13 Sep 2002

Fri, 13 Sep 2002

Marc Canter and John Robb Argue Multimedia Blogs

John Robb posted an article about the future of multimedia and blogging. Then, Marc Canter wrote a thoughtful response.

Marc says, "Yes $40 a year is about for a blog tool. But that won't include bandwidth access, which BTW should be different for folks who care about publishing out to their old college roomates and family, versus the entire, whole world. Bandwidth costs money and video will never flow out over the 'free Internet'."

I wouldn't be so sure. What John may have been thinking of is the future of the wireless internet. Future, you say, what future? Well, have a look at this. That's a screenshot of netstumbler running on my laptop as we drove to lunch today in a section of Pittsburgh called Shadyside. Over 20 wireless networks in a 3 mile drive. And Pittsburgh is not exactly the tech mecca that the aforementioned left coasters live in. We do have CMU as you can see from the WAP ID's. Nonetheless, I'm not the only one who's discovered the rate of adoption for wireless technology around here.

Now, imagine for a second that I have the digital video camera that allows me to shoot whatever news happens in my 3 mile drive to lunch. Imagine that I have a fully charged battery in my laptop and that I've got a firewire connection and the necessary software and skills to create the stream. There's effectively nothing stopping someone from creating their own mini regional blog collective streaming video TV station right now. Hell, I could have uploaded the video stream from the free wireless connection at Pittsburgh Deli Company where I ate lunch.

I can imagine an even more likely scenario centered around the deli company.It's a unique place, particularly for this locale. You see, not only do they have the best sandwiches in the city and free wireless, they've also got some hip music happening at the bar upstairs. There's a list of the acts playing there on their home page. So I go there with my laptop, record the performance using my favorite music software (with their permission of course), publish the mp3 to my site, and blog the experience, all without leaving my seat at the gig.

Keep in mind, technologically speaking, I could do that tonight if I was so inclined. What we're talking about here is guerilla digital media blog convergence. It's not the highbrow convergence that Marc talks about, it's a much more duct tape oriented approach and that's OK with me. I've been running my blog-cum-digital-audio-and-digital images-site hacked together with a bunch of perl and php duct tape for six months now.

The problem lies on the content consumer's side. It seems to me that bandwidth on the content creators end is not going to be the problem. Rather, bandwidth on the content consumers end will remain a barrier to adoption. We can assume that the alpha geeks will always know where to get cheaper, broader bandwidth but that's not a safe assumption with mom, dad, and grandma. How many of folks outside the early adopter population actually watch streaming video from mainstream sites? Further, how may folks outside the early adopter population know about the coming ubiquity of wireless? In either case, I think the answer is arguably few.

Posted at: 10:31 | permalink