Brad McCormick wrote:
> Reading Chris's response to my posting led me to think of the telephone,
> which seems to me to be an example of a "de-centric medium with
> producers as consumers" etc. Even if there are not as many
> phone calls as emails, there are zillions of them, between
> Every(man|woman|child)-sub-m and Every(man|woman|child)-sub-n
> where m is not equal n and both m and n are between 1 and
> about 6,000,000,000.
1) The Internet is not just e-mail, and obviously I wasn't talking about
e-mail when I mentioned MP3, Gnutella etc.
2) The vast difference between telephone and Internet (the Web part) is
that the telephone communication is 1:1 and very volatile (hot air),
whereas websites communication is 1:N or even M:N and durable (24h up)
and most importantly, you can search contents to find info -- practically
impossible by telephone. Producers need 1:N (or M:N) relationships.
3) Even with e-mail, the communication is 'richer' than by telephone,
as it's very easy to communicate 1:N, be it via "CC:" or mailing-lists,
and very inexpensive even over long distances.
(Suprised that I have to explain these trivia here..)
Brad, how do you *publish* by telephone ? How do you run an *international
discussion group* like FW by telephone ? etc. etc.
> My guess is that the "popularizing" effects of the
> Internet may be somewhat similar to the telephone.
Wrong guess because it's based on a flawed analogy (above).
> I hypothesize that my personal website gets more
> hits than most, and, in 4 years, the total is probably
> less than the margin of error in the hit count of
> one "major" website for one day. I am reminded of
> "the vanity press", as an analogy for the effort I
> have put into my personal website.
With the still-present dominance of the 'old' media, the hits are being
channelled to "major" websites (by mentioning their URLs in the old media)
-- this is not an inherent flaw of the Internet, but a bad inheritence
from the centralistic old media, which will fade over time.
The other question is how many links lead to (and from) your website, and
how distinguished (keywords) and interesting/brief-and-to-the-point is the
content of your website.
At any rate, the Internet *increases* your possibilities to reach a wide
audience, and *reduces* the relative power of centralistic media -- both
contrary to your original claim.
Yours in dissent ;-)
Chris
_______________________
WTO = We The Oppressors
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