller artists who's material is traded by napster users will never see income from the RIAA license. they're only chance for income is that the listeners like the material and purchase a cd directly from them later on.
ASCAP and BMI (and presumably, the RIAA would do the same for their cut) distribute income from site-licenses (such as public restaurants, bars, store p.a. systems, etc) based on one market value only: Radio Airplay. It doesn't matter that, e.g., Live365.com can log exactly what was played, and to how many listeners. It doesn't matter that a local pub is an Irish pub that never plays pop music.
Brittany Spears, her songwriters, and her producer will all get most of the money.
Hate to break it to you, but the "killer-app" growth of linux comes from Apache and old-line Unix stuff like NFS, and other server-side tools like Samba, not from KDE or Gnome. Yes, those can have GUI configurators, but nobody really uses them on a regular basis yet. At any rate, its servers that you set up and CAN TRUST to leave alone to do their thing without having to check on them every hour on the hour like with some other...proprietary...O/S out there...
Others have Linux because of either the free/open-source model as a philosophical thing, or because they're in education and linux (w/ the source codes) is a great way to learn OS design and implementation.
I couldn't name one person out there who says "yeah, i just HAD to go get Linux 'cause there's this great Desktop called GNOME out there..."
Indeed, after the new cut was screened for the ratings board, the original G rating was upped to a PG.
Nah...the real reason the rating changed was that the MPAA at the time actually forgot or didn't notice that Kirk and McCoy actually say "Damn" in the film.
After years of watching it in video, this has caused them to lose much sleep...now they can finally rest easy, knowing that they've restored the rating to fit their convictions : "Damn" is still a dirty word, and too dangerous for a 'G' audience.
One more -- get a second machine. Use Linux for your real work (and for dealing with the English speaking world that believes in open standards), and a cheap Windows box for dealing with the local traffic that's Hebrew only.
Well, you HAVE to run "Windows" in some form or another. Deal with it.
But to get done what you need to get done, you have 3 options:
Dual-boot
VMWare or some other virtual machine emulator, so you can run Linux and Windows at the same time (I wouldn't trust WINE to deal with I18n yet) -- whether its VMWare for NT, running linux inside, or vice-versa, is up to you. If you play games a lot, use that -- you'll need it for correct DirectX support. If you don't, or Linux games only, then VMWare for Linux, with NT running in the emulator.
Cygwin, emacs, NuSphere's Apache+MySQL+Perl+PHP, and Java will get you a pretty sizeable portion of tools for Win32 (especially command-line tools) that work just as well as their Linux counterparts, if its those particular applications you prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
To clarify -- yes, there are some markets where free content leads to paying customers, but they just won't be in the millions that VC's want -- merely the thousands. These are some of the more particular e-zines out there, that take 'net subscribers the way they'd take paper-delivery subscribers. The market will be small, but likely reliable provided your content maintains its quality. Main examples are, naturally enough, software development zines like JavaPro.
Why does it work that way in the adult internet? Because the people involved are running actual businesses that depend on cash flow and profitability.
And because "adult entertainment" is a sure bet -- people WILL pay for it, especially if its served up in a way that maintains their privacy. They have for centuries; and they have for every new media since radio.
Nothing else available on the 'net is stuff that people, personally, absolutely will pay for. All you can do is hope. Trouble is that everything else people buy, they aren't (necessarilly) ashamed to buy in public.
You can buy CDs and VHS/DVDs in a store, with the gratification of taking it with you; the 'net can't do that. You can buy software in a store, and have the books with you right away, as opposed to having to read on the screen or waste 100s of pages of paper to print them. Books are the same way -- if there's a store that carries what you like on a regular basis, then you hit that store, and take it with you. Ditto magazines, newspapers, etc...nothing they have you couldn't get some other way.
Yes, you could get "porn" the old fashioned way, but you'd rather do it in total privacy and not deal with the anxiety of funny looks from people in or outside the "shop", or the postman delivering your "descrete plain brown wrapped package". Porn on the 'net is value added -- the value added is privacy in a form never before seen. No other market needs that particular "value added". The only anxieties 1) your sig-other looks at your visa bill, 2) your company actually looks at its web-logs, or 3) you do it so much that you exceed the download limit of your ISP, and they start charging $1/meg (back to said visa bill).
So the problem is that e-commerce will not and never will be the internet's true "killer app". Shipping costs and times are prohibitive compared to the convenience and experience of walking into a store and walking out with product, regardless of the extra availability of items online.
The "killer app" of the 'net is what it was made for -- communication mechanisms like slashdot and groups.yahoo.com and stuff like that. Only that stuff is so easy to make (relatively speaking -- especially with so much free software to build it on), nobody thinks its really worth paying for. Egroups, listbot, onelist all just finally (and cleanly) automated the process that majordomo and listservs have had (and that required a lot of "administration" for far too long) for years; my reaction was "about time".
The idea that free sites leads to pay sites in "information" sites just isn't going to work. People will too quickly content themselves with the free, because the "value added" from the pay site usually just isn't enough. As comment 19 states, most content out there isn't worth paying for.
"Net Taxes" won't work either, as it will create an entity like the ASCAP, which will unfairly redistribute its collected fees to the point that only a small portion of the sites out there will get a large portion of the cash, and most sites get nothing. ASCAP does exactly that with regards to all of its site-licensed based income like from broadcasting sites and stations, and public merchants. It goes to the top radio airplay artists, regardless of what the broadcaster is actually broadcasting.
Slashdot, Ebay, Amazon all are 100% database driven sites. The entire "page" is constructed using data from a database query or two (or two dozen). If the database is being overloaded by too many requests, there's absolutely nothing that compressing the text coming out of it will achieve.
Of course, two months later they were acquired by VA Linux and PenguinComputing's ad-rates have shrunk quite a bit since then... ;-)
Now in buying they did what some consider to be a "good" thing: in acquiring a number of otherwise failing .coms (egroups being the biggest example).
Now we have problem two -- yahoo's own potential for failure (nothing they did distinguished themselves from any other "dot-com") takes out all those other acquisitions with it. If yahoo reaches a point of shutdown, egroups and many others go with it. THIS would greatly affect the public's perception of the internet. People have gotten used to certain services, and the loss of services that were regularly used is something that may end up devestating the 'net in the public eye (much less wall street); just look at how great the magnitude of complaints was when deja went.
So now we have our delimna -- how do these services (not the shopping stuff, but the stuff the 'net was made for -- communication and information exchange, via mailing lists) survive when there is no decent business model to pay for it? These things are too big to be run by "volunteers" anymore.
One successful model is O'Reilly's. Yes, their new "oreillynet.com" pages are advertising based, but for the most part the advertising is for products they know their audience wants -- O'Reilly's books. Their advertising is mostly internal, directing their "web" readers to become "paper" readers. The o'reillynet stuff becomes a donation, strictly for brand recognition.
IBM's developerworks and alphaworks function the same way -- show people IBM's coding quality and they'll come to IBM for commercial work as well. Sun wanted the same impact from Java, but early on, with "javasoft", they distanced the Java work a bit too much (for some; not enough for others).
Therefore, Yahoo's only ultimate form of survival is to get someone else to buy them out, and have the site supported by advertising that's mostly oriented to the buyer. This means the buyer can not, in themselves, be an advertising-based site. It has to be something "real", from the old-economy.
Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be utterly full of shit... ;-)
Another problem with 'net documentation (the infamous "HOW-TO" pages and websites) is the age. A lot of the how-to and mini-howto pages are still meant for older (pre 2.2, much less 2.4) versions of linux; some involve kernel configuration/rebuilding (like the iomega zip howto) that you don't need to do for more recent/up-to-date kernels (zip support is standard in most distribution's binary kernels). Others involve applying patches that were written for the 2.0/2.1 trees, and have no place in the current kernel to be applied.
Two problems with this. One -- the boatload of beauracracy to manage publishing rights (ASCAP, etc) still exists and can't be undone.
Two: the reason ASCAP exists in the first place is addressed by your suggestion I quoted. As Sting said in the trial of his ex- accountant (who embezzeled millions out of String, among others), "I read music, not figures".
Musicians don't want to be in business, as much as they may want to be in the business (not the same thing). They would find it far easier to attach themselves to another already existing company than set up their own (they just want to get on with playing music), and once that's done, you've got a beauracratic conglomerate, representing the goals of multiple artists, often without their direct input. You replace the labels with something worse: a second mega-"representative" like ASCAP. MP3.com had the potential to be that mega-rep, and that's why they were a threat (and remain one) to the RIAA. By making mp3.com pay (through the nose) for the distribution rights over the my.mp3.com service, the RIAA keeps mp3.com from making enough money to make this non-record-label-distribution scheme work.
I wonder if when they do 3rd season, they might include some of the cut Yamato season two footage that shows exactly who got killed and how... ;-)
Because (provided you're GPLing it) U.S. law still conflicts with the GPL. You can't give the sources away in a "generic" fashion once you have a copy within the u.s., because you couldn't allow your copy, or your modifications, to leave the country.
So somebody writes a P2P software package that's "anonymous". Yes, it means whoever wrote the damn thing will be an RIAA target (like the norwegian who wrote DeCSS is being targetted by the MPAA), but again -- the cat will be outta the bag...
They keep forgetting that mp3, xmms, icecast -- its all out of the bag. Even if they kill shoutcast, winamp, mp3.com, and live365.com, its too late. I can still set up my own little private internet-radio station all i want. I already have the tools and they can't (legally) take them away (yet).
Basically, catching "napster pirates" is going to end up a lot like catching speeders. Every so often, to meet quotas, they'll pick on one or two here and there, and those will probably be given fines or penalties far out of proportion to their "crime"...and otherwise, they stick to going for the napster-pirate equiv of "aggressive drivers".
To me, programming is a craft, and relies on the same degree of discipline that craftsmen in "hardware" (carpentry, model making, etc) rely on.
Also, games design does have roles -- its just that in some cases the game implementor maybe taking on more than one role. One role is that of the progrmamer, who takes the 3-D models and designs how they will react to each other on the screen and what it "means" when one fires an anti-tank rocket at the other. The other is the artist who designs the 3d models and the texture maps and how they "move" within themselves, usually using software that some other programmer wrote. With either a really creative individual, or a really tight budget, game companies will overlap roles among their staff, but its still the staff member performing two separate roles -- programming or 3d art.
Except Trudeau still has a problem with Breathed -- see the last answer at the bottom of this Doonesbury/Trudeau FAQ page...
Basically, for a streaming radio station, you want icecast, and either set up playlists directly or use xmms + liveice. That discussion covers stream on demand, like my.mp3.com does.
About the only thing with all-accoustic recording @home (even if you have great resonance in the room being used) is that it can still have difficulties in the mixdown -- instruments will tend to cross over from one mic to the next ("Drum microphones record everything" -- R.Fripp)...you can't get that isolation that modern studios do with plexglass and separated instruments where each is recording their own in a near sound-proof room, listening to the others on headphones...
This is quite unlike the "group" which often signs away the publishing rights to the label just as they do the copyright on the recording itself.
That's not going to change until enough artists bitch about it. Robert Fripp and Courtney Love and Prince and a few rappers here and there aren't enough...especially not with Metallica being the spokespeople for the RIAA and ASCAP's position.
Not everybody is covered under those organizations. Many smaller artists who's material is traded by napster users will never see income from the RIAA license. they're only chance for income is that the listeners like the material and purchase a cd directly from them later on.
ASCAP and BMI (and presumably, the RIAA would do the same for their cut) distribute income from site-licenses (such as public restaurants, bars, store p.a. systems, etc) based on one market value only: Radio Airplay. It doesn't matter that, e.g., Live365.com can log exactly what was played, and to how many listeners. It doesn't matter that a local pub is an Irish pub that never plays pop music.
Brittany Spears, her songwriters, and her producer will all get most of the money.
Others have Linux because of either the free/open-source model as a philosophical thing, or because they're in education and linux (w/ the source codes) is a great way to learn OS design and implementation.
I couldn't name one person out there who says "yeah, i just HAD to go get Linux 'cause there's this great Desktop called GNOME out there..."
Nah...the real reason the rating changed was that the MPAA at the time actually forgot or didn't notice that Kirk and McCoy actually say "Damn" in the film.
After years of watching it in video, this has caused them to lose much sleep...now they can finally rest easy, knowing that they've restored the rating to fit their convictions : "Damn" is still a dirty word, and too dangerous for a 'G' audience.
and <marquee> was never supported by netscape...
One more -- get a second machine. Use Linux for your real work (and for dealing with the English speaking world that believes in open standards), and a cheap Windows box for dealing with the local traffic that's Hebrew only.
But to get done what you need to get done, you have 3 options:
Um...forgive me if i was mistaken, but i thought i WAS talking about the PTO.