102 karma · joined September 23, 2011
https://twitter.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1657219168863756288
"The design of a medium strongly affects the revenue model that is applied to that medium. Entrepreneurs will seek an appropriate way of creating a revenue constrained and encouraged by the media technology. One example of this relationship can be discovered through examining the different variations of the television medium. The traditional technology of broadcast made it difficult for content creators to charge individual viewers for selecting a program. This lead to revenue sought via advertising, based on making the viewers the product rather than the customers, and resulted in bland programming in an attempt to get as large an audience as possible to sell to advertisers. The technology of cable television and scrambling made it easier to charge for subscription or pay-per-view, causing more directed programming towards smaller audiences. [...] The revenue model has implications for what content will be made available on a medium as well as the quality of that content. Web technology designers can strongly impact which revenue models will be used on the web. Creating alternative revenue models is important to avoid the application of potentially harmful revenue models due to a lack of alternatives."
I got to demo my Common Lisp based social web application server and showcase how to extend it with dynamic, hot-loaded components. Apple said I could talk about pretty much whatever I wanted within the scope of the conference, so I included an introduction to how it used what I labeled Light Weight SGML, soon better known as XML.
It was a blast from the past seeing my presentation again 20 years later. I had prepared the slides to be displayed in a web browser, generated from extensible markup using my WebSlides tool, but my handler at Apple insisted on converting them to PowerPoint. They weren't all sold on the web eating the world yet.
Despite having a complementary ticket for the conference, I had no time to stick around, flying straight back home the day after to prepare the next product release. The following years were quite a ride, like having a tiger by the tail. Then came 2001.
A major challenge is to get a large number of patients to continuously track their symptoms. Most want to know what’s in it for them. It takes substantial incentives for people to regularly report outcomes and use wearables for data collection. Until we can make the marginal cost hit zero, they need to benefit from their efforts and investment, preferably instantly.
Ted Nelson, who coined the term 'hypertext', said after his talk that he thought the web was an excellent step forward. By the next year it was everywhere. Twenty years later, many of the good ideas we discussed back then are mainstream.