stevenberlinjohnson.com

It's Time We Had A Talk

I know you're not going to like to hear this, but I'll just come out and say it: there's Another Blog in my life. That's why I've been so distant, so uncommunicative. It's a short-term affair, I promise, but I thought I'd be honest about it.

But seriously -- I've been running around like a madman doing nine speeches in the space of about two weeks, and my only quality blog time has been spent at the Institute for the Future Of the Book weblog, where they've been hosting a "serious critique" of Everything Bad Is Good For You. Naturally, that caught my attention, because 1) I like what they do over there, and 2) one of the key folks behind the Institute is Bob Stein, who was one of my early multimedia heroes and the first "name" to agree to do something for us at FEED in the months before we launched. Most everyone who has posted has had some pretty heavy criticism to deal out, but it's been a fun and revealing discussion, exactly the sort of conversation that I hoped the book would provoke. Check it out.

Apple On Demand

It's interesting how today's special event turned out to be so much more significant than the more hyped iPod Nano event last month. As cool as it is, the Nano is just a smaller iPod. But today's event introduced some major moves for Apple: everything from an Apple-branded remote control to video on the iPod to a full "media center" application in FrontRow.

The most telling thing, however, relates directly to a pet peeve of mine that's bothered me for about two years. Being used to ordering HBO episodes on demand, it never fails to amaze me that the networks don't offer a comparable service for their big shows. I would happily pay a few bucks to watch a show that they're already giving away for free if they would only give me a chance to pay for it on demand. But as it is, if I miss an episode of 24 and forget to TiVo it, I have only one choice: Bit Torrent. This is absurd.

But now we have Apple offering episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives and Night Stalker for two bucks via iTunes. Now, I know the resolution isn't as good as I'd like, and obviously the selection is pretty limited. But you can see where it's going. As far as I know, this is the first time one of the big four networks has actually offered on demand programming. It's pretty remarkable that it took Apple to finally convince them to make the leap. Then again, given Jobs' track record over the past few years, I suppose it's not remarkable at all.

In Which The Blogger Returns To The Academy

I spent around seven years of my life (roughly from 18 to 25) thinking that whatever I ended up doing with my writing career, I'd do it out of some kind of academic base. The plan for most of that period -- particularly when I was working towards my doctorate in English Lit at Columbia -- was to get tenure somewhere nice and play the university game a little, but also write for a larger audience outside the academy. (A model that I'd taken from one of my old advisors, Edward Said.) But then FEED came along and pulled me off my dissertation (never finished, alas) and while I've had some wonderful semesters teaching seminars as an adjunct at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, I've never had a regular home base in the university system. For the most part, that's worked out fine, because I have no interest in a full-time position anywhere -- I'm traveling too much now giving speeches, and I love spending the rest of my time working at home with the kids in Brooklyn. And I'm trying to write a book every 18 months or so, which takes a lot of commitment.

Still, I love teaching, and there's part of me that is still attached to the academic world. So I'm very pleased to report that the NYU Department of Journalism has appointed me a Distinguished Writer In Residence. I'll be teaching one course a semester there -- one grad seminar followed by an undergrad lecture. I start in the spring, teaching a seminar on new media ecosystems, based loosely on the ideas in my Discover column this month. It's a great honor to join the faculty there: the other Distinguished Writers make my bio look undistinguished by comparison, and I've long admired the work of many of the colleagues there, including Mitch Stephens, Mark Dery, Ellen Willis (all of them FEED alums) and Jay Rosen, who made a valiant effort to revive FEED in the months after we went dark, before 9/11 ended up killing off the idea.

This should be a lot of fun.

Why The Web Is Like A Rain Forest

The latest issue of Discover on the stands is their 25th anniversary issue, and so for my column this month my wonderful editor Dave Grogan asked me to do a kind of "state of the internet" piece. I decided to take a look at the premise of Web 2.0 that has been tossed around a lot over the last few years, without getting too bogged down in the details (i.e., what's the difference between Web 2.0 and the semantic web?) For most readers here, I suspect that the example scenario I give will be old news, but the more interesting stuff comes at the end. I think this is a useful way to talk about what's happening online right now, whatever you want to call it.

The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.

A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.

Think of information as the energy of the Web's ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun's rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.