Expansion

Torill (scroll down a bit, for once it's not my permalinks that don't work properly) wonders about profitable business modells on the net.
With a little help from the New York Times she comes to the conclusion that there are only two: those that are directly based on the net and its properties and those using the net as advertising channel and additional outlet. Among the first, Torill and NYT say, porn and other dirt are most likely to succeed and as for the second, the results are hard to measure. But Torill is not convinced. What about newspapers or educational institutions online?

Well.

For one thing, I'm not convinced that porn is best suited for the internet. Rather, the internet is best suited for porn: it's faster, cheaper (is it?) and certainly more anonymous than the adult section of your neighborhood video store.
Also, you don't need to center your business around the internet. The internet is a great supplement. E.g. for know how-heavy industries. Expert systems can help sell complex products from air conditioning to financial services. Companies who set out to inform their customers don't just push their products. The well-informed consumer is happier, more likely to buy the product that fits her needs and desires, faster in the stores (well above 50% of German consumers get information on the internet and buy in the shop) and less likely to bother your support personnel.
And, yes, you can measure the success of your online advertising. You can track a user from her click on a banner-ad or sponsored link on a search engine, into your website and all the way to the checkout (if you have one). + you can use the same measuring tools as for print or broadcast ads.

So, why *did* so many New Economy businesses go bust in the past months? One reason is certainly that many of those businesses had been led by very young people, doers, mostly, not managers, who got hyped into living a high-speed American dream. Seen without the generalizing view of experience, the story of your individual success is irresistable. What do you mean, getting lucky is *not* a business plan nor a management objective.
The other reason is expansion. But while the universe is slowly expanding, terrestrial markets are not. Until a year ago, noone would've bought your business plan unless it was based - not on the internet but on global expansion. Grow. Go international. Drive your competition out of the market. That's a game only one can win while many more have to leave the market. Just like many businesses did. Surprise.

Sex

I touched the (not quite so) new (anymore) iMac. Wow. If you focus on its base, erm, CPU, it's incredibly lumpy and unelegant. If you focus on the big screen, you can't keep your mind from wanting to jump forward to catch it when it topples.

But just pull the screen toward you ... right - like you need to get any closer to the crystal clear screen to see well. Then push it to the side so the person next to you can see. And find you don't have to, because seen from the side, the screen is as clear as before ...

*sigh*

Honestly, if I had anymore desktop space ...

Computers

The book Steven Levy could not write is Computers. Eine Illustrierte Geschichte (computers - an illustrated history) by Christian Wurster (Taschen, 2002).
Where Levy struggles with his human interest-approach, Wurster can focus on the machines. The human touch enters through the backdoor: Wurster invites guests (people like Emil Zopfi, Wolfgang Harz or Gero von Randow) to write about their encounters with historic computing machinery. But the heros are the machines and their workings.
And the book is full of sexy tech photography. Really neat.

What Computers is, too, though I'd say invluntarily, is a history of woman as technical accessoiry. Only war-time pictures show women in the central operating position. In the 50s and 60s, men are the only users. In the 70s, women are allowed into the pictures for added appeal. From that time on, the people in the pictures clearly pose. We see men planning and discussing and women doing secretary work. Or a man and a woman against a backdrop of impressive machinery with the woman holding papers up to the men.
If the book has representative images at all, the positioning of women only changes in the late 90s, when computers (and cell-phones) obviously acquired enough sex-appeal to advertise themselves.

Kanzlerduell

Last night, Germany became America. Or so the media would like us to believe. The current Bundeskanzler, Schröder, SPD, and the top-candidate Stoiber (of opposing CDU) faced questions by two journalists in front of TV cameras.
The whole thing was pretty dull and slow and lacking in climaxes - but the first properly televized pre-election campaing in Germany.

What I find far more shocking than seeing two major league politicians being stiffly polite in a so-called "duel" are the analyses that sprang up on every channel immediately after the show.

Early on, analysts had predicted that Stoiber would only have to do less badly than usually to win the night. And indeed heavy coaching over the past months has taught him to speak in full sentences that follow in a more or less meaningful progression.
However, the evaluation heard most ofter after the interview was that Schröder had been boring, un-brilliant, defensive ... while Stoiber had been refreshingly aggressive and had used his chances to show off his superior knowledge.

Sorry, but did I watch the wrong channel? I normally find Schröder a bit on the sleazy side, but last night he was cool. Utterly relaxed, obviously not overrating this opportunity to come on to the camera (which he'd done too often in the past). Whereas Stoiber was not only tense, with a fake swith-on smile and a weird grimace after every contribution during the second half.
Stoiber was also beside the point most of the time. Most of the time, he merely told the audience how the audience would vote for him in September and how they'd do that to punish the Schröder-government for their mistakes.

Would anyone really vote for someone whose stongest claim is that he will win the elections?

256meter

Kerstin and Ingo launched a cool little website, 256meter. Watch the Frankfurt skyline, seen from up North, change through the day.
Note: Takes a bit long to load.

P.S. to Mark: I fixed the permalinks (I think) ....

Borders 2

Mark comments on Sunday's post. He also adds a screenshot from the add I mention.

Anyway, the comments: Mark links the city that tunes itself to the colors of the chameleon to the movie Pleasantville - dull grey vitalized by the advent of entertainment technology.
Right on. But Pleasantville, too, is about transgressing borders (from the living room into the TV soap) and releasing the tensions this creates by reshaping (or at least re-coloring) the new space.

I'm never too happy with all-too-structuralist approaches to literature (or life, even), but trangression-tension-release is seductively catchy. And basically, correct me if I'm wrong, this is where hypertext fiction differes from all other fictional genres: No fixed space. No b/orders to step over. No tension?

Game Studies

Game Studies 2 is online.
Espen is right - it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to establish an academic journal and the Game Studies team did a great job in ensuring the quality of the published papers.

I haven't had the time to read it all, but at a publishing rate of one or maybe two issue(s) a year, Game Studies is a journal you can return to every now and again and read the contributions at leisure.

Hackers

Steven Levy's Hackers - heroes of the computer revolution was published in1984, but it received renewed publicity a couple of years ago when hackerz were the hype.
The book is boring enough. Levy is a science journalist and much as he tries to vamp up his tale with human interest, the characters remain cut-outs and the carefully dramatized story never flies. But would you buy a book called Terminals - the machines that started it all?

Levy never quite steps into the trap of finding lonesome and unwashed male-only communities kewl, still I miss broader and more contextualized reflections on how such communities work and on parallels to other segments of society and the power-structures in these segments. After all, despite the current "dot-com-crisis" and everything, computers are spelt with a "c" as in clout. And the coolness commonly attributed to geek-culture (esp. in the late 90s of expanding cyberspace) only serves to perpetuate such structures.

What I found interesting, however, was part three: Game Hackers; the early games-years that were so much centered around adventure games (does anybody out there still play adventures??). What determined the Mac/PC trench wars and how they determined the history of both computers and games.
Hackers is pretty early in pointing out that computers and software as we know them today were shaped by "hackers" desire to play, to build more and better games. In fact, this connection appears to be so obvious to Levy, that it doesn't seem necessary for him to spell it out ...
I'm tempted to write that Levy says something I (more or less) said years ago: "In a sense, Adventure [the game] was a metaphor for computer programming itself - the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be travelling in when you hacked assembly code." Too bad he said it 18 years ago, way before even my first encounter with Space Quest.

B/Orders

Karl N. Renner builds on Jurij Lotman's narratology. All narration or maybe even all conceptualization depends on the recognition or transgression of borders. "In a text, an event is when a character gets transported across the border of his or her semantic field." For "border", substitute "order", if you like.
In a second step, Renner asks what happens after the (spatial) order has been disrupted. The protagonist may return to her place, she may leave the scene entirely or - the most interesting case for Renner - she releases the tension created by the transgression by adapting her new environment to match her own properties.

Renner illustrates his theses with examples from TV spots. I wonder what he'd make of the new advert for E Plus (German mobile phone provider): A chameleon escapes from its terrarium and walks the streets (street signs, memorials, underground stations) of a Western metropolis. Instead of the chameleon changing its color to match its new surroundings, the stone and concrete of the city acquires the bright colors of the chameleon.
Release of a tension (wildlife in an urban environment) and reinstatiation of an / some sort of order? Or the denial of (b)orders and their significance?