Dan rants: Notes from the Churchill Club

Random ramblings. No point or dramatic structure.

Went with Todd to the Churchill Club yesterday evening for a session on "The Future of Online Entertainment". Robert Burgess, chairman & CEO of Macromedia was there, Jim Banister of Warner Bros. Online, John Geirland and Eva Sonesh Kedar, authors of Digital Babylon , and it was moderated by Mike Malone, editor of Forbes ASAP .

First off, I might even be willing to concede that "Flash content" isn't an oxymoron if we can institute floggings for the use of the phrase "delivering compelling multimedia experiences".

It's interesting, everyone was talking technology, there were a few tips o' the hat to story, but no one was talking about why someone would want to sit down in front of a computer in the home office rather than sprawling out on the couch or the living room floor in front of the TV. The Playstation 2 will be a hugely money-losing market gaining product from Sony that will attempt to change this, Macromedia needs to make damned sure that they get a Flash player into it.

And this is where I think the bigwigs and the media pundits still don't get it.

Entertainment is that portion of the economy that isn't directly related to survival. There were glimmerings of awareness, like when EBay was mentioned as entertainment, but if 'net based entertainment is going to be more compelling than traditional broadcast media it's going to be unlike what we've seen before. Auctions are part of that, as are some of the better filtered community sites.

Todd proposed http://www.sellmykidney.com/

"Better filtered". That's also a key to the future of the 'net. Jorn Barger has been asking questions about Google . I don't use Google because the answers that it gives me are filtered in exactly the opposite way from the information I'm usually looking for. There's lots of talk about "community interaction", but that's what Usenet is, and the best newsreaders are the ones with the harshest filters.

The post event Flash demonstration was quite telling as well. Two poorly animated soccer hooligans talking about films. But this was put up on a big projection screen, and the interactive portions were driven by a demonstrator. Helloooooo: You're showing us broadcast again, in a media particularly ill suited for it.

And on the way out, Todd and I were laughing and joking about taking things to the ridiculous ends, and I proposed something that was so far out it was ludicrous, and we both stopped, and looked at each other, and we're doing web searches today to see if anyone else has proposed it and if not we're going to implement it.

I can't tell you about it, partially because I don't want you to steal my ideas, but mostly because when it happens I want to be able to disassociate myself from it as much as possible. Hopefully it'll be worth a couple of bucks, though.


Thursday, September 23rd, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com