E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (essential reading .TXT) 📕

(NetBot) cannot be blocked or fooled by using differing

product categories.

In the future, these agents will refer also to real life

retail chains and issue a map of the branch or store closest

to an address specified by the user (the default being his

residence). This technology can be seen in action in a few

music sites on the web and is likely to be dominant with

wireless internet appliances. The owner of an internet enabled

(third generation) mobile phone is likely to be the target of

geographically-specific marketing campaigns, ads and special

offers pertaining to his current location (as reported by his

GPS - satellite Geographic Positioning System).

Internet news are advantaged. They can be frequently and

dynamically updated (unlike static print news) and be always

accessible (similar to print news), immediate and fresh.

The future will witness a form of interactive news. A special

“corner” in the site will be open to updates posted by the

public (the equivalent of press releases). This will provide

readers with a glimpse into the making of the news, the raw

material news are made of. The same technology will be applied

to interactive TVs. Content will be downloaded from the

internet and be displayed as an overlay on the TV screen or in

a square in a special location. The contents downloaded will

be directly connected to the TV programming. Thus, the

biography and track record of a football player will be

displayed during a football match and the history of a country

when it gets news coverage.

Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent

This is an unconventional way to look at the Internet. Laymen

and experts alike talk about “sites” and “advertising space”.

Yet, the Internet was never compared to a new continent whose

surface is infinite.

The Internet will have its own real estate developers and

construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their

profits from the scarcity of the resource that they exploit -

the Internet counterparts will derive their profits from the

tenants (the content).

Two examples:

A few companies bought “Internet Space” (pages, domain names,

portals), developed it and make commercial use of it by:

* renting it out

* constructing infrastructure and selling it

* providing an intelligent gateway, entry point to the rest

of the internet

* or selling advertising space which subsidizes the tenants

(Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others).

* Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names

identical to brand names in the “real” world) and then

selling the domain name to an interested party

Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The

investment is low and getting lower with the introduction of

competition in the field of domain registration services and

the increase in the number of top domains.

Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for

free home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is

precisely this infrastructure that the developer can later

sell, lease, franchise, or rent out.

At the beginning, only members of the fringes and the avant-garde (inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers)

invest in a new invention. The invention of a new

communications technology is mostly accompanied by devastating

silence.

No one knows to say what are the optimal uses of the invention

(in other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members of

the scientific and business elites - argue that there is no

real need for the invention and that it substitutes a new and

untried way for old and tried modes of doing the same thing

(so why assume the risk?)

These criticisms are usually founded:

To start with, there is, indeed, no need for the new medium. A

new medium invents itself - and the need for it. It also

generates its own market to satisfy this newly found need.

Two prime examples are the personal computer and the compact

disc.

When the PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear.

Its performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was

horribly user unfriendly.

It suffered from faulty design, absent user comfort and ease

of use and required considerable professional knowledge to

operate. The worst part was that this knowledge was unique to

the new invention (not portable).

It reduced labour mobility and limited one’s professional

horizons. There were many gripes among those assigned to tame

the new beast.

The PC was thought of, at the beginning, as a sophisticated

gaming machine, an electronic baby-sitter. As the presence of

a keyboard was detected and as the professional horizon

cleared it was thought of in terms of a glorified typewriter

or spreadsheet. It was used mainly as a word processor (and

its existence justified solely on these grounds). The

spreadsheet was the first real application and it demonstrated

the advantages inherent to this new machine (mainly

flexibility and speed). Still, it was more (speed) of the

same. A quicker ruler or pen and paper. What was the

difference between this and a hand held calculator (some of

them already had computing, memory and programming features)?

The PC was recognized as a medium only 30 years after it was

invented with the introduction of multimedia software. All

this time, the computer continued to spin off markets and

secondary markets, needs and professional specialities. The

talk as always was centred on how to improve on existing

markets and solutions.

The Internet is the computer’s first important breakthrough.

Hitherto the computer was only quantitatively different - the

multimedia and the Internet have made it qualitatively

superior, actually, sui generis, unique.

This, precisely, is the ghost haunting the Internet:

It has been invented, is maintained and is operated by

computer professionals. For decades these people have been

conditioned to think in Olympic terms: more, stronger, higher.

Not: new, unprecedented, non-existent. To improve - not to

invent. They stumbled across the Internet - it invented itself

despite its own creators.

Computer professionals (hardware and software experts alike) -

are linear thinkers. The Internet is non linear and modular.

It is still the age of hackers. There is still a lot to be

done in improving technological prowess and powers. But their

control of the contents is waning and they are being gradually

replaced by communicators, creative people, advertising

executives, psychologists and the totally unpredictable masses

who flock to flaunt their home pages.

These all are attuned to the user, his mental needs and his

information and entertainment preferences.

The compact disc is a different tale. It was intentionally

invented to improve upon an existing technology (basically,

Edison’s Gramophone). Market-wise, this was a major gamble:

the improvement was, at first, debatable (many said that the

sound quality of the first generation of compact discs was

inferior to that of its contemporaneous record players).

Consumers had to be convinced to change both software and

hardware and to dish out thousands of dollars just to listen

to what the manufacturers claimed was better quality Bach. A

better argument was the longer life of the software (though

contrasted with the limited life expectancy of the consumer,

some of the first sales pitches sounded absolutely morbid).

The computer suffered from unclear positioning. The compact

disc was very clear as to its main functions - but had a rough

time convincing the consumers.

Every medium is first controlled by the technical people.

Gutenberg was a printer - not a publisher. Yet, he is the

world’s most famous publisher. The technical cadre is joined

by dubious or small-scale entrepreneurs and, together, they

establish ventures with no clear vision, market-oriented

thinking, or orderly plan of action. The legislator is also

dumbfounded and does not grasp what is happening - thus, there

is no legislation to regulate the use of the medium. Witness

the initial confusion concerning copyrighted software and the

copyrights of ROM embedded software. Abuse or under-utilization of resources grow. Recall the sale of radio

frequencies to the first cellular phone operators in the West

- a situation which repeats itself in Eastern and Central

Europe nowadays.

But then more complex transactions - exactly as in real estate

in “real life” - begin to emerge.

This distinction is important. While in real life it is

possible to sell an undeveloped plot of land - no one will buy

“pages”. The supply of these is unlimited - their scarcity

(and, therefore, their virtual price) is zero.

The second example involves the utilization of a site - rather

than its mere availability.

A developer could open a site wherein first time authors will

be able to publish their first manuscript - for a fee.

Evidently, such a fee will be a fraction of what it would take

to publish a “real life” book. The author could collect money

for any downloading of his book - and split it with the site

developer. The potential buyers will be provided with access

to the contents and to a chapter of the books. This is

currently being done by a few fledgling firms but a full scale

publishing industry has not yet developed.

The Life of a Medium

The internet is simply the latest in a series of networks

which revolutionized our lives. A century before the internet,

the telegraph, the railways, the radio and the telephone have

been similarly heralded as “global” and transforming.

Every medium of communications goes through the same

evolutionary cycle:

Anarchy

The Public Phase

At this stage, the medium and the resources attached to it are

very cheap, accessible, under no regulatory constraints. The

public sector steps in: higher education institutions,

religious institutions, government, not for profit

organizations, non governmental organizations (NGOs), trade

unions, etc. Bedevilled by limited financial resources, they

regard the new medium as a cost effective way of disseminating

their messages.

The Internet was not exempt from this phase which ended only a

few years ago. It started with a complete computer anarchy

manifested in ad hoc networks, local networks, networks of

organizations (mainly universities and organs of the

government such as DARPA, a part of the defence establishment,

in the USA). Non commercial entities jumped on the bandwagon

and started sewing these networks together (an activity fully

subsidized by government funds). The result was a globe

encompassing network of academic institutions. The American

Pentagon established the network of all networks, the ARPANET.

Other government departments joined the fray, headed by the

National Science Foundation (NSF) which withdrew only lately

from the Internet.

The Internet (with a different name) became semi-public

property - with access granted to the chosen few.

Radio took precisely this course. Radio transmissions started

in the USA in 1920. Those were anarchic broadcasts with no

discernible regularity. Non commercial organizations and not

for profit organizations began their own broadcasts and even

created radio broadcasting infrastructure (albeit of the cheap

and local kind) dedicated to their audiences. Trade unions,

certain educational institutions and religious groups

commenced “public radio” broadcasts.

The Commercial Phase

When the users (e.g., listeners in the case of the radio, or

owners of PCs and modems in the example of the Internet) reach

a critical mass - the business sector is alerted. In the name

of capitalist ideology (another religion, really) it demands

“privatization” of the medium. This harps on very sensitive

strings in every Western soul: the efficient allocation of

resources which is the result of competition, corruption and

inefficiency naturally associated with the public sector

(“Other People’s Money” - OPM), the ulterior motives of

members of the ruling political echelons (the infamous

American Paranoia), a lack of variety and of catering to the

tastes and interests of certain audiences, the equation

private enterprise = democracy and more.

The end result is the same: the private sector takes over the

medium from “below” (makes offers to the owners or operators

of the medium - that they cannot possibly refuse) - or from

“above” (successful lobbying in the corridors of power leads

to the appropriate legislation and the medium is

“privatized”).

Every privatization - especially that of a medium - provokes