mattiv.com
web design | Matti Vähätalo
Dear Rupert Murdoch,
I may not be in any position to give business advice for you, Mr. Murdoch, but since you started pushing forward your idea to start charging for online news content, I couldn’t help saying to myself: “You just don’t get it, do you, Ru?” Since I know you’re reading this, let me share you some widely agreed thoughts about how things work nowadays. May this blog post be called “Internet economy for dummies: Love is no more the only thing money can’t buy”. This should be obvious information for the younger generation, but you’re not one of them.
To simplify to extreme: in the “old economy”, whenever we create something, resources are used, and because resources are scarce, this “something” has a cost. This cost then affects the monetary value of this “something”. For example when we make a newspaper, the approximate monetary value of the newspaper can be counted by adding the costs of paper, ink, labor, copying, distribution etc, and then dividing the number with the amount of copies. To make a newspaper you need money, and that keeps the poor idealist hippies at bay.
But what if paper, ink, copying and distribution had no cost and the amount of copies is unlimited? Then the same calculation brings the monetary value of the newspaper to approximately zero. Add the fact that everyone has an unlimited amount of paper and ink, distribution would be instant world wide and everyone can make a newspaper for free. Now, how much can you charge for it, when idealist hippies are writing the same stuff for free and have the same audience?
Unfortunately for you, Mr. Murdoch, the Internet was invented and we moved to another era. Publishing transformed from scarcity to abundance and this means the economical models are different. It’s not simply about money anymore: we have new currencies, such as reputation. The USD on your bank account has been rivaled not by EUR, but by WLR (Wikilandia Reputation), a currency of reputation, good will and ego boasting. Open source is a serious competitor to your model: Most of the world’s servers are running Linux, the biggest rival of Internet Explorer is Firefox and Wikipedia is our most important single source of information. All three are ridden by non-profit foundations rather than money. They have value that money can’t buy, and *boom*. Money has lost some of its power.
I can just imagine how much you would be willing to pay for Wikipedia but – I hear your curse – owning Wikipedia is impossible. It works outside your world, in a different dimension where money can’t buy content.
Then what is valuable, you might ask? At least money is not valuable anymore. YouTube is still making losses every day, but still its value is counted in billions. You probably would have stayed away from that kind of business, but Google seems rather happy to own this little peace of money-eater it bought couple of years back. Maybe Google thinks more about the value than the money. For Google, which is a 100% Internet company, money is a mere number, credits instead of bills and coins. It’s not the main focus, the primary objective on their radar. Google understands that money has the tendency to find its way to where people are. In the internet, you can be big without being rich!
But don’t worry! Even though you’re better in the USD-based economy than WLR-based one, you have a chance: Just that you can’t really sell air doesn’t mean you couldn’t make USD out of it: You can sell compressors, air fresheners, ventilators or scuba diving equipment. You have to make it special. Nobody buys air just to get the oxygen required, but to add value to their lives by specialized air products. Just like nobody pays for the news anymore, but are prepared to pay for specialized highly valued content or better consuming experience that is not available for free.
(Of course, if you happen to be a cigar-smoking representative of music of film industry, you can always push out legislation that turns online content usage and effective independent publishing into criminal activity. This still seems to be too easy.)
For further reading, I suggest the following:
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
In a cliché movie scene, an old man has just lost his wife. He goes through his archives, his wife’s lockers and finds an old photograph, picturing a happy moment from when their love was young and blossoming. A tear drops from the old man’s eyelids as he flips through photos he didn’t remember existing.
Let’s imagine the same situation in the year 2050. An old man has just lost his wife and wants to go through her archives. He opens her laptop and luckily guesses the password correctly. He knows she has kept her private diary and documents online, behind a secure password. The man tries to get through but can’t guess the password this time. Disappointed, he closes the laptop and turns to a pile of old CDs and DVDs from 50 years back. He becomes desperate: CD and DVD drives are a memory from the past, and the few ones that still are left, are held in museums, obviously not working anymore. Now all he has is a pile of plastic, holding his precious memories, and no way to access it.
As archeologists find hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt or pieces of clay in ancient Sumeria, they have their tactics in learning to understand the language they are written in. Thinking about the archeologists 3000 years forward, what do they learn from us, finding pieces of silicon in ruins of ancient San Francisco? What kind of ancient civilization will we be? The Digital Dark Age. It’s just a pile of silicon. No writing, no stories, no documents.
It’s not only a problem of the archeologists of the future. If I would be run over by a bus today, all my email, online accounts and many files would be inaccessible for eternity. Then I heard about Legacy Locker and signed up. The service promises to hold my online assets and pass them to my family (or whoever I choose) when I pass out. This really is an answer to our needs. What worries me is that since the Internet is in constant change of ever-growing speed, I doubt this service even exists anymore when it is needed in my case. I don’t have my old emails from 3 years back anymore, so let’s say I live for more 50 years, what will my family get? Passwords to services that haven’t been existing for generations? Not to say that probably the whole service will be long forgotten.
I am a huge fan of Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote long-term thinking in this world where 10 years is enough to call something “ancient”. 15 years ago, I first connected myself to the Internet and already this very technology has changed our society in a radical way, with more changes to come. The same time passed between years 1034 and 1049 AD, one tenth of the time that passed between 2300 BC and 2150 BC. Still, we don’t feel there is any difference between these numbers. Even 4000 years is a very short time in Earth history: The sun is approximately of the same age even after 3 million years, but for us, 100 years is enough to make us dizzy. Year 2109 feels like being far in the future! We are the Homo Erectus of technology, and we need to understand that.
Long Now Foundation has many projects helping their cause, some more concrete and some based more on educating people. Along them, is Long Server and its Format Exchange project. In the project, the foundation is building a format library to prevent old file formats to be completely readable after they become obsolete. I really hope this foundation grabs the attention and critical mass it needs to survive the inevitable end of its core people’s limited life spans. I recommend checking also other projects of theirs, like Long Bets.
Oh, and don’t forget to leave something behind you! Luckily, I lived my childhood in the analogue age, so my first grade school material is still available, whenever I want to feel nostalgic. And when I ever will have children, I can imagine their faces when they see how backwards the life was in the early 90’s: paper and pens! Or maybe the archeologist of the year 5000 thinks we’re the backward ones, for not leaving a trace of our civilization?
I should tell you how sorry I am for not writing anything for a while, but I won’t, because I don’t feel at least sorry about that. Mostly, I have been living a life and whenever I have had something in my mind worth writing, I have felt I don’t have nothing to say about the subject. These subjects include Iran, Ning, Michael Jackson and MySpace’s fortunate crisis. None of these crossed the line for me to come out of my shell. Then I realized why: I’m offline, and thus my line has gone up. This time I write less about what’s going on in the world, and more about my personal life, so if you’re just not that interested, then stop here. Good.
Since all readers are either spam bots (I love them, sending me comments and couraging me to continue when nobody else cares about this stuff) or my friends, I probably don’t need to say that I live in Brazil right now, learning about my life and doing an internship as a web developer, which is professionally more like being on a gap year than something that I would get retired from. As I was the reknown Facebook addict in “my circle” back in Finland, here my life is less on the web. These might be some of the many reasons:
What most surprises me noticing, is of coursenumber 6. Since most small businesses don’t have a website, or if they do, it is coded by the boss’s nephew and then left outdated, I don’t know what the local lunch place has on its menu today (although I know it’s rice and beans). Nor do I know what are the prices or opening times in the other one – the existence of which I happened to learn by walking past, and not by Googling. I don’t know which bus to take to go from A to B, and sometimes my credit card is not accepted when trying to buy something online. I can’t get an appointment to the doctor by a handy online form and in order to make a bank transfer, I need to go to the bank. I can’t order a taxi with an SMS and sometimes I even have to explain where I am, because of the lack of GPS.
SMS is not quite popular, since it is not very reliable, to be honest, and the usual way to get information here is calling on the phone. Calling is not exactly difficult, so of course there’s no problem. I mean, if you feel comfortable making phone calls… Probably one reason why I love the internet so much is that I hate talking on the phone. For example, I don’t keep enough contact with my family for the mere reason that the only way to do it is via telephone, and it makes me feel like a bad person. I am of the type who has to write down a script about things I’m going to say and then take a deep breath and prepare myself mentally to press the numbers and the green button. The fact, that here I have to do that usually with a language I only started practicing a half a year ago, is not making it any more comfortable.
My time here in the tropic might me teaching me more than I ever thought it would. It is teaching me what I need to learn, and what the technology really means to me. It means “relief”. It means independence. It means no extra heartbeats and misunderstandings because of bad line. It means… comfortably controlled social deprivation.
Today it happened again: Google changed the way we see the universe, communication, ourselves, each others and the pedobear! That is, soon we start seeing these things in waves.
As much as I really want to see the universe from a different angle, I’m afraid it changes only the lifes of a minority. It’s a good and a big idea, but maybe the fact that the introduction video has the length of a Hollywood movie, is a sign? Maybe it’s just a bit too big, don’t you think? I want to have all my friends in waves and not just the nerds, so please, don’t scare them.
As much as I would like MSN to be history, I can’t see the world really changing until these means of communication are used by at least 50% of the humanity… And I really don’t see people who already have a difficult time writing e-mails and SMSs taking part in my waves, as handy and cool as they might be. The reason? They feel overwhelmed… Some dude called Mitchell Kapor once said that “Getting information from the Internet is like drinking from a fire hydrant!” When it comes to Google Wave, it looks like a waterfall, so I don’t see many people taking a sip. Knowing people, most of us are too lazy or have a real job…
Google should rethink their elevator pitch. That is when your idea is so clear that you can explain it during an elevator ride. Usually that’s like 30 seconds, not 80 minutes! I feel pity for those people who are stuck in an elevator for the entire lenght of that brief introduction. Hope they have spare oxygen…
With Google Wave, I see the internet-aware people excited and getting the kicks out of it, while the not-that-much-aware people are left cold, so the gap between the “estates of the cyber realm” will most likely grow even further. I would prefer doing something to get those old-fashioned offline people with us to this new dimension, instead of just scaring them away with even more powerful fire hydrants. And all those people who use Internet Explorer (sorry for the accurate generalization) don’t even want to understand, but rather do something more important. Internet should not be scary and overwhelming, but rather the welcoming and natural continuation for the physical world that it is. That’s when the world really changes.
Let’s hope it’s a step that needs to be taken, and ten years from now, also the IE people are catching up to where the nerds are now. I mean, more than ten years ago, most people considered e-mail to be nerdy. Now even my neighbour’s dog has one, and there’s nothing special about it. Maybe Google thinks that they really don’t need to push the IE people to the new, but they will get it eventually anyway. I would still prefer Google helping them with the start.
Yes, you’re correct. I never watched the presentation. Instead, I did my job and visited the library. And now it’s Friday night so don’t expect me to watch that now!
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