If telecom and cablecom executives don’t pay attention to blogs, ally wanted to hear–and then listen to it they risk being slide-ruled out of the next generation of TV. anywhere, any time I wanted. By trial and error, by asking friends, and by judiciously using search engines, I found feeds such as “The Gillmor Gang” (a tech talk show), “The Nashville Nobody Knows,” and NPR’s “On the Media.”
It transformed what I did when I walked, drove, and flew. It made an immediate, major cut in my TV-watching time. Adding the iPod to user-generated content, RSS, and faster-than-real-time downloading created an emergent, life-changing new thing.
The Internet treats video like audio. Apps based on user content, RSS, new devices, and fast downloads are emerging. YouTube is but one weak signal from TV’s future. It’s an 18-month-old Web site that already attracts millions of video viewers. It gets tens of thousands of new videos made by its users each day. It features RSS subscription, of course. The amateurish quality of most videos obscures the fact that, as with blogs, the good ones certainly rise to the top. It is certain that the next Vid-or, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, or Tarantino will soon understand the new video medium in yet-undiscovered ways and won’t be bothered by how Hollywood used to work.
If you’re somebody whose job depends on understanding the future of TV, start a blog, get an iPod, get the fastest home Internet connection you can, subscribe to some RSS feeds, and check out You Tube. When the future runs you over, at least you’ll know what hit you. V
Science students carried slide rules when I began college. Calculators were mechanical. They weighed a hundred pounds. When they did long division, they sounded like a Vespa with a bad crank. Electronic circuits with dozens of transistors were not yet rolling off the line. Then the transistorized calculator appeared; it could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it couldn’t do tangents or cosines, so slide-rule makers felt smug. Then, a couple of years later, the calculator could do tangents and cosines. The slide rule was dead. Slide-rule makers never saw it coming.
If telecom and cablecom executives don’t pay attention to blogs, they risk being slide-ruled out of the next generation of TV. At one cableco I know, the senior managers all say, “Blogs, shmogs, what’s that Internet hippie stuff got to do with us?” They don’t keep blogs, they don’t read blogs, and they don’t listen to podcasts. They don’t understand how podcasts evolved from blogs, or how this could have anything to do with them.
ple Syndication), a protocol that creates a machine-readable description of each participating blog article at a public Web site where other machines can access it. These other machines collect “feeds” you subscribe to (e.g. Bloglines) or search for (e.g. Technorati) so you can scan the blogosphere for the information you want.
RSS is the engine behind podcasting, too. Because the Internet does not care what it carries, it carries audio as easily as blog postings. Indeed, podcasts are little
There are several aspects of blogging with lessons for the future of TV. The first is end user–generated content. It is easy to sample a few random blogs and scoff, “Who’d want to read this?” But blogs such as Engadget and BoingBoing are good, hence popular, so they’ve risen to become primary sources of news, entertainment, and, yes, culture. Global Voices bloggers in dozens of countries have become firsthand sources. Online security bloggers such as Ed Felten, Avi Rubin, and Bruce Schneier outclass (in my opinion) all the official security sites put together.
The second aspect is RSS (Really Sim-
audio blog postings consisting of music, speeches, dramatic readings, chapters of talking books, newscasts, and whatever. If there’s a particular audio blogger you like, you subscribe to her feed. When she pub-lishes a piece, your software discovers it via RSS and downloads it to your computer.
Devices are a third critical aspect of blogging. I didn’t understand why podcasting was useful until I got my first iPod.
The fourth aspect that’s critical is faster-than-real-time downloads. It was a revelation that I could plug my iPod into my computer for two minutes and grab a couple hours of audio–audio that I actu-
David S. Isenberg ( isen@isen.com) is the author of “The Rise of the Stupid Network” and founder of isen.com, LLC. He spent 12 years at Bell Labs, where he was promoted to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.
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