musings

A month of anniversaries

2007-01-31T17:34:16-06:00

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions.

-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Two years ago

Wow. Two years ago we launched this pingVision site. Actually, as I write this, it was about two years and nineteen or so hours ago. I had been working with Drupal for several months at that point, helping people when I could and eventually parlaying that activity into some freelance work.

pingVision was the beginning of a formalization of that -- a shingle for a business partnership with my friend and colleague, Katherine Lawrence, as we contemplated a business plan incorporating Drupal web development, DVD authoring and other interactive media notions not yet ready for public discussion, into a coherent plan for world domination ... or at least a means to make a decent living.

Happy birthday, pingVision!

A year ago last week

We forged pingVision into a limited liability company a year ago last Wednesday. Alas, we had no birthday cake on hand -- too busy -- so we at the office just enjoyed memories of the seven-layer fudge cake we had for Drupal's fifth birthday the previous week.

Since that time a year ago, we've become a company of over ten people, which just boggles my mind. I had never dreamed of that a year ago. I'm humbled and thrilled, especially when I consider the caliber of people we have in our pingVision family.

Happy birthday, pingVision, LLC!

A year ago

A year ago, BlogHer launched. Time has flown by since then, and yet it seems like developing the BlogHer site happened a lifetime ago. Back then, I was the sole designer and the sole developer we had pingVision, and the experience drove home to me the importance of building a team. I really enjoy collaboration more than just sitting alone in front of the computer until the wee hours. And yet, while it was very hard to build that site pro bono while trying to find and complete paying client work, it was a project I delighted in working on. Today the BlogHer community is a wild success because of the energetic and insightful work of its founders and the bevy of outstanding Contributing Editors (of which [full disclosure] I am one, though I make no claim at being "outstanding").

Happy birthday, Blogher!

The Story - special effects, DVD, and the author

2006-04-19T10:28:25-05:00

"Tell me a story."

It's one of the oldest requests. We asked it as children, and our children ask it of us, and we ask it of one another. "Tell me a story."

We marvel at "King Kong." We're enthralled at seeing the "Lord of the Rings." We're mesmerized at the sweep of "Star Wars." "Sky Captain," "Final Fantasy," and "Sin City" head into new realms. And who will forget, "Who Shot Roger Rabbit?"

Yet, at some point, all these projects were screenplays, or at least treatments. There was a story.

I was reminded of this as I listened to the commentaries of Jodie Foster and Robert Zemeckis each give their running account in the background as I watched "Contact" on DVD.

For Foster - the star - it was mainly about the story. For Zemeckis, it was more complicated, or as the top-level guy, Zemeckis had a wider range of responsibilities, but I could not help but notice how devoted he was to the technical aspects of the film. Perhaps he let Foster take care of the story and rather than be redundant, he gave his spin on what magic was done during the production.

And yet, as I look at the latest in a series of box office offerings, special effects are playing more of a role. To be sure, it is cost-effective to paint things out. For example, in "The Untouchables," a street scene required that all window air conditioners be removed from an exterior shot so that the scene would look like the late 1920s and not the late 1980s. No longer would a film company have to go door-to-door and incur the expense of removing and replacing the offending window units.

Special effects, like spice or salt, are best when they enhance rather than overwhelm the scene - in effect, upstaging the actors.

Is "Hamlet" a better play if the Ghost (of Hamlet's father) is made especially gruesome? At what point do we stop listening to the dialog, only to be swept along by a spook house or "Space Mountain" sort of experience?

Laura and I chatted about this a bit before Staff Meeting. I am "borrowing" her idea and putting it into entirely my words, but it goes like this: What if the last three Star Wars episodes had to be shot using the same special effects of the first three episodes?

Would the human drama come out better? Would there be more tension? How is it that some fantastic actors gave such wooden performances. Ian McDiarmid ("The Emperor") alone stands out.

The special effects don't have to be all that special. Let me conclude by turning back to the film "Contact," and the scene that did it for me. Our hero, Ellie Arroway, is listening to "the array," hoping to find intelligent life on other planets. She is alone, in the late evening, out in the field of dishes (dreams) listening to "outer space." Suddenly there is a crackling through the headphone. The camera zooms in on just her eyes.

Sentimental me, I am always moved to tears at this scene. The "girl scientist" has the "eureka!" moment. She has seen something that has escaped everyone else's notice.

The special effects show "the array" at night in the background, but the tension for me is over the top. And what's happening? She races off in a car to the center building. Her colleagues simply waken sleeping computers. No scene before, or after, compares with this moment.

This is the story - a scientist who is scoffed at makes the greatest discovery of the century. We are not alone, There is intelligent life on other planets.

Alas, that too many films, so enamored with special effects and not story, forget there is intelligent life on this one as well.

Drupal Evolution and Documentation

2006-03-21T12:09:48-06:00

There is no question that Drupal is growing, largely through word of mouth. Yet, go to the computer section at a well-stocked book store, and still there is precious little on the shelves about Drupal.

But breakthroughs, both large and small, are like that.

When calculus was first introduced, there were no text books on what Newton and Leibniz had discovered. The knowledge was largely word of mouth and it took one of the Bernoullis to put together a first pass book about calculus. It would be hundreds of more years before Thomas' Calculus would flood every modern scientific school of higher learning.

Part of what we are seeing is a moving target.

I once heard a graduate student put it this way,

The text books are at least a couple years behind the latest advances.

To understand what has happened in the last year, we go to the journals - which are usually six months to a year behind what is happening.

To get more recent informations, Conferences and Symposia are a place where data is a month or two to six months old.

To get what the latest is? "It's like we're sitting now," he said, "over coffee."

Today it is even faster than that grad student said. I don't wait to see him in the Student Union Building where we can chat about the cutting edge.

The cutting edge is happening all at once on the internet, just as fast as people can get the information up and moving.

Surely there is a place for a good horn book and reference manual, but you know you're in a revolutionary mode when things are happening faster than the press can report them.

iPod, Therefore I am - "Vanity Fair"

2006-03-17T08:03:23-06:00

Michael Wolff has written a piece on Steve Jobs for the April 2006 issue of "Vanity Fair."

This impressionistic piece is good. Wolff writes of Jobs

... it turns out that Jobs is not marginal, or eccentric, or even fanciful at all. His is the at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut.

Calling Jobs the "ultimate media guy," who has outdone Bill Gates at every turn, Wolff declares Jobs the real winner.

The reader wonders if the claim is valid - at least I wondered. Isn't Microsoft far and away more commercially successful than Mac?

Well, Wolff has that covered.

... one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It's Steve's gadget-centric world which we just live in.

iPods, Razr phones, BlackBerrys, plasma screens, Xboxes, TiVos, laptops. Machines are the habituating, behavior-changing things. Machines themselves are fascinating, life-changing, cool, sexy.

The medium is the message.

I can't reprint the article here, but it is worthwhile reading.

Webolution

2006-03-12T09:53:51-06:00

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a growth in Web 1.0. This amid the pundits claim that Web 2.0 is the wave of the future.

Statistics from a Nielsen story titled Sponsored Link Advertising (PDF format) could be interpreted as a bellwether.

At pingVision, we get a stream of inquiries - proposed web development projects we are asked to consult on or develop. The projects seem to break into the two "visions" as it were - Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It stands to reason that the older, more entrenched technology will be what the latest set of adoptors want to "get on the web."

What do I mean by that? Well, classically there are waves of people who adopt new technology, be it the horseless carriage, the telephone, VCR, cell phones, or web sites.

There are,

1. Early adoptors
2. Mainstream adoptors
3. Late adoptors

1. Early adoptors are ones who see a new technology, or new way of doing things, and they adopt it without much trepidation. They are sometimes called "self-actualized buyers." They rarely need to be "sold" on a product. They see it and seize it.

Those of us who got on the World Wide Web in the 1980s and 1990s come out of that tradition.

2. Mainstream adoptors are not too different from the early adoptors, but they want to avoid fads. An early adoptor might end up with a lasderdisc player - whereas the market plays out by going to DVD format.

This group divides into three sectors:

A. Analytical

B. Empathetic

C. Entrepreneurial

The Analytical person wants lots of figures and facts - the Consumer Reports statistics.

The Empathetic person wants to know how it will effect people.

The Entrepreneurial person wants to know what it will do for the bottom line.

In general this is the mainstream.

3. As for the late adoptors, they come on after just about everyone else has. To go back to the DVD example - if they do watch films at home, they only adopt DVD when they find titles are no longer available on video tape.

The mainstream is at the Web 1.0 threshold because that is mainly what is out there, and that is is the "face" of the web.

Web 2.0 is not on the radar because, in large part, the Web 1.0 is dazzling as it is. Web 1.0 works well enough because it is focused. For example, if I set up my own brochure-like page that people can read, I do not run into too many design issues.

Once, I begin to build a community and have a range of people interacting on a site, ebb and flow become critical and feng shui is key.

The "loose ends" of a me-alone Web 1.0 site increase linearly as the site grows. With a Web 2.0 site, the loose-ends grow exponentially ... but this is where the World Wide Web community is headed.

Web 1.0 is pretty much uni-directional. That is, the message goes up onto a site and - maybe - there might be some room for comments. Mainly it is a "speech."

Web 2.0 is multi-directional. It is a "conversation."

The feng shui comes from designing a system that makes possible a smooth conversation among many people.

As I wrote earlier, simplicity is not simple-minded. It takes a great deal of work to make that happen.

Many people, the first big wave of adoptors is now coming on the scene and for them the world is essentially Web 1.0.

But with Web 2,0 site, many of them communities, they will soon be coming into these conversations and seeing how their own web sites are part of a whole.

The power of the new technology is ahead of where most the the public is today. There is a slingshot effect that is about to make itself felt.

My prediction is that in 18 to 24 months, Web 1.0 will be around, but the action will all be Web 2.0. Time will tell if that prediction will be accurate or not.

[Updated to fix typos.]

Web site feng shui

2006-03-10T09:07:35-06:00

Feng Shui, we read on webterrace

... is the ancient Chinese art of manipulating and arranging your surroundings to attract positive life energy, or chi, so that it flows smoothly, unblocking any obstructions in your body and environment. Feng Shui evolved from the theory that people are affected for better or worse by their surroundings.

New Space; New Opportunities

As pingVision has moved into its new offices, Laura and I have had that lesson brought home loud and clear.

Here we have a lot of electronics: banks of computers, monitors, scanners, printers, phones, wireless routers, FAX machines, and modems; cables, hubs, wires, switches; speakers and sound systems ... on and on ... and I won't bore the reader with a laundry list, but the elements are like that of any other modern office.

Joni Mitchell in "Big Yellow Taxi, "sang, "don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," was certainly not singing about moving!

The mountain view of Boulder's Flatirons is spectacular. It is part of the light and space of being at 5300+ feet above sea level, nestled along the Front Range of the Rockies.

The light. The view. The windows. The open spaces. All these contribute to join the exterior with the interior ... a Zen concept.

In classical feng shui there were "lucky" and "unlucky" directions ... sectors ... if you will and arranging a city, or a building, required a practitioner, often a priest, to work out the harmony.

Being modern and Western, and fresh out of Shinto priests, Laura and I have been moving the pieces to make the work flow effective.

Work flow management is time management.

As a cub engineer at DuPont, I became fascinated with cybernetics - the man/machine interface. Simplicity does not mean simple-minded. In fact, brevity takes wit. Churchill is quoted,

I am sorry this letter is so long; I didn't have the time to write a shorter one.

Time management specialist, Charles Hobbs, whose concepts evolved into the Franklin-Covey System, gave a talk some years back. He suggested we look at the "typical" desk - the working surface.

How often do we need the stapler? How prominent is it? One-by-one Hobbs went through the things that are on the desk. Are they vital, or are they a distraction? After all, how many pages does an average worker staple in the post-paper office?

Enzo Ferrari, it is said, kept his desk completely clear ... the deck of an aircraft carrier ... and it is even reported he kept his phone in a drawer. Extreme? Perhaps, but study show that the subconscious mind "sees" everything the eye sees and more. That is, the things the conscious mind does not see, the subconscious mind, does: the coffee cup, the pen, the scissors, the reading glasses. They're there too. Are they "good" feng shui?

The plants, the carved wooden box which is suppose to hold my reading glasses, and maybe the scissors. Is this "good" feng shui?

Surely man does not live by bread alone and the idea of an aircraft carrier deck desk - the sterile office - has little appeal ... especially to a creative design company. A stark environment does not invite. But a cluttered environment, beyond a certain point, can also be distracting.

A place to find things

John Hoyt, time management consultant, once remarked that many people find files and filing systems to be a bore, annoyance, and just about the most unexciting thing imaginable. He concluded with a piece of wisdom,

Files aren't a place to put things; they're a place to find things.

This becomes another element in the cybernetic feng shui of the office. Something may be out of sight, but if it is filed logically, in a snap I can have it in my fingers.

A gentle snow falls outside and reflects vibrant light into the office - connecting the tranquility of the mountains and sky with the fast-paced world of work. The light reflects off the plants that pingVision uses as partitions, rather than the standard corporate flat cubical 3/4-walls. It is a "forest" and not the corporate cubical canyon maze.

Not just light, space, and flow, but also the wonderful smell of coffee greets me as I power up in the morning to read the emails that have come in overnight.

Laura once asked, rhetorically: what message are we sending out if we brew bland coffee instead of flavorful coffee? What are we saving, a quarter per cup?

Feng shui may be ancient - with superstitious underpinnings - but in the modern office, and modern web site a lot can be said for making things smooth, simple, and easy.

And that in my book is what user-friendly truly means.

Thoughts on Oprah-gate and POP culture

2006-02-05T10:49:33-06:00

I have to thank Melinda Casino on BlogHer for an interesting link about Oprah-gate. The blog she cites is called James Frey and the pornography of confession. and it appears over on "chandrasutra." The blog isn't so much about pornography as it is about public confessions.

It seems an author, James Frey, made up an "autobiography" and people believed it was his true-to-life personal story, or so my sources say who are following this story closer than I. Oprah then endorsed the book for her Book Club, only to find out later that it was a "manufactured" biography. At first I believed this furor to be a bit pedestrian; that is, until I read some of the pithy insights that raised a mirror to middle America. Why this scandal? Why the outrage? What exactly happened? Well ...

... there is something that sets Frey apart. That made it bad: He lied to Oprah. You lie to Oprah, you lie to America. Dig?

The Oprah empire taps into a distinctly white, bourgeois, female demographic. This is a demographic you've got to be careful with. Nothing too risque, political/satirical or intellectual really flies. It's got to be mainstream. Things can be sexual, violent or difficult as long as it's not political, intellectual or radical ...

I may not have read Frey (although I'm now curious) but I do know something about Oprah's demographic and how they think. I've had friendships with them, taken courses with them in university, worked with them and have family members in this demographic. They all enjoy the same thrills, especially the glossy pornography of confession in the commercially imagined "women's" culture ...

What Frey offended was not their sense of ethics, but their bourgeois relationship with human suffering and confession. For this audience, reading of the tragedy of Frey's (or anyone else's) life experience is a means to survey and "learn about" another human's darker moments from the safety of a Starbucks ...

- emphasis mine

An editor friend of mine observed that all Oprah has to do is endorse a book and she delivers an audience that makes almost any book a commercial success. What power! Personally, I can't think of anyone who else who can do that.

Oprah's credibility is what is at stake. At one time Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, and now that mantle has passed to a woman. Both she and Cronkite have been windows on the world, and part of the power of any source is that the news/report has been vetted - and in this case something slipped through.

However, there is more to it than that. Mel, the blog-post author, goes on to make two points,

Truth isn't always stranger than fiction. The "truth" of the human condition is old news. We know what we're capable of - it's there on the news every hour. So why are we such "confession" junkies?

putting this in perspective with an observation,

they are connoisseurs of confession. They indulge it high and low. From the chair-tossing excess of Jerry Springer to the tearful Princess Diana admitting to an eating disorder, it's all POP ( Pain on Parade ). I suspect that Frey, knowing what he knows about the market, catered a little to well to this audience - knowing full well that they would not accept a truthful account of his addiction because it would be too boring.

And it is interesting to me that Mel begins the blog by citing Gore Vidal. Some years back I recall Vidal gave one of his annual interviews with Dick Cavett, and Vidal said something like:

The title "guest" on television talk shows is a misnomer. The so-called guest is not really the guest at all. He's merely the stooge. The actual guest is the audience and it is they who are interviewed and their opinions are solicited on the topic.

And I suppose, if I think about Phil Donahue, I see that dynamic more clearly. Oprah is more subtle in how she does it - more classy (no offense to Donahue intended), but basically she is the interlocutor for a distinctly white, bourgeois, female demographic.

Alas, in this case, she ended up looking like she could be hoodwinked ... middle America won't stand for it. They may put up with the lies from crooked politicians ... they have come to expect it, and even have some sort accommodation with political lies ... but do not believe Oprah would ever lie - not to them.

There are limits and there is a point where a line is drawn.

Oprah happens to be middle America's litmus test for that.

And Oprah-gate spins on.

On itch scratching, hitchhikers and growing within the interactive ecosystem

2006-01-06T11:57:55-06:00

The story goes like this: A couple hundred years ago, Scottish chemist Joseph Black was approached by some Scotch distillers. With the explosion of coal power, they wanted to know exactly what techniques they should use to replace their wood-burning distilling processes with coal-fired methods. Black did some experimentation and developed for them the appropriate method.

But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black's ideas of "latent heat" and used them in the development of a new steam engine.

The Scotch distillers were "scratching their own itch," and a major technological invention developed as an almost-direct result. This in turn revolutionized power generation, which allowed for major improvements in factories and industrial plants and led to a burst in what we call the Industrial Revolution.

Each of these steps involved new development, new inventing, new improvements in that which was. But how many of these things happened only because Scotch distillers wanted to use coal instead of wood to fire their boilers? If invention were left to inventors inventing only what they themselves might want to have around, would we be where we are today, beyond the industrial, transportation, atomic and information revolutions into this explosion of interactive communications?

The Drupal itch

There's been quite a bit of discussion going on in the Drupal developer community about, well, how to cultivate community. For the most part, there's a recognition that something needs to be done. For example, Dries Buytaert, who launched his idea of an open source CMS a few years ago, noted that in 2005 the user base on Drupal.org grew threefold, but the number of contributors remained essentially constant.

What to do about this has been the subject of debate for the past several days now.

On the one hand, you have folks who believe that if you're not coding for Drupal, you're essentially a parasite -- a "hitchhiker."

Users who don't contribute to Drupal are hitchhikers. Nobody needs them onboard, Drupal will get from A to B fine with or without them, and if they want Drupal to go out of its way on their behalf they should ask nicely, if there isn't time to take them exactly where they want to go hitchhikers should be thankful for the free ride they have had.

Thankfully this attitude isn't a majority opinion -- at least I don't believe so. And the man who wrote the above paragraph has expressed a desire to have it rewritten because he readily admits that the wording is rather inflammatory and off-putting. (Reader: The linked page very well could have changed by the time you look. The documentation pages on Drupal.org are living documents, always subject to revision.)

However, I question the entire concept of users as "hitchhikers." A CMS does not grow in a vacuum. And I don't think it's simply the result of "scratching your own itch," either. Because the fact of the matter is that Drupal is not simply a result of development, it's also a tool for community-building, personal communications, business facilitation and so on.

A product or a tool?

Think of Drupal as the text. The developing community is the writer. And the users, site admins and designers are the audience. One cannot exist without the other. Just as a book's audience gives the book significance and meaning, Drupal's users give Drupal meaning. The text would not exist without the creator; the text would have no meaning without the user.

But Drupal is not simply a text -- a static body -- but is a dynamic object. It's both a product of development by the Drupal developer community, and a tool used by the users to achieve things that perhaps the developers never imagined. Drupal's development gives Drupal existence, but Drupal's use gives Drupal meaning. Drupal is the result of community development. But it's also the result of how it's been applied in the real world.

For example, CivicSpace would not exist if it weren't for the developers who made that Drupal distribution happen. They are doing a lot of hard work to integrate powerful community-building features and modules into a seamless, effective community CMS. But would CivicSpace exist if it weren't for the demand for something like it in the Dean campaign? Would the changes in CivicSpace since then have happened if people weren't actively using CivicSpace, challenging its limits and discovering new ways to make it useful and effective?

For example, would Drupal have a trackback module if the trackback concept never was embraced by bloggers in the first place?

Whose itch is it?

How many developers discovered they had an itch to scratch only when a site admin tried to do XYZ or simply asked if something were possible? How much of what has been developed for Drupal and CivicSpace happened in a vacuum far removed from reality?

How many itches that got scratched never would have appeared if the scratcher were not exposed to this or that idea, notion, approach or feature somewhere along the line?

I cannot say for certain, but my guess is that there are very few itches that start tickling in a vacuum. We're all a part of the world. In the Drupal context, we're all a part of the interactive web universe -- at least to some degree. And Drupal's evolution is not just a matter of DNA -- the programming ideas and talents of the developers -- but also a result of the habitat in which it exists.

I think the hitchhiker metaphor is a bad one because it suggests a monolithic construct of an automobile, in which developers are in the driver's seat and everyone else is just looking for a "free ride." The Drupal community is much more amorphous and diverse than a singular automobile, and there are far more drivers than can fit behind one wheel.

And let's face it, the "end users" -- bloggers, site admins, business people, campaign managers, community leaders, artists, etc. -- have a lot more influence on development than a hitchhiker does on an 18-wheeler trundling down the Interstate.

A community defined by Drupal

In the end, I guess I'm saying that Drupal is not only defined by its community, but the community is also defined by what is Drupal. And because of that symbiotic relationship, it's only healthy to cultivate communication and camaraderie across all niches within that community. We may each be able to survive without each other, but we won't thrive.

And just as Drupal does not benefit from users demanding free work from "ubergeeks," developers' looking at the user side of the community as hitchhikers yields no gains, either.

Divided we can survive. But working collectively we can thrive.

But is it fun?

2006-01-04T16:00:45-06:00

Customers don't want a 1/4-inch drill; they want a 1/4-inch hole.

So said Ted Levitt and his article, "Marketing Myopia," stands as a classic.

In my own experience at Hewlett-Packard Medical Electronics, our engineers were positively charmed by their inventions, but what the savvier marketing folks understood was that the patient's vital signs were not the central reason the equipment was purchased - although it was very important - but more to the point, the physicians and staff wanted a trend line.

We "hire" products to do jobs.

Some years ago there was the "CB craze." The Citizen's Band radios were all the rage, especially among truckers. Driving an 18-wheeler, alone, over miles of interstate can be a lonely life and the CB radio became an instant fixture. There was even a hit single about truckers called "Convoy" where the CB radio was a "star."

CB is still around, but the cellular phone has largely supplanted it. Today, a strong signal and the stored phone numbers of good friends are important, but it the days of the CB, people talked pretty much to strangers.

The CB radio of old was bedecked with knobs that could be twisted and turned and tuned. At the time a CB could be purchased for about $39.99 - and it could be tweaked for hours on end.

A group of bright engineers decided that all this was too much work and they came up with a one-button electronic CB radio. Simply press the button and the electronics would zoom, lock the signal, and voila!

It was listed at $200 and word has it that exactly 3 were ever sold. Perhaps it was bad marketing, poor distribution channels, or too high a price to pay.

However, I think that what happened was that the engineers had all the fun and took the fun away from the guys on the long haul who filled the miles of road twisting, tweaking, and tuning the knobs.

2006: Beyond Technology; interactive, HDTV, and Gen-X,

2006-01-04T13:25:36-06:00

Hollywood on the run.

Hollywood is worried, although they have not yet had a full-blown panic attack. Their bedrock market - the one they have always taken for granted - is eroding beneath their feet. Generation X, is growing up and their tastes have changed. The once captive audience that grew up on the "Star Wars" movies that their parents took them to is finding that their own children are not nearly as impressed as the Gen-X parents once were with special effects.

But that is not the only place we are seeing changes.

Video games are capturing a bigger piece of the pie.

"If I had some time in the afternoon, and it was a choice between watching a movie or playing a game, I'd rather play a game," said Marlon Castro, 35, of Foster City.

Already, the gate is down not only at theaters, but also at Blockbuster Video - once the powerhouse of video has taken yet another hit as reported on PBS, Marketplace. The reports says,

Blockbuster is expected to report a third quarter loss today. Efforts to adjust its brick-and-mortar business model to compete with on-line DVD distribution don't appear to be working. Jeff Tyler reports

In short, the market in going through a shakeout - one which Laura and I have watched closely.

It is no secret that I take much of what Clayton Christensen says, to heart. Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School. His specialty is the evolution of technology.

I have a few observations of my own which square with Christensen's observations.

New technologies are often force-fit to solve existing problems - and that makes sense. We have today's problems that need to be solved. Disruptive technologies are those that unseat the market leader, the dominant player, the king of the hill. In film, Polaroid, the instant picture people, did not survive. Wedded to emulsion technology, Polaroid did not take the grasp the realities of the emerging videotape market. Polaroid plunged millions into its Polavision. The product is now a curio.

What seems to be the case is that new technology creates new markets and disrupts old channels of distribution. Revenue and distribution models change - as do tastes and forms and even cost structures. Can emulsion film compete with digital? The business model Polaroid had was to provide cameras at cost and sell the film to make the revenue. The digital camera turned that model on its head.

Both radio and television evolved over time into what they are today, but first they experimented with older forms - such as vaudeville - before settling into their current content.

2006

The silent revolution hasn't been so silent - computer generated graphics, but the interesting thing is that film makers are not the only ones who have benefited. To be sure, the barriers to entry for a film company are substantial - high-cost equipment, pricey actors, and technical issues having to do with real-world filming.

More and more, blue screens and animation have crept into the movie process. And the directors are fascinated with their toys. As an aficionado, I enjoy listening to the director's commentary - sometimes good, sometimes really bad - and the interesting thing I am hearing is how they used some special effects gimmick to accomplish something. It wasn't a commentary about the story; the commentary was about how they managed to make some effect happen. I suppose there is nothing wrong with that, but it does suggest that the movie making mind-set is currently driven by technology.

And yet, the "Revenge of the Sith" has not ignited the popular culture the way very first "Star Wars" movie did. Re-releasing the original one, with current special effects technology inserted into it, had little tangible impact.

The trend has been for films to be turned into video games, yet there is a countertrend where video games, such as "Tomb Raider," are turned into movies.

Content

I suppose this all reminds me of the first Apple computers - when people collected fonts, just like some people collect baseball trading cards. Memos appeared with a variety of font. (Guilty, your Honor). But soon people got back to the content and were not quite as mesmerized at the fonts as they once had been.

The basic difference between video game and movies is the level of involvement in the outcome.

This is the dark horse, yet always the front runner. Technologies come and go - but involving the reader-viewer in the story and giving the person a say in the outcome, is a powerful thing which sall too often gets forgotten.

This is where interactive will change the landscape and the time is much closer than people think.