Jeeze, I didn’t realize just how much money I’ve spent in iTunes (and on CDs) over the years until I decided to make a “smart playlist” and put every alternative, rock, punk, pop, etc genre I have into it. The thing came out with 3348 songs, and a playing time of 9.3 days.

So, what did I do about it? I put the whole thing on shuffle, and hit play. Its like a radio station with music from the past three decades, a mix of heavy metal, and slower stuff, explicit stuff that couldn’t be played on the radio, and a handful of those old “guilty pleasure” songs you’d never admit you listened to in a million years.

And what else am I doing about it? Using iTunes printing feature to post the whole song list in PDF format right here for the world to see. Yeah, I know, some of the songs on there are inviting ridicule, so sue me, it was a different time when I bought those.

I think it’s pretty fitting that the first song on the list after I hit the shuffle button was the most famous phone number in the world since I haven’t heard that song in years. I would have hated to have been one of those poor unlucky bastards who actually had that number in the 80′s – their lives must have been miserable. Actually come to think of it, I can’t even remember what phone number my family had in the 80′s, but I do remember the green rotary phone in the kitchen with the really long, tangled cord, my, how far we’ve come now that I have an iPhone sitting on my desk.

That actually raises an interesting point about the passage of time. I’ve grown up in a world where we had rotary phones (and you only had one phone in the entire house unless you were lucky), we had big boxy TVs with two knobs on them and small curved glass screens that distorted the picture in the corners and only got a handful of channels on the rabbit ears (those channels going off the air at a certain time at night, and starting the next morning again with the national anthem, and only one TV per house unless you were filthy rich, oh and you had to be home at a certain time to watch a program, which you found in a magazine called TV Guide), big vinyl records that wore out after too many uses, VCRs with simulated woodgrain sides and blinking clocks, station wagons with simulated woodgrain sides, and dinner every night at the kitchen table (unless you had the oh-so-rare permission to go to a friend’s house for dinner).

That period gave way to touch-tone phones (but still with long, tangled cords), cable TV with a couple dozen channels, portable tape decks called the walkman, and big-screen TVs massive cabinets in the den, and an extra TV in the parent’s bedroom. You had to go to the local pizza parlor (think of an early version of Dominos or Pizza Hut) to play a video game on a large machine in a cabinet (simulated woodgrain on the sides, of course). A president named Reagan proposed building a space station to beat the russians.

Then came cordless phones (with long antennas that you had to pull up and down for each call), bulky computers with two big “floppy” drives (and no hard-disk) and monitors that only produced a few basic colors (and MS-DOS, no windows or Mac OS yet), and dot-matrix printers that printed on huge spools of paper with holes in the sides that you had to tear off, and cable TV with 50 something channels (and nothing on). Movie theaters only had one or two screens in them (not the 20 screen multiplexes we have today), and you could get a ticket, popcorn, soda and a box of candy for around $5 (try getting even just a ticket for that price now). The state of the art in video games was the Atari 2600, and the controller had a stick and a single button. You could plug the thing in to your TV and play at home. If you tried to call someone and they weren’t home the phone just rang and rang and rang until you gave up.

Somewhere along the line was controversial that the captain (Picard) on that new Star Trek show (The Next Generation) said the word “damn”. Interracial couples are sort of rare, and people don’t talk much about “those two guys who live together but aren’t married”.

Then came the Macs (or windows), with a monitor that had more colors (256, wow!), a hard-disk and a smaller, hard-sided floppy disk that wasn’t really “floppy” anymore. Laser printers that printed on plain sheets of paper, and something called a modem that let you connect to a service called “prodigy” (or eventually “AOL”). No one knew what the heck the world wide web was. Tape decks started to give way to CD players, and finally you didn’t have to “scrub” back and forth trying to find the beginning of your favorite song. The big game to have was Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the controller had a cross-shaped pad and two red buttons labeled A and B (and two lesser-used buttons called start and select).

We fought a war in Iraq, and watched the whole thing on CNN (the only twenty-four hour news channel).

Next were such innovations as “car phones”, which were like really large cellphones you had to have installed in your car by a professional (of course before that there was also the “brick” cellphone that you could attempt to carry around with you, but I never noticed anyone who actually did that except on TV and the movies). Public service announcements stopped showing a crying native american (called an indian back then) and started pleading with families to eat a meal together every day (huh? people didn’t do that already? when did people stop doing that? I had done that with my family every day of my childhood). If someone wasn’t home when you called them an “answering machine” picked up the call and recorded a message for them on a small tape deck, for some reason this annoyed the hell out of people (what? you enjoyed it more when the phone would ring twenty times? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, there’s just no pleasing some people).

Computers kept getting smaller, faster, and more spacious in terms of storage, and the screens kept looking better and better. Cellphones got smaller and could be carried around in a bag and plugged in to a cigarette lighter in your car. Computers got CD-ROM drives, and TVs were commonplace in just about every bedroom. Oh, and people started having a second phone number for their constantly chattering kids, and phones scattered all through the house. If you didn’t have an answering machine by now, you were looked at as a dinosaur (and yet the machine answering the phone still annoyed people). People said the cure for cancer was about 10 years away.

Teenage pregnancy meant a 17 year old got knocked up by her boyfriend, and someone was getting an ass-kicking.

Eventually something called Netscape came around and people started “Surfing” the web. Pages were mostly just text, and some of it blinked (wow, that was cool!). No one had ads on their sites, but eventually commercials on TV for companies started saying “visit us on the web at w-w-w-dot-name of company-dot-com”, prompting people to turn to each other and say “so, you think we should get this web thing?”, which was usually followed by “I don’t know, is it expensive?”.

Computers became portable (sort of, if you had a strong back), cellphones started to fit in your pocket (uncomfortably though), and someone tried to put movies on large metallic discs the size of the old vinyl records, but most people stuck with the video tapes instead. Public service messages urged families to eat at least one meal per week together (oh my god, what the hell was going on here?). Modems gave way to cable modems which were called “broadband” and only available in limited areas.

There was a time that we thought the world would end when all the computers crashed on new-year’s eve in the year 2000 (hrmm… didn’t happen, oh well, I guess some of those people wasted all that cash on the years worth of food they hoarded). People started downloading music instead of buying CDs. Movies began being sold on DVDs, and some people talked of “high definition” TV but not many people actually saw it.

We fought another war in Iraq, and watched in on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and countless other channels (we’re still fighting it unfortunately).

Now, the high definition TV hangs on my wall, its a flat screen like in those old sci-fi movies from my childhood and it gets more than 200 channels (and still nothing on), and has a remote control with a screen of its own in it, My phone is a small slab of metal and glass that I dial by touching a person’s name, and it plays music and videos and lets me surf the web. It fits so comfortably in my pocket I have to remember not to accidentally sit on it. My TV and internet connections are fiber-optic (like those old wired magazine articles promised they would be eventually). My computer is the size of a notebook and is easily carried around. I can pause and rewind TV when I watch it (and watch my shows whenever I want, I find them in a list on the TV itself with my remote), and movies are now available on Blu-Ray discs (like DVDs but better). No one in their right mind buys CDs anymore, and some people download movies and TV shows from the internet like when music first started making its way online years before. They gave up on trying to get families to eat together I guess since I haven’t seen any more of those public service messages. I guess its common now for kids to be out late on school nights, go to movies without their parents, and all sorts of other stuff I couldn’t have even dreamed of when I was that young.

It isn’t controversial that someone says “bitch” on TV, and there were award winning shows on some channels that said “fuck” several times an episode.

Teenage pregnancy means a 14 year old got knocked up by “maybe it was (insert name), or it could have been (insert second name), or I guess it might have been (insert third name), I don’t know”. Students have to go through metal detectors at school because every once in awhile some crazed student brings in a gun and shoots up the place. People still say the cure for cancer is about 10 years away.

On the more positive side people routinely date and marry people with different skin colors, and in some states, gay people can get legally married. Unfortunately for them though its coming a bit late since some countries are seeing the start of a shift towards couples not getting married at all, but still living together and having kids.  We’re almost finished with that space station that Reagan guy wanted us to build (of course he’s dead now), oh, and we’re doing it WITH the russians.

Oh, and people think the world is going to end in 2012 when some old calendar stops counting (why does that seem so familiar? heh). If they’re wrong this time too, I wonder what this blog post would look like if I were to re-write it then.

Anyway, this got long, so here’s that playlist.

Current Playlist

Now, again, tonight we see another new reality forming. Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic party in the next presidential election. Barack Obama is an african american (or black, a person of color, whatever term you find least offensive when discussing race and skin color). I’m white, I’ve never been oppressed, neither have (to the best of my knowledge) my ancestors, and yet the pride I feel knowing that this man is the nominee of one of our major political parties, with an “even money” chance to be the next president, is overwhelming.

First of all, I never would have expected it. I never said anything like “are we ready for…” or anything like that, but ever since I was a kid when I thought of a president all I could imagine was a middle-aged white guy. Even people like John Edwards wouldn’t have come to mind when someone said “what does a president look like?”. Well, let me tell you what a president looks like now – find a clip of Barack Obama “working the rope line” after his speech tonight, and there you have it, that is what a president looks like. You might question if his experience is presidential enough, but you can’t question that this “skinny kid with the funny name and the big ears” at least looks the part.

I don’t know why I care so much to have such a pride filled emotional reaction, but I do. And I am filled with the audacious hope that in January we’ll see this new kind of president actually get a chance to do the job, to put his hand in the air and swear to faithfully execute the office, and cement this sea change in thought forever in the minds of the American people.

The world changed tonight, for the second time this decade, and by the very nature of this particular change, it may do it again in November, and yet again in January, how incredible that would be.

First of all, we’re going to establish (based solely on my saying so, because, well, I said so) that there are currently three types of widely consumed pornography in our modern society. We’re also going to agree (again, because I said so) that an occasional indulgence in porn is perfectly normal, but that an excessive addiction to it is unhealthy.

Now, the first of our three types of porn is erotic imagery designed for sexual gratification. This is where you find words like “MILF”, “cumshot”, “gangbang”, etc. This type of porn is often available on websites with unoriginal names, and actresses in their late twenties who claim to be “barely 18″, and that “they’ve never done this before”, even though they’ve probably been on several dozen sites, getting railed more than an Amtrak train. People pay money for this stuff because it arouses one of our most basic animal instincts, the desperate need to get some tail.

The second type of porn is an entirely different type of media, and it is most certainly not erotic, and if it gives you sexual gratification you need to get some help. This is “torture porn”, movies that feature actors and actresses at the mercy of some horrible killer who slices and dices them while you watch and laugh or giggle or, hopefully recoil in horror. Movies like “Saw” and “Hostel” lead the crop here. Like any type of porn, people pay money to see it because it arouses one of their most basic animal instincts, the so-called “fight or flight response”. People can’t get enough of this shit, seriously, those movies make a ton of money (and none of it comes from me, as I’m not a fan of seeing people suffer, even if its fake). People eat it up as they see the curved blade send the blood splattering across the screen, the guy begging for mercy, or the woman crying. 

Now, obviously the definition of the word porn I’m using is one that basically says that if it arouses some animal instinct in you, or is potentially addictive, and people can’t seem to get enough of it, its porn. So with that, I unveil the third kind of porn; The weather report. Yes, the weather report. Its got it all, curves (either on the weather girl, or on the map behind her), its highly visual, and people can’t get enough of it. Every time I’m near people someone will ask someone else about the weather, if people tune in to the news just to see the weather report, then like fast forwarding through a sex tape, they tune out when its done. Everyday someone wants to see the weather, people are addicted. I don’t know what animal instinct it arouses in us, but it clearly grabs hold of us somehow. We are a society obsessed with the weather, who’s giving the weather report, how hot its going to be, and does it look good. Clearly, the weather report is porn.

More examples: The actors sometimes use stage names, they engage in inane banter and pretend to enjoy themselves, and they use phrases like “this big front comes in behind this one and then it gets really wet”. All that’s missing is a dude at the door with an empty pizza box and a woman in her underwear who can’t pay the bill.

Yep, we’re obsessed with porn, every single one of us. So the next time you condemn the wooden acting, fake looks, curves and hot wetness of the stuff you hear about on the internet, or at the movies or on TV, just take a moment and remember, you’re watching the same thing in a different form every time you tune in to the weather.

Anyone who knows me probably knows that math isn’t my strongest ability. Actually I tend to think of math as a language of its very own, and like any other language except english I have almost no serviceable ability to use it without some sort of technological assistance. Maybe its the way my mind is wired or the way I learned as a child, but something goes wrong when I try to think in anything other than english.

If you ask me the rules for how to execute a certain procedure I can tell them to you very easily, but when you plug the numbers in and ask me to actually complete that procedure my mind blanks. It was the same thing when I tried to learn German or Spanish or French, I could tell you the rules for conjugating the verbs and all that stuff, but I couldn’t actually do it.

I tend to think in concepts, maybe that has something to do with it. When I read a book or something is explained to me I immediately start having this inner dialogue with myself where I hash out the way I might use it, or what I think it means, or what it might look like, or how I would explain it to someone else. I develop scenarios, I plot strategy, I build my own narrative. I prefer the “executive summary”, as opposed to the footnotes. I am, obviously not a details guy.

Why this is coming up right now is because I came to a realization yesterday (or the day before?): the way I make my living is entirely dependent on math. Furthermore, several of my passionate interests also depend on math. Its a strange thing, to realize that your major strength is totally dependent upon your greatest weakness. Let me explain, just a little.

I make my living with my investments and with entrepreneurial endeavors, but mostly the investments lately. The market can go up, it can go down, whatever and I still somehow manage to make a living. Obviously math is important when you’re dealing with money, and stock prices, and earnings per share and all that, and yet, somehow I don’t go there. I don’t know how I do it but I can somehow figure out the right move by looking at the big picture and ignoring the smaller details. In fact, if I try to drill down into the details and too many of the numbers my mind locks up and I’m like a retarded monkey just staring at the screen.

I look for movement, I look at graphs, charts, the news from a company’s sector, and the competition it has, but don’t put the giant spreadsheet with all the numbers and formulas in front of me or I won’t know what the heck I’m doing. Somehow this has worked for me for a many years. I keep a running list of all the bad calls I’ve made over the years and its pretty short. Actually I’m much more likely to make a bad investment in a business of my own than I am in the stock market.

As another example, take politics. Politics is something I’m passionate about. What the day before christmas is to a small child, the days leading up to an election every four years are to me (yeah, that sentence didn’t make much sense, but its the best I can do). Anyway, elections are all about math. You have delegates in the primaries, you have the fundraising numbers, you have poll numbers, you have the electoral college, and some other numbers. Even people I know who are math wizards get driven insane by the whole mess, but somehow I just “get it”.

Again, I ignore the raw numbers and look for the trends, look for movement. The difference between Obama and Clinton’s, numbers means nothing to me, until I see the previous week’s results alongside them. I ignore the numbers and just look to see how the thing is changing. I can’t look at a static snapshot and understand what’s going on, but if I see the thing unfold over time I’ve got it pegged. Like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, if they hold still they don’t register with me, but when they move against the backdrop I’m locked on to it instantly. If I were to keep track of the predictions my instincts have lead me to over the years, I’m sure I’d be right about 80 percent of the time (unfortunately even when I wanted, desperately to be wrong, like in 2004).

Long story short: Glance at a number and make an instant, instinctive judgement = good. Try to work with a number and get an exact result = not so good.

Bonus info: Audiobooks are lost on me, I don’t retain anything from them, but if I read the actual book instead I’ve got it nailed. People talking on the phone are the same thing, I won’t retain the info, but if I look them in the face I’ve got everything they said (seriously, talk to me on the phone or with my back turned to you and I won’t remember much of it after 10 minutes or so, talk to my face and I’ll remember every word for years). Maybe I need some sort of visual cue to organize info, like an arm movement coinciding with someone’s speech, or whatever, but either way, if I’m not using my eyes for whatever it is I’m trying to absorb I don’t retain it. This is one reason I prefer email over phone calls (much to a few people’s chagrin), when I read the text I retain its meaning, when I hear the disembodied voice I don’t.

It doesn’t matter how interesting or important it is, my attention level doesn’t change, I’m paying attention, my mind isn’t wandering, I am focusing on what’s being said, but unless I can see something I don’t grab on to it mentally. Obviously when I learn with my eyes, and I think with dialogue, and act with instinct I’m successful, when I try to swim against that tide, I’m not.

Double Bonus info: While listening to music, the lyrics tend not to register with me, its all the rhythm, tone and instruments. Unless I’ve heard a song several dozen times I won’t know what its about, I’ll just know it sounds good. This is probably why I’m not big on rap or hip-hop or whatever its called now, too vocal, and it may also be why I seem to be drawn to modern remakes of older songs from my youth, because I’ve already heard them repeated enough that I understand the lyrics without trying. (Chris Cornell’s version of “Billie Jean” is 100 times better than Michael Jackson’s original, as is whatever band’s version of “Beat It” I just heard a few days ago, oh and on an older note the “S&M” album where Metallica remade their own songs with an orchestra in the background is their best album, it has a depth that makes all the original songs on their original albums sound flat and uninteresting). By the way, Spoon’s “The Underdog” might be the best-sounding song ever, especially if they ever release a version without the lyrics, the music behind that song is unbelievable.

If Abraham Lincoln had my hair he could have avoided that whole civil war mess, yes, it looks that good right now. I found god today, and it is my hair. You may kneel before it and worship, I don’t mind. Soft and supple, shiny without being oily, and, as always, not a drop of “product” anywhere near it. Shampoo, condition, rinse, towel-dry, run the fingers through it, give it a shake and its good to go, looking better and better as the day goes on and it finishes drying in the air. Oh, if only the rest of my genetics worked out this well for me.

Heck, even the hair in my beard is soft, actually, come to think of it…

*This post stops here to avoid going in to the “T M I” zone.

That said, I did get wordpress 2.5 on here a few days ago (thanks to my uber server admin guru dude Kit), and I’m checking out the damage now   Obviously the footer area is a bit broken, so pardon the dust until I can get that taken care of.  I did make a little change to the settings, so that the front page only shows the most recent post now, and you’ll have to click the nav buttons to go to the older ones.  The idea for doing this is that I should (in theory) be updating the footer section more frequently in the future, so I’d like to bring it closer to the top of the page.  I’m thinking of having Matt (when he’s got some time available) tweak the sidebar a bit, perhaps to remove the tag-cloud.

Anyway, if you notice any weirdness with the text formatting on the site, just try to ignore it, it’ll probably get fixed sometime next month.

This is the latest bit of spam that I found in my inbox a few minutes ago. It seems to be from a woman (actually probably a machine) named Marcella Dolan, and it simply says this:

Subject: Want to be a hero in bed?

Are U Tired with erectile dysfunction?
Enhance your sexual life now!
Want to be ready for sex in few minutes?
Reproductive and ED problems solution

http://geocities.com/XXXXXXX—REDACTED—XXXXXXX/

We are verified by VISA. Confidential purchase.

My response is this:
Yeah! I want to be a hero in bed. I’d love to be able to save the world, or even just a house all without leaving the comfort of my nice, warm bed. How do I do it?

No, I’m not tired of erectile dysfunction, but I am tired of all these emails that seem to think that I might have that issue, the truth is I don’t have a problem, that’s never happened before, I swear, it was just stress, really.

What sex life?

I already am ready in a few minutes, my place or yours?

Woah! We really shouldn’t be thinking about reproduction so soon in our relationship. I’m not ready to get tied down yet.

Geocities? Wow, they still have those sites?

Verified by Visa with a confidential purchase? Can’t I just use my old Texaco card? I could also offer some half-chewed jelly beans that I yanked out of my dog’s mouth earlier, I’m sure they’re still good.

For the love of all that is good in this world, can’t they see that they have a great looking button style in the finder and iTunes, and that they have a horrible, plasticy, cheap, pill-looking bunch of crap in Mail.app and Preview? These guys are supposed to be the paragons of great looking design, and they let that stinking pile of crap get through? Come on, its like the original brushed metal quicktime player all over again.

Someone, anyone, start a petition, stage a protest, bribe an Apple UI designer, do something, anything to make those god-awful capsule buttons go away. I’d rather look at one of those old flower-power iMacs all day than have to see those buttons every time I check my email or open a picture.

Oh, and they’re horrible in terms of usability too – you can’t tell which buttons are enabled unless you actually move your cursor over each one to see if it highlights or not, that’s just amateurish on so many levels its not funny.

Look at the schedule.

Web 1.0 – The “just show up line”. If you wanted to ride this train all you had to do was show up at the station. The whole point of this was to build something online, anything, it didn’t matter as long as you had something. Profit? Who cares. Revenue? Who cares? Budgets? Budgets are for pussies. Just get to the station and cram in, go on, don’t be shy, just cram in there. Well we all know what happened there. Like any train there are a limited number of seats, and people don’t like to sit on each other’s laps. This thing got more overloaded than a commuter train in India. Money flowed from investor’s bank accounts to founder’s wallets (and gas tanks, and mansions, and lavish parties, etc). It was like the bar in those old westerns where everyone would say “put it on my tab”, and you never saw any of those characters pay up at the end. This train left the station years ago, and already derailed because it was overloaded.

Web 2.0 – The “all about the user express”. This is where most people think we’re going now, the train they think is sitting on the platform ready to pull out. They’re wrong, the train already left quite awhile ago. Digg was on it. To ride this train you had to have something called “user generated content” all over your site. Of course the word “user” in that line should be a red flag. It means “internet user” and as we all know, quite a few internet users are actually pre-pubescent 12 year olds who need a significantly higher dosage of Ritalin (or some good old fashioned elephant tranquilizers and a good swift kick to the head). Seriously, go to digg.com, read the comments. Go to YouTube, read the comments. You can’t. They are of such low quality that they are unreadable, and that’s just the comments, can you imagine building a business that depends on those people producing content that is actually usable? Forget it. This train left the station a couple years ago, and no one can communicate with it because the signal to noise ratio is too low, and no one is paying for a lousy signal.

Web 3.0 – The “all about the editor limited”. This is where we actually are now. This train is on the platform and ready to leave the station. This is the stage where people start to try and boost the signal and filter out the noise. To do that you need an editor or a moderator, and a few companies have begun to figure this out. Take Mahalo’s approach for example, they say they want to have an actual human being edit the search results for the top however many sites on the net, or take Brijit where they have a human being helping you decide which articles are worth your time reading. These are both things google can’t do. Try a google search, what do you get? A whole lot of stuff to click through before you find what you really want, that’s what. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if you knew that you could find what you wanted easily because some one else had already found it for you and served it up on a nice little platter? Hell yes. Expect tons of people to be chasing this train down the tracks killing themselves trying to jump on as it pulls out. Also expect that, like all the other trains to come and go before it, the seating will be limited, and more expensive, and less people will be able to get on board than the previous train. Unfortunately you can also expect that those people will still not make any money. Yeah, I’m saying it, there isn’t a viable income model here. I’ve heard a lot of talk about people saying that this is where we are going, no, remember, it is where we already are, and those people are just behind schedule.

* Note: Some companies cough google cough will try to make this the “all about the algorithm limited”, totally missing the point of the much needed human factor. They’ll try to automate everything and let the computers decide what is ham and what is spam. And those efforts will be futile. A computer lacks the intuition to make those decisions and instead has to rely on statistics, and as a wise man once said “there are lies, damn lies and statistics”.

Web 4.0 – The “pay the rent special”. Finally we get to the golden age of rail road. Instead of cramming into box cars with folding chairs, or sitting behind a sooty steam engine in an open air car, or sitting in nice car without some of the niceties of travel, people (investors) should finally have learned to expect it all, and to not pony up their cash unless they get it. We’re talking branding (web 1), interaction (web 2), quality signal (web 3) and, oh yes, wait for it, profit. Yeah, web 4 really, truly has to be about finding an income model that works. By the time people have been through that many bubbles with the same group of people involved almost each time they hopefully will have learned that a web site isn’t a business, a company is a business. Until now most of these people have been sinking their money into sites without any real revenue model, on the blind faith of “growth” and “valuations”. Bad move. This stage has to be about building an actual, profitable business that will endure future changes, it can’t be just another stage about building the next coolest website. This train is overdue, and its the one we all should have been on in the first place but were to impatient to wait for.

So that’s the schedule. Each train comes and goes, and each train has fewer and fewer seats on it than the last one, and they each come and go faster than the last one. They’re each also harder to get on than the one before it. My proposal at this point is to ignore that nice, shiny Web 3.0 train getting ready to leave the station and instead get in line at the ticket window and buy a first class seat on the Web 4.0 “pay the rent special”. What that means is that you don’t go out to silicon valley and hit up some VC for millions of dollars and build your super cool web site. Instead you plot and plan, and take some small amount of your own money and prototype different things. Throw a bunch of inexpensive stuff against the wall and see what sticks, with your number one priority being to make money.

You see, if you don’t have a profit you don’t have a business, you either have a hobby or a charity. If you want to run a charity, then by all means, go out there and make the world a better place, but don’t pretend that you’re running a business. Oh, and if you want a hobby, don’t try to get other people to invest money in it for you.

Branding is great, that’s what web 1 was mainly good for, community is also great, that’s what we learned in web 2, in web 3 we’re learning that we don’t need an endless supply of thousands of sources of information, we just need the right amount of quality information. In web 4 we’d better find a way to leverage that to make money. Right now no one has found a reliable formula for generating profits with an online business (businesses that have an offline component are excluded from that statement). The closest anyone has come is the porn industry, but even there it isn’t a sure thing, and there’s a ton of risk. Shockingly when you have millions of porn sites on the net all vying for the same eyeballs, not everyone is making money. Also shockingly, when you’re in a hot button industry some people are getting hung up on all sorts of regulations. That’s a hostile market to start a business in, but right now it has the highest probability to making you money because they have one thing figured out – making money is important, and so they plan their sites around that concept from day one. They all have some revenue model they’re focusing on, even if they pick the wrong one or don’t execute it properly if they’ve picked the right one.

The problem with the mainstream companies is that they seem to take the attitude of “we’ll worry about the money later”, and they build a great site, and when the bills come due they don’t have a revenue stream. These people usually turn to advertising, but (again, shockingly) there aren’t enough ad buyers to match up with all the ad sellers. If you’re depending on advertising to build an empire and join the list of the Forbes 100, you’re going to be disappointed. Advertising might make one lonely webmaster on a well-written, popular blog enough money to live very, very comfortably, but it isn’t going to support an entire company. Can you imagine if Apple gave away their computers and put ads on them to try and pay the bills? People would gladly take the free computer, but Apple wouldn’t make enough money off of those ads to support all of their employees, oh, and a good number of those people who took the free computer would hack it to get rid of the ads, further driving down the prices that ad buyers are willing to pay. No, slapping a banner ad on your page isn’t going to cut it. The only people that can make a boatload of money off of ads are the companies like google that broker the sales and get to dictate the terms. So if you want to make a fortune off of ads, you’d better build an ad platform, not a content site.

Some people will try (and have tried) the walled garden approach where they take their content and charge a membership fee for it. Again (shockingly) there are only so many subscription purchases to go around, and eventually people will say “well I pay for these sites already, I’m not gonna sign up for another one”.

So if advertising won’t work for everyone, and subscriptions won’t work for everyone, what will? This is what I don’t know yet, and I don’t think anyone else does either, but sometime during the web 4.0 bubble someone will figure it out.

So to recap: Web 4.0 will be about the countless attempts to build an actual business. A successful web 4.0 business will have great branding, a loyal community, a high signal to noise ratio, and an actual business model that makes its owners money. Oh, and because of that last point, it will probably be a fairly lean operation with scrupulous spending controls (not quite Scrooge McDuck-like but close). I highly doubt that the most successful of those companies will be started out west in the valley.