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Slate has an article on the economic analysis of whether newspapers should charge for their online versions. Now before I go on I should say that us Internet types are supposed to pooh-pooh these kind of analysis as “old school” and “not understanding how the Internet changes things”.

So I’ll get right on it. Don’t want to disappoint after all.
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My reading of this article is that all its analysis is in terms of traditional models. It asks the classic economic questions “does one product (the online version) act as a replacement for another product (the print version)”. And it looks at pricing/revenue models in terms of subscription vs. advertising. It suggests the big thing that has changed is that advertising on the Internet is becoming more mature and thus there is real money in it.

Of course the article totally ignores the ways in which the Internet is not like other media. Their analysis might be appropriate for comparing newspapers to TV news (with TV having free + advertising vs. subscription, not that anyone was crazy enough to try to charge for the subscription beyond the inclusion in the basic cable package).

What’s missing about the analysis of the Internet sites is a discussion of the effects of linking and search engines, and those don’t really have a comparison outside this new medium. By keeping lots of their content locked up inside a subscription site the NY Times and Wall Street Journal have by and large kept their content out-of-play from the rest of the Internet.

When looking at any Internet property, you consider three types of non-paid traffic sources- direct, referral, and search. Sure, there are some web-sites that people will regularly go to on a frequent basis just by typing their address into their browser, and relatively speaking a daily newspaper is a good candidate for this since their most important content has a low shelf-life and thus if you are prominent enough you will get a fair amount of direct traffic. But even among daily news a large amount of traffic can be from blogs, link blogs, news aggregation (like Google News), and search. These publications actually do tons of articles (food reviews, recipes, movie info, and more) that would be great targets for organic search and could generate substantial long term advertising revenue if they were available.

The NY Times had the worst of these worlds. Much of their daily content was available for free, but after a week or two it would get locked away. So they didn’t get the ability to really monetize that old stuff and people would be reluctant to link to their news since the links would go dead after a bit.

Hopefully with the recent changes these publications will actually join the web (the world of interconnected sites) and I’m expecting with the huge value of their content they will be able to make some great bucks off that.

Joel writes on outsmarting your airline. I do this all the time- use FlightAware and other services to tell when your incoming flight is actually arriving. Also as a pilot I have access to aviation weather and flow control information and I’ve often checked up on them when the airlines claim a flight is delayed due to ATC flow-control or weather. I’m estimate is that for the major airlines like American, United and Northwest, about half the time they claim delays due to ATC or weather its a lie. Which is not to say that the gate agents are telling a lie themselves- they may not know, but someone at the airline is. More often than not the cause is bone-headed airlines that have scheduled 50 of their own flights to take off or land at the same moment at one of their hubs, which is just inexcusably bad management.

An interesting contrast in airlines is our trip out to Minnesota two weeks ago. Outbound we flew Northwest. I just missed taking a photo of the gate sign showing our “departure time” as 10 minutes in the past. The flight was late (ok, it happens, no big deal) but they never bothered to try to keep people informed or update the displays anywhere.

Our return flight was on Sun Country, one of the newer-style airlines. The contrast was amazing- the return flight was also late. But they made announcements every 10-15 minutes keeping us updated on the status, they frequently updated the board with a projected (and fairly realistic) new boarding and departure time, and even suggested that people call ahead if they having someone picking them up to warn about the potential delay. It was the model of good customer contact through proactive honest communication.

I just don’t believe that its that hard for an airline to keep passengers and gate crews informed of what is really going on- heck, I was in Bend Oregon the other day being picked up by a friend in a small Columbia aircraft and could track his arrival with better precision than Northwest or the other guys would ever communicate to their customers. Travel can be complicated and stressful and if these big airlines would spend 10% of what they spend creating ads showing the beautiful travel experiences, on actually giving a better experience, people might not hate them so much. Instead they are just lazy and take the short cut of telling deliberate lies to try to placate their captive audience. Lets be clear- if it were not for government subsidies, the old guys would have already been out of business by now in a classic case of good capitalist “creative destruction” and there would be more room for the new guys like Sun Country, JetBlue and Southwest to replace them with good service.

Got the link in my email this morning. The download went flawlessly, all the concerns about Radiohead being able to deal with the infrastructure seemed unfounded. To be honest, it went more smoothly than my Amazon mp3 download experience since Radiohead just sent out customized links and didn’t try to do some wacky “you can only download once and you are screwed if the download fails” sort of thing. Its amazing how people can just make things more complicated for themselves (and their customers!) in unnecessary ways… I wonder if Amazon should try to block TCP-level retransmits to make sure you receive each packet only once?

Two things that could have been better- I wish the files were encoded at more than 160kbps. Its better than 128kbps but I’d rather see 256-320kbps to get much closer to lossless quality. I would have expected that with the band managing the process they would have cared about making sure their “product” was at the best quality possible, but then again most people won’t notice or care and I suppose it does preserve some value for people who buy the physical CD.

I also wish they had included some album-art files. Its nice to have them in Explorer / the Media Library and too bad they didn’t just include a few of the correctly named JPG files.

The music? Its almost beside the point right? Listening to it now. In any case the last few Radiohead albums took me a few play-throughs to get into so I’ll wait a week or so before making up my mind.

Radiohead just blew everyones minds and I suspect almost no one has actually heard their new album yet. The specifics around how they are releasing it are going to eclipse the album itself…

So this weekend they announced the new album In Rainbows. And in an unprecidented move its available in 10 days, not 4 months. Because you don’t have to wait for it to be pressed onto CDs and for the big marketing rollout. Its a download.

Not only that, but you get to set the price that you think is fair for it. I’d kill to see statistics on what people choose to pay. Heck, given how screwed mosts artists get by their labels, I bet Radiohead could get more cash selling the market research than the typical band gets for the album (not that this would be consistent with their style).

Apparently after the last album their contract with their label expired and they just decided to not renew. So far it seems like the new approach is going well for them- their blog says that the site has been experiencing difficulties from extreme load.

For what its worth I’ll share what I decided to pay for it. 3.99 pounds. Which comes out to a bit more than $8 US, or about the same price as downloading any of their other albums from Amazon. Except of course this way the band presumably gets most of the money, no middlemen.

So, a big round of applause for Radiohead, and if anyone still thinks the music industry in 5 years is going to look remotely like what it used to look like 5 years ago, I’ve got a quality bridge to sell you in New York…

I just noticed they had an older Radiohead Knives Out Download (3 songs) for $1.87. For a single where you aren’t going to see them lower than $5.97 in physical format this is extra-great.

or Radiohead Knives Out Download ($1.87)

I was just checking out the Amazon MP3 Downloads service and so far its two thumbs up. You get high bit-rate MP3s (256-320kbps) with no DRM protection and prices that range from $.79 to $.99 a song. Even better they often discounts if you download a whole album. EMusic is still less expensive, but Amazon expands the mix quite a bit by carrying major label artists.

I thought I’d share a few interesting notes on the progress of my Speakeasy DSL upgrade. First, Speakeasy is doing an impressive thing where every day they send me an email with the current status of my order. This email has a set of checked off steps, but it also have the complete details of every communication between Speakeasy (ISP), Covad (DSL line provider), and Qwest (line infrastructure). Its an interesting way to approach the issue of having three vendors that don’t always see eye to eye. Speakeasy is still the main touch point with the customer, so even if they can’t always control their vendors, they can at least provide full visibility of what is going on. I’m impressed.

Also, they emailed me today to double check on the install date to make sure that I’ll be home. It turns out I need to take care of some aircraft maintenance that day so I asked to reschedule. They said that the next install date was 2 weeks out, but hey, can you do this Friday? Again, very impressive, both that they made sure they were in touch, and also that they did it through email (which is by far my preferred mode of communication).

A bit later I was wondering if they were going to have time to ship me the DSL-modem. I was about to email the guy back when I got my daily status update and I see from the notes in it that they realized the issue and are going to make sure that the guy who comes out Friday brings one with him. So far today Speakeasy is 3 for 3…

Dave posts about some great airline experiences and it doesn’t surprise me that the airlines involved are Southwest and Jet Blue. There is this great opportunity for up and coming airlines that emulate these guys to take over and provide a great, efficient air travel system for our country. The main thing holding this back is the lobbying efforts of the old guys. The old guys grew up under the old system of regulated air travel and while they adapted once the industry was deregulated, they never figured out how to escape the trap of their old business models that were based on charging 10x fares to last minute and business travelers compared to everyone else. They also appear to be stuck in a fundamentally hostile management/labor relationship and the combination results in the bizarre poor service that we all see.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about a movement to create a passengers bill of rights. This appears to be driven by people who are focused on the incidents where they have been trapped in airplanes sitting on the ground for 5+ hours. My feedback would be that there are some good ideas in this movement, but they are missing the bigger picture. Passing new rules that protect passenger rights is putting a band-aid on the gushing wound. What we need to do instead is to stop subsidizing the old-style airlines and let the bad ones fail. In the mean time we need to provide good customer information on how the airlines are doing and try to remove some of the restrictions that are holding them back. I understand Southwest still deals with some bizarre rules about flights into and out of Texas, and if you look at the pain that Virgin America went through to get permission to fly in the US, its just a shame. Another great move would be to pursue a more consistent energy policy that helps the airlines have more predictable fuel prices. One of the cornerstones of Southwest’s strong business performance over the past decade is that they did a great job of locking in fuel prices before they went swinging all over. In theory the government could be helping provide this kind of stability for the whole industry and even making it available to new entrants in the market.

A shill for the “Copyright Alliance” was given a venue to write on news.com and wrote a piece that could have come right out of the movie “Thank You For Smoking”. Maybe if they do a directors cut of that movie they can add the copyright guy into the back-room along with the smoking, alcohol and gun lobbies.

Copyright is indeed an important thing for our society and as someone who creates intellectual property for a living I rely on it quite a bit. But the take that Patrick Ross takes in his piece deliberately misstates the origin and concept behind copyright (and patents for that matter). Both were created intended as a balanced sets of rights and responsibilities between producers of creative and innovative works and industry. With both copyrights and patents the idea was that the creator would be given exclusive rights to their creation for a limited period of time in exchange for making it publically available and adding it to the body of human knowledge. This was always explicitly balanced by the notion of fair use that these copyrights and patents could not be used abusively.

Now forward in the current era, greedy folks are making land-grabs to increase the value of their intellectual property and lobbyists like this guy are trying to confuse the public about their fair use rights. Copyrights were supposed to expire after the death of the creator, but various entertainment interests (especially Disney) keep pushing Congress to extend their copyrights almost indefinitely. Meanwhile the copyright lobby keeps trying to diminish your traditional rights to purchase a piece of creative work and use it as you would like and protect it with backups by layering on DRM, the DMCA, and hostile legal threats at the beginning of videos and TV programs. Not content to sell you a song for a buck or two, they want to charge you an extra $1-2 for a 30-second excerpt of that thing you already own, but used as a ringtone. They want you to have to buy new copies of all your media every few years as there are new technological shifts and as the CD/DVD media you own wear out.

Lets be clear. There are vibrant and creative entertainment industries and despite the fear-mongering by the copyright lobby, they are not going away. Sure, they are going to have to shift and adapt with new times and new technologies. Some industries that have made money in the past as middle-men might be going away (for example the big record companies and tv networks) as these new technologies reduces the need for their role (and creates new middle-men like Google, Amazon, Apple). But just because a given big record company isn’t healthy does not imply that musicians are somehow going to go away.

Anyway, I’m fairly annoyed with news.com for running this propaganda piece without enough context and wanted to call it what it is.

Andy writes about how Amazon is going into the home grocery business similar to the WebVan/HomeGrocers of the past. I’m hoping this will be successful. I’m assuming this is also related to the same-day delivery thing that Amazon has been already offering in certain markets. If so they are well set up to have the critical mass necessary to make this sort of thing work. I’m hoping they pull it off- we order from Safeway sometimes for home delivery but I miss the level of service that Home Grocer used to provide.