Digital Media Perspective 950220
February 20, 1995
Table of Contents
- Editorial: Letting publishers be publishers
- Demo 95: The Experiential Report
- Small Newspapers, Big Possibilities
- Conference Announcements
- Inside the February issue of Digital Media: A Seybold Report
- Who We Are, How to Reach Us
- How To Subscribe to DMP and Get Back Issues
Editorial: Letting publishers be publishers
By Neil McManus
A fiery dispute broke out between Apple and The Voyager Co. this month after Apple removed Voyager's "Who Built America?" history CD-ROM from a software bundle it was selling to schools. According to Voyager, Apple asked it to create a sanitized version of the CD-ROM for the bundle in response to complaints from some school districts about certain references to birth control, abortion and homosexuality. Voyager refused to edit the disc, and Apple allegedly told Voyager it would stop selling the title. Voyager officials then fired off a release entitled, "A CD-ROM Faces Censorship: Apple stops distribution of 'Who Built America?'"
The Apple-Voyager flap spilled onto the pages of newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, and triggered some public email missives against Apple by outraged historians and others. I'm sure Apple could have handled the situation better, but on a certain level the company was just clumsily responding to the wishes of some of its customers. As Voyager's release points out, "Apple has the right to sell what it wants." Assuming Voyager's account of the situation is accurate (Apple says it's "re-evaluating" whether to continue distributing the title), Apple may have inadvertently done the CD-ROM industry a favor by demonstrating why computer and system software companies are better off staying out of the content publishing business.
Although Voyager may be guilty of grandstanding, the company has shown itself to be an honest publisher in standing by its material. The fact that Voyager's disc has created a stir means it's probably worth viewing, as the best history is always provocative. Frankly, Apple's ignorance of what a book publisher does is clear: In demanding an edit of the material in "Who Built America," it tried to usurp Voyager's role and responsibility in the editorial process.
The dispute immediately got me thinking about Microsoft, a company that's attempting to be both a neutral system software company and an honest content publisher of CD-ROMs, such as Encarta. It's a balancing act that may be ultimately impossible to maintain. System software companies should act like phone companies -- common carriers that are neutral to whatever content is carried through their unifying technology. Publishers, on the other hand, should act like Voyager and refuse to water down their material to please every constituency. In fact, publishers know they can't possibly please everyone, so they are free to make bold, honest decisions about the content of their products.
Dave Grenewetzki, executive vice president of Mindscape (formerly Software Toolworks), said that when his company agreed to produce an early version of the Newsweek Interactive CD-ROM, officials at his company argued with Newsweek executives over who would be the "publisher" of the disc. The argument ended when everybody realized that software publishers have a different connotation for the word "publisher" than editorial publishers in the book and journalism trades.
For the Microsoft Home division, its software is more than just neutral computer code; it carries ideas. But the company is designing products using the software model, often placing more emphasis on the interface than the information inside. In at least one case, Digital Media has learned, Microsoft cleansed a title of potentially offensive material.
A member of Microsoft's CD-ROM publishing team recently acknowledged that the company gets angry letters about the content of Encarta, which means it must be doing something right. But the fact that the Home content publishing team is part of a company best known for its system software makes me wonder if there are hidden or subtle pressures to avoid creating controversy.
The Home division would be better off if it were spun out as a separate company -- perhaps combined with Bill Gates' other content company, Corbis (formerly Continuum). Then the Microsoft Home team could be true publishers, in every sense of the word.
Nothin' But Good Times Ahead? Demo 95: The Experiential Report
By Mitch Ratcliffe
Is this visionary or just collective delusion? I'm writing from my room in a posh Palm Springs resort while the heavyweights of the computer industry jam questionably on their electronic instruments in the bar below. It's just good clean fun, right? But you've got to wonder if these folks know they don't have products for the rest of us. The scene puts me in mind of Nero about two years before Rome actually burned and the population still had to play along.
The question confronting the computerists: How dumb do they think the general public really is, and how offended will people be if they guess wrong? There's a lot of talk at these high-level conferences about the evolution of a consumer's computer, but it's buried in the same jargon that has been used to make information systems managers a class of specialists, vying to DOS our living rooms.
What goes undiscussed at Demo and similar conferences is what the applications touted by industry executives mean and what is the social impact of the computer. I've seen countless copyright violations during product demonstrations when, out of good clean fun or a grab for a laugh, nerds have freely pasted a photo of the Starship Enterprise or a video clipped from a major motion picture into their documents. So, good-bye intellectual property? Publishers, the entertainment industry, and countless other content providers these computer folks want to win over in the march to the future experience unadulterated horror at the undoing of their business models. One entertainment executive here just shook her head when I asked about an image snatched from one of her company's television shows.
Likewise, there's no discussion of privacy, nor is there much concern about the idea that computer and telecommunications companies will have access to the preferences and predilections of their customers. A Microsoft employee ranted in response to the a question about the destination of name and birth-date information entered by users into the Bob operating environment. (They call it a social interface, because it's got characters that dance and wish you a happy birthday.) "Don't you know that I can get an entire dossier of information about you in just 24 hours that describes your purchasing habits, credit status and income?" The unanswered question: Would Microsoft be receiving Bob users' names and birth dates?
So, just to make the point that these issues are germane, Digital Media did a little privacy busting of its own to determine where the conscience of the computer industry lies. I found it squarely in the craw of the libido.
There's a little-known feature in the SpectraVision on-demand television system. When the system runs out of VCRs, rather than deny new customers access to a film, it gives them a choice of the movies currently playing. Having discovered that the 560-room Stouffer Esmeralda resort, where Demo was held, had only 15 VCRs serving SpectraVision users, I guessed the system often would be full; which meant that we would be able to access a list of films playing most evenings. A further check revealed that 80 percent of the rooms in the hotel were rented by Demo attendees. At 11:15 PM on Sunday, Feb. 5, 13 of the 15 pay-per-view films running were pornography. The most popular title was "Marilyn Chamber's Intimate Fantasies," followed closely by the scintillating work of Christy Canyon.
Not one word of the conference was dedicated to higher-level issues, like privacy, the theft by machines of meaningful work now done by people, and the diminution of skills transferred into machines.
Take the Vivace box demonstrated by Coda Music Technology which is so simple to plug in that "any high school professional can do it," according to the company. The box (at $1,000 a pop) is an affront to musicians everywhere. It plays along with a performer, adjusting time and pitch to match the performer's. It encourages no new musical skills, like learning time, staying in tune, etc. "We sell musical experiences," said John Paulson, chairman and CEO of Coda. It's karaoke for the orchestral musician. They want to put these things in schools. Why not hire more teachers, so the people learning all this musical skill have something to do with their lives?
"Our job is to lay down a groove," Paulson said. "Vivace allows the flawed model of teaching music to finally be changed." I imagine a future when the kids show up to play in the band and can't understand why the band doesn't shift time to keep up with them, and the skill to transpose a song from one key to another is lost. Kids would be better off getting together to practice their French horn, not playing alone in a room. Music is social business, not simply rote skill that can be mastered by sitting in a room with a machine.
On other fronts, Demo 95 was dominated by Web authoring and browsing applications, mostly for Windows. The clear trend in net surfing will be the hierarchical menu, which will sort sites and HTML documents by relevance to users' queries.
And the Demo God (an appellation granted by Demo host David Coursey on the coolest demonstrators) of the event, from my vantage point, was Nick d'Arbeloff of Wildfire Communications. Rather than use a computer and spend his 12 minutes in front of the industry dragging us through a series of screens and justifications for some software, he simply picked up a phone and had a conversation with his voice-activated software agent, known as Wildfire.
When computer technology fades into the background of our lives it will have achieved consumer electronics status. Until then, it's always going to carry a workaday reputation.
Small Newspapers, Big Possibilities
By Margie Wylie
You don't have to be the New York Times to sell an online newspaper.
In fact, it might help if you're not.
Big prestigious newspapers may have the money, the clout and the fancy technology, but small newspapers have the kind of content that plays well online.
The big boys have learned through bitter experience that cloning their broadsheet dailies online won't cut the electronic mustard, but they haven't figured out what will, and quite honestly, they've put very little effort into the question. Small weeklies and their ilk have the content that people are willing to go out of their way to get: local, specific and customized information.
Little league scores, weddings, movie listings, restaurant reviews, local school lunch schedules, and a lost-and-found may seem like pitifully small potatoes to the editors of the Detroit News and Free Press, but that's exactly the sort of information that the twice-weekly News Herald has used to beat that big metro paper out of its top-selling slot in the Michigan communities it serves. With a circulation of only 95,000, the News Herald today prints several different demographic versions for the 21 community and 19 school districts within its purview. On Sundays, the Heritage Sun dedicates a section to each community.
Now the News Herald is expanding online. For $10.95 per month, readers get 30 hours of Internet access, e-mail service and daily updates to the forthcoming issue. According to publisher Fredrick Manuel, the newspaper's staff gathers more local information than they can ever publish. And that, from the silly to the sublime, will go online too. With its French-MiniTel-like scrolling text interface, the service won't be a marvel to behold. In fact, it was designed to accommodate the oldest of computers and modems.
Community and regional publications like the News Herald aren't offering custom-tailored, localized information because their publishers are savvier about information networks. Au contraire. Small publishers are offering exactly the sort of information they always have, as it just happens that they are in the right place at the right time. What they are quickly finding out is that while not many people care what the San Francisco Chronicle thinks about the federal budget, they'll pay to know where the best or the closest Thai restaurant can be found.
Very few small papers realize what a strategically important spot they occupy, if only temporarily, in the electronic spectrum. They have the content, they have the flexibility and they have the attitude to play the electronic information services game. If they ever get serious, they might surprise publishers of dailies who are just trying to survive, rather than thrive, in tomorrow's information age.
(For a more complete look at the future of newspapers, see the March 1995 issue of Digital Media.)
Conference Announcements
NetWorld+Interop 95 Las Vegas, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV Conference: March 27-31, 1995; Exposition: March 28-30, 1995
First of five venues in four countries, Vegas N+I touts itself as the gathering place for the network computing community. Focusing on enterprise applications, network management and connectivity, this three-day conference also features InteropNet, which links a slew of vendors and their multiple platforms directly to the Internet for perusal. Engineer and executive conferences, two-day tutorials and one-day workshops are offered along with independent forums for network analysis, OS/2 and NetWare.
Conference fees: $895 for three days, special packages for conferences, tutorials, workshops
Contact: Softbank Expos, P.O. Box 5855, San Mateo, CA 94402-9637
voice: 800.488.2883, 415.578.6900 outside US - fax: 415.525.0199
Email: info@interop.com
gopher://programs.interop.com
http://www.interop.com
Seybold Seminars 95, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA Conference: March 28-30, 1995; Exposition: March 29-31, 1995
Seybold Boston's fifteenth anniversary conference brings graphics and electronic publishing industry professionals the tools and techniques transforming their respective fields, including Internet publishing, digital delivery systems and workflow management. Demos and tutorials evaluating these can be found in the New Technology Labs on the exposition floor, alongside the Seybold Electronic Art Gallery sponsored by Fractal Design, and the Type Gallery, which will feature over 200 new typefaces. Printer's symposium and 16 tech courses are slated as well.
Conference fees: $995, package pricings for courses
Contact: Seybold Seminars, P.O. Box 5856, San Mateo, CA 94402-0856
voice: 800.488.2883, 415.578.6900 outside US - fax: 415.525.0199
Email: info@sbexpos.com
http://www.sbexpos.com
The Fifth Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy - CFP'95, San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel, Burlingame, Calif. March 28-31, 1995
Still the premiere forum for discussion of the vexing legal and ethical issues involved with digital living, CFP will provide seminars on constitutional, intellectual property and criminal law in cyberspace, as well as panels on information access, government regulation, privacy and the meaning of computers in everyday life.
Conference Fees: $445. Tutorial Fees: $220. Registration is limited to 550 participants.
Contact: P.O. Box 6657 San Mateo, Calif. 94403
voice: 415.548.0840
Email: CFP95@forsythe.stanford.edu
http://www-techlaw.stanford.edu/CFP95.html
Inside the February Issue of Digital Media
Should we call it Internewt now? New Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has got the Internet itch. We take a look at how he and the Republican-controlled Congress may scratch it;
An editorial calling for Microsoft to shed its pesky anti-trust problems by breaking the company to three pieces: The OS/Applications group; the Microsoft Network; and the finance software group;
MUDs and MOOs aren't just for nerds anymore. These text-based virtual reality worlds attract thousands of users who spend hundreds of hours playing. Despite their lack of graphics, video or sound, MUDs and MOOs inspire loyalty in a very diverse group of players, including women, the market that many gaming companies have written off as unreachable. Today these Internet games are mostly free. But they just might be the biggest untapped market around for gamemakers;
Now that multimedia producers finally have ScriptX in their hot little hands, will they know what to do with it? The complex but nearly limitless authoring environment still needs tools that are easy to use before it can make a dent in the current market, much less become the standard;
A review of 2Market's CD-ROM and on-line service. This pioneering effort raises a shopping cart full of questions about how retailers can use multimedia and interactivity as effective sales and marketing tools;
The Good Stuff: A list of Things Digital Medians Should Know.
Digital Media: A Seybold Report, the monthly paper newsletter that sponsors Digital Media Perspective, brings its readers the most provocative analysis of the developing industry for interactive titles, smart networks and broadband applications. We turn an eclectic eye to the stories of the day to provide a more informed perspective with which readers can judge new technologies, new competitors and the assumptions driving the growth of the electronic economy. We question everything, and bring back the hard facts.
Digital Media: A Seybold Report is available monthly for $395 a year; individual issues are $40. Call 800.325.3830/610.565.6864 (voice), 610.565.1858 (fax), or send email to info@digmedia.com for information on how to subscribe.
Who We Are, Where to Reach Us
Digital Media Perspective is a twice-monthly electronic newsletter produced by Digital Media: A Seybold Report.
- Publisher: Jonathan Seybold
- Editor in Chief: Mitch Ratcliffe (godsdog@netcom.com)
- Editor: Neil McManus (neilm@netcom.com)
- Managing Editor: Margie Wylie (zeke@digmedia.com)
- Senior Editor: Stephan Somogyi (somogyi@digmedia.com)
- Editorial Assistant: Anthony Lazarus (lazarus@digmedia.com)
Editorial Offices
444 De Haro Street, Suite 126
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.575.3775 vox
415.575.3780 fax
info@digmedia.com
How To Subscribe to DMP and Get Back Issues
If you'd like to receive this free electronic newsletter regularly, send us email at perspective-request@digmedia.com and we will put you on the list. The subject line of your messages should read "subscribe perspective". Please put your full name in the message's body; we would appreciate it if you would also include your title and organization in the message.
You can get back issues of Digital Media Perspective by sending email (subject and contents unimportant) to our back issues server at perspective-backissues@digmedia.com -- it will respond with instructions on how to retrieve individual issues.
Copyright (c) 1995 Digital Media: A Seybold Report. This electronic newsletter may be freely duplicated, reproduced or retransmitted, but only in its entirety. Excerpts used for the purposes of quotation must be attributed explicitly to Digital Media Perspective.
