Business — Page 12

One of the things

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

I’ve been kicking around in my brain: it’s irresponsible to develop a web project that doesn’t feature integrated content management. Doing a site without it means that the site is, essentially, a bolt-on to an existing business, rather than being properly integrated. To me, a bolt-on site is already a failure, traffic figures be damned.

The trick is that the kind of content management that I’m thinking of (accessible to small businesses, to sites that get very low but specialized traffic, and to particular departments within larger organizations) is the opposite of what Vignette or Interwoven offer. It must be low-cost, easily deployed in new situations, and accessible to non-specialists. And it’s not really a technical question to implement such a system – the technical side of things is the least of the problems.

It’s pretty boring of me

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

to link to a Feed article – I do it all the time – but that’s only because, to me, it is the most interesting magazine going, in any medium. Anyhow, tonight’s object of my attention is the excellent, refreshing article, This Is Planet Earth. Mitchell Stephens has begun a long journey to report on the state of globalization around the world.

His first stop was to meet with the inestimable Clifford Geertz and his second, Wichita KS, where he found Laotion food among other things.

It’s personally interesting to me to read that because it mirrors my own experience in a way. In the early 90s I had this insane job in which I travelled to every city in Canada (pretty much). In my travels I was shocked, quite literally, to find a completely legitimate Thai restaurant in Prince Albert SK, to meet Indian (i.e., from India) businessmen (they were invariably men) in all sorts of cities, no matter how small and remote, and generally put the lie to the standard Canadian dogma: immigrants live in the big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and the rest is still very white and protestant. In my experience 10 years ago, that is simply not true.

I grew up at University in an environment in which very different issues were at the front of everyone’s mind – a very similar world as was described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (in fact if I’m not mistaken we overlapped at McGill). But I studied political theory, so even then the idea of globalization was kicking around – but at that time the whole edifice relied (at least casually) on the bedrock principle that cities=diversity, towns=whitebread. In Canada that’s an even deeper idea that permeates our entire canon of literature until 1990 or so. And it was, and is, wrong.

All this by way of saying that this sort of fresh, novel approach to the question of globalization is long overdue.

The New York Times

February 28, 2001 by Michael Boyle

has compiled an E-Business special section. Some good stuff in there, particularly the (very long) roundtable discussion. Of course it’s the NYTimes, so (free) registration is required.

Big changes here

January 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

in my world. I left my job, but I don’t know what’s next, exactly. Put it this way: I am highly motivated to find something new to do on a daily basis. If anyone has suggestions for a very experienced (I started on the web in 94) web-world project manager with experience in business development, strategic planning, marketing, and more, please let me know!

Yet another nay-saying

December 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

article about peer to peer network applications in eCompany Now [via Scripting News]. I don’t know what SETI@home has to do with p2p, however. It’s a classic client-server app, no? A central server collates the results of the work of a distributed network of machines that send it processed data. The only difference is the relationship between the machines doing the crunching and the server. Maybe I’ve missed something?

P2P is something else entirely – it’s all about eliminating (or minimizing) the central server’s position in the mix. That’s its power – and its disadvantage. It is hard to see where the profits lie in deploying P2P schemes. No harder, though, than divining the profit-potential of the internet as a whole – and that certainly didn’t hinder its development.

For me, the power of P2P is more fundamental than whether or not anyone has figured out the business model to make it work. Think of something like the old Firefly music-suggestion site (which was very cool for its day, and anticipated a lot of stuff people are looking at now). Imagine if people had the option of running Firefly within their net-aware MP3 player. And think if you could make “buddies” lists (like in an IM program) and integrate their preferences to help suggest what you might like. Say you could tell the software, “give 100% weight to my preferences, 80% confidence to my buddies list, and 60% to people one degree away from my own buddies.” Etc.

The trick with p2p isn’t to hold off until the profitable way comes along, just as that wasn’t the case with the net as a whole. The trick is to recognize that it’s there, and that people love it. That’s the world – now people have to figure out how to live in it, commercially or no.