this is sippey.com

Last week either Netscape announced, or news was leaked (is there a difference?) that they’ve got a “secret” team of between 30 to 50 people that are working on porting their browser software to consumer and hand-held electronic devices. Soon you’ll be able to run Navigator on your personal organizer, your cell phone, your pager and probably your toaster.

Don’t laugh.

There’s been a long standing goal in Silicon Valley and points north of “ubiquitous computing.” Cell phones, pagers, laptops…all are helping millions of knowledge workers keep in touch with managers, employees, customers, suppliers, family and friends. Heck, Java started out as Oak – an operating system for hand held devices. But the utopian dream world of ubiquitous computing goes way beyond the simple tools we have now. Why stop with connecting every PC to the net? Why not connect every fax machine, every telephone, every refrigerator, every microwave oven, every VCR and every camcorder as well?

Long relegated to the ghetto of department stores and suburban malls (“Can I help you?” “No thanks, I’m just browsing.”) The web has given new life to the verb “to browse.” Browsing now means much more than “just looking.” It now means “looking and clicking.” Just think, in a few short years, you’ll be able to…

• Browse your favorite web sites. “Wait,” you say. “I can already do that.” Sure you can, you’re doing it now. But can you do it from your pager? From your cell phone? From the back of a airline seat? From a web-enabled wristwatch?

• Browse your television. Not only will you be able to browse using your television, but you’ll be able to browse content as well. How do you think they’re going to have you navigate all 500 channels of pay-per-view boxing? Think “pulsating N in the upper right hand corner” and you’re on the right track. Heck, why stop at the television? Why not browse (and program) your VCR, right from your PC at work?

• Browse your phone. Need to pick up your voice messages? Why not browse your voice mail system? All those voice you hear are digitized to begin with. Heck, why even have a real phone? Just make calls on the ‘net.

• Browse your kitchen. Need to see what’s for dinner? Browse the content of your refrigerator. Sure, there are cameras connected to the web, but that’s primitive. Why not have your refrigerator scan the barcodes of each and every product that moves in and out, and continuously update a database? That way, in the afternoon when your stomach starts rumbling at a client site you surf over to your refrigerator and browse the shelves for anything edible. Got milk? No? Order some online and have it delivered.

• Browse your neighbor’s shoes. For about three years now, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab has prognositcating that shoes will become carriers of digital information. They’re incredibly portable (you don’t have to carry them around), and they have a renewable energy source (the pounding of your feet on the pavement). He says they’ll carry digital calling cards, which will be automatically communicated to other people’s shoes when we shake hands at a cocktail party. But why even shake hands? Why not use the Netscape browser in your PDA, and automatically scan the room for interesting shoe profiles? Imagine the ad banner possibilities for Nike and Reebok…

What the net has given us is a common platform (TCP/IP) for communication, and a common metaphor (browsing) for doing it. I don’t have a problem with connecting more and more computers or devices to the net. The market will decide which connections are useful, and which connections are frivolous.

My problem is with the metaphor of browsing. For all the hype about the “interactive” nature of the web, browsing is a very passive activity. Click, wait, read. Click, wait, read. Click, wait, read. This is not how I want to interact with my computer, much less my refrigerator or my neighbor’s shoes.

“Browsing,” aside from its obvious connotations of shopping (see above), leaves the viewer in a state of passive acceptance of the information that they’re, well, browsing. There is no challenge and response. There is no questioning of validity, no feedback loop.

Plainly put, when you’re browsing, you can’t talk back.

Remember the deluge? It began with Netscape Navigator 1.1, when Netscape hijacked the HTML standards and implemented tags that the other browser makers didn’t have. I’m not talking about the deluge of people rushing to Netscape’s FTP site to download the latest and greatest.

I’m talking about the deluge of free advertising that Netscape garnered around the web: “This site is optimized for Netscape Navigator.”

Netscape caught on quickly and encouraged this behavior, by placing nice postage-stamp sized logos on their web site screaming “Netscape Now!” These little GIFs were ripe for the picking by web producers looking to put a little corporate cachet on their site. And soon Netscape had their name, their corporate identity and (usually) a link to their site all over the web.

Netscape continued to add support for useful features for web designers into their browser (background colors, font colors & sizes, frames, animated GIFs, Java, etc.), and web sites took advantage of them. Meanwhile, the gap between the Netscape-haves and the Netscape have-nots widened. Netscape gained market- and mind- share, while other browsers languished in obscurity.

Netscape’s strategy seemed to be just as much content driven as it was browser driven. If the major (and minor) web sites were including tags which only displayed in Netscape browers, then more people would use Navigator. In a way, it was very grass roots – let the web designers “sell” your software with a little extra code they could use (does the center tag come to mind?) to improve the look of their site.

The problem with this strategy is that the foundation upon which the web is built is relatively open. The official specs for HTML are managed by the W3C, and Java virtual machine technology is easily licensed from Sun.

Thus, when the “sleeping giant” in Redmond awoke and went “hard core” about the Internet, it didn’t take long for them to catch up. Last week, Internet Explorer was officially released, and it’s the first browser to challenge Navigator. IE supports frames and cascading style sheets, loads pages and compiles Java content very quickly, and has support for Microsoft’s new brand of interactive web content – Active X (which is really just another way to spell OLE).

Thanks to the relatively simple and level playing field of Internet technology, Microsoft was able to catch up and level the browser battlefield. Plus, in an interesting move, and one most likely intended to placate the Justice Department, Microsoft offered to put the specs for their Active X technology under the care and feeding of Internet standards bodies.

Now, Microsoft probably won’t be able to wrest the market share from Netscape so easily, especially without a Mac, Unix or Windows 3.1 client. But how are they beating the drums for IE? How are they trying to displace Netscape’s mind share, if not their market share? Through content, of course. It’s deja vu all over again.

Microsoft is heavily pushing the adoption of Active X controls on high profile web sites. Everyone expected the “best viewed with Internet Explorer” suggestion on Slate, the Bill branded political journal from Michael Kinsely. But who expected to see it on at the Wall Street Journal?

Microsoft announced last week that they’ve paid The Wall Street Journal, ESPN Sportzone and Investorsedge.com to give IE 3.0 users access to premium content for five whole months. Plus, dozens of others are planning Active X content that will only run on IE 3.0. (I should say will only run on IE 3.0 until Netscape bends and includes support for Active X content in Navigator.)

Microsoft funding the “optimized” phrase with free premium content for web surfers is a perfect example of how the web has changed since the days of “Best viewed with Netscape 1.1”. Netscape, with some quick and easy features, encouraged a bottom up, grass roots “advertising” campaign on web sites ranging from Widget Inc.’s Corporate Site to Billy Joe’s Home Page. Now that the web is a much more consumer-oriented place, where big names get big hits, and advertising and content blend seamlessly, the grass roots approach will most likely lead to, well, not much more than grass clippings. Consumers need a stronger reason to switch than scrolling text banners, and $80 worth of premium sports, news and stock information will definitely help.

In the “old days,” the grist (content) helped fund the mill (the browser). Now the mill is funding the grist to help fund the mill.

And what’s really interesting is that Microsoft, by funding information providers to develop content that will display correctly only on Microsoft’s browser, has essentially created a miniature proprietary online service within the Internet.

Hmmm. Do the letters MSN come to mind?

It’s unfair, really. If you’re reading this over a modem you’re suffering without knowing it – you’re part of the net’s underclass. Because for all the talk of “equal access to the means of production” that the net gives you, in reality it’s not quite that way. Because right now, as I write this, I’m connected to the net at some ungodly speed. 1.544 mega-bits per second. It’s more than 50 times faster than the 28.8 modem I use at home.

Obviously, with a T1 connection, I get a completely different view of the web than the one my parents have, connected to the net through AOL. I get images that load almost instantly. Java applets that are actuall y useful, if only because they run almost instantly. A connection that’s up all day, enabling useless toys like Pointcast.

They get glacial download times and network outages.

I’m leaving all that bandwidth behind – that, and my job, my coworkers, my salary… As of next week I’ll be a student, and will be be surfing the web at mere mortal speeds. And I think my perspective is g oing to change.

No more watching one site after another play “keeping up with the Jones’,” which usually means fatter graphics, more whiz-bang applets, and loads of Shockwave. Inst ead, I think I’ll be looking for sites that intelligently serve up nothing but ASCII. They’re few and far between.

In HotWired’s recently launched WebMonkey, there was a discussion thread last week re. browsers and “the speed of the web .” Most of the posts came from a web publisher’s perspective; wish list items like downloadable fonts, cascading style sheets, true HTML standards. But one post (OK, it was min e) asked for some things from the user’s perspective. The perspective that really matters when it comes to speed. Simple things like loading all the text before loading any of the images, loading interlaced images before non-interlaced im ages, any images before Java applets, and Java applets before plug-in data.

Plus, one not-so-simple thing. Let the page specify the next logical URL, and have the browser load that page/image/file/applet behind the scenes while you’re reading the current page. A fairly simple idea that could drastically change the nature of browsing over slow phone lines.

(Of course, it could completely screw up ad hit counting, but that’s another story.)

The web, for the consumer, takes entirely too much time, and requires entirely too much patience, for usually very little in return. The bandwidth “haves” can laugh about the web’s mid-life crisis, all the while knowing that the “have nots” will never get the chance to enjoy their fair share of streaming video before the web loses its inertia…

What’s the web? On the one hand, it’s a global information superhypeway, letting us trade bits across borders without running into glorified crossing guards. On the other hand, it’s a small little town where everybody knows your name.

Remember Intenet 101? Where you learned that the Internet is really a network of smaller networks? Key concept, because try as they might, the BigBooks of the world will fail. It seems that local directories of things, well, local, are turning up all over the web.

Where I live, I have access to gobs and gobs of localized web content. The Digital Lantern. San FranZiskGo. Television and radio stations. Of course, the fact that the self-described “epicenter” of the web happens to be 100 yards from where I work probably has something to do with this.

But while programming guides from your local classic rock outlet are one thing, entire local web directories are another. In the “looking for somewhere to invest our IPO dollars” category is Yahoo! San Francisco Bay Area. With a nice colorful home page graphic, some message boards and a restructured content tree, they’ve created “the ultimate, ultra-current guide to Bay Area living.” Case in point: they have a link on the front page to 20-minute delayed quotes on the “Internet 25.” Now all those Bay Area knowledge workers can watch their fortunes rise and fall.

Yahoo cheated. With a little database programming and their existing treasure trove of links, they were able to create a “guide” to Bay Area living. It obviously doesn’t matter that Yahoo’s a local company; they’ve gone ahead and created Yahoo! Canada and Yahoo! Japan. Yahoo’s primary motivation is not to build local communities around localized Yahoos. It’s to open up more opportunities for advertising revenue. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) It’s hard to sell a spot to the San Francisco Giants at Yahoo proper’s ad rates. And don’t they realize that the great thing about Yahoo! is that it can point you to a page on Algeria just as easily as a page on Alameda?

I’m not worried about localized content turning the web into a series of provincial, insular communities. That’s already happened. The web is a wonderful tool for connecting regional, like-minded folks. Just look at the real life community that the Well created. But for true local content to survive, it will need true local advertisers.

Case in point. I’m a semi-regular reader of both the SF Weekly and the SF Bay Guardian. Both are excellent (read: free) guides to local arts, politics and entertainment. The Bay Guardian is online, with their content freely available to anyone who doesn’t want to get their hands covered with newsprint. Craig McLaughlin’s article on the local content issue” is there. Heck, they even have a nice search engine. But there’s a problem here. I don’t read the Guardian for the editorial. I read it for the ads.

Any free weekly is only as good as its ads. And the printed version of the Guardian has great ads. They’re not only informative (clubs, restaurants, events) but highly entertaining (body art, sex therapy, methadone research, psychic hotlines). And all of those ads are missing from their web site.

The struggle to create and support real local content will be attracting real local advertisers. The Guardian would be more than “just another web site” if they could attract local merchants (bars, book stores and bodegas) to advertise. It would mean an enormous education effort to bring potential advertisers up to speed on the potential of advertising on the web. But it could lead the way to an Internet that’s truly useful on a local scale.

In the music industry there is life before Soundscan, and life after Soundscan. Life on the Billboard charts before Soundscan was a prototypical Scorsese movie, dominated by the sleazy triumvirate of radio programmers, record chain executives, and Casey Kasem. Life after Soundscan is blissfully bit-driven, with record sales instantly beamed through the ether from record stores straight to some air-conditioned, Halon gas-protected computer room.

Like any new technology is bound to do, Soundscan has spawned a new job category at every major label - specially-trained spreadsheet jocks crunching the raw album sales numbers to tweak market share here, mind share there, and wallet share everywhere else. Their ultimate goal: maximize the lifetime value of any particular artist.The result? Reconstituted adult rock masquerading as hip hop.

But I’m going to put all of those data-massaging monkeys out of business. Not with any new harebrained tracking scheme or business model, but with an entirely new methodology of b(r)and scenario planning. Think of it as the place where David Geffen meets Carl Sagan. It’s the new Astral Theory of Rock.

During literally days of research, I’ve discovered that the life cycle of a star mimics that of, well, a star. This flash of brilliance has led me to believe that those Excel worker bees could someday be replaced by a few, highly-paid quantum physicists, or at least some folks who took Physics for Poets at the local community college. In order to predict the lifetime value of a star, they’ll just need to follow the easy-to-remember, five-step life cycle of a true celestial body: Birth, Radiation, Exhaustion, Collapse, Black Hole.The Birth of the star is easy to predict, and shouldn’t concern our new breed of record industry knowledge workers. They should be focused on future record sales, not how the star got there in the first place. All A&R schleps worth their salt know that some combination of bloodthirsty local fans (“I knew them first!”), sleazy record producers (“Sure, pal. Full creative control. Whatever you say.”), and alcoholic managers (“But I landed you your first paying gig, asshole.”), mixed together in a crowded, humid club in some Godforsaken part of town, usually creates enough pressure and mass to form the infant star. The new science of star tracking, however, will prove that what happens “before” a star is born is irrelevant, since “before” is merely a temporal concept, and has no discernible effect on future record sales.

During most of a star’s lifetime, nuclear fusion in the core generates electromagnetic Radiation. In other words, the star just plain shines. The Radiation phase is the most profitable period of a star’s life. The highly perceptive star tracker will need to keep tabs on the quantity and quality of a star’s shine. Michael Jackson’s sequined glove shines. Paul Simon’s bald spot shines. Paula Abdul’s lycra does not shine. Furthermore, new “astronomers” should be wary of the “Glistening Effect.” Glistening should not be confused with shining. Case in point: Kenny G’s saxophone glistens. Michael Bolton’s hair shines.

In outer space, a star survives by balancing the outward force of shining with the inward pull of gravity caused by the star’s mass. Back in Los Angeles, entertainment physicists should note the “balance of fame” practiced by Madonna, a perpetually radiating star. She always seems to have an equal number of bodyguards (a show of outward force) and basketball players (an inward pull of gravity) at her beck and call.

If the balance of fame is upset, the star begins the Exhaustion phase. During Exhaustion, the star stops shining, gravitation compresses mass inward, and the star starts feeding on itself. Van Halen is in a prototypical exhaustion phase. The core of the star has contracted (Sammy’s out), and it is allowing their remaining nuclear material to be used as fuel (Dave’s back, but only for the greatest hits record).

Exhaustion inevitably leads to Collapse. The Collapse phase may last over a period of hundreds of Entertainment Tonight segments, during which all remaining fuel is used up. Sting has been in Collapse for years. I’ve traced the precise beginning of his collapse to the Police song “Mother,” which prompted millions of people to learn to accurately program their CD players. How far the star collapses, and into what kind of object (VH1 spokesperson, singer of country tunes in odd time signatures, role in touring company of Grease) is determined by the star’s final mass and the remaining outward pressure that the burnt-up nuclear residue can muster. Or, in Sting’s case, how many jazz musicians he can fit on the head of a pin.

If the star is sufficiently massive, it will collapse into a Black Hole. The rocket scientists among us will immediately recognize the KISS revival tour as the largest black hole the industry has ever seen. In the center of the black hole lies the singularity (Gene Simmons’s tongue), where matter is crushed to infinite density, and the curvature of spacetime is extreme. Which explains why millions of people keep expecting to hear “Beth” on the radio, and to be reunited with their 7th-grade car pools.

Any 12-year old with an Einstein t-shirt can tell you that stars surrounding the Black Hole run the risk of being sucked in. But when the geek with E=MC^2 blazened across his hollowed chest happens to be toting an HP 12-C, look out. Because a single Black Hole could suck in an entire star system, creating revenue potential unheard of anywhere else. (Imagine Carl Sagan saying “billions and billions,” and you’re somewhere in the ballpark.) It’s not a coincidence that the KISS tour spawned reunions of Foriegner, Styx, Kansas, the Scorpions and REO Speedwagon.

Finally, the labels have always struggled with the issue of star retirement. Do they ship them to Vegas? Set them up in rock operas? Or simply send them on some endless talk radio tour? If the Astral Theory proves correct, their problems could be solved. Certain physicists believe that if a star survives the whirling vortex of the black hole, it may find itself in an alternate, parallel universe.

Like Europe.