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Table of Contents
Web Notes -- AltaVista, CompareItAll, iSyndicate, Learnlots, flypaper, Harry Potter, and free Internet access
Off-the-wall ideas -- URhell.com, baseball salaries, author chats
Feature articles:
Click on Advanced Search, then click to "Preview the new Advanced Search Center." There you'll find an extensive tutorial that covers not only how to search effectively, but also how to have your pages found. If you print it all out it comes to about 60 pages of important reference material (written by Richard Seltzer).
CompareItAll www.compareitall.com
This new shopping comparison site features weekly articles by Richard Seltzer and also has posted the full text of his book Shop Online the Lazy Way (published by Macmillan).
AuctionRover www.auctionrover.com
This support site for auction sellers and buyers features a weekly column by Richard Seltzer in the section "Beyond the Basics."
iSyndicate www.isyndicate.com
Providing content from over 700 providers to over 170,000 Web sites, iSyndicate also includes three features from Richard Seltzer -- a weekly article about Business on the Web Today, a weekly book review, and this monthly newsletter, Internet-on-a-Disk. Currently, 32 Web sites have signed up to carry his features. Among the first were:
Among the free tutorials available at this site, you'll find (under On the Web) three by Richard Seltzer: How to Find People Online, Online Shopping, and Best Web Stores. He's working on three more for them: How to Create Web Pages Without Knowing HTML, Advanced Search Techniques, and Internet Marketing. Other sites carrying these tutorials on license from Learnlots include: avantgo.com, simple.com, and firstsource.com.
Update on "flypaper"
The tactics that you use to be found -- to have friends, as well potential
readers and customers find you rather than you actively pursuing them is
called "Flypaper." You can find a series of articles on this subject by
Richard Seltzer at
www.samizdat.com/altabook.html#fly
Here are two more personal success stories:
Without a Myth (three-act stage play), written by Richard Seltzer nearly 30 years ago, never published in paper, and never before performed, was found at our Web site by a theater company in Spokane, Washington. Now it will be produced for the first time by High Impact Theater at the Met Performing Arts Center in Spokane, Washington, April 12-14, 2000.
Ethiopia through Russian Eyes (a translation by Richard Seltzer from the Russian of two books about Ethiopia by Alexander Bulatovich) was found at our Web site by Professor Pankhurst (a renowned Ethiopian historian in Addis Ababa) and also by a great-grandson of Emperor Menelik II. Thanks to their support, the book will finally be published in print this March by Africa World Press/Red Sea Press.
Harry Potter rides again
Amazon.com now lists the fourth Harry Potter book, and you can order it now, even though it won't be old until July (five months from now). And already it is Amazon's number one best seller.
Free Internet access
First there were free browsers, then free plug-ins of all kinds, then free Web space and free email. Now free Internet access is spreading like crazy, not just dial-up, but also DSL. Your choices today include: freedsl, altavista, worldspy, juno, and netzero. The ads can be annoying, but these services are great as a backup, if and when your regular ISP has problems. Also, if you have cable or DSL access from your home, it's good to have a free dialup service for when you are on the road.
Branded auctions
After pioneers establish a winning business model, you can soon expect another company will package that capability, lowering the barriers to entry, making it easy for many companies to head in the same direction. That is the case with online auctions, where FairMarket now lets you create your own auction site, with your own brand, running as a hosted service, and even lets you set up auction kiosks for smaller companies. For details check the transcript of our recent chat session on that topic at www.samizdat.com/chat121.html
Believe it or not, as of today (Feb. 13), this prime domain name has still not been taken. Grab it now. What a natural for radio and TV advertising: "The URL is URHell."
Baseball salaries
Back in September 1998 (Internet-on-a-Disk #25), "Castro, baseball, and a possible end to political conflict with Cuba," we suggested that Major League Baseball put a franchise in Havana and give it to Castro, as a face-saving way for him to retired from government, and also as a way to improve relations with Cuba and jumpstart capitalism there. Since that time, the Cuban national team played an exhibition game with the Baltimore Orioles; and when the Cuban national team played the Venezuelan national team, Castro acted as manager of the Cuban team. So the "off-the-wall idea" wasn't really that off-the-wall.
With spring training just a couple week's away, here's another baseball suggestion. Today, competition for the best major league players drives salaries to astronomical levels, and the stars make separate endorsement deals for still more money. Why not let advertisers subsidize player salaries? In that case, the advertiser would make the deal directly with the team, and the player would on his uniform and in other highly visible ways display his affiliation with that company. That way, a local company could generate lots of good will by making it possible for the home team to afford the star they need.
Author chats
(This idea occurred to me during a recent chat session, the transcript of which will soon be available at www.samizdat.com/chat125.html. I've sent it to Amazon in hopes that they'll give it a try. -- Richard Seltzer)
I love Amazon.com and find their user-contributed reviews helpful. But they don't have any direct dialogue at their site (that I know of) -- no forums or chats. Barnes & Noble holds scheduled chats with authors, as an off-shoot of their author visits to physical bookstores. But that experience more closely resembles talk radio or talk television -- with a auditorium style where very few of the attendees ever actually get to submit a question to the celebrity and no real peer-to-peer dialogue takes place.
I'm not sure that open chat or forum would help sell books. But Amazon could easily set it up so authors could volunteer to chat at specific times or to participate in a forum of their own, just as now they allow authors to post "interviews" with themselves. That could be interesting, and it needn't involve a lot of work on Amazon's part. It would be self-selecting, with only the authors that feel comfortable in the medium stepping forward.
This item and followup messages first appeared in the I-Sales Digest, <i-sales@list.mmgco.com>. It is included here with the permission of the author. NB -- we'll be holding a chat session on the topic of Virtual worlds and 3D shopping/advertising on Thursday, Feb. 17. Check www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details.
While 3D gaming and "virtual worlds" have been with us for a while, there has not been much in the way of a business model in them, besides developing community sites around them.
3D advertising seems to me to be one way to go. The next logical step, IMHO, is to actually develop 3D e-commerce.
One of the major complaints about current e-comm. Web site offerings is that there is never the right help when you need it. Consequently a large proportion (75% springs to mind) of attempted purchases are abandoned by customers.
At present, various vendors are trying to push "analog" solutions to this online problem, including having chat-windows on the site, or allowing customers to click a button to establish a live "telephone call" via their PC with a sales rep. These solutions are highly problematical.
One solution that no one has, to my knowledge, attempted is to build a 3D shopping experience.
Imagine your favourite clothes retailer. Imagine their store. You know the layout, as you shop there often. Now what if you could visit that store, and its entire layout, online and in 3D? Move about the isles. See the clothes on the hangers or on virtual models (which, at the click of a mouse, adopt your exact dimensions).
Need help? Just tap the shoulder of a virtual store assistant as s/he wanders past. Have a text/speech dialog with him/her, answering your queries and even finalising the transaction.
An interesting scenario, for sure. But such a business would take a while to scale. The development costs alone would require that the store grab thousands of regular customers to pay it off.
But there are already large scale online 3D communities (like Worlds Inc.). Why not fashion (no pun intended) a store on one of these virtual worlds? They already have banner advertisements of sorts (i.e. Coke signs) which, when clicked, spawn a new browser window linked to the advertiser's site.
Why not create a virtual store, in the virtual landscape, that customers, via their 3D avatars, can explore and shop from?
How long to you think it will be before eBay style auctions become even more entertainment-oriented (which is half of eBay's attraction), as people participate in them in real-time, via 3D avatars?
One pet project that I have been kicking around for a while is developing a 3D representation of an existing street (say, Times Square or the Sydney Opera House precinct), where people who live there can go to "hang out". And instead of just walking around with the street as a mere backdrop, each store on the street would be replicated in true scale.
Such a scenario would combine a number of community elements: interaction, familiarity and common reference points.
I think it would be a pretty exciting offering, and a well received one.
But, of course, there are potential problems with the model. As any Web designer of merit will tell you: People don't download plugins. You can't design a site with the premise that visitors will download non-standard plugins. Basically, if the software isn't included as part of the standard browser install, you're going to cut-off a very large % of prospective customers. Microsoft et al. realise this, which is why they charge a hefty fee to bundle.
It is possible to overcome the plug-in barrier, but you need to offer a hard-to-refuse value-proposition (sex sites offering online peep-shows and virtual tours, for example, don't appear to suffer this limitation) and it needs to be a point-and-click, no-brainer exercise to download and install the plug-in.
The other alternative is to eschew plug-ins and go for openly supported Web platforms (Java, DHTML, VRML) or code your systems for deployment within existing 3D environments (ala Worlds Inc.), where you have an existing userbase with the necessary 3D software.
Mark Neely, LLB AIMM - mpn@infolution.com.au, Author, Lawyer, Internet Strategist & Professional Cynic
Response from Nancy Yates, nyates@simplyclick.com
In regards to to post on 3D shopping, it does exist. Check out www.styleclick.com. A collaboration between manufacturers, Intel and a company formerly known as ModaCad. They are doing just that! I've been watching the development since, we tried 3D about 3 years ago, problem was, not too many normal web surfers had graphics accelerator cards and fast connections to make 3D a success... as usual, we are always ahead of our time.
Our version of the 3D advertising was to seamlessly integrate advertising into everyday 3D scenery online. So the storefront built in 3D would have a point of presence display at the virtual cash register promoting "blistex" lip saver or a can of coke on the counter. These items would be "hot" and would link to a specific site coke or blistex has designed to sell, communicate messages, etc. to the consumer. We have also developed a new software application that will enable a company to really know who its customers are, be able to target and send very specific messages to them - and best of all know their surfing habits. It's kinda like being their own Double Click! Anyone know of VC money to help us launch the software technology?
Nancy L. Yates, CEO, Simply Click, www.simplyclick.com
Reponse to response (Mark Neely responding to Neil Fischbein)
Neil Fischbein wrote: "Imagine? This is a reality today. The problem is that most people hear '3D' and immediately associate it with the world of 'Tron' or 'Blade Runner.' The reality is that many companies are using photographic 3D content on their websites very successfully to represent their products and their showrooms."
I checked out most of the sites that you referred to and they all indeed use some form of 3D imagery. But a 3D image grafted onto a 2D page doesn't quite go to the lengths that I outlined.
You are correct - vendors can and are using 3D photography/imaging to represent their products online. Real Estate agents were one of the first to leap onto this technology, allowing potential purchasers to remotely view/tour houses etc. Current 3D imaging technology now allows users to zoom in and out, pan, spin/rotate items etc. This goes someway to alleviating the problems inherent in the non-tactile nature of online shopping.
But I think that we are discussing two different issues.
My original idea behind 3D shopping experiences was that it would be "immersive" and that it replicate existing store formats (though this isn't always a desirable goal). The primary driver behind using immersive 3D experiences was not so much the presentation of items for sale (although this is a considerable benefit), but rather the flexibility that it provides in enhancing and tailoring the purchasing process.
Chip Shop, for example, provides a stunning example of the use of 3D imaging to display golf clubs etc. It offers an array of tips and advice for golfers. But nothing on the site allows me to ask the one question that I need resolved before I commit to purchasing a club. Sure, I could send an email and wait for the hour(s)/day(s) a reply takes, but by then the purchasing momentum is lost. I am certain that Chip Shop has a number of employees "manning" their Web site - but they are nowhere to be seen when the consumer needs to interact with them to finalise a purchase.
Sites like Chip Shot work for those who know what they want. It doesn't work for those who don't.
Many online purchasers put in the time actually walking through real stores, researching their purchase, asking questions of the attentive staff to decide what club (or whatever) they want, then they jump online to get the best deal (not necessarily in the store whose staff were so helpful and knowledgeable). They do this because of the inherent failings of the current online purchasing experience.
To put a different spin on this: I have never gone to Amazon to browse for book purchase ideas. I only go there to order books that I know I want to buy (the motivation to purchase which invariably comes from other sources, such as reviews etc.).
I would hazard a guess that this is true of most of Amazon's customers.
People who want to browse or are uncertain of what it is they want to buy _don't_ do it on Web sites, because their 2D nature is not conducive to this. Many times this is because the site structure is counter-intuitive, other times because the site assumes purchasers come knowing what they want.
If vendors want to encourage purchasers to abandon the current "hybrid shopping process" (i.e. browsing offline, shopping online), they need to better replicate the purchasing experience that we are currently used to.
"While online retailers are just beginning to realize the real possibilities, other market segments have known this for years and have taken advantage of it to the benefit of their consumers. If you have any doubts, just look at automotive websites - from manufacturers <www.vw.com> to resource sites <msn.carpoint.com> - and you will see 3D product representation of interiors and exteriors of nearly every vehicle."
Yep. I can remember providing advice to a marketing agency about 2 or 3 years ago when they were designing a Web initiative for a major car manufacturer. This was precisely where I told them they needed to go. But, again, while viewing a 3D replicatate of a car or its interior helps me understand the product, it doesn't help me purchase it, nor does it educate me - in a single glance - as to the range of cars available via a particular site.
Mark Neely, LLB AIMM - mpn@infolution.com.au, Author, Lawyer, Internet Strategist & Professional Cynic
Upcoming chat session -- Feb. 17, 2000
Inspired by this discussion, we've decided to hold a chat session on the topic of "virtual words and 3D shopping/advertising." As indicated in our "chat reminder" message:
With more and more people able to connect at high speed (with cable and DSL), new business models become viable. Where do we stand today? Is anyone making good effective business use of 3D graphics on the Web? Or is it still a curiosity? Is the virtual world experience significantly different than the typical flat view, and if so, what are the implications? Beyond the obvious 3D views of products like houses and cars, can avatars play a business role? And has anyone succeeded in making avatars interact with one another, in real time, in ways that might be useful for business? Please share your experiences and let us know about creative uses of this technology.
If you know of good example sites, please send me the URLs by email so I can alert others before the chat and we'll be able to have a richer discussion.
Please check www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details.
Response from Kaye Vivian kvivian@cloud9.net
I have been working passionately with the whole 3D virtual worlds and business models thing for about two years now. Lots is happening, and there are lots of applications...personal tutoring online, training and coaching online, business meetings, virtual trade shows, customer service. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to participate in the noon sessions. I'll read the discussion with interest, though, and comment after if I can. Please keep me in mind for any discussions on such topics! My two cents? It's an extremely interesting and useful technology, and almost totally unrealized and underutilized. Still needs some breakthroughs in the technology itself for most business people to really see the advantages. If you want to see what *could* be possible, check out the games Everquest, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call. Nice graphics, good communications interfaces (well, they could be better). Just imagine it in a business setting.
Sites like Exciteextreme.com and the MIT Elastic Catalog and Inxight.com hint at what is possible with the 3D technology or organizing data. I find it a powerful medium that is a year or more away from meaningful business use. Consequently, there are few examples of what it can do!
Kaye
Sites to check:
http://www.styleclick.com -- selling clothing, take their 3D tour (if you have a Penitum III)
http://www.exciteextreme.com -- demo site, leading to shopping
the MIT Elastic Catalog http://nif.www.media.mit.edu/ecat/ -- an alternate way of presenting information
http://www.inxight.com -- selling software for fancy Web experiences
http://www.boo.com -- selling clothing
http://www.moma.org -- Museum of Modern Art
http://www.chipshop.com -- golf equipment
http://www.vw.com -- selling cars
http://msn.carpoint.com -- selling cars
Thanks to Kaye Vivian, Mark Neely, Nancy Yates, and Neil Fischbein.
The Internet -- by linking so many people together efficiently -- makes it possible to do much with very little. You can market a company or product or Web site by doing good things, providing useful information and services, and promoting online discussion to spread the word.
But, Internet-time is different from the time-frame of traditional business. Change happens faster. And the expectations of investors are higher. As a result, ironically, few Internet startup operations, with ambitions of growing large, have the leisure to take full advantage of the free and inexpensive marketing techniques that the Internet makes possible.
Imagine that investors have just handed you a million dollars for your Internet startup. Or imagine that the company that you work for has just given you a large budget for a new Internet project. In either case, you are expected to spend the money allotted to you quickly and produce quick tangible results, which will help you get maximum value at the next round of financing, or at IPO.
So what can you/should you do?
My personal bias is toward low-cost, grassroots efforts, trying to build and serve an audience and mobilize word of keystroke. In this case, that's too slow. So you turn to banner ads. You check opt-in email lists built by other companies rather than taking the time to build your own. You sign up for other pre-packaged services like link exchanges and affiliate programs, caring little about how efficient or cost-effective they are. You pay dearly for partnerships with sites that have established audiences. Your mission is to get results, immediately, not to save money. Print ads, radio and TV ads, and billboards all start to look very attractive, despite the high price and low response rate -- simply because they are fast.
I think of this as "sprint marketing" as opposed to "long-distance marketing." And it has led to strange aberrations throughout the business world. It means that no matter how low banner ads sink in terms of click throughs, demand for them stays high. It means that radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and billboards -- media that theoretically should be hurting from declining ad revenues because of the availability of far less costly and more efficient means of reaching people over the Internet -- are in fact flourishing thanks to an influx of ads from Internet startup operations. It seems that on news-oriented radio stations more than half of all the ads today are for Internet companies. And, reportedly, much of the advertising at the upcoming Super Bowl will be Internet-related.
Meanwhile, the efficiency of business over the Internet had promised to push brick-and-mortar companies to the limit. How could they, with all their fixed overhead, possibly compete with Internet-only companies, which operated with no inventory and were readily accessible by anyone anywhere? But the intense competition for attention among Internet companies, and the mad race for immediate results has led these companies to spend far more on marketing than their brick-and-mortar competitors. Yes, all this marketing captures the public eye and helps escalate stock prices, but it also leads to bizarre business models, where profit is not an immediate goal, and an enormous percentage of revenues goes to marketing expenses -- which more than balances the fixed-cost disadvantage of traditional companies.
So who wins? By another bizarre twist, the startup that has been rapidly burning money with sprint marketing, gets a high stock valuation; so even though it cannot turn a profit with such a cost structure, it can buy other companies, including its brick-and-mortar competitors with stock rather than cash.
Such is the world that we live and do business in, an Alice-in-Wonderland world that many of us now take for granted.
But I can't help but wonder if companies that use long-distance, instead of sprint marketing, that operate with very low costs and that provide true value, might not in the long term win the race. Or is that just wishful thinking?
Reply from JCGreen@ix.netcom.com, Sat, 22 Jan 2000:
It's kind of crazy out here in Silicon Valley. There are about 100 billboards between San Jose and San Francisco on US101. The dot com companies have bid up the price to match Times Square, about $100K per month. You can be sure it's venture capital being squandered. They've also bid up the price of Superbowl ads to $2M per minute. For all I know they've priced it out of the range of the traditional beer, cola, and athletic shoe sponsors.
Internet startups that are playing the venture capital game can find themselves in a position where time is more important than money. They need to show immediate results -- in terms of hits, or members, or downloads. They need to get traffic to their site quickly, no matter what it costs. Hence they are willing to spend a large part of the money investors have handed them on Super Bowl ads, other TV and radio ads, billboards, banner ads -- anything and everything.
Let's reflect on what they are trying to accomplish and whether the Internet might provide better ways of doing it.
Marketing consists of three major elements: the vehicle, the message, and the substance. You need a way to reach your audience (the vehicle). You need something to tell them (the message). And once you've got their attention and motivated them to act, you need something that pleases and satisfies them (the substance).
Traditional marketing presumes, with few exceptions, that the vehicle already exists in a fixed and predictable form: print publications, radio, TV, billboards. Direct mail is a bit different, because you can, if you wish build your own list. But in most cases, advertisers rent lists or include their messages in the mailings of others. Telemarketing is also different, because you can have your own people make the calls using your own lists; but many, once again, engage the help of specialist firms, both for lists and callers.
Traditional marketing, typically, neglects the substance. Marketers presume that products and services are developed or chosen by other people in the company. Their job is to get the message out, to bring the products and services to the attention of the target audience. In some cases, their campaign might include events, contests, and offers that have little or nothing to do with the substance but have been created solely to draw attention to the message and motivate the audience to act now.
People who are used to this traditional perspective at first might think of the Web as another medium -- analogous to radio and TV and print. They might also equate marketing over the Internet with the creation and placement of banner ads, since that's the form of marketing most likely to get their attention first. And just as they turn to ad agencies to help them with ad creation and placement for radio, TV, and print, they turn to the same agencies for help here.
Eventually, they become familiar with other pre-packaged Internet marketing services: link exchanges, affiliate programs, opt-in email (AKA permission email), and search engine optimization. They may even know about specialists they can turn to for help putting together games, contests, and gimmicky offers. By then they've learned a whole new set of buzz words and sound like Internet marketing pros.
So given a large marketing/advertising budget, a short time frame, and goals which probably do not include the generation of revenue, they put together a plan that includes traditional and Internet-based ("new media") elements, craft their messages, and start racing.
But this approach masks the substantial differences between how the traditional world works and what is possible with the Internet.
In many cases, the substance is what visitors find at a Web site -- not a physical product that can be purchased in traditional ways. The goal is to get traffic to that site where visitors will find useful or entertaining content or services or experiences. Unlike a traditional product or service, a Web site can be changed immediately and repeatedly and can be made to look and feel very different for different visitors. Yes, a Web site can be a carrier or repository of marketing messages -- a place to post brochureware or other content written for print. But it also can become a place where visitors interact with one another and with your experts, where what they have to say is added to the content of the site and where the experience of conversation is part of the substance that makes people want to come back again and again.
And thanks to search engines, if the site contains useful and interesting content in a simple form that can be retrieved by search engines, the content itself can drive new visitors to a Web site.
In other words, the substance can become an important vehicle for attracting an audience, without the need for separate messages and motivating gimmicks. The substance is the message and the substance is also the medium or vehicle.
In other words, the focus of Internet marketing should be not the message, but rather the substance: the complete experience offered by the Web site, the value that you provide to visitors, not just words crafted to describe it and make it sound interesting.
Also, while in the traditional world you often have little choice but to turn to packaged services to deliver your message, on the Internet you can far more easily build your own. Yes, links are important; but links exchanged with handpicked sites that are complementary to your own are far more valuable than random ones picked up through link exchange programs. Likewise, you might want to build your own affiliate program rather than piggyback on pre-packaged and shared programs. And you might want to build your own electronic newsletters, with their own opt-in email lists, rather than using ones developed by others. Yes, all these activities take time and effort, but by doing them yourself, you can tie them closely to the substance of your site.
Likewise, it's very important to be well indexed by search engines; but that's not a matter of metatags and key words -- the factors that search engine optimization companies typically focus on. Rather, the full text of all the content at your site helps draw audience; so you are much better off generating more content, better content better matched to the interests and needs of your target audience, rather than carefully crafted key words.
Above all -- remember that on the Internet, substance is everything. It's not enough to get visitors to click to your site once. When they get there, they need to find content, services, and experiences that truly engage them, that they value. Ideally, they'll want to return and will want to recommend that others go there as well. If there is a serious disjunction between the messages that attract visitors, and the what they actually find at the site, these people won't come back and may even actively discourage others from coming.
With sprint marketing, yes, after the first, very expensive, hundred yards, you may lead the race, having induced large numbers of people to come to your site once. But when you disappoint an Internet audience, the price of getting them to return gets higher and higher; and when you satisfy them, they'll come back on their own and bring their friends.
So if you have money to spend and a very tight schedule for showing results, you'll probably have a much better chance of success if you invest in the site itself -- in the substance rather than the Super Bowl.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is available from Amazon.com
Three of the four co-authors joined us for my chat session Feb. 3, 2000. That's Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and David Weinberger. You can see the edited transcript of the Feb. 3 chat at www.samizdat.com/chat124.html
In the beginning was the voice.
The authors don't use that phrase, but that's the sense of what they have to say.
By voice, they don't mean sound, rather they mean personal expression, the kind of self-revelation that comes when you speak candidly or type rapidly and the words just flow, without the typical self-censoring of corporate-speak.
For them, everything that matters about the Internet seems to be related to voice.
Markets are "conversations." And companies that don't realize that and don't participate fully and honestly and openly are locking themselves out of the online marketplace -- and hence out of any marketplace at all.
The efficient internal operation of companies, as well, depends on open dialogue, which is made possible by Internet technology, but which runs counter to the corporate culture of many large companies.
This is a favorite theme of mine, as well -- that knowledge management means nothing if people don't share information, if the corporate culture, instead, favors information hoarding as a mark of status and a means of personal advancement. They make the point that the current opportunity evolved from earlier advances, including the total quality effort associated with Deming. They quote Deming as saying "drive out fear." If employees are afraid of speaking up, quality efforts are basically doomed. And the same applies now over corporate intranets. The real value to be gained comes with employees feel free to candidly share their insights, inspirations, and criticism.
And customers and partners, also want to be dealt with candidly, without the hyperbole and the fuzzy jargon of press releases and brochureware. They want to be able to talk with real people who understand their concerns and will try to give them real answers.
Many companies have been reluctant to head in that direction, for fear of legal liability if "unauthorized" employees make unedited statements to the outside world. The authors make the point that the loss of business from not speaking with a clear voice, from not letting responsible and caring employees help customers, is probably far greater than any liability. If you don't take part in the conversation that is the marketplace -- through email, forums, newsgroups, etc. -- you simply won't stay in business for very long. And if your employees don't have the confidence and experience of speaking out clearly in their own voices over your corporate intranet, chances are good that they won't be able to effectively help customers over the Internet.
The authors convincingly, eloquently, irreverently, and humorously point out the typical mistakes and the right direction. But they refuse to provide a formula for success -- a neat list of things you need to do to put your company on track. While the problems seem obvious -- once they have been pointed out -- there's no cookie-cutter solution.
They provide a mock 12-step program for Internet business success:
"... The lesson is: don't wait for someone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don't try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right. Getting it right isn't enough any more. There's no invention in it. There's no voice...
"Scary isn't it? Good. You ought to be scared. That's a realistic reaction. You want comfort? Invent your own. Exhilaration and joy are also in order. But face the facts: the tracks end at the edge of the jungle."
Response from Sudha Jamthe <sujamthe@yahoo.com>, Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 1
Very well written. You bring your own experience in this timeline and raise an important point about "shrinking timlines and internet time" by talking about our own recent past as history.
This makes me look at my personal experience as I think thru this phase. I am amazed at how we all have tried to cope with the speed of change by compartmentalizing the change into multiple phases - the early browser days, new tool days, push technology, communities, portals ... Its just our way of handling the speed by saying that phase imparted upon us, its over, now we build upon that into the next phase and in some way prep ourself that we understood the previous phase.
Thanks for sending me the review. I saw a related book -"New Rules of the new economy" by Kevin Kelly when I was travelling. This focuses on building an economy by decentralization but not total grassroots, but why some degree of order is useful.
Rgds,
Su
The following article is based on a chat session about the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, with one of the co-authors, David Weinberger, as a guest. You can see the edited transcript of that Feb. 10, 2000, chat at www.samizdat.com/chat125.htmlThe Cluetrain Manifesto is available from Amazon.com
The main theme of The Cluetrain Manifesto is that markets are really conversations. Traditional companies that lock themselves out of the conversation, lock themselves out of business. People need to express themselves over the Internet in their own unique voice and style, and companies need to let them, to encourage their employees to engage in dialogue with customers and partners, without the usual censorship and corporate-speak. But while it's easy to describe the problem, there doesn't seem to be any simple way to solve it.
Talking about this book with Phil Grove, who I used to work with at Digital, Phil made an excellent point -- voice is important, but listening is also essential, and is often neglected. Especially in a corporate environment, it is very difficult to get people into the mode of listening. Everyone tends to be locked in their own little office or cubicle, with their own narrow goals. That's part of the typical corporate culture.
"Listening" sounds like some New Age touchy-feely seminar topic. But it's a very serious matter. You can't carry on online discussions with fellow employees, customers, or partners if you aren't attuned to "listening" in the broadest sense -- paying close attention to what other people are saying and showing the respect that comes with trying to understand and then responding on their terms, rather than just rattling out your pre-rehearsed PR-trained messages.
So why don't people listen? Weinberger see this not as a business decision, but rather as a psychological/sociological problem. He pointed out that learning to listen is "a lot like learning to join the party. There's a global party going on. And it's where the real work of commerce is going to happen. It's very hard for many companies to take the party seriously. Listening has something to do with respecting others and controlling your urge to 'own' the conversation. It requires giving up the reflex to manage every damn thing that exists... I don't think there are easy techniques to create a culture that values listening. E.g., you don't listen to people you don't respect. And often you don't listen in order to show that you don't respect them. Watch just about any business committee meeting..."
In our chat session, Bob Zwick agreed, "I battle that all the time. It's like my ears are turned on, but I'm not hearing. Just waiting for a good opportunity to jump in and get my say in control."
The typical manager in a major corporation has Internet access today, but uses it just get to static information and to distribute edicts by email. It takes a change of mindset to start to "listen" to what's happening in forums and newsgroups and over distribution lists -- even to really "listen" when people send you email.
Here we have all these great tools for high tech communication -- voice over IP, videophone, full-blown videoconferencing on the desk. But we haven't learned to listen in face-to-face meetings, and we haven't learned to listen to voices that are loud and clear in plain text. As usual, technology is running ahead of humanology. And the biggest benefits for business are likely to come not from adopting more technology, but rather paying attention to the basics of person-to-person communication.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is available from Amazon.com
I had read the title essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" on the Web about a year ago. In fact, I held a series of chats on the subject (which I considered to be "the Linux development model" www.samizdat.com/chat100.html, /chat101.html, and /chat102.html). So when the book came out, I presumed that I knew what it was all about. I just figured the author had expanded on that single brilliant idea and blown it up to book size. Little did I expect a book with such a broad scope and such far-reaching implications.
The title essay examines the question of how to make "open source" software projects work. In the background is the incredible success of Linux. In the foreground is the development of a mail utility that was developed in similar fashion with the author as the leader. Based on his very concrete experience, he tries to explain how it is possible to manage such a project -- with self-selected volunteers all over the world identifying and fixing bugs and contributing new code. The contrast is between software which is developed like a cathedral by a group working in isolation and only releasing the code when it is "totally finished"; vs. the open "great babbling bazaar" which is how open source development is described. He tries to understand what makes an effective manager in such an environment, and how to keep the volunteer team motivated and on target.
In the additional essays that appear in this book, Raymond takes a closer look at motivation, and comes to the very interesting conclusion that open source coders operate as in "gift economy" as opposed to an "exchange economy." The classic anthropological case of a gift economy was the Kwakuitl from the vicinity of what is now Vancouver. There social status was determined not by what you possessed but by what you could give away or deliberately sacrifice/destroy. This type of behavior/motivation is characteristic in cases of abundance -- whether for an entire society or a class within a society. The conspicuous consumption of Veblen's "leisure class" seems to be an instance of this general phenomenon. It is easy to see it in operation in the exorbitant expenditures of Hollywood celebrities on parties and weddings, and the public charitable contributions of wealthy. Raymond's application of this concept to the realm of open source coders is both unexpected and convincing.
He examines the behavior patterns of this set of people with the eye of an anthropologist, presuming that the truth lies in what they do rather than in the reasons they publicly state for their actions. He uncovers interesting contradictions between public statements and actual motivation, and makes a strong case for their close adherence to a rigid set of unwritten rules. As a key player in the very society that he is describing, he proudly takes on the very unanthropological role of helping these people better understand what makes them tick, as well as helping would-be leaders better understand how to lead in such an environment.
In other words, enabled by the Internet, a self-selecting group of people has evolved which operates with the motivations of a gift culture/economy. This culture crosses all geographic barriers and all social barriers, where membership has nothing to do with wealth or class in the traditional sense. Marx would have been dumbfounded.
As if that were not enough, Raymond goes on to make convincing arguments that two well-established "laws" of human behavior do not apply in this case.
According to Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons," without law and supervision, a village of peasants will turn their common -- where all are free to graze their livestock -- into a mudhole. While they all might be aware that cooperation is necessary, without enforcement they each greedily try to grab as much as they can for their own livestock, which destroys the resource for all of them. Following such a model, one would expect that a team of software engineers could not stay together voluntarily for any extended period of time, that greed would lead to its inevitable and rapid collapse. But, as Raymond points out, "using software does not decrease its value. Indeed, widespread use of open-source software tends to increase its value, as users fold in their own fixes and features (code patches). In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it's grazed on." (p. 151)
Likewise, "Brook's Law" from the book The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, predicts that "as your number of programmers (N) rises, work performed scales as N but complexity and vulnerability to bugs rises as N squared, which tracks the number of communications paths (and potential code interfaces) between developers' code bases. Brooks's Law predicts that a project with thousands of contributors ought to be a flaky, unstable mess. Somehow the Linux community had beaten the N-squared effect and produced an operating system of astonishingly high quality." (p. 199)
Raymond's examination of what makes that possible leads to the inevitable conclusion that not only is open source development possible, but rather that it seems to be the only economically viable way to develop a large and important piece of software that will affect many people.
At the beginning of the book, it seemed like Linux was the anomaly -- a special case that might never reoccur. By the end, it appears that Microsoft is the anomaly -- that it is extremely difficult, extremely expensive, and almost impossible to build a program as immense as the Windows operating system without the help of a vast community of volunteers. With the Internet as an enabler, with Linux, Apache, and other projects as clear examples, and with Raymond's analysis of how it all works, open source seems to be the only logical way to go. The cathedral is not an alternative to the bazaar. Rather it is an historical artifact, an outmoded method of operation, left over from pre-Internet days.
Then with clear-headed balance, Raymond, rather than simply proclaiming victory, considers the limitations of open source, and when and how a balance of proprietary and open approaches is necessary.
All in all, this book helps open our eyes to an importance new force that is changing the high-tech business world today. And at the same time, it leads us to re-evaluate what had seemed like fundamental concepts of human nature and destiny. He starts by asking intriguing questions about how software is developed, and winds up providing valuable insight into the question of "what is man?"
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has already made over 2400 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Many of these are also available on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html or send your email request to seltzer@samizdat.com)
The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold (bgita10.txt)
Aristotle -- The Categories (arist10.txt)
Maynard Barbour -- That Mainwaring Affair (mnwrn10.txt)
Arnold Bennett -- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (24hrs10.txt)
George Borrow -- Romantic Ballads (rmbdd10.txt)
C. Brentano -- Das Maerchen von dem Myrtenfraeulein (7myrt10.txt and 8myrt10.txt)
Edmund Burke -- Thoughts on Present Discontents, etc. (thdsc10.txt)
Sir Richard R. Burton -- Vikram and the Vampire (vikrv10.txt)
Wilhelm Busch -- Hans Huckebein (7hckb10.txt and 8hckb10.txt)
Thomas Carlyle -- History of Friedrich II of Prussia (Volume 15 = 15frd10.txt, Volume 16 = 16frd10.txt)
Geoffrey Chaucer -- Canterbury Tales (cbtls10.txt)
Padraic Colum -- The Golden Fleece (fleec10.txt)
Susan Fenimore Cooper -- The Lumley Autograph (lumly10.txt)
Charles Darwin -- The Descent of Man (dscmn10.txt)
Margaret Deland -- The Voice (voice10.txt)
General the Baron de Marbot -- Memoirs (marbo10.txt)
Chretien de Troyes -- Cliges: A Romance (clige10.txt)
Alexandre Dumas -- La Dame aux Camelias (8dame10.txt)
George Eliot --
Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary (mbova10.txt)
John Gay -- The Beggar's Opera (bgopr10.txt)
Ellen Glasgow -- The Deliverance (deliv10.txt)
Goethe --
Gail Hamilton -- Gala-Days (galad10.txt)
Henderson -- The Conquest of the Old Southwest (cnqsw10.txt)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- Oldport Days (oldpt10.txt)
Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr. -- The Path of the Law (palaw10.txt)
Homer -- The Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler (iliad10.txt)
George W. James -- The Grand Canyon of Arizona (gcoaz10.txt)
Henry James --
Rudyard Kipling -- Actions and Reactions (actre10.txt)
Albert Lang -- Introduction to The Compleat Angler (alcma10.txt)
Jack London --
J. MacCaffrey -- History of the Catholic Church (hcath10.txt)
Sylvester Mowry -- Proposed Territory of Arizona (tariz10.txt)
Hesther Lynch Piozzi -- Anecdotes of Johnson (andsj10.txt)
Alexander Pope -- Essay on Man (esymn10.txt)
Walter Raleigh -- The Discovery of Guiana (guian10.txt)
Edward P. Roe -- He Fell In Love With His Wife (inlhw10.txt)
Gerold K. Rohner -- Frau und Kindern auf der Spur (8spur10.txt and 7spur10.txt)
Rafael Sabatini -- Bardelys the Magnificent (barde10.txt)
Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Chastelard (chast10.txt)
Albert Payson Terhune --
Anthony Trollope -- Barchester Towers (btowe10.txt)
Mark Twain --
Booker T. Washington -- Up From Slavery (bookt10.txt)
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