The first time I heard the name Clay Shirky was through a post titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus on Daring Fireball. I watched his Web 2.0 presentation and was struck by his clarity of thought, the way his arguments made sense and the way I would go “Yeah!” at every salient point he would make.
Again, through Daring Fireball, I read Shirky’s latest essay on newspapers, journalism and the revolution we’re going through. This is a must read. It compares the state of online publishing to what happened around 1500 A.D., right after Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. Newspapers, advertising, walled-garden content, micropayments, subscriptions… it’s all there in this essay.
If you have some free time I would highly recommend reading this and then watching Clay Shirky’s videos on YouTube. Even the titles of the videos make you think! How about this one: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. You immediately have an “A-ha!” moment just reading that title!
I think his book Here Comes Everybody is one I’ll read on holiday.
Back in 1986 my brother Mahmood started a Bulletin Board Service (or BBS’s as they were known then) called Stray Cats. Remember those? 9600 baud modems beeping, handshaking and connecting? Settings like 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity? Ah, those were the days… online communities stripped to their bare essentials. Except it felt ultra high tech then.
A few years later my boss gave me access to his Compuserve account which I was very careful with. I would log on, download what I wanted and then log out making sure I didn’t spend too long “online”. The only problem was that Batelco, the state-backed telco monopoly, was billing their customers per character instead of time. Yes that’s right, per character. The bill that month was BD 1,500 or $3,980. I stopped using his account after that.
Then came AppleLink. At the time I was working for the Apple dealer in Bahrain and we used it to download software updates, email Apple Support and scour their libraries. It was, as far as I know, Apple’s first online network. It was also where I made my first online purchase. During the first Gulf War when everything was locked down I wanted to buy a fun software package that’ll skin the interface on my System 7-based Mac (it was a Mac IIci as I recall). I couldn’t get the package delivered so I emailed the developer through AppleLink, paid by Visa and downloaded the software. And that felt revolutionary.
It was only after I moved to London that I started using a new innovation called Mosaic to “surf” the World Wide Web. Those dancing hamsters were something else! And GIFs that were first blocky and then resolved themselves to images! And it was zippy fast! 56K fast!
ADSL and broadband came next. 256Kb/sec speeds and always on! No, wait 512Kb/sec now and… how about 1Meg! And MP3′s online! I can download music! Wait, the iTunes Music Store! And now I’m on 2Meg broadband! Please stop, this is going far too fast.
Virgin just launched their 50Meg cable service this month. Here’s what I want now. An online 1080 HiDef film site which sells or rents new release films as they hit the cinema. A beefed up Apple TV hard wired to a blazingly fast 100Meg+ line. A BBC iPlayer that is integrated into a razor thin flat screen that streams HD TV shows especially Planet Earth. Direct downloads from Amazon of film titles, TV shows and games. And all of that controlled from my iPhone. Now, where do I sign up?
I recently read a post that had me thinking about Facebook. Titled If It’s Too Social, You’re Too Old, the author argues that designers who ignore the site are like the businesses who ignored the Web way back when.
I’m lucky since the internet isn’t my vocation or source of income. I don’t have to grapple with the ins and outs or the direction the winds blow online. But I am interested in new internet trends if I find them exciting and can see myself using them.
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