What our prototype will be is, among other things, a deployment of satire in the new media realm. What it most definitely won't be is anything like Mako Ads, a banner ads project developed in a previous nerd school session. A story told through advertising still sounds like advertising to me; what's even more pathetic than this soul-less exercise in capitalism is the fact that the group responsible for it couldn't find legs for the concept in the real world!

Saturday, March 24th, 2001: He thinks he's people! My Rogers@Home service went down for the first time yesterday morning. Here's why, from today's Globe & Mail:

"A rascally rodent may have taken a bite out of Rogers high-speed cable Internet access yesterday, disrupting service to hundreds of thousands of customers. Police investigating a break in a fibre-optic line in Ontario's Niagara Region say an animal gnawed into the line exposed by Canadian National Railway technicians. The technicians were repairing cables damaged earlier this month, reportedly by thieves searching for copper cable to sell as scrap."

Aww...

Well, with Napster all but gone, what's left for the up and coming recording artist ain't exactly pretty. Grant Dexter from Maple Music paid us a visit yesterday, with an explanation of how your typical big record label $17.99 CD breaks down:

1. $6 goes to the retailer
2. $5 goes towards promotion/marketing
3. $3 goes towards manufacturing
4. $2 goes towards a retainer
5. $0.60 to $1 of the remaining money goes to the artist

But the label also fronts up to $500,000 for things like tour support. If they dump the band, and in Canada nine times out of ten they do, from where do you think they recoup their losses? You guessed it... Artist royalties!

Grant and his company are trying to make things better for artists, by not dumping them nine times out of ten, cutting out overhead, giving them more rights and moving from album-based to single-based sales, which the artists dig as much as you and me!

Did I really just say "dig"?

Thursday, March 22nd, 2001: Before you write me off as some kind of cyber-cynic, let me tell you all about a little Toronto start-up called Tucows. The name is an acronym indicating their humble beginnings, "The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software". Five years later (an eternity in Internet time) they're still around; in fact, they are now, among other things, the second largest domain name registry in the world! And within the next month or so, you'll be able to download your shareware from anywhere on the planet, then pay for it at a price set in your local currency.

That's right, I said "pay"! Who do you think was responsible for the big dot-com bust, anyway? It was partly the over-hyped companies choosing exit strategies (being bought) over long-term growth, and partly the millions upon millions of surfers expecting a free ride. And while I certainly find myself with shallow pockets after paying my $40 @Home bill every month, I don't think I can deal with the next generation of web ads; click on any breaking news story at ZDNet to see what I mean.

Every new media company I've heard of is struggling to show profit. It's my belief that the notion of subscription services, micropayments, whatever, is at critical mass. Slate tried to get paid subscribers and failed. Now that Napster has been struck down, Salon is testing the waters with a paid subscription option of its own. So be thankful you're getting all this insight for free!

Wednesday, March 21st, 2001: Fueling my rage against Bell Canada has been two days of presentations on the Bell New Media Fund. You can get a grant of up to $250, 000 for your new media project, so long as you have a television show attached to it. The rather naive folks who dole out the fund maintain that unscrupulous TV producers (is there any other kind?) would never misappropriate the money for their crappy series, then slap up an unremarkable website. But in that most embarrasing case of SketchCom, they did just that.

How many representatives from Rogers sit on the board of a fund firmly anchored by the dead weight of television? Zero. How much promotion does your Bell New Media Fund-ed project get on Bell Canada's Sympatico Internet portal? Zero.

One more question: As a consumer, how much of your hard-earned money should you be spending to support anybody this clueless?

Monday, March 19th, 2001: Let me begin this week's first entry with a shameless plug for Reefer Madness: The Musical. The more perceptive of you will recognize a certain Devil's Advocate in the top left corner of the poster for the show. No, it's not me.

Rats in the stable: It's business week at nerd school! This morning we saw new media through the eyes of a venture capitalist, and in the afternoon we were insulted by two people from a struggling software company called Thinksmith. The first thing said that pissed me off was something like "don't let your personal morals interfere with your product". I guess that might apply to kiddie porn or something catering to white supremacists; I still felt like plunging a dagger into the cold black heart of the woman who said it, just to prove that she was already dead!

If this wasn't bad enough, the rest of the afternoon was wasted on remedial business tips, like "put your website address on your letterhead". No shit, Sherlock!

I should probably take this opportunity to justify my growing lapses into potty-mouth. One of the things I hate about the web is that much of it's content is bland and generic to the point of irrelevance, so as not to offend. I figure Disney and AOL have this pretty-much covered, so keep it locked right here for some good old fashioned bias, along with more potty-mouth...

Friday, March 16th, 2001: What do you get when you take a piece of see-through plastic, slap an antenna onto it then cast it into a sea of kids in those awkward years between Game Boy and cell phone? You get Cybiko, a portable train wreck with ergonomics that only a Russian engineer could love!

I was introduced to Cybiko by a visiting usability tester, who asked us to try it out as an "exercise". When that visitor starting logging our comments into her PowerBook, I put two and two together and started skewing my free market research, with comments like:

"It should be heavier and more expensive..."
"The keyboard and screen could be smaller..."
"It should be even more uncomfortable for left-handed people to hold..."

And so on...

Wednesday, March 14th, 2001: Today I was dragged kicking and screaming into the pretentious world of Griffin & Sabine, and the even worse CD-ROM The Ceremony of Innocence. The book, an assemblage of post office scrapings is certainly artistic, but brother, it sure ain't art! As for the CD, be prepared for the interactive "experience" of pointless point and clickery, rewarded with some correspondence read by Ben Kingsley and an oh, so foreign-sounding Isabella Rossellini.

I challenge anyone out there to give me a compelling reason to open up my wallet for this way-too precious love story, told through postcards. Until then, I'll stand by my sweeping condemnation of G&S as a pile of worthless horseshit.

Monday, March 12th, 2001: Our first nerd school field trip took us to a downtown hotel to see Toronto's planned Olympic Village for the 2008 Games, in virtual reality, of course. Pictures don't really do justice to the experience of flying through our city of the not too distant future; here they are anyway.

Pass that brie! The Film Centre's old media residents are clambering over each other for a spot at tomorrow's Michael Douglas love-in. Catherine Zeta-Jones will not be present, but maybe Mikey will show his ass like he did in Basic Instinct...

Sunday, March 11, 2001: It's nice to know that even with my sabbatical from professional comedy, my timing remains impeccable...

Case in point: My @Home setup was scheduled for this morning. Last Friday, some bozos cut the @Home fibre optic line coming into Ontario... Seriously! So when my hardware was initialized, I was told that it would be fully functional (i.e. working) "as soon as possible".

Luckily, the connection came up within the half-hour, and I'm now happily cruising along at speeds about 10-20k/second faster than Sympatico. Woo. There are more substantial benefits, of course: The Internet on cable is a more Macintosh-compatible experience, and the modem itself is quite sexy. Check out those labia-like curves, then think of someone you might want to set me up with; this boy probably needs to get some, don't you think?

Thursday, March 8th, 2001: I'm home early today, to prepare for a mandatory social engagement, at which residents and alumni of the Film Centre's New Media Design Program will "network". I call it the nerd school debutante ball!

On a more troubling note, I've started getting junk faxes, which I thought were illegal; they are, but only in the states. Here's Canada's position, lifted from the site of a Miami law firm (?!):

"In 1997, the Canadian Direct Marketing Association (CDMA) released amendments to its Code of Ethics which require its members to have your consent before they can send you advertising materials. This is certainly a step in the right direction and more than any American counterpart of the CDMA has done. Still, these are voluntary standards without any real means of enforcement."

Well, in the spirit of the whole "knowledge is power" deal, here are the folks who have been junk faxing me:

Why not jot down their number? That way you can make a free crank call in complete anonymity from the next pay phone you pass by. Or maybe use their address as contact info when you download the next update to RealPlayer? The possibilities are endless...

I thank you in advance :-)

Wednesday, March 7th, 2001: Surprise! It's not yet 100% functional, but as soon as Google sends some bots over to log my pages, you'll be able to search each and every one of 'em!

In the meantime, let me tell you about the standard so far in this media we call new. It's a CD-ROM that was released eight years ago, but is such a rich, immersive experience that people are getting PhDs exploring it. It's Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel. I have seen it and my world has been rocked...

Tuesday, March 6th, 2001: I don't know about you, but I was getting tired of looking at big blocks of black text, so here's a first baby step towards a more sophisticated layout: Colour! Now before you go and start suggesting even fancier layout stuff, like frames... Don't, because they might not work with the big surprise I've got planned for you. "Bigger than that new counter?" you ask, "... Which you changed back to the old one anyway?" Yes, smarty-pants... Bigger.

You may have also noticed that I've taken down the faux "sponsored by" banners. This is mostly because of the seething rage I'm directing towards Bell Canada at this particular moment. I was actually considering an upgrade to Bell's business DSL service for faster download/upload speeds, until one of my nerd school instructors told me that their consumer DSL (Sympatico High Speed Edition) is throttled. That is, the technology in both business and consumer offerings is identical; Bell just scales back the speed of Sympatico HSE because they don't want to give you your money's worth!

To be fair, Bell's servers and such are classified as telephony equipment by the CRTC, and as such are put on a slow depreciation schedule. This means that cost-effective upgrades to their system aren't made as often, and therefore they're in no hurry to provide you with any new groundbreaking products or technologies.

Because of this, I've signed up for Rogers@Home, though I know from experience that it will inconsistent at best. Did you know that Ontario is ranked 10th for high-speed Internet access in Canada? Us nerd-schoolers have decided that we like the idea of civic networks, local communities like Palo Alto, California who wire themselves without the phone companies and their crap. If you investigate that link, be sure to read the local PacBell rep's plea!

Monday, March 5th, 2001: It's 7:15PM and I'm sitting at my nerd school workstation, and I've just been informed that the accumulating and unplowed snow outside has made our exit impossible, at least for the moment. I'm not complaining; my homework for the evening is to check out games on PlayStation 2 :-)

It's now 9:30PM and I'm safe at home. My other homework is some reading for tomorrow. Front and centre is an excerpt from DIGITOPIA, an upcoming book by RITALIN NATION authour Richard DeLongpre. How's this for a quote?

"Media technology does not great brings to life, it simply shifts the venue for where one has to go to feel alive."

Not to worry, though: Shannon Thunderbird came by this morning and made us all promise to be responsible digital storytellers, so you can safely put your digital life in my hands!

Sunday, March 4th, 2001: Click here for some groovy wedding photos...

Okay, I'm falling behind on the daily updates. But gimme a break; I've spent the past week learning object-oriented programming, for crying out loud! And now that I've kind of wrapped my head around the concept, I can heartily recommend iShell, a multimedia container app from the old Apple Media Tool team.

Don't get me wrong; I still agree with my main man Bill Buxton, that software and hardware interfaces as a whole are a pile of unintuittive crap.

Perhaps more importantly, I participated in a lengthy discussion on the future of content, versus connectivity. Try this online essay for some light reading, or at least consider this quote from it:

"The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks!"

Consider also the popularity of chat and peer to peer programs like Napster. Napster is a weird one; though the model is based on connectivity, what people are sharing on it is content.

What does this all mean for a content guy like me, and his humble website? Well, for starters the world wide web is basically a broadcast deal; I publish and you (hopefully) consume. There is some interactivity via email (which I always encourage), but wouldn't it be great if anyone could add info and/or comments for all to see?

Well, wouldn't it?