"Wired Weirds Out"
George Gilder, possibly the smartest cat in Web Alley, has this brilliant retort to Wired Magazine's "The Web is Dead." If you are not already subscribing to George's free weekly Friday Letter, what the heck is taking you so long? (Go to Gildertech.com and treat yourself to life ahead of the Curve! He's even cooler than The Webster. Much.)
Excerpt:
May I be so bold as to contradict my old friends at Wired? I would suggest that they have the picture wildly upside down. What is dying is not the Web but television and the Internet. The onrush of video bits as a share of traffic is irrelevant to the prospects of the web, which is measured not by bulk traffic but by information entropy: by impressions, transactions, and servers. The video flood, however, is deadly to the Internet with its ungainly TCP aks-naks, buffers and security patches, multi-layered latency and dropped links. It is the Internet that must die as a result of the dominance of video traffic.
Video will kill the cumbrous, porous seven layer Internet model just as the rise of voice killed the old best efforts, asynchronous, non-deterministic telegraph network. As my friend Henry Gau ingeniously explains, the rise of voice communications with their needs for deterministic synchrony required a new Bell infrastructure to replace the old Western Union tap-tap. Similarly video's needs for deterministic synchronous delivery precisely parallel the previous demands of voice streams when they became the prevailing form of traffic early in the last century with the rise of telephony.
Who will build this network remains in question but the floods of video all the way down from the server through the living room to the desktop to the handset cannot be handled by some Microsoft, Symantec, or Cisco patch on the old Internet.
As for Google, its goofier-than-Gore postures against life giving CO2 and bizarre drive for a network neutrality litigation carnival in Washington make it easy to make fun of. But contrary to all Wolff and Anderson's disparagement of the company and its allegedly obsolescent open Web model, Google is becoming more central than ever to the new era and is emphatically on the right side in the wars over the future of the Internet.
While Wired touts the end of the Web, Google is unleashing a program to mash all TV and other video onto the Web. It is producing ingenious end-of-TV software that transforms any Android or iPhone into a Web browser remote control for capacious big screens or even uses the Android or iPhone screens themselves (and soon their onboard projectors). Its new Native Client software, already manifest in its Chrome browser and coming OS, trumps Apple's Objective C language (Jobs' mandatory apps legacy from his old NeXt machine), that Wired trumpets a super now force on wireless phones. Thus Google promises to fulfill at last my Life After Television dream of a teleputer in every pocket (or bioslot), with access not to a hundred channels but to a 100 million interactive sites on any display.
At the same time, Facebook, a Website with no significant new technology, does not "control" the future as Wired imagines. Like AOL, MySpace, and Twitter, it will have its day in the sun before falling into the gap between a social playground and a commercial hustle.
The death of the Web? Apple uber alles? Giant monopolies closing off the world in a cutesy Farmville cartoon garden? That's Weirdsville.
The Webster's Canon
The Webster’s Canon:
The key books about how to transform the world by using the Web:
- Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky (pre Web, identical distributed power dynamic, indispensable)
- Free, by Chris Anderson;
- The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson;
- The Argument, by Matt Bai
- The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
- The Websters' Dictionary, by Ralph Benko (The neutrality of this entry is disputed.)
- Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe
- Code v2, by Lawrence Lessig
- The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger
- Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan (not Web, simply indispensable)
- Viral Loop, by Adama Penenberg
- Planet Google, by Randall Stross
- Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger
- Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger
- Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Joe Trippi
- Taking on the System, by Markos Zuniga
Net(squared): what it takes
To summarize precisely what it takes:
Narrative (or counter-narrative)
Network (of your allies)
Exposure (via media)
Empirically-based program (not doctrinally-based)
Team (who will execute)
Technology (the easy part)
The Narrative is most important.
The Webster's Twelve Laws
How to Use the Web to Transform the World, by Ralph Benko
Visit the Websters' Bar & Grill by clicking on the tab in the navigation bar toward the very top of the homepage. It's a friendly place. Make yourself at home to learn the latest.
Here are the Webster's 12 Laws of how to use the Web to transform the world.
1. Pulitzer’s Law: "Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they will remember it, and above all accurately so they will be guided by its light."
The very best "mission statement" for the Web, composed an eon ago, still applies.
2. Nast’s Law and (Boss Tweed’s Complaint): "They can see pictures."
As Boss Tweed famously said, “Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures.”
The Webster says: Use compelling graphics.
3. Clarke’s Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
4. Beecher’s Law: "No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy."
The Webster says: Controversy is golden – interesting, draws attention, drives traffic, and excites the community. But use common decency.
5. Lazarus’s Law: "Unleash the imprisoned lightning."
On the Statue of Liberty is engraved a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles….
photo credit: by Tengis, of replica statue near Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, hosted at Flikr.com
The Webster says: The Web can be our means of unleashing “the imprisoned lightning” of millions whose voices have been exiled and who deserve to be heard.
6. Metcalfe’s Law: "The value of a communication system grows at approximately the square of the number of nodes of the system."
source: A Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community: The Wiki and the Blog, by D. Calvin Andrus, Center for the Study of Intelligence vol 49. no. 3, CIA. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=755904
The Webster says: The more people we enroll and connect with one another, the more powerful we become.
7. Bianchini’s law of Viral Loops: "When your currency is ideas, people become emotionally attached."
"Chen calls a viral loop the 'most advanced direct-marketing strategy being developed in the world right now.' *** [I]f you create something people really want, need, or merely enjoy, then your customers will grow your business for you. Users, just by using a product, are, in essence, offering a testimonial 'When your currency is ideas, people become emotionally attached,' Ning's Bianchini says. 'Then you become a public utility like Blogger, YouTube, or Facebook.'" (Emphasis supplied.) Source: FastCompany.com
The Webster says: Offer something people really want, need or enjoy.
9. Trippi’s Law: If you pay attention to the community you’re building, then the community will step up and do the work."
12. Cage’s Law: "Begin anywhere."
The Webster says: It can appear daunting, the Webster knows. But just listen to John Cage, the greatest experimental composer of the 20th Century – and a profound philosopher – and begin. You will discover what you need as you go.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extranoise/169187125/
Brilliantly and with wit, Ralph Benko provides agitators and advocacy groups the way to get out our message and to "organize" in the Web 2.0 world. Couldn't be more timely -- or needed. --Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine.
Spinning silica into worldwide webs of glass and light, the Internet has become a planetary community in need of a global guidebook. The Websters' Dictionary is it -- a cornucopian resource for all compendious world-warpers. -- George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, Telecosm and Microcosm.
Download The Websters' Dictionary
