echovar

Media outlets report that NBC will not renew its contract with Apple’s iTunes. The stated reason was control over pricing. Apple likes simple pricing that everyone can understand. Traditional networks and record companies want to maximize revenue even if it means confusing users. They seem to have forgotten all about the original Napster.

Apple created the legal market for media downloads, and iTunes has become the hub for all downloadable content. That’s a nice position. The Networks and record companies will try and create an alternative hub with a terrible user interface, confusing pricing and lots of strings use of content. Users will revert to Bit Torrent. People use iTunes because it’s a very usable director and content browser.

Ultimately pricing will probably become more complex, but you should be able to buy and download NBC content from mulitple sources. May the best directory, browser and e-commerce interaction win.

Earthlink‘s recent problems has set back the cause of municipal WiFi. Earthlink missed a deadline in Houston, and has bowed out of WiFi in San Francisco. Chicago has scrapped their WiFi project.

The question that has stalled most municipal installations of WiFi is whether private enterprise or local government should build and own the network. The other question they should be asking is whether WiFi is the right wireless technology. Local governments don’t deal with change very well. If they build a mesh WiFi network in 2007, you can bet it’ll never change. You’ll have the same network in 2020. For the companies thinking about entering the municipal WiFi business, dealing with the demands of local politicians may make the task impossible.

I’d like Internet access everywhere. I’d like to resolve the digital divide. But will municipal WiFi really solve those problems?

If you’re in San Francisco on September 6th, drop by the opening of Mimi Jensen’s new show at the Hespe Gallery. Mimi has provided a preview of the show on her Web site. Her paintings are filled with wit, an unerring sense of composition and a master’s hand with oil paint.

Here’s the info:

Hespe Gallery
251 Post Street, Suite 420
San Francisco, CA 94108
415-776-5918
September 6, 2007

Remember, paintings can’t really be seen on a computer screen. You need to meet them face-to-face. And ideally, you need to live them and have a silent conversation over the years. It’s then that you really begin to understand the meaning of value.

As has been previously established, the Internet is dead and boring. Some say it’s because we don’t have enough bandwidth, and that the network isn’t ubiquitous. Without question, more will make more possible. But will it make better possible? Sure, it’ll destroy television as we know it, but that’s really already happened. Once the distribution system got beyond 3 major networks, it was the beginning of the end for the economy of scarcity.

The real problem is that there’s not enough quality content to be distributed through 800 cable channels, zillions of Web sites and your phone. And even if there was, you wouldn’t have enough time to consume it. The reality is, you need to filter out 99.9% of the crap people are aiming at you. Your friendly local venture capitalist hopes that social networking sites will provide that filter for you. You and your “friends” can collectively filter the vast wasteland of the Web to something that’s actually interesting. But even that may be too much, people may have to stop sleeping to keep up with the river of “interesting stuff” their friends have dugg.

While gossip can be amusing, can the Internet also introduce us to the small, the original, the unique and the beautiful? Small shops like Bell’occhio are much better in person, but I love seeing them on the Web. No VC invested in this company, but it’s more interesting than all the Web 2.x companies missing vowels from their names.

Can the old chaotic magic be recreated? Steve Gillmor announces that the Gang Formerly Known as Gillmor will be getting back together. Much like the Artist Formerly Known As Prince, Gillmor has legal issues around his band’s original name.

But me? I just care about the music, and the conversation. And the old gang provided some of the best conversation, insight, comedy, drama and ideas-per-minute in broadcasting/podcasting. I’ve been missing the old gang, so I hope they can get it going, and keep it going for a while.

Scoble writes that Mahalo, Facebook and TechMeme will “kick Google’s ass” in 4 years. Actually, he both writes and videos his prediction.

We live in a polluted environment on the Web. We destroyed the value of the Meta Keyword tag, and with spam we’ve made email a pain and with SEO spam, we’re poluting Web search results. And our poluters use automation for the purpose of polution. No wonder the internet is boring. We’ve fouled our nest, and now we retreat to the walled gardens, gated communities and da club.  The Web begins to organize itself into feudal kingdoms.

Mark Cuban has stated the obvious. The Interent is dead and boring. Any popular media will eventually be subject to Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crud. Of course, that’s why there are so many businesses built around finding the 10%.

Beatnik slang is in some ways an invention of the mass media, a safer flavor of the Beat Generation made palatable for mass consumption. Movies and television featured kooky characters that assumed this stereotype. Other films presented a more hard edged vision. But none of them really captured the life, times and writing of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs, Cassady, Ferlinghetti and the rest. A calcification of the Beat spirit is under way, the Beat Museum has opened just around the corner from City Lights.

While it only treats the Beat generation peripherally, the television series Mad Men provides a strange and wonderful picture of how foreign that world was. It chronicles the dominant cultural themes that created a Beat Generation at the margins. It’s a history that is disappearing from our memories and emerging into our imaginations.

In San Francisco, there’s a lot of public discussion about the architectural designs submitted for the new Transbay Terminal. It will substantially change the City’s skyline and the feel of that part of downtown. If you’ve ever visited the current Transbay Terminal, you know we need a change.

The three architectural firms have submitted lots of provocative plans and pictures about how the new terminal will look. They all want to make their mark of the skyline of a major international city.

Things never look so perfect as they do in the planning stage. Pure vision is a wonderful thing. But as Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz once said, no plan survives its first encounter with the enemy.

That brings us to Pigeon Spikes. No, the image above isn’t one of the new tower designs. It’s the kind of thing that’s added to “great architecture” once it encounters the pigeon. It’s the ugly set of spikes added to ledges and surfaces on which pigeons might roost.

In the war between pigeons and architects, I’d have to say that the pigeons are winning. I’d like to challenge the architects to design the new Transbay Terminal so that it doesn’t require the subsequent addition of pigeon spikes (or even worse chicken wire nets). You can’t win a battle you don’t plan for.

Is it April Fool’s Day? Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of SUN, has announced the momentous decision to change SUN’s ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.

If this is true, it marks the moment that Java jumped the shark. There’s already discussion about whether or not Java has peaked as an enterprise programming language. This move confirms it.

Java never fulfilled its original promise, but it was very useful and developers found lots of things to do with it. The Web needed to move from PERL to something more sophisticated. But as soon as you think Java is everywhere, that Java touches everyone—it’s the beginning of the end.