Last post here.
So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I’m letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won’t bring more in lessig.org/blog.
Pity. He’ll be missed.
There’s a nice piece in this week’s Economist about the menace of feature creep.
Look at what has happened to netbooks — those once-minimalist laptop computers for doing basic online chores while on the hoof. Though palmtop computers and sub-notebooks had been around for decades, a Taiwanese firm called Asus introduced the world to netbooks in 2007 with its ground-breaking Eee PC. The two-pound device had a seven-inch screen, no optical drive or hard drive, and occupied half the space of a typical notebook computer of the day. It had all the essentials (and no unnecessary extras) for doing the job, and could be slipped into a briefcase, handbag or raincoat pocket and hardly noticed.
Seeing a good thing, rival makers rushed in with me-too versions—each purporting to offer improvements. The original keyboard was only 85% as wide as a full-sized one. Many people thought that just fine, especially as it offered the luxury of a seven-inch screen. For the past 20 years, your itinerant correspondent has cheerfully used palmtops with 62% keyboards and six-inch screens to check his e-mail, surf the web and file stories from odd places. The me-toos, nevertheless, deemed 85% unusable and increased it to 92%.
With the increase in keyboard width came an increase in the netbook’s screen size, room for a fairly hefty hard-drive, additional ports, a bigger battery—and yet more weight. Today’s netbooks are now the size of low-end laptops, with up to 12-inch screens, 160 gigabyte drives, one or two gigabytes of random-access memory, a video camera, and cellular as well as wireless transceivers. As a result, they now weigh well over three pounds and need a padded case to lug them around. The original concept has been lost in a blizzard of feature-creep.
Spot on. I’ve tried a lot of these NetBooks and still haven’t found anything that beats the original ASUS. The worst culprit, in a way, is the HP MiniNote which is beautifully over-engineered and has a lovely screen but is too heavy and bulky to carry round.
And while we’re on the subject of how print publications might reverse the decline in their circulations, I should report that we are not the first generation of journalists to fret about these things. My illustrious countryman, Flann O’Brien, was much exercised by these matters and wrote about them often in his Irish Times column. In one, he reported on his Research Bureau’s work on a new form of ink, provisionally called Trink.
It looks for all the world like the ordinary black ink you can buy for twopence. ‘Trink’ however is a very special job. When put on paper and dried, it emits a subtle alcoholic vapour which will hang over the document in an invisible odourless cloud for several days.
The whole idea, he explained, was to print the Irish Times with it.
You will then get something more than a mere newspaper for your thruppence. You get a lightning pick-me-up not only for yourself and your family but for everybody that travels in your bus. Any time you feel depressed, all you need is to read the leading article; if you want a whole night out, get down to the small ads.
Like all great inventors, O’Brien foresaw opposition.
Every great innovation must expect it. Vested interests, backstairs influence. The Licensed Vintners’ Association will make a row; newsvendors will have to hold an excise licence or possibly the Irish Times will be on sale only in hostelries; the Revenue will probably clamp a crippling tax on every copy and compel us to print under the title ‘Licensed for The Sale of Intoxicating News, 6 Days’. All that will not stop us, any more than the man with the red flag stopped the inevitable triumph of the motor car. And no power on earth, remember, can compel your copy of the Irish Times to close down at ten. You and read and re-read it until two in the morning if it suits your book, and even tear it in two and give your little wife a page.
You may laugh, but this is at least as good an idea as some of the dafter wheezes dreamed up by marketing executives to persuade people to buy copies of print publications at newsagents. Of course nowadays, one would segment the market. The Sun and the Mirror would be printed using the cheaper Spanish reds, or possibly bulk-buy Retsina; the Financial Times would be done in one of the Duexieme Cru clarets, or perhaps a decent Chambertin; Vogue would be printed in champagne while Hello! would be admirably served by Tia Maria. The Guardian and Observer would be best suited by Chilean or South African Pinot Noir, I fancy. Loaded and other Lads’ Mags would be printed in Newcastle Brown. The Independent, for its part, would be done in non-alcoholic lager while the Tablet would be printed in communion wine (with the lonely-hearts page perhaps done in Holy Water to discourage fornication?) And of course the Telegraph would patriotically stick to the products of English vineyards.
I tell you, we’re onto something here.
Succinct wisdom from Peter Feld about the proposition that putting out news free on the web cannibalises one’s print edition:
The flaw in the print person’s perspective is in thinking that there is any relation between your print audience and your web audience. There is none. You are not undercutting your print product by publishing a website because the people who you can reach online have almost no overlap with the people who you reach in print. Your print readers don’t want your website, and your web audience doesn’t. want. your. paper. (or magazine). (There’s a small overlap for whom that’s not true — many of whom are the mediavores who read articles like this one.) Audiences are more stratified by media habits than they are united by common interests.
So, you will not send people back to your paper by eliminating your website (though you’ll save the cost of operating a website — maybe that’s the real consideration) — you’ll send them to other websites. And if you do maintain a website with a prohibitively high paywall, to try to send people to print, you have the worst of both worlds: a website that costs money to maintain, and no audience or revenue.
The real error of print people is thinking that cost is a factor driving people from print to the web — as though people go to the web to save the price of a newspaper or magazine. Wrong. They go to your website because the web is where they hang out, and because they are hoping to find something that would be fresher than they could in a paper printed last night and filled with yesterday’s news.
Every time I go to Provence I am reminded that these Citroens (and the Deux-Cheveaux that preceded them) were ideal cars for this climate. If I lived there, I’d try to buy one. But I guess that by this stage it’d have to be from eBay.fr.
Flickr version here.
