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A significant benefit of business school is sitting in on one dog and pony show after another. And then trying to rip them to shreds during the Q&A.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of seeing a presentation by a product manager at the @Work division of the @Home network. Since @Home just launched their cable-modem service a couple of weeks prior in Fremont, California, I thought it’d be interesting to hear how the darlings of the Valley were going to solve all of our bandwidth woes.

Their service is enticing, for sure. For a flat rate per month of around $40, you get a cable modem and a dedicated connection to the ‘net at speeds approaching 10 megabits per second. He demonstrated some of these ungodly transfer rates with a videotape showing an instant download of a 500k jpeg through the @Home network alongside the same image being downloaded over a 28.8k modem.

Even the T1 addicts were salivating. Until they started asking questions.

@Home is providing gobs of bandwidth through two primary features of their network: a fat pipe, and a private network of proxy servers. The fat pipe is easy enough for most people to visualize: take that thick black coaxial cable that MSNBC comes in on, and partition off a channel for downstream data and a channel for upstream data. Voila – MSNBC alongside MSBNC. Since it’s a dedicated connection, you can leave it up all day long without tying up a phone line.

The proxy servers are other half of the equation. And the half that makes me nervous. In their presentation, and on their web site, @Home makes no bones about the fact that in order to give users the fastest downloads possible, they basically have to build their own private internet.

From the user’s point of view, the coaxial pipe from their cable modem goes out to the street, to a cable headend, and then up to a regional data center. Those regional data centers are connected to each other by a private ATM backbone, which in turn is connected to the Internet at large. (For a very basic schematic, check out @Home’s network architecture.) Some of the more astute members of the audience I listened with commented that the speed the user experiences will be limited by the speed of the web sites they’re viewing, or the traffic on the Internet at large.

“Ah, but the beauty of @Home is in the regional data centers,” the product manager replied. “We’re going to cache the most popular sites on the Internet there.”

What this means is that @Home will be offering subscribers a copied (or “cached” or “proxied”) version of the Internet at large. @Home’s regional data centers will periodically query the “most popular” sites on the Internet for changes, and make a copy of the site on their own servers. Thus, when an @Home user goes to look at Pathfinder, for example, they won’t be looking at the actual Pathfinder, but a reasonable facsimile of Pathfinder which will be sitting at @Home’s regional data center.

This gives @Home a definite speed advantage. An @Home user’s request for Pathfinder will never have to travel outside the @Home private network, and will never have to compete with the traffic of the great unwashed masses of normal Internet users.

On a pure bandwidth level, @Home will basically further balkanize the Internet. Those communities that have cable companies that have an alignment with @Home will have an advantage over the rest of us. They will have access to privately cached websites, at 10 megabits per second. The rest of us will be left fight it out at the regional NAPs.

But @Home’s private internet is also an issue for web publishers. With a robust set of proxy servers, @Home could start to do all sorts of interesting things to content coming in off the ‘net. Censorship for families that don’t want their kids surfing Playboy without the delay. Or replacing a web site’s own ad banners with some sold by @Home.

Admittedly, proxy servers are nothing new. AOL runs a whole host of proxy servers in order to make up for their own bandwidth limitations. And corporations run them all the time, in order to add a layer of security between their internal networks an the rest of the world. But @Home is looking to proxy services as a primary differentiator for their service. And as a small web publisher, that frightens me.

With a private internet, @Home has the power to make it very difficult for smaller web publishers to get access to @Home subscribers. What if their proxy server only gets around to updating my site once a month? What about sites that change daily? Or hourly? It’s not too hard to imagine a scenario where content providers will have to pay @Home to have their site proxied on a regular basis (daily, hourly) in order to provide @Home subscribers with a full bandwidth-intensive experience. It comes as no surprise that @Home is cutting deals with major online information providers for customized, proxied content for the @Home network.

Finally, let’s say for argument’s sake that a small web publisher named Jill does a good enough job promoting her web site that she can sell ads to support her writing habit. And, let’s say that @Home actually does bother to proxy her site. But what happens to Jill’s count of page views when @Home hits it once, and then serves it up to their X million subscribers? Does Jill get “credit” for those hits? No. Does Jill get paid for those hits? No.

Even given the lousy state of traditional bandwidth offerings, if @Home were offered in my neighborhood I’d have to think twice.

In the go-go days of the ’80s art market, it seemed as if any old stockbroker with a creative streak and a penchant for self-promotion could have been crowned “King Midas of SoHo.” In fact, one of them was. Back in, say, 1983, when Saturday afternoon gallery strollers encountered a ready-made, plexiglass-encased vacuum cleaner courtesy of Jeff Koons, they usually had the same, amazed, open-mouthed reaction: “I could have done that.”

Unlike Warhol and Duchamp before him, Koons wasn’t out to infuse everyday objects like soup cans and blonde movie stars with extraordinary meaning. Instead, Koons was interested in eliminating meaning - parodying shiny things by making them even shinier. By proclaiming himself the “most written-about artist in the world,” Koons became the ultimate art world parodist. Only by crowning himself King of Pop could he skewer the other King of Pop.

More than a decade on, today’s parodists know that those who can, do, while those who can’t, redo. Still, they must ache for the life that Koons enjoyed - wine-soaked gallery openings, ArtForum covers, an Italian porn star for a wife. But, since the bottom fell out of the art market just around, say, October 1987, the parodists of today can’t hope to enjoy Koons-like riches. Instead, they’re stuck with nonprofit art spaces - where society types masquerade as curators - or the web. Thanks to the brass ring of press coverage and ad banners, most choose the latter. These days it’s easy for a young, budding parodist to get hooked on the illicit thrill of digital caricature. Combine a need to blow off some work-induced stress with the common desire to surf a bastardized version of the corporate web site, and boom - the Zippy the Pinhead active filter appears. It’s the equivalent of that first hit of reefer for the kid in the schoolyard. It’s safe, it’s easy, and if their hand eye coordination is good enough, Alt-Tabbing away when the boss walks by will be just as natural as palming the smoking joint when the wrestling coach spotted them behind the high school gym.

Eventually, they’ll turn to stronger stuff and need to steal to support their habit. The standard web browser’s View Source command is the Saturday Night Special of the web. Sure, HTML is easy as hell, but outright robbery is a hell of a lot easier. Armed with a browser, all one needs to jumpstart a web counterfeiting career is some free time and a web server.

And maybe a C-note for a domain name. Case in point: everyone’s favorite web whipping post, Slate, spawned two ripoffs, Stale and Stall. Both swiped layout and images. Both took cheap shots at the khakied ones from the northwest. But Stale had the $100 for “stale.com,” and won the publicity contest hands down.

Sure, your mother told you never to judge a book by its cover. But on the web, image is everything. If the game were based on what’s actually beyond the URL, Stall would be the obvious nominee for the Parody Pulitzer. In the book review category, Stall’s review of Kathy Acker, My Mother, where “250 pages of the book are blank” smartly appeals to the postliterate in all of us. Stale, on the other hand, tries to combine the worst of a decade-old Wendy’s ad with Upton Sinclair in “Where’s the Beef, Inspector?” Nevertheless, Stale wins the ad banners, while Stall languishes with obscure-joke banners.

Stale better watch their back, because sometimes the grandest plans of a parodist backfire. After all, who’s not to say that Stall couldn’t reinvent itself as a parody of Stale? The more likely scenario, however, is that the “Oprah syndrome” takes over, and the cult of the victim (in this case, Kinsley) grows over time. In New York, a mediocre subway mugging transformed an ordinary commuter into the “legendary” Bernard Goetz. On the web, The Squat helped catapult The Spot from just another Southern California soap opera to Cool Site of the Year. If Microsoft were smart, it would acquire both Stale and Stall, set up alternate production staffs, and reap the ad revenue from all three.

Don’t laugh - metaparody’s been done. Some of the web’s more jaundiced parodists have found that the thrill of vandalizing the unsuspecting mark dulls after a while, and instead turn sights on themselves. On the one hand, it’s a way of keeping one step ahead of the pack, of outparodying the parodists. On the other hand, or with the other hand, it’s a bit autoerotic. Sure, it may feel good for a while, but eventually you’ll just go blind. It used to be that high-profile crimes required high-profile tools - automatic weapons, getaway cars, Swiss bank accounts - and thus limited the number of people that could actually pull them off. But on the web, with such easy access to the weapons of choice - browsers, text editors, Paint Shop Pro - the work of the Way New Parodists seems to elicit an oddly familiar response: “I could have done that.”

As you read this, the minions from the north are busy preparing release 4.0 of Internet Explorer. Which supposedly will merge the browser with the operating system, giving folks a browsable view of their file system.

Some people may get their yahoo’s out of browsing their C drive, but not this jaundiced writer. I’m more interested in another rumored feature of IE 4.0 that’s getting a bit less attention. Microsoft is planning on using IE 4.0 to set aside part of the Windows 95 desktop as real estate for a stream of constantly updated news, quotes and ads.

Having a hard time picturing it? Think Pointcast. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Pointcast is nothing more than broadcast television for the web. It leaves users transfixed by their screensavers, blinded by scrolling headlines, Shock’ed ads and nice weather maps. So, having teased us with HTML goodies like properly implemented style sheets, it turns out that Microsoft has seen the future of the browser, and its not browsing at all. It’s more like, well, television.

This does not bode well for us Zoomers.

(In a Packet column last week, Andrew Leonard described the difference between what he calls “Slippers” and “Zoomers.” Slippers enjoy a passive net experience, with toys like Pointcast, Magellan’s (seemingly defunct) Search Voyeur and Pathfinder’s Slipstream (for which “Slippers” are now named). Zoomers, on the other hand, enjoy the hypertextual nature of the web, following links, “zooming” down, across and sideways into different levels of information. Of course, it’s no surprise that Leonard considers “slipping” a devolved form of infotainment.)

There have been several surveys of web users that indicate that the slower the connection, the “focused” users are when they’re on the web. Surfers with 28.8k connections or slower surf with purpose – they’re usually looking for a particular piece of information or heading to a particular site. Makes sense to me, bandwidth limitations make web surfing painful. Meanwhile, surfers with corporate or educational bandwidth at their beck and call can afford to hop from site to site, aimlessly meandering the hyperlinked jungle. What’s ironic to me is that “Slipper” tools like Pointcast or the vaporware IE 4.0 are actually targeted at the corporate user – the person with a dedicated, full-time, high bandwidth connection, who can afford to have content pushed at them all day long. Meanwhile, the home user gets left behind, forced to scan headlines at Yahoo.

What’s really a shame is that the “Big Media” companies, who 18 months ago didn’t have the first clue about the web, have hijacked the technology to turn it into something that they’re familiar with: the broadcast style, top-down, centralized distriution of information. There is no place in the Pointcast world for something like gURL, or Stubb ex Machina or Stating the Obvious, or even the above-mentioned Packet for that matter.

Basically, what it comes down to is that there is no place in the Pointcast world for anything resembling a point of view. And that is what you should be surfing for. Now that you can have all the pre-digested information you can handle spewed to you in real time – in a nice, animated screensaver, nonetheless – you should spend your time surfing for someone that actually has something to say.

I fear that as the web slowly morphs into a television wannabe, content providers with a POV will be relegated to the sidelines. And surfing will be relegated to the consumer backwater – like shopping at an independent bookstore or local record shop. Instead, most people will sit back and let content come to them. The only point of view they’ll enjoy will be one with a Time Warner logo stamped on it.

It’s out of control. During a typical session with my email account, I’m faced with a stream of messages with first sentences that look like this…

• Delete this message if you’re not interested in buying my car.

• Delete this message if you’ve found my lost statistics book.

• Delete this message if you don’t don’t speak German.

• Delete this message if you’re not interested in a lecture on electronic banking.

• Delete this message if you’ve already been through Powerpoint training.

• Delete this message if you’re not interested in the consulting Firm Night, a daytime visit from a consulting firm, having a consulting firm critique your resume, or acting as a guinea pig for interviewers from a consulting firm.

My classmates are, shall we say, zealous users of email. I’m currently tracking at about 80 messages a day, and about 7 of them (on average) are moderately useful. Sure, people have learned not to “reply to all,” and at least they’re preceding their message text with “Delete this message if,” but it’s almost enough to drive me off email.

OK, well, maybe its enough to force me to buy Eudora Pro.

I’m a “free” software junky. I’ve been using Eudora Light (the free version) for quite some time now. When the email traffic wasn’t overwhelming (no, theobvious doesn’t get that much feedback), it worked really well. I dial, connect, swap an outbox for an inbox. Easy as pie. But now, I’m connecting two or three times a day and grabbing 30 messages at a time. Buried in there somewhere could be a nugget, and I’d never know it. I’ve heard that Eudora Pro offers some message filtering features that will enable me to sort incoming mail by author, subject, priority, etc. Of course, I’d also heard of messages that get lost in some godforsaken mailbox because of a mis-written rule…

But I’m going to hold off. Simson Garfinkel’s recent Packet article titled “Dead Letter Office” made me realize that I didn’t know what I really wanted. And now I do. Not email by mailbox, by email by database. Ahhh, bliss. Someday I’ll be able to make sense of my correspondence, dynamically moving through views of my messages by author/recipient, subject, status, mailing list, etc.

Meanwhile, Cyber Promotions and AOL are involved in a legal battle over email turf. Cyber Promotions calls their indiscriminately addressed missives to AOL users “free speech.” AOL calls it “spam.” The winner could be Qualcomm or another email package provider who can sell packaged advanced mail filtering functionality to AOL, just like Microsoft was able to sell Internet Explorer for advanced web browsing to AOL users.

But email’s just the tip of the iceberg – forget keeping up with the web. I’m not spending any significant time just surfing anymore. Not just because I’m busy, but because I’m afraid that if I started to look around, really look around, I’d realize that there’s more out there than I’d ever have time to look at. And that would be depressing. For Chrissake, there are something like 1,000 sites added to Yahoo every day. Their digest of “cool” new sites has around 30 sites per week. (Most of them have their own domain names, which is a whole other topic of discussion.)

Affinicast is trying to be everyone’s personal web filter, taking stock of your preferences, and suggesting sites which fit your media consumption profile. Affinicast hopes to help narrow the deluge of web sites through “psychographic” software. If they really want to go the whole nine yards, they should take a page from the Firefly book, and start having me rank websites I’ve already visited. They could even provide a customized browser with a “rate it” toolbar to enable me to rate websites for my psychographic neighbors in real time…

But I digress. A few weeks ago I wrote about some potential implications of ubiquitous computing. While we’re not quite at the stage of ubiquitous web browers, we’re almost certainly at the point of ubiquitous web sites. Lately, if I’m thinking about a publication or a company or a group of people, I’m more likely to assume they’re on the web than not. Their mission statement, their product(s), their marketing material, their taglines, their press releases -- they’re all going to be there. A doppleganger of real life.

So, then why even surf?

We hadn’t done it in a while, so on Sunday we ignored the newspaper, locked the apartment, boarded a train and BARTed into what the Examiner likes to call “The City.” You see, thanks to my school life, and her job, we recently became suburbanites. If you can call Oakland a suburb.

Occasionally Sundays are museum days. I’ve written about them before, and will no doubt write about them again. Wandering through a temple of whitewashed walls and oil on canvas helps me clear my head, look outside the proverbial box, and hopefully make connections to things I’m dealing with in “the real world.”

The SFMOMA recently installed a relatively faithful recreation of Charles and Ray Eames’ famed conference room. The Eameses were a brilliant design team, and were responsible for groundbreaking work in furniture, film, architecture and exhibition design. The museum has been planning the conference room exhibit for a while – in 1988, when Ray Eames died, they acquired the contents of the entire room. Chairs, tables, shelving, knick knacks, projectors, photographs, wastebaskets…

If you know Eames, you know that the room’s furniture has to be great. But the key feature of the room is its focus on fostering creative collaboration. Shelves hold a few reference works, but not too many as to be overwhelming. One wall displays a grid of polaroid photographs of natural forms – one can imagine they’re the inspiration for the shapes of the Eames chairs. Another wall is a projection screen, and a projector is permanently affixed to the opposite wall. The conference table has pens, pencils and and small toys lying on it, and the above-mentioned chairs around it. And although the room has been rebuilt inside a city monument, you can feel the serious work, and serious play, that went on there.

The wonderful thing about the Eames room is that it encouraged people to work together, as a team. Where is the equivalent on the net? Why does it seem that all for all the talk of this wonderful enabling technology, we still are sitting at our individual machines, tap tap tapping away by ourselves?

I’m involved in a multitude of group projects this semester. It’s exciting, but will be a logistical nightmare. Different people populate different groups. Everyone is stretched for time. Coordinating face-to-face meetings is difficult, and there is plenty of group work to be done. The obvious question: why can’t we be using the net as a tool?

I would love to have a cross-platform collaboration product that combines combines the ease-of-use of email with the publishing capabilities of the web. I work with folks who live lives both on- and off-line, on PCs and Macs. The only thing we have in common is a UNIX machine hosting our web sites and running our POP server. We’re not interested in building online communities, we’re just interested in getting some work done. Asynchronously, easily, and cheaply. Oh, and a dose of security would be nice. Regardless of what the admissions department tells you, business school is competitive.

Everyone and their mother, it seems, is pushing an Intranet based product to help solve these issues. But nothing has gone beyond the firewall. Lotus Notes? For the individual? Ha. Netscape’s LiveWire? Do you think we’re actually in control of the server we use? Microsoft’s NT and IIS? See above. Meanwhile, can someone remind me why Netscape bought Collabra? Did I miss something, or were we not promised browser-based collaboration for the masses?

I, of course, want the impossible. I want a set of tools which turn my machine into the equivalent of the Eames conference room. But I won’t get it, because it’s an impossible dream. The beauty of the Eames room is that it’s a room, a physical place, for physical (not virtual) collaboration. Working face to face is, of course, better – a machine can’t replace the inimitable buzz of a group working on a caffeine induced high.

But when we’re apart, and have work to do, when schedules dictate that things have to be done alone, then why can’t we work alone together?

P.S. In the course of surfing for this piece (I don’t dare call it “research”), I came across an Eames film that should probably be on the curriculum at business school. It’s titled “Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, and the Effect of Adding another Zero.”

Yup, it’s that time again. The presidential campaign is in full swing, men in pads are practicing violence by committee on a weekly basis, and loads of kids are loading up on new notebooks, Levi’s and haircuts in preparation for the fall semester.

(Wait, that sounds like what I just went through.)

This past week for me has been full of syllabi and new textbooks, so my fall reading list has been pre-determined by the folks at Haas. But since I did a list last year, I figured I might as well do one this year. Plus, it’s an easy way to fill a week.

Since I have very little time these days to read anything of the print variety (unless it has present value equations printed in it), I’m in no position to recommend juicy bedside tomes. Instead, this year’s list is almost entirely electronic – plain old ASCII to fill your web browser or stuff your inbox. So, without further ado…

• Educom’s Edupage. Educom – “a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities seeking to transform education through the use of information technology” – publishes “Edupage,” a thrice-weekly email newsletter re. news in the area of information technology. Don’t have time to glean PC Week, Information Week, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times for relevant IT news? Let Edupage deliver soundbite news summaries to your inbox. For free. To subscribe to Edupage: send mail to: listproc@educom.unc.edu with the message: subscribe edupage Stephane Dubois (if your name is Stephane Dubois; otherwise, substitute your own name).

• Packet. Packet is a new creation from those wily folks at Hotwired. The editors at Packet must live under the adage “An idea a day keeps the boredom away,” because in their three weeks of being “live,” there hasn’t been a single day when I’ve come away from Packet without something to chew on. Mondays: “Ned Brainard” delivers the Flux gossip. Tuesdays: Michael Schrage tackles online business. Wednesdays: Simson Garfinkel peers inside the guts of web technology. Thursdays: Andrew Leonard looks at net culture. Fridays: some Real Audio “HotSeat” discussion.

• MEME. David Bennahum has a tendency to be wordy and self-absorbed, but he writes well and seems to have access to some interesting people. Plus, his writing inspires debate. Earlier this year his piece on Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” garnered reaction from John Perry himself. The web site archives the memes. To get memed, drop a line to LISTSERV@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU with message: subscribe Liz Bernstein (if your name is Liz Bernstein; otherwise substitute your own name).

• The Project McLuhan List. The medium is still the message for the folks at Project McLuhan. Their contribution to the continuing legacy of Dr. McLuhan is an occasional message to the McLuhan list, which spots online and culture trendlets and generally says “Hey, McLuhan told you so.” Entertaining at the very least. To subscribe, send email to majordomo@astral.magic.ca with the message: subscribe McLuhan-list.

• Countermedia in general. If you spent any time in front of the tube this past week, you were subjected to the Democrats’ version of scripted nirvana in Chicago. But the untold story was, well, untold by the major news media. Regardless of your political persuasion, you have to acknowledge that the web is the perfect countermedia news outlet. During the coming election, use the web to keep tabs on the things the networks aren’t telling you.

And, finally, one non-electronic reading recommendation…

• The New Yorker Music Issue (Aug 26/Sep 2). The issue of the New Yorker that’s currently on newsstands is testament to why hiring Tina Brown was a good thing. The old New Yorker would never had mixed an issue with Mark Singer on the Fugees, Lou Reed on “The Aches and Pains of Touring,” and Nick Hornby on “The Pain in My Heart.” But the best part is the opening essay from Alex Ross. Forgive the long quote, but it had to be done…

“Turning the dial or browsing in record stores, you encounter a teeming mass of genres, hybrid forms, unnamed styles. Nowadays, new sounds are multiplying in crazy profusion, fending off – or feeding off – one another. … All styles under the sun are clamoring to be taken seriously, freighted as they are, with heavy investments of ethnicity, ideology, tradition, and expertise. You may offend by dismissing them, or you may offend by embracing them.”

Hmm. Sounds a bit like the web.