The Internet Is Falling! The Internet Is Falling!
You blew it, it’s too late. You should have started blogging five years ago. The Internet is going down because it’s too popular and populist.
How do I know this to be true? Because Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast interviewed Jonathan Zittrain about some of the ideas in his forthcoming book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It! His basic premise is that the current open, collaborative Internet allows lots of untalented people to generate useless if not destructive garbage (spam, viruses, MySpace pages, etc.) Nothing useful, grand, significant, clever, wondrous will be created by untalented people on an open network (Uhhh…Wikipedia?) What’s his solution: let’s go back to proprietary networks like Compuserve, AOL, etc. And in the meantime, get much better security software because people can run any code they want on an open Internet.
Agree or not, this is worth a listen. The interview is about 12 minutes and you can download it for free here.
Publishers / Authors: Jonathan’s ideas run counter to the euphoria everyone feels about Web 2.0. His ideas are controversial AND he can argue persuasively for them. Think about how you can use controversy in marketing your titles. Controversy doesn’t always sell but it sure stands a good chance of getting noticed.
Gary Ward
Topics: Books, Harvard Business Review, Jonathan Zittrain, Marketing, Predictions, Technology | No Comments »
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