dive into mark

Clay Shirky figured out the Internet in 1996. We already know what people using networks want: they want to do what they do now, only cheaper, or faster, or both. They want to do more interesting stuff than they do now, for the same amount of money. They strongly prefer open systems to closed ones. They strongly prefer open standards to proprietary ones. They will accept ads if thats what pays for interesting stuff. They want to play games, look at people in various states of undress, read the news, follow sports scores or the weather, and most of all they want to communicate with one another.

According to his home page, the above article was published in October, 1996. Some other people are finally catching on, others are not:

• Fast Company: Inside Job [via Tomalak's Realm] – State Farm created an intranet with a “best practices” forum. Amazingly, agents love sharing tips about what works for them.
• Doc Searls: Markets are Conversations – the seminal work on Internet marketing. Apparently, people like talking to each other. About your company. Or not. As Oscar Wilde may have once said (or maybe it was just a Monty Python skit): “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
• News.com: Broadband still a tough sell. No, you idiots, we don’t want broadband for movies. Nobody is going to watch crappy little thumb-sized copy-protected movies on their monitor months after the DVD is available in Blockbuster. People want a fast always-on connection so they actually start using the Web as a reference tool (the same thing they do now, only faster — I actually searched Google once for “current time” and found The official U.S. time government web site). So they can share files (more interesting than they do now — Napster, Gnutella). So they can talk to each other.
• Fortune.com: A Cure for E-mailsclerosis [via Tomalak's Realm] – …we’ve got a long, long way to go in figuring out how to harness the Internet to make people more productive rather than less so. Maybe you do. Maybe you should stop treating the Internet as a broadcast medium. (The senior executives in my company do this too. Of course, these were the same executives who insisted on having a 500K Flash splash screen on their company home page. With a soundtrack. And loud repeating noises on their home page, even after you frantically clicked “skip intro”. These are the same people who send e-mails to the entire company telling us that they’ll be in Barbados all next week, but you can direct all questions to their underling. Then the underling sends a company-wide message saying that they’ll be in the Hamptons all next week, but you can direct all questions for him or his boss (yes, they’re all male — we have some female executives but they’re smarter than this) to an intern, who, it turns out, unbeknownst to anyone, doesn’t actually work here anymore but continues to collect paychecks because no one in the chain of command has ever noticed his absence because they’re too damn busy sending e-mails announcing how unavailable they are. But I digress.)

Excuse me, I’m going to go ping my girlfriend via Yahoo Instant Messenger and ask what we’re having for dinner tonight. When you’ve figured out how to make good use of the Internet, be sure to let me know.

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