Internet — Page 8

Is a lesson

October 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

starting to be apparent coming out of some of the spectacular dot-com failures? Soundbitten’s article on the failure of Verde and the possible contribution Scient made to the failure is instructive. Verde was trying to be a web-only content site, with e-comm built in at the ground level. OK, fine. But they outsourced the very lifeblood of the company – the platform on/in which it was to live!

Maybe it’s just me, and my biases (the company I work for does its own design, programming, editorial, hosting – everything) but I think that if you’re going to live on the web, you have to develop for the web in-house. That’s the real challenge for marketing and sales types with an idea – to figure out how to work with developers – and developers who themselves are radically different from one another (i.e., programmers and designers are different from one another in dozens of ways, in general). But if you’re a retail bookseller, you don’t farm out your retail sales staff to a consultancy – that’s what you’re about, to a great extent.

There may be a place for consultants in all of this, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a net company, you have to have to develop your own internet infrastructure – you can’t get around it. Doesn’t mean you can’t purchase products that will help you do this – a company doesn’t have to invent everything from the ground up.

Maybe the real lesson is that new dot-coms try to separate back end from front end too much. It isn’t enough to be good marketers, writers, strategists. To split form (content or marketing) from function (CMS, design, UI) is to tie one hand behind your back as you try to get a dot-com off the ground.

It’s like some sort

October 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

of whacked internet Jeopardy game over at Zeldman Presents.
Alex: “The answer – ‘Signs the world is more screwy than ever.'”
Zeldman: “What is the Middle East is a cauldron of hatred and violence, children go hungry all over the world, and Network Solutions continues to exist?”
Alex: That’s right for 1000 pts!

I think if I hear

October 17, 2000 by Michael Boyle

some quip like “Heh heh Gore said he invented the internet!” – or worse, some serious critic pointing to it as an indicator of some serious deficiency of his I’m going to hit the roof. Declan McCullough discusses it more in Wired News: The Mother of Gore’s Invention.

The idea of user-developed wireless networks

September 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

The idea of user-developed wireless networks is great in so many ways. First of all, whether the commercial space is ready for it or not, such open wireless access is how the whole thing will have to work for it to avoid ultimately being no more significant than Compuserve or the old Prodigy – which were important but couldn’t really last in the face of the internet. But it’s also pretty cool that the guy in London is using Web Stalker as his network mapping system. Web Stalker was an art project. An award winning art project – and very cool, if inscrutable. What I like about it is that it reaches back to an earlier era on the web – when people were still getting used to browsers in the first place, Web Stalker came along as an alternate browser, deconstructing an idea that had barely taken root in the public consciousness. Kind of like the wireless project itself.

I just received

August 28, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the September-October issue of Artbyte in the mail and there is no longer any doubt about it: it’s the best magazine going on the subject of digital culture etc. It used to be too focused on art stuff before – not that arts coverage is a problem, obviously it’s the starting point for the mag. But now it does a better job of extending from the aesthetic to more general cultural, social, and political arenas. And in a way it lives up to McLuhan’s idea that artists are probes into the future, something I think is true.

Although I like mags like the Industry Standard (and some of the other net-biz-porn mags), they don’t tell me anything about what’s in the pipe – it’s all about what has happened. When they try and predict, they’re almost always wrong. After all it was one of those pubs that said – not two months ago – that “obviously” drkoop.com would be the great success story in the consumer internet space? Uh, not. Artbyte features great writers, great thinkers with a real provenance as commentators on these issues (like Geert Lovink, for example), and of course looks gorgeous.