Tuesday, March 4, 2003

Going off track

I love construction games. And I love marbles. So does my kid. So now Bernie has convinced me that we need Cuboro. It consists of blocks with channels and holes that allow you to invent and build complex constructions through which marbles can travel, propelled by the battery we call gravity.

I love the fact that the pieces are carved and polished wood instead of molded plastic, just like I love the fact that marbles are glass.

Fun stuff.

Got blog?

Christopher Filkins has blogged an exposé of what he politely calls "a fascinating attempt to use a blog to sell a product." Deep reportage. Filled with facts, links and an interview with a perpetrator. Well done .

Dan Shafer adds,

Doc Searls doesn't think this will work. I'm not convinced of that. Product placement advertising is, I think, going to hit the Web one of these days and blogs might just be the perfect vehicle for it. We endorse products and services all the time without pay. What if someone who made a product you really loved came along and said, "I'll give you $100 per week if you'll make sure this product gets mentioned favorably on your Web log 20 times, by you or others, every week." Most of us would probably turn that down. But would we be right? Or would we simply be staking out high moral ground (or our view of it) for the sake of doing so?

I think this is an issue that we will face sooner than later.

Bonus link #1: Tristan Lewis: Marketer, Marketer, where have you been?

Bonus link #2: Grant Henninger: Viral blog marketing.

Bonus link #3: Christopher's Live from the Blogosphere blog posting. Missed it the first time around. Really good.

Right arm

Arnold Kling: A Metaphor's Metaphors. He summarizes,

I think that the public policy issues that surround ideas and creative works require more than one metaphor. In fact, for many creative works, my controversial metaphor Content is Crap applies. That is, until the works have been sifted by a filter, they have no value.

Arnold doesn't see much value in the Commons metaphor, either.

At Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons, I wrote,

I believe conceiving the Net, and the airwaves of which it partially consists, as a commons, does a much better job of framing a useful regulatory regime than the property model, which still sounds to me like a legacy of the regime that gave us commercial broadcasting.

I should add that I don't believe commons excludes property. Rather, I believe it frames property, much as gravity frames real estate. Property has a commons context. The commons, in fact, is the markeplace.

My hmm for the day is a bit of wondering about the term "spectrum." Maybe what we're talking about here — those qualities the Net takes on when users spill it out of the wires and out into the waves — isn't spectrum at all. Maybe it's more like an older noun: Ether.

Spectrum is an incrementally linear concept: a dial, a series of frequencies, each a notch, each fixed as a musical note. A spectrum has a top (the highest frequencies) and a bottom (the lowest). RF (radio frequency) signals vary (logrithmically) with distance.

This is all finite stuff: Very good for understanding in terms of property, power, scarcity and other variables that lend themselves to customary economic explanations. Hence: spectrum is property. The metaphors settle the argument the moment we begin speaking with them.

As cognitive linguists will tell you, metaphor is how we understand one subject in terms of another. We do this all the time. Constantly. Most of all, unconsciously.

When we speak of content that's carried on signals over distances or ranges, we are conceiving our subject in terms of transportation. Radio is transport.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, which isn't far enough for the Net.

What if the Net were fundamentally not about transport (the T in TCP/IP notwithstanding)? What if the Net were, in a functional sense, a place where everything is zero distance from everything else — a world of nothing but ends?

I ran the idea of the describing the end-to-endedness of the Net as a 3-D zero — a holllow sphere — past David Reed at Fry's on Sunday in Palo Alto, where a bunch of us (Bob Frankston included) were geeking around in the afternoon, buying too much stuff. I explained how Craig Burton says a hollow sphere is the the only geometry that describes a world of nothing but ends. David liked it, and said it actually helped explain something (though I forget what).

Anyway, what if Net's wires and local ethers — what Bob Frankston perfectly calls "the first mile" — were most constructively conceived as nonmatters of infinite abundance? What then? And why not? Just because we're accustomed to the conceptual crutchwork of transport and property? Hey, even if we are, why not try on another concept for size?

Bonus link: Bob Frankston's Dim Copper.

[Later...] Roger Turner takes the sphere thing to a hyper dimension here.

All that remains

For a few weeks last year I almost got into Six Feet Under. I just watched the first half hour of the first episode of the show's new (3rd) season. I'm not sure, but I think we're not supposed to know if Nate (one of the lead characters) is dead or not. I got tired of guessing. Ah. I see here we're exploring different possible realities. One problem: they're all boring.

I believe the show has jumped the shark.