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Category: culture

The Small Internet: Bell’occhio

Published August 29, 2007 by cgerrish

french pen nib

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.

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Feudalism & Automating Web Polution

Published August 27, 2007 by cgerrish

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.

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Disappearing Over the Horizon

Published August 26, 2007 by cgerrish

Maynard G. Krebs

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.

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