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Wired push
The Wired cover story on the coming dominance of push starts its
conclusion with the four points:
1)Increasingly fat data pipes and increasingly big disposable
displays render more of the world habitable for media.
-->K: does "fat data pipes" mean dark fiber?
2)Advertisers and content sellers are very willing to underwrite
this.
-->K: the same issue of wired has an article on p. 120 stating
that the total spent on web advertising in the first three quarters of
1996 was around 160 million, while Miller brewing alone spent 250 million
on traditional forms of advertising in 1995. Any web advertising sales
pitch has to start with the number of computers connected to the web,
which remains much less than the number of households with a television.
My uneducated guess is that hardware and access fees will have to plummet
before web advertising has anywhere near the effect of television. These
fees will plummet only from the effects of an intensely competitive market
or a very generous government, or both. Maybe *that* is what drives
President Clinton's stated goal of giving every twelve-year-old the
ability to surf the web.
3)The ever expanding network model that started with the postal
system and telephones is being transplanted to this new ecology.
4) Do-it-yourself is great, but as in most aspects of life,
people prefer ready-made. And when it comes to infromation, that means
getting things from trusted sources.
While the article seems to be mostly unnecessarily fluffy hype, I admire
wired's common-sense take on the competing pressures associated with
this new, lucrative, and potentially very intrusive direction for the web.
Karl Lietzan (^^;)
e-mail: lietk@ruby.ils.unc.edu
phone: (919) 967-2236