Web 2.0, Meet Business 101

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

We've been hearing an awful lot about so-called Web 2.0 "initiatives" over the last couple of years, and I'm still not exactly sure what Web 2.0 means. And since people are talking about Web 3.0 now, I thought it was time to suss this out.

Web 2.0 is a diaphanous marketing concept liberally applied to a hodgepodge of technical approaches, websites, and web communities to separate them somehow from that which came before - Web 1.0, I imagine. While no one, not even Wikipedia can give you a firm definition of what the expression Web 2.0 really means, it does roughly allude to the use of technologies such as Ajax, and evokes the idea of community-based sharing (for instance YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, etc., social networks and so-called folksonomies that are part of the "semantic web." The term appears to have been coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2004:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called 'harnessing collective intelligence.')".

If I may be blunt, this is a pretty lousy definition. In fact, I see absolutely nothing new or novel about Web 2.0 ideas at all. What I do see are business people attempting to recast perceptions about web development in order to attract investment. I see the desire to separate technology companies from the Internet crash of the late 90s through rebranding and renaming what is seen as having failed in the past. Essentially, the Web 2.0 concept was created to differentiate Internet technology companies from the failed the dot-coms that preceded them.

But dot-coms they are, prone to the same excesses, and facing the same sobering business realities that one day, one day soon, they will have to actually make more money than they spend. While the new high priests of Web 2.0 preach the democratic notion of folksonomies, they baffle consumers with jargon and misinformation, and when you try to pin them down about specifics, they move on to the next big thing. Sounds familiar.

Web 2.0 concepts are simply a natural evolution of the Internet and require no re-branding or new jargon. All web development should be plainly understandable--be wary of those who would baffle you with FOAF, tag-based taxonomies, synergies and rich web applications that somehow fit their vision of the future, but not your needs. There is no magic in web development; it is a very practical medium.

Let's hope the Web 2.0 bubble just drifts away without collateral damage to rest of the Internet economy.

CEO Blogs

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

In an article in this week's Puget Sound Business Journal, local CEOs were taken to task for revealing too much about themselves and their companies through their blogs. The main thrust of the article is that many CEOs have taken to blogging and, like any other piece of corporate marketing writing, blogs ought to be vetted by editors et al before they are posted to make sure they aren't saying bad things that will damage the company's and the CEO's reputations.

Luckily for me, I am a mere vice president, so the article clearly wasn't direct my way.

From a consumer's point of view, knowing more about a company and its management is a good thing; I've always thought there should be some kind of simpatico between a client and the business, particularly in the service field. Furthermore, and I don't think the Business Journal points this out, I will be the first to admit that blogging is less about a CEO's primal need to preen in front of an enrapt public, and more a way to attract the attention of Google and other search engines (you see, frequently updated, novel content attracts search engines and improves a company's search ranking ;)

As to the Journal's suggestion that blogs be carefully edited, I can't say that makes much sense. A blog is an informal form of communication, and one would hope that a corporate director would show a little common sense in choosing their topics and would strive to present their company in the best light.

I myself am frequently self-editing so as not to reveal my lengthy criminal record (white collar, of course); my thirteen year stint as an operative for the CIA within the Median Cartel; my role in the creation of robots who will one day subdue and enslave mankind; that Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks was named after me; that I have a Carpenters' CD in my player right now; that I think Alec Baldwin is handsome, but only in a certain light; that I changed my name from Jarman to Jarmon to avoid the authorities; that "Jay's Blog" is actually an anagram for "Jay's Glob"; that grey aliens are actual more on the purple side.

So, have no fear Puget Sound Business Journal, you'll find no such damaging revelations here.

PS -- Did I mention that this blog is actually written by a mandrill? You know, the monkey, not Barbara or one of her sisters. That would be crazy.

Democracy, Such As It Is

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

One of great promises of the Internet is its democratizing effect; that is, it is freely available, largely self-regulating, and gives everyone - large or small - the ability to speak and post openly. For now, this remains a promise.

This weekend, Google announced that its agreement with the Chinese government to censor Internet content was a mistake. Google had originally made the decision in 2005 for financial reasons, essentially abandoning its much touted core value of "Don't Be Evil" - unless, of course, you see censorship of political thought as a good thing.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president, issued a public apology Saturday saying that the deal with the Chinese government to censor and even alter information had damaged Google's reputation in Europe and North America. He said that it had been a "zero-sum game," and in retrospect the deal may have been a mistake as it directly affected public perceptions of Google.

Democracy in action, right?

I don't want to parse this too much, but it is a very disappointing communication, for two important reasons: 1) Brin said there was no plan on changing the censorship policy in the foreseeable future, and 2) he conceded error only insofar as the decision had affected public perceptions of Google, not because overt political censorship is fundamentally wrong.

For example, Google does not allow Chinese Internet users to see basic historical facts about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Information about the Tiananmen Square protests is not allowed. Radical economic and political theories are suppressed (to the extent that free market capitalism and democracy are radical theories). For this, Google is sorry because it affects "public perceptions."

A sad irony, I suppose, for a company that is supposed to be different from other companies and has seen a wealth of attention, good faith, and investment based on its supposed core values.

All Fun and Games

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Some big steps have been made recently in the race to dominate the convergence of digital media, and it's coming from the gaming industry. It makes sense, I suppose - in any business endeavor you need to follow the money, and the video game industry is larger and certainly more robust than either the movie or television industries.

It all started with the Xbox 360, which allowed users to connect to the Internet for online gaming. A small step, but one that introduced Internet-based gamer communities, and showed that game consoles were really no different than any other Internet client.

Sony raised the ante recently by giving its Playstation 3 the first commercially available Blu-ray high-definition DVD player. For the first time, electronic consumers could view DVDs in high def, and it was through a video game console, not a stand-alone player for the television crowd. When a consumer electronics giant like Sony sees the gaming community as the prime place to launch new technologies (and, of course, an opportunity to re-package its enormous movie catalog), there is a sea-change taking place.

Nintendo announced this week that its new gaming console will not only allow users to connect to the Internet, but it will be equipped with an email client and an Opera browser so that users can watch movies, play games, send emails, and browse the Internet all through the same console.

Will game consoles be the winner of the convergence race, getting to the Holy Grail before the computer hardware industry, the television industry, et al? With systems and applications increasingly being designed to be shared across the Internet on a distributed model, CPU processing power becomes less of an issue and our children's little game boxes start looking more and more like a viable "computing" platform.

How long will it be before you go to work and find yourself sitting in front of an Xbox? See, I always knew the future would be all fun and games!

Peace At Last

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

While visiting a friend in London recently, I went to his computer to check mail. Nothing odd about that - the familiar Windows interface, Internet Explorer, the usual. I was several minutes into reading, when it suddenly dawned on me that I was using a Macintosh.

A Macintosh!

How had it come to this? I was brought up on old Apple IIe's, but of course they ran MS-DOS 3.0 and pre-dated the Mac GUI by several years.

For virtually all of my professional life, first at Microsoft (the center of the DOS and Windows universe, and then at Saltmine and Lux) I had openly mocked the Mac. I used to call it the Fisher-Price computer, likening it to an automatic transmission car when we all know it's much cooler to drive a manual. Like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. You wouldn't catch this guy using a Mac.

Steve McQueen: the ultimate PC Man?

Macs were good for graphics and audio. They were designed to appeal to kids. They were cute.

I knew that the old PowerPC approach had allowed Macs to emulate the Windows OS several years ago to what were at best mixed results. I had also heard that Apple had recently struck a deal with Intel to create dual core processors that would allow the Mac to run both the Mac OS and Windows. But I was struck all unaware that afternoon in London. It worked beautifully.

To my thinking at least, the PC/Mac holy wars are over. In the last couple of months I acquired two computers, one of each for my home. And here's the kicker: I'm using the Mac OS on the Mac and not Windows. What would Steve McQueen think?

Telecommuting: Does It Work?

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

I live in the city of Tacoma, Washington - about 30 miles away from the southern border of the so-called Emerald City, Seattle. That 30 miles requires a drive a 1.5 hour commute each way by car, or 1 hour each way by train. As I have made that commute since 1997, figuring two commutes roughly five days a week, I have spent something like 7,800 hours...nearly a year in aggregated time, sitting on my rear end traveling between the two cities (and yes, living in Tacoma is worth it).

If anyone in the world would like to see proof positive that telecommuting works, it is me. Sadly, there is yet little evidence to support it as an improvement upon a fixed workplace.

First off, and most sadly, I'm afraid, given the amount of fossil fuel going into the air and the deplorable congestion of the Puget Sound's main roadways at rush hour(s), the meme that telecommuting increases a company's productivity is over-hyped. According to a Cal State study, virtually all of the evidence yet put forth breathlessly touting large increases in productivity associated with telecommuting are, at best, anecdotal.

Well, perhaps that can be explained away by the novelty of telecommuting...surely there are longitudinal studies suggesting improved performance over time. Sadly the answer is no, according to a study commissioned by Honeywell.

Well then, what about improvements for the individual? While there are benefits to working at home, there are as many drawbacks if you've done it. Crying babies, no contextual feedback from co-workers, no separation of work life and home life, and worst of all, the blogs are full of complaints from telecommuters about how being away from the office is fettering their career and damaging their chances of advancement.

Well, you know what? As much as some of the early results damage the case for telecommuting, I think we still owe it to ourselves as employees and employers to continue experimenting and finding ways to make it work in appropriate circumstances. We owe it to the planet, to our families, and to our own commute-stressed physiologies. All good things take time to suss out, and telecommuting is no different.

The Political Season

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Well, I suppose it's always the political season somewhere, and it seems we just came out of a political season here in the States with the recent congressional elections. But with everybody and his brother (or, this season, sister) throwing their hat in the ring for the presidency, it seems like a good time to re-assess the role of the Internet in political campaigns.

During the last presidential campaign, my partners and I wrote a piece on the subject for the Puget Sound Business Journal. Our assessment at the time was that Internet sites had for the first time become a front line in the various campaigns, with some paying more attention to Internet as a fund-raising and organizing tool (Howard Dean comes immediately to mind), and others just beginning to understand the power of the Internet for influencing and organizing voters. We concluded that the web had become as important in political campaigns as traditional media, but had not yet eclipsed it in terms of its outreach. That may well change during the next two years, and here's why:

This year, the Democratic Party has two clear front runners, one, Barack Obama, about whom the American people still know very little; and the other, Hillary Clinton, whom the American people know all too well.

Sen. Barack Obama

The game for Clinton, about whom most American have already made up their minds, is how to drive down perceived negatives among the strongly-opinionated. Once again, the Internet provides the subtlety and nuance needed to shade a campaign and to be an outreach to those who would sit by the wayside unless otherwise motivated. You can count on the newspaper and television people to re-affirm the same message and image they have always put forth about Clinton, it will only be via the Internet that significant inroads will be made in changing anyone's mind.

Sen. Hillary Clinton

The fact that there are two strong frontrunners, and many other candidates who can't hope to get a meaningful piece of the traditional media's attention during the next two years, is also an indication that Internet will be more important than television or traditional media. The Internet is the only level playing field the also-ran candidates will have. It is also cheaper and not exclusive.

So, politically speaking, the Internet will finally come of age in the 2008 campaigns. It will be fascinating to watch as it unfolds.

More Fun with Tech-Speak

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

I have not yet sought one out, and am steadfast in my resolve not to do so until after I have posted this blog, but I'll bet there are several credible and entertaining Tech-Speak dictionaries out there on the Internet. You'll know if there are without even having to bust open Google if the expression "Tech-Speak dictionaries" in that last sentence is a nice blue hyperlink, (thanks to the link editors who connect my babblings to other content on the Internet). Well, that was nicely post-modern.

So, here are some fun terms you can drop into your next conversation about the Internet that will impress your friends and fill your competitors with envy.

Sand Hill Road: "Sand Hill Road" is an expression tech businessmen use the way stockbrokers use the word "Wall Street" or thespians use the word "Broadway." The actual Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley boasts an unusually high number of venture capital and private investment companies. So, if you've been spending a lot of time on Sand Hill Road, that means you've been actively trying to find financial backing for your high tech company out there in the VC and investment world, as in: CEO Fred Wickett hasn't been watching the bottom line lately; he's been spending too much time on Sand Hill Road on his hands and knees and not enough time in the finance office.

Bells, whistles, *and* gongs: I just heard this one the other day ... meant to suggest that a software developer has gone two steps too far to far in adding gratuitous features to a piece of software. Meant to be spoken quite sarcastically with emphasis on the word "and."

Drool proofing, or Drool-Proof Paper: Okay, this is one from my days in user documentation. This refers to docs that are written at such a low level that they are unbearable to read for anyone with more than a fourth-grade education, as in: The Product Manager says this one is aimed at bloggers so we better break out the drool-proof paper.

Sagan: Referring of course to the late Nova host/populist scientist Carl Sagan, and meaning any enormous number of anything (Carl of course famously saying "Billions and billions" of stars, etc). For example: They must pay that Jarmon guy a Sagan to write those rockin' blogs.

Salt Mines: Dense clustering of software developers in lightless, airless rooms, pounding away on code like Ivan Denisovich in a Siberian labor camp, as in: Me and 14 of my best buddies have been down in the salt mines adding drool-proof bells whistles, AND gongs to the program while Fred Wickett has been sniffing around for Sagans on Sand Hill Road.

Sometimes, It's Just Plain Creepy.

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Okay, I'll admit it. Sometimes I'm just plain creeped out by some of the changes I've seen over the last couple of years as far as digital technology is concerned. This is particularly true in movies, games, and television special effects. For some reason or other, the old analog cut-and-paste effects were comfortably fake-y. If you are an aficionado of Ray Harryhausen's films, you love and enjoy the giant Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, because, well...it's obviously a bit of stop-motion animation.

Fake-y but Lovable!

He isn't exactly Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but it's patently obvious that he is eight inches tall.

While watching an episode of I Love the 90s! the other day, I saw a video of the Weezer song "Buddy Holly." You know the one...by a series of clever cuts, the band appears to be playing at Al's restaurant in the 70s television show Happy Days. The illusion is unconvincing albeit clever. No digital technology was used.

Weezer in Happier Days

(An interesting aside: the Weezer video shipped as an extra surprise feature on the install CD of Microsoft Windows 95. If you have an old disc lying around, check it out.)

Now, in the digital age, just about anything is possible. If you want to make a James Bond movie, you could conceivably digitally reconstruct a young Sean Connery (perhaps that's what Daniel Craig is). You want to do a new version of Hamlet? How about digitally reconstructing Laurence Oliver? (They did it in the crappy movie Sky Captain and the Blurry World of Tomorrow, and I'm told that caretakers in Westminster Abbey could hear Lord Larry rolling in his grave).

And this is where things get really creepy. If you were watching the Golden Globes on TV the other night, you were treated to an absolute horror show during one of the commercial breaks. It was an Orville Redenbacher commercial, starring none other than Orville Redenbacher. Nothing odd about that, except that he's been dead for fifteen years! If you haven't seen it on TV yet, you can witness the entire nightmare online at http://www.orville.com/aboutUs.jsp.

Note the IPOD!

We need no ghost from beyond the grave to tell us about popcorn! It is the very realism of the video that makes it disturbing; there is no comfortable fakeness in the thing, just a dead man jabbering away about microwave popcorn. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of the digital revolution and what can be comfortably called digital fidelity, but let's be a little more selective about how it's used!

Man … that's just creepy.

E-Learning, ADL, SCORM, Acronyms and You

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

When one considers all of the changes the Internet offers in our lives-media, communications, sales, et al.-few rival the increasing importance of online learning or so-called E-learning. In the spirit of making all things digital that can be digital, education, particularly structured learning, is becoming a focal point in the development of Internet standards and technologies.

There are essentially two parts to online instruction: 1) the content itself, and 2) the technical environment that presents the content, monitors progress, and evaluates the user's learning of the content. The environment is the key here, as the content can be virtually any kind of structured course material; it is that environment that requires structure and consistency in order to ease adoption of E-learning systems.

Enter the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) Initiative, established in 1997 by the Clinton administration, Department of Defense, and Department of Labor. This initiative was designed to create a framework allowing the government, academia and industry to work together in establishing online education standards. Such standards would allow all interested parties to develop online education systems more cheaply, more efficiently and ultimately allow easier interoperability.

The ADL initiative, after some initial stumbles and some debate with regard to the standards, ultimately endorsed an approach dubbed SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), which is essentially a set of standards for content aggregation, navigation, and run-time environment. Before you seek out your own e-learning module to explain all of these acronyms in greater technical detail, suffice it to say that this approach, now being widely adopted by e-learning vendors in the design of CD and online-based courseware, is making online education cheaper, easier to implement, and more effective as an education tool.

So, in our world of decaying classrooms, backbreaking levies, obsolete textbooks, and school schedules based on 19th-century agrarian schedules, how do we hope to keep up in an increasingly technical world? By the rapid adoption of these standards, and a movement in education to a distributed Internet-based model that is ultimately democratic, inexpensive, and likely to produce better results.

No Halfway Measures

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

In a blog entry made last month, I talked about halfway measures being used by traditional media to enter into the digital age...sort of toeing into the field of digital distribution to avoid the fate of Tower Records and the other Luddites who held on to mechanical distribution far too long.

I made an offhand comment about Blockbuster being doomed, and that Netflix had at least taken advantage of a digital ordering system, but would fail unless it moved rapidly and affirmatively in the direction of digital-only distribution. I think I called it a halfway measure, sort of a quasi-digital lifeboat.

Allow me, after the briefest chuckle of self-satisfaction, to direct you to the following story posted today on MSNBC.com, involving Netflix. As a matter of survival Netflix is adopting a strategy that will *begin* digital distribution with a limited number of subscribers.

For Netflix, I fear, it is too little too late. In the final analysis, content is king and the owners of the content, whether they are the movie studios, the record companies, or the television networks will ink exclusive deals with larger carriers (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL), or they will begin their own digital distribution systems and have no need of smaller carriers enacting halfway measures.

At the risk of being preachy, let me once again quote Jeff Dachis and say "Everything that can be digital, will be digital." All news, books, television, radio, music, motion pictures, greeting cards, communications, jobs, retail, *everything*. It is admirable of Netflix to move in the right direction, but hardly laudable that they saw the situation too late to effectively take advantage of the change.

(By the way - how cool is it that Blockbuster is now using Alec Baldwin to do the voiceovers for its new ads?)

Products or Services

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

I'm often asked what the difference really is between a "product" company and a "service" company. The distinction is an important one because it affects how a job is done, what sort of people are doing it, the finances of the matter all together, and indeed the nature of the work itself. This is the first in a series of entries that will try to look at all sides of the service vs. product issue.

Customers vs. Clients

A software product company works to execute a business plan that requires a certain amount of capital up front in order to develop and market a sellable item(s). The capital investment before the product(s) goes to market pays for market research, product development, marketing, sales (and ultimately support), before the product makes a single cent on the open market. The success or failure of the product is therefore determined by the sales and licensing that occurs long after the sunk cost of the development.

A service company approaches the market as an agent willing to do "work for hire," that is, work that will ultimately be owned by the client party, even if that work is one the client's product. In this sense, the service company is similar to an attorney, or a plumber, or any other kind of contractor: clients look to use the skill of the service company for a fixed period of project work to execute work that the client is not adequately resourced to execute. Often the service company is part of a product company's strategic plan, providing specific skill and sheer manpower without the overhead of taxes, human resource oversight, or payroll during lags in the development process.

While the ultimate goals of each company remain the same - namely profit and adequate cash flow to maintain and grow company operations - the approach taken, and indeed the risk taken, is different. The product company requires a significant amount of time preparing to execute on the product, the service company requires a significant amount of time acquiring marketable resources; the product company delays fiscal gratification until the product is fully marketed, the service company must muster adequate cash flow from the moment of inception.

While the companies are often doing the same kind of work, which can lead to confusion among employees and investors, the terms of engagement and the goals of the companies are different. If you are interested in moving into the technology field, it's an important question to ask. Next time, we'll discuss the environmental and cultural differences between the product and services sectors, and what you can expect to find in each of them.

The Problems with Email

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Email is the most passive/aggressive form of communication on earth, rivaled only by monitoring incoming phone calls via an answering machine. Email, like its technological predecessor voicemail, gives us the ability to leave a message without having to actually communicate face-to-face...so you can drop a gigantic stink-bomb in someone's inbox without having to deal with the actual effects until a later presumably more convenient time.

Don't get me wrong-I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 emails a day (yes, some of them are Viagra spams), and email is probably the most essential tool for communication within the workspace because its convenience. But there are some issues that one should always keep in mind, particularly if one is overly-reliant on email.

First off, email does not show the intended tone of the writer very well. In literary criticism, there is the time-honored idea called the "Fallacy of Intent" that is, the intent of an author in creating the writing is irrelevant to the meaning of the words themselves. The "artifact" that is the message exists without authoritarian meaning...it is imbued with meaning by the reader.

Over the years I have seen it literally thousands of time: a well-meaning email writer is shocked to find out that their carefully crafted note about the bake sale or how good a co-worker looks after a diet is met by the recipient with anger, disgust, and offense. Sometimes it's the interpretation of tonal nuance, sometimes its inadvertent capitalization (YELLING in email), sometimes it's punctuation!!!!

Often the nicest, clearest, and seemingly factual mails hit a nerve in the reader causing anger, confusion, and frustration...a situation which could have been entirely avoided by taking the time to pick up the phone, or by sticking your head over the top of your cubicle. The non-verbal nuances and cues in communication taken from tone of voice and facial expression are lost in email (thus the odd emoticon phenomenon), and sometimes old-fashioned talking is better when there are sensitive matters to communicate.

Another issue with email is that writing persists long after the fact. Casual communication in speech literally flies away into the air after the communication event. Email, as the both the Clinton and Bush White Houses have found, stays put. Emails between friends listing out grievances, for instance, remain as evidence of the problem long after the event loses relevance-email keeps old pain fresh. And probably unnecessarily so - humans evolved where cooperative work was essential, the passing of grievances and the ability to forgive and forget are necessary to any cooperative venture. That is why you need to be very careful of what you type in emails, because it just stays there and hampers mending. It can also turn up in lawsuits, in your personnel folder, and sometimes, on the Internet.

Then there is the "oops" factor with email. In an incident while I was working at Microsoft, a co-worker sent a mail detailing my pathetic attempts to grow a beard. In it, he speculated that my rear-end must be similarly hairless. He thought it would be funny to add the expression "Jay's Mom and Dad" to the to: line, and the rest is history. The Microsoft email system interpreted the word "DAD" as the "Desktop Application Division," fully one third of Microsoft. Suffice it to say, the issue of my backside was the talk of Microsoft for a couple of days.

Ah the fond memories. But that’s all behind me now.

So, if you need to email go right ahead, but this in mind: when in doubt, pick up a phone, or better yet dare to leave your desk and actually talk with someone-it's still the best form of communication.

To Watch or Not to Watch

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

In an interesting Chicago Sun-Times article published yesterday, columnist Richard Roeper writes about the recent hanging of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. While Roeper describes the video as "chilling" and "crude," he also points out that the video is "kinda cool in a dark and vengeful way ... [seeing the] S.O.B. literally hanging by his neck..."

Roeper uses the article to support his viewpoint that all executions should public and that the television networks should broadcast them. He further points out that the Saddam hanging video is available on the Internet (which he describes as the "ultimate network").

Politics aside, it is odd to see a play-by-play review of an execution video publicly reviewed by a movie critic in a major American paper (yes, this is the "Ebert and Roeper" Richard Roeper). It is odder still to see someone who enjoys seeing this video and is willing to talk about it.

The Internet, as I've mentioned before, is all about choice, and free expression should be a cherished goal for all Americans. But there is a dark side to free speech as well-the proverbial shout of "Fire!" in a crowded theater, instructions for making your own hydrogen bomb, misleading links to potential child molesters, and yes, graphic images of violence.

How many times have you hesitated before clicking on a link? Do you ever have anxiety over what you are going to see when you select that video on YouTube? Will the content and the images you come across in your day-to-day surfing be appropriate at work and for your family?

There are those who would censor (the television networks and the print media do so on a daily basis), but it is to no avail: the information will become available via the Internet faster, as Roeper points out, than you can say "Drudge Report."

The Internet requires personal responsibility and asks the user to make the tough calls about what is or is not appropriate. We need to moderate our curiosity with our own sense of taste and decorum-no one is going to do that for us anymore.

As far as Roeper's desire to see more of such fare on television and in the papers, I welcome his opinion and agree that content should be freely available to all those who want to see it. For myself, I can think of nothing more monstrous than enjoying repeated viewings of a man dying, whoever he is.

Tobin's Spirit Guide

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

A frequent scene of my now distant youth, one played time and again in front of the giant, round, black and white television in my parent's living room:

Dad: (commenting on a movie) Hey, isn't that what's-his-name? Mom: No, no, that's not him. Dad: No I'm sure of it. He was in that other thing with the girl from It Happened One Night ... Mom: No, that wasn't him. Or was it? Was he in Gilligan's Island?

The scene played itself out inconclusively ad infinitum, of course, there being no sure way to tell if it was indeed "what's-his-name," whether or not he was in that one with the girl from It Happened One Night, or whether it was somebody else all together.

It is the memory of those indecisive conversations, the kind where there was no way to find a conclusive answer to the matter, that makes the Internet my favorite thing in the world. Now the matter would be solved in matter of moments using IMDB.com, showing conclusively that it was "what's his-name" and further linking him to 50 other projects he was involved with, quite likely It Happened One Night." Of course the Internet is so much more than this, but what a cool thing to have.

In the matter of trivia, the Internet has no rival. If you need to find the name of the kid who played Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford on Leave it to Beaver, you've got it (Frank Bank, btw). If you need to know the height of the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, it's there (btw, why are you looking at the height of the Aurora Bridge?). If you need to remember that quote from Ghostbusters, the whole script is up there (SPENGLER: Of course! Ivo Shandor, I saw his name in Tobin's SPIRIT GUIDE. He started a secret society in 1920!).

In short, the Internet is not at all trivial when it comes to trivia, and while I would not give up those time honored conversations with the parents for anything in the world, now at least, technology has provided a solution ("what's-his name" was probably Alan Hale, Sr., the father of the actor who played the "Skipper" on Gilligan's Island).