Azeem alerts me to Tony Perkins’ latest project. Perkins is an interesting figure: a glamorous member of a Sand Hill Road tech VC dynasty, founder of the Silicon Valley bible The Red Herring (and certainly the most prominent supporter of Steve Forbes for President that I can think of). Always On is in trendy blog format and apparently intends to combine useful tech investment analysis with air-headed nostra like:
“The Semantic WebThe next generation web will be programmable and will search, process and transact for individuals and businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People will benefit by this increased network efficiency, but it will mean consolidating your personal and business life on to the Web.”
What are they on about? Still, if The Herring in its heyday is anything to go by, we should probably give these guys the benefit of the doubt.
yes indeed, give us a chance. we are having a fun time anyway.
best to all on the other side of the pond, and please forgive us for our sins.
yours cordially.
I am so glad you raised this issue. Blogging has never been an activity of profit seeking. But ever since good’ole Nick Denton began to capitalise on the medium, other savvy pros have seen the window of opportunity. Now, for the purpose of innovation and change, what is the main difference for me as a reader to read edited news in a different format? Ah, oh, those Comments and/or Trackbacks (for the techies). To give Tony Perkins and boys some credit, if they engage people to post comments, they’ll reap up an enormous non-tangible value: readership honesty, good collaborations, and, yes that oh-so trendy term: social engagement within a social network.
I was sad when Red Herring went down in value having been a reader for years. So kudos to him this time and bonne chance. Only sad thing is to see the list of sponsors: total external entities without a clue about the real essence of the medium, which grew out of pure counterculture drive. I would have liked to have seen blogging growing a bit further in its organic mode. I hate medium appropriation ‘cos I’m a bit of a “rebel”…
i look at it this way. for a long time the only folks that used the internet were unix geeks. it was their own private network, and they dug it. then along came tim berners-lee, then marc andreesen and jerry yang, and it eventually blew out into the mainstream commercial market. with 600 million users going to 2 billion, and cisco, intel and dell now the largest e-commence companies on the planet, it has clearly radicalized the global consumer culture and economy.
a subplot of this drama is, as they say, the “decentralization of media” and the underground blogging movement has shown us what is possible and where the real value is.
but what bloggers have shown us is too powerful to be contained. and therefore entrepreneurs are going to saddle its uniqueness, build businesses around them, and blow it out just the way the internet in general was.
i think this a good and natural process. and what we will end up with is a much more uncensored and participatory media world. which will allow people to cut through a lot of the crap, and more easily find the truth. and i am all for that, because whether it is the new york times, or bowblog, it is all someone’s opinion to me. and at least original bloggers were upfront about what they were all about.
The vitality and the sheer rate of innovation around weblogs reminds me very much of those early days of the web. In those days I used to say that the promise of the web could not be realised until it crossed over and became a mainstream phenomenon. The same applies to blogging and, necessarily, this requires some compromise on the part of the pioneers and the purists. The blogosphere will be richer and more useful once there are millions of bloggers and hundreds of millions of readers. Sometimes it’s hard for the pioneers to let go…
“Market-Earned Monopoly,” Quoth FCC Chmn Powell
At the AlwaysOn Conference at Stanford last Tuesday, FCC Chairman Michael Powell was describing how tough his job was in regulating the Baby Bells when he let us all know what he was really thinking. He contrasted the former government-granted…