Space — Page 4

It’s only recently

August 30, 2000 by Michael Boyle

that I got a machine that could handle downloading mp3s en masse, but now that I have enough space on my HD I’ve had some funny surprises. I’ve been tending to look for stuff I had on vinyl back in the day. Today I made a great find – and old song called Ici les enfants by a relatively obscure band whose most interesting recordings were done in the late 70s/early 80s, the Monochrome Set.

At the time their albums were near-impossible to find, at least on this side of the Atlantic. It meant going to a good shop, first of all, which was relatively hard to find in Ottawa (I shopped at Shake Records for years; now Pete Besserer owns the Black Tomato restaurant in Ottawa and sells records there as well), and second it meant shelling out for an import.Subsequently, it turns out, the band stayed active for many many years – but in 1982, it meant one record, seen but once in any store.

I just received

August 28, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the September-October issue of Artbyte in the mail and there is no longer any doubt about it: it’s the best magazine going on the subject of digital culture etc. It used to be too focused on art stuff before – not that arts coverage is a problem, obviously it’s the starting point for the mag. But now it does a better job of extending from the aesthetic to more general cultural, social, and political arenas. And in a way it lives up to McLuhan’s idea that artists are probes into the future, something I think is true.

Although I like mags like the Industry Standard (and some of the other net-biz-porn mags), they don’t tell me anything about what’s in the pipe – it’s all about what has happened. When they try and predict, they’re almost always wrong. After all it was one of those pubs that said – not two months ago – that “obviously” drkoop.com would be the great success story in the consumer internet space? Uh, not. Artbyte features great writers, great thinkers with a real provenance as commentators on these issues (like Geert Lovink, for example), and of course looks gorgeous.

I don’t talk about

July 13, 2000 by Michael Boyle

work at all in this space. Mostly a question of boundaries, really – I wouldn’t want anyone to mistake my personal ramblings for anything coming from the company (not that it’s a huge threat, but still). But I will say this – the transition from a very small company to a larger company is fascinating to watch, and to be involved in. As someone who’d never worked in an office, per se, before this job, I was always quite disdainful of bureaucracy and structure. Now, though, I’m learning the value in adding such structure, as long as it’s done well. And it’s actually pretty fun, trying to dream up ways of doing things with the creativity and vitality of the old days, but much more efficiently.

I’m very happy to state in public that my co-workers, all 130 of them, are among the smartest, most talented groups of people I’ve known. It’s quite amazing, actually.

These wireless folks

July 12, 2000 by Michael Boyle

are pretty brazen about their plans to control and meter the wireless space. I’m not worried – if they focus on this they’ll ignore the next generation, or two generations from now, and they’ll look like they’re trying to re-invent compuserve when along comes a much more sophisticated system – one that’ll look a lot like the internet, with its attendent openness and chaos.

That was a bit

June 26, 2000 by Michael Boyle

of a rant this afternoon and glossed over lots of stuff – in the post about MS. So let me clarify one or two things. First, yes, I do think it’s a complete smokescreen, that MS has no real intention of doing any of this, at least in the complete, all-encompassing way they are trying to sell. Second, for 99 percent of companies in the world I agree that it’s a GOOD thing not a negative that there are tons of others in this space already. Microsoft just doesn’t seem to be one of them, based on past performance. Third, if they were really serious about this, practically the whole presentation would have been about wireless. dot-NET type systems only make sense when you’re talking about a radically different landscape made up of massively-deployed wireless networks using standards-based protocols like IPv6. Microsoft has a good record with their browser to date, but I don’t see them betting the farm on external standards. Which means, to me, that it’s either not serious or will never happen regardless.