Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

The cable company’s ablity to lock its customers is improved by selling phone and internet service as well as television. If take all three and you want to switch you need to coordinate the switching of all three services, which is amazingly hard. The television is the least sticky of the three, since there is always broadcast television as a fall back. The phone company plays a similar game around here where it is practically impossible to get internet via DSL without also paying for a plan old phoneline. Subscription customers who are well locked down are great revenue generators. You can entice them into your system with huge discounts. The vendor discovers that he can raise prices and they don’t bolt. Higher prices increase the size of the discounts you can offer up front.

There is another player in this game; at least around here. The town grants the monopoly to the cable companies by negotiating a lease for the right to string all those wires. The cable company pays for the right by providing a community access channel, and donating internet acess to various public enterprises around town.

We are currently negotiating the next N year lease. The cable company is being very agressive about reducing what it pays us. Clearly they see the town as being just as locked in as its customers are.

It makes me wonder what the town’s BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is in this case. What happens if we decided not to grant the cable company a new license.

Maybe we should run our own. I assume we could not provide all the same TV channels that the current dominate provide does. I assume we couldn’t pick up the ball, or switch to another vendor without some service interuption. Which implies cutting off some residents phone service.

My town is exceptional in that it has two cable companies. The cable company guys will scold you if you complain about the mess on the telephone polls. “Utility Polls!” they will say. The polls are a mess. This extra degree of freedom doesn’t seem to change anything in a meaningful way. One effect is notable though. The community access channel isn’t on the #2 cable company and the community members who run the channel want it to be; so they are a large part of the constituency fighting for a more generous cable contract.

Here is a another really delightful metaphor for the power-law dialectic between the elite and the long-tail.

In his essay on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, Berlin starts with the fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The conventional interpretation of this proverb is that the fox, for all her cunning, may be defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. Berlin suggests the metaphor may also be used to highlight one of the important differences among basic vision of life held by different thinkers and writers.(4) On the one hand there are those who believe that there exists a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance. On the other side of the divide are those whose beliefs are scattered or diffuse, moving on many levels, seizing upon a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are without seeking, consciously or unconsciously, to fit them into any one unchanging, all embracing, unitary vision. The first kind of intellectual is like the hedgehog, the second, like the fox. Berlin suggests that Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs. Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce are foxes.(5) Berlin readily acknowledges that, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd.(6) Yet he argues that because the distinction captures an important insight, it provides a useful starting point for genuine investigation.

There is a small excerpt from Berlin’s essay here.

Listened to Joshua Schachter answer questions at Berkman last night. He seemed to be at the end of a very long day. Many of the usual questions were asked and the usual answers were given.

Things I learned. You can now type delicious.com, rather than del.icio.us. But does that mean we can stop typing del.icio.us every time we talk about it? That “bacon” is a very delightful word for ambiguous search. Maybe we could introduce the term bacon for output of bad actors who’s spamming is more sophisticated than just spraying mass quantities at open systems.

I was a bit surprised by what appears to be the lack of any platform strategy; and of course I find that extremely lame. (And no, an API does not constitute a platform strategy!) People in the audience read lots of value propositions into his business. He seems very centered in the value of delicious as a means to help people capture the memorable.

I’ve long thought that delicious would be a fascinating opportunity to introduce some light weight group forming as a means to raising the bar on the quality of the tagging. But while they are intending to play the group card into the design space it appears that they don’t see that as a means toward raising quality, or even as an enabler of additional sociability. They have seen a demand for it, as they have seen a demand for privacy so they are chasing that demand.

In passing he mentioned how they would like to be able to enable some degree of account linking so sites could link up account info enough to help a user manage his things to remember stuff.

Two thinks linked up. He was working as a quant with a brokerage before. He’s curious about the possibility of finding trend spotters in his user base. Stock trading is all about buying before the crowd arrives and selling back when they do. Which is, of course, also somewhat the business that Ester Dyson and Tim O’Reilly are in. Two of his investors. I wonder if that’s a of a NYC mindset about things rather than a valley mindset? Of course crowds and social have some overlap; but they are quite differing attitudes about the group. Probably three things there: modeling the crowd’s behavior, shaping the crowd’s behavior, and encouraging the forming of crowds.

I’m a big believer that a web site that built in this manner, i.e. draw upon the lite contributions of a large pool of talent, is better off if its operators are conscious of what qualities they are attempting to aggregate. So for example my story about how everything2 went off in a particular direction by it’s emphasis on cool; or how wikipedia is has a heading set by the emphasis on neutral point of view, or how each of the open source enclaves has particular attributes they use to ground their work.

Most sites like these don’t manage this well. That comes, possibly, of a modern fetish for dismissing the value of planning with such vigor that any plan becomes suspect. They tend to settle into some attribute that then rises toward the top for reasons that have to do with the dynamics in and around the operators. Wikipedia is a good example because neutral point of view addresses an organizational and coordination problem; but is only slightly correlated with other qualities you might want in a reference work. It is an evolutionary approach; and tends to create curious mutations that happen to work rather than designed things.

That delicious is trying to be a good place for its users to remember stuff is pretty clearly an attribute that was written into it’s DNA early and still gets a lot of respect.

It looks like trend spotting, or some analogous term, is in its blood.

Memory aid for the trend spotting crowd, Makes for an interesting target audience. Interesting to contrast it with other attempts to serve that fickle mob. A developer net, a political activist, or an advertiser would be trying to shape and draw the crowds interests.

So many threads in this story.

LBJ wanted to be president, so he allied with the northern democrats that were pro-civil rights. The South switched over to the Republicans. The rest is history.

When they buried Dr. King my mother stood next to the cleaning lady watching the television, both weeping.

The student reading the news on the college station which woke me this morning said Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a black man.

The map at right shows the black population density from the 1990 census data for Boston and suround. American cities look like that today because of racial covenants in the mid-century and then latter because because mortgage lenders, lead by the federal mortgage lending rules, treated race mixing as an indicator of increased risk. That made drove mortgage lending out of cities into sharply segregated suburbs. In Detroit, where Rosa Parks died, a desperate developer solved this problem by constructing a high wall around his property - entirely so he could get a mortgages for his buyers.

My town of about 40K people is a bedroom community; it’s population shrinks by about a third each day as people head off to work in other parts of the Boston metro area. When the railroad into this town the commuting ran the other way - farm workers who lived in the urban center and came out on the train to work the fields.

Urban cores typically draw workers into them during the day. Boston’s population rises by 41% each day, more than most. A very few larges cities in the US shrink, anti-cities? Not a hubs of economic activity but instead of hubs of housing. In Virginia Beach the population shrinks by 12%, in Mesa City, AZ it shrinks by 10%. In San Jose, CA it shrinks by 6%, and in Long Beach, CA it drops 4%. Detroit manages to just break even. Washington DC grows by 72%; and Boston swells 41%.

I’m amused by the idea that San Jose and the surrounding area, silicon valley, might become the first inside out metro-donut. A dense vibrant urban residential core built in the vertical with a surrounded the flat 1-2 story industrial landscape, so popular in the valley.

Data from US Census by way of Infectious Greed.