Category Archives: Net Culture

Radio Is the New Sensation

Radio UserlandDave Winer is gunning for the role of patron saint of Web loggers. Not only is he the author of one of the longest-running Web logs out there, but he’s also the guiding light behind UserLand Software. A scrappy publisher of content management tools like Manila, UserLand seems dedicated to the idea of bringing the power of database-driven Web publishing to the masses. Their latest release takes them a signficant step closer to this goal; Radio Userland looks like a remarkably capable personal publishing tool priced at the ridiculously reasonable rate of US$40 per copy. Bravo. I hope to find some time to download and try the 30-day free demo soon, and perhaps if all goes well, Subtraction.com will move over to Radio.

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Lewis’s “Next” and First

Liar’s PokerJust back from California. On the flight out, I devoured Michael Lewis’s “Next: The Future Just Happened,” the follow-up to his wildly popular “The New New Thing.” Though not as epic as its predecessor, “Next” was terrific, a keen survey of social change in the post-Net age. Lewis convinced me that he is a truly gifted chronicler of eras, and while in San Francisco, I eagerly hunted down a copy of his first book, “Liar’s Poker,” a less polished yet thoroughly engaging recreation of the bond trading business during the heady Eighties.

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Toys of Summer

McMovieWriting in the New York Times on Wednesday in an article called “Summer of the Spinoff,” Rick Lyman takes a look at the impending movie season, which, even moreso than those in recent memory, is chock-full of what some call “the inevitable result of more than a decade of growing influence for studio marketing departments and corporate risk-aversion strategies.” In spite of my growing excitement over next week’s release of “Spider-Man,” it’s alarming to realize that, according to Lyman, at least sixteen films this summer will fall into the category of “sequels, prequels, spinoffs, remakes and franchise films based on comic books, television series or video games.”

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Apologies

Novelist and sometime Wired contributor Po Bronson had some thoughts on his own complicity in inflating the dot-com bubble, published yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.The article, entitled “Calculating the Loss and Blame in Silicon Valley,“ has been trumped along with most of yesterday’s issue by a special edition of the magazine focusing on the World Trade Center tragedy. Bronson has a copy of it posted on his own Web site here.

He says, “I was publicly associated with the entire shebang, parties and billionaires and IPOs. I leveraged the hype to build my career. At the very height of the fever, in the summer of 1999, I posed alongside some of my subjects for a cover of Wired magazine. So if apologies are to be made, I’ve lately come to think, I should be apologizing myself.”

I find that sentiment mildly laudatory, but I won’t hold out for similar acts of contrition (even at much smaller scales) from the mendacious snake-oil salesmen that turned a tremendous amount of genuine potential into this pathetic mess.

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Open for Business

Khoi’s StoreI have my own store now. For real! Seriously. Amazon.com is now adding a new tab to its venerable pantheon of tabs — this one has your name on it. If you’re a registered Amazon.com customer, that is. The megaretailer is leveraging their formidable recommendation engine to push more customized recommendation items to all of us buying machines.

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