Andrew Grossman: Daily Content Comment: Online Databases

Why Aren’t We All Telecommuting?

-Andrew Grossman

May 8, 2009

Various solutions have been offered to lower the amount of CO2 that is spewed into

the atmosphere by the American automobile. Since the majority of automobile miles are logged

in commuting to and from work, most of these solutions pertain to rush hour traffic. Here is a

compendium of proposals, from smallest economic shift to biggest economic shift:

1. Incentivize and/or force all drivers to buy high mph cars.

1. 2. Divert financing from road maintenance to public transportation. Build more

subway and bus lines and then incentivize and/or force commuters to use them.

3. Incentivize and/or force commuters to abandon their suburban homes and move

to the city where they work. (This assumes that places of employment will

continue to locate themselves in cities, despite escalating tax rates.) Then, since

this mass relocation to cities would cause apartment rents to skyrocket, relocate

the urban poor to the abandoned suburban homes.

4. Incentivize and/or force commuters to abandon their suburban homes and move to

city. Then, since suburban homes are inherently energy inefficient, bulldoze them. Have

all the population live within the confines of a small number of mega-metropolises which

can be easily serviced by mass transportation.

5. Return to a subsistence farming agrarian economy. Outlaw the internal combustion engine.

Outlaw imported or exported products. Incentivize and/or force people to go back to

growing their own food, making their own clothes and learning how to entertain themselves

without electronics.

What if we just use the internet and stay at home? The internet and individual company intranets have

the following capabilities: communication pathways (these can be used for every possible business

communication: consumer outreach for market research, business to business, in-house business

communication, product launch promotions, webinars, business meetings, etc); unlimited and secure

document storage; employee productivity monitoring. Which one of the reasons for employees to get

together under one roof are not handled just as well from remote home locations? Even standing around

the water cooler talking about last night's game came be handled in a virtual fashion.

It is not just individuals, but also countries, that are becoming more and more specialized in a global

economy. The manufacturing sector in the United States is not in danger of completely being exported, but

it has been diminished. The suburban to downtown commuter traffic is largely made up of white collar

workers. As we apply the existing capabilities of online networks to structuring telecommuting jobs, we

will quickly see that the answer to lowering CO2 emissions, not to mention lowering blood pressure for

workers who inch along in traffic for four hours a day, is sitting right at home.

Category: Online Databases, Telecommuting

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached

or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net

Individually Wrapped Chocolates

-Andrew Grossman

April 29, 2009

Creatives hate databases. The internet is a difficult selling atmosphere for creatives

because almost all selling is done from databases. When a whole bunch of something

is thrown together, the unique quality of each piece is undercut. Steven Spielberg

likes it no more than any other creative. He wants his movies to be sold one at a time,

with their own stipulations that honor his standing, and not sold as part of a massive

library sale to TNT or Hulu or any other broadcast company.

Each movie, each song, each novel, each article, each cartoon, was a chunk out of

a creative's life. If the work was successful enough to sell, it came only after many

years of struggle and paucity of monetary success. The creation came from the

unique mind and imagination of the creator, and the idea that it will be shoveled into

a massive trough of content for sale is objectionable. Many creatives will not let it

happen: they refuse to include their work into databases, except those they create.

The assumption has also been made, and supported, that database selling brings in

far less money per creative piece. Databases have become one of the three great enemies

of price supports for creative work online. Another is the internet tradition, going back

to the first exchanges of academic research papers in the 1970's, that content should

be as free as the wind blows. The third is the presence of amateurs online, who are

happy to sell their work for free because they just do it 'for fun' or because they believe

that giving something away is a precursor to getting paid.

The culture of free is changing slowly. The sales vehicle of databases will be unlikely

to change. Like so many other 'convenience' aspects of the internet, such as being able

to have sports scores and stats updated from second to second and being able to date

128 people at once, database selling is what the buyer wants. It has changed how buyers

view and think of content. In movie database searches, buyers typically base their keyword

searches on genre rather than an actor's name. The same is true in the fiction world.

Cartoon searches are made by topic keywords, not by cartoonist's name.

Quantify it. That is the dictum of the internet content buyer. The creative's sense of self

is shifting as the studio has been sucked into the box.

Category: Film Industry, Music Industry, Fiction Income, Cartoon Income

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached

or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net

The Kindle Pit

-Andrew Grossman

April 9, 2009

The popularity of Amazon's electronic-book device, Kindle, has electrified the market. E-book readers have been

around for years, but none of them provided the connectivity and the depth of content provided by Kindle. Even

Sony's own entry in the market, Reader, does not provide wireless access. But it soon will. And many other offerings will

follow from additional tech companies coupled with additional wireless services. Five companies have already applied to

Verizon, which provides wireless access, for new e-book devices. AT&T will soon jump in with an announcement of their

first agreement with a device manufacturer. Nothing succeeds like access.

The effect of reading devices on the income of writers has not yet become clear, but the fervent nature of consumer

content demands is very well established. On April 8, a group called The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents

disabled readers, staged a protest outside the Authors Guild's New York offices. The reason for the protest: the Guild,

when it negotiated a vast content sale on behalf of its members last year, refused to allow a blanket availability of content to the

text-to-speech function, which is built into Kindle. The reason for the refusal is that the Guild felt such access would

be a major threat to the billion dollar audio book market.

One result of the Guild's intent to protect the income and rights of its member: limiting the rights of the disabled.

Is the Guild at fault? Only of wanting to slow down content access in order to examine rather writers are cannibalizing

their sales in print without achieving equal dollars from e-book download sales. The hesitancy is justified, in order to study

the implications of such access, and to conduct this study without the warp speed of consumer device advances. Devices

demand enormous databases of content-the Kindle offers more than 260,000 books, plus newspapers-and such quantity

cannot help but lessen the author's sense of the integrity and the uniqueness of individual works.

What we know, but only the first implications, are the insatiable content demands of current devices. What creatives

fear even more are the heightened demands of future e-book devices, and the likely expectation, from manufacturers, from

network providers and from the public, of ever more access for ever less money.

This entry is part of a larger article. To receive the full article, contact:

andrew@andrewgrossman.net

Category: Kindle, Fiction Income, Author's Guild

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached

or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net