USA Today: “More than 200 Internet-based radio stations have shut down because of a royalty fee that takes effect in September, and more are closing daily.” [Scripting News]

The Internet may have bombed on Wall Street, but it’s doing just fine on Main Street

Very good “NYT” article outlining the way the technology is changing the world even as the stock market thinks the revolution’s over. Useful source of quotes for a point of view I’m often trying to put across. For example:

As old-line media celebrates its return to power and to vogue, some analysts and executives caution that the Internet’s capacity to change the rules should not be discounted too quickly. Investors may have repudiated the Internet, they say, but consumers have not.

“The Internet may not be doing so great on Wall Street, but it’s doing great on Main Street,” said Marshall Cohen, senior vice president for research at America Online. “As far as the people who are online, they’re using it more and valuing it more.”

For consumers, that may be a good thing. But for media companies looking to the Internet for profits, it remains a frustrating reality. The “digital revolution” that many traditional media executives were convinced would topple them or make them rich has not materialized.

In part, that is because the Internet has turned out to be more of a souped-up telephone than a delivery vehicle for media and entertainment. E-mail messaging is by far the medium’s most popular feature.

But with 61 percent of American adults using the Internet, up from 46 percent two years ago, analysts and media executives say the medium is beginning to change consumer expectations of what mainstream culture should offer. Consumers who were once content to sit back and absorb what was beamed at them are demanding more control over how and when they consume movies, television, newspapers and music.

And whether it turns a profit or not, media companies are being forced to respond…

Real Networks takes on Redmond
“NYT” report by John Markoff.

“SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 — In a significant challenge to Microsoft, RealNetworks plans to announce a new version of its software on Monday that can distribute audio and video in a range of formats, including Microsoft’s own proprietary Windows Media.

The new software is intended for large media companies and other corporations that need to send audio and video data to customers and employees in a variety of different formats. But RealNetworks acknowledged that it was possible that the company might incur Microsoft’s legal wrath.

Nevertheless, Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive who founded RealNetworks as Progressive Networks in 1994, said he believed the strategy was good for both Microsoft and consumers.”

More on digital photography — what happens when our attics are no longer full of shoeboxes of old snapshots?

Interesting piece on BBC Online by Paul Rubens. Quote:

“The digital photos will still exist of course, though not as prints which can be dusted off and passed around. They will instead be collections of ones and zeros on various types of electronic storage media.

The problem is there will be no way to look at them. That’s because technology evolves so fast that any storage medium in use today is bound to become obsolete sooner or later. Finding the right equipment to retrieve digital images stored decades previously on obsolete media will become almost impossible.

In fact, it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was stored on laser discs.

The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more than 1,000 years after it was produced. ”

Forbes magazine discovers Linux

Yes, honestly. And likes what it finds, too. But in typical capitalist tool fashion, it coyly manages to avoid giving any links to the websites of the free products it so lavishly praises. Thus “Gaim may be the best instant messaging program around” — but can we find a link to the Gaim development site? Can we hell.

Lies, damned lies — and Internet traffic growth statistics

An interesting piece in the Economist suggesting that many of the most extravagant statistics about Internet traffic growth came from, er, Worldcom sales fantasies.

Why we need librarians and information scientists

“I have watched as hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested to re-invent the wheel – often badly. Everybody understands and takes for granted that there is an expertise needed for the application and use of technology. Unfortunately, many Web entrepreneurs fail to recognize that there is a parallel expertise needed about information – collecting it, organizing it, embedding it successfully in information systems, presenting it intelligently in interfaces, and providing search capabilities that effectively exploit the statistical characteristics of information and human information seeking behavior.

“Content” has been treated like a kind of soup that “content providers” scoop out of pots and dump wholesale into information systems. But it does not work that way. Good information retrieval design requires just as much expertise about information and systems of information organization as it does about the technical aspects of systems….”. [more].

My Observer column about the threat to Web radio from the Librarian of Congress’s adjudication on royalties is now on the Net.

Rethinking the AOL-Time Warner merger
“NYT” article.

“Were Time Warner to have acquired America Online and simply called it another division, there would be no crisis of confidence today. But in January 2000, when the deal was struck, that was not possible. That was at the peak of the Internet stock boom, and America Online was worth $200 billion, more that double the value of Time Warner, a far larger company by every other measure….”

[…]

The deal gave Time Warner shareholders only 45 percent of the combined stock in the company, even though Time Warner represented some 80 percent of the revenue and 70 percent of the operating cash flow. Talk of how the deal would create the “world’s first Internet-age media and communications company,” as the announcement said, was meant to convince investors that AOL’s sky-high stock market multiple should be applied to the combined company.

How to run a company (not)

Conventional wisdom these days is to hire the smartest folks and give them their heads. Guess which company pursued this strategy most fanatically? Yep, you guessed it — Enron. Fascinating piece by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame.