*This is awesome, really. These we-the-media blogerati
can cause actual, real-world, viral-marketed tech development
just by talking about it! It's as if they said, "Hey, you know,
we like hot water" and the town arises as one and a water reservoir
appears, because everybody takes one spoonfull of dirt.
I do see the self-serving conflict-of-interest being decried
by the WALL STREET JOURNAL (the "well-your-another"
of journalists who suck-up to the business community),
but this situation is truly weird. It's as if the WSJ had said, "we need to kill some trees for our pulp mills" and a vast forest grew up overnight.
The key here? The *geeks who are buying these FON
boxes* are in exactly the same moral conundrum as the
top dogs of the FON "movement." That's
their *business model.* They are implicated as a class.
You can't buy into it without buying into what they've
already done.
If you open your FON wifi signal and
nobody much picks up, hey, it's no biggy, you're just
a nice guy, you're Linus Torvalds' little brother. But if you
happen to open a FON wifi in a heavily trafficked area,
hey, you're gonna make some money. See that structure?
Big bloggers get rich, little bloggers do it for the Revolution!
And the blog-trafficking Power Law sorts out who's got the power.
And who's the biggest blogger here, the Lenin,
the Mao? It's Varsavsky, the guy who FOUNDED THE COMPANY
and is also a blogger! He's blogging the FON company
right in front of all the other bloggers! He's just kinda
sitting there tossing EU18,000,000 in a big canvas bag!
I can hear 'em drooling from here!
*This has definitely got the sardine stink of a pump-and-dump
boiler room outfit, and also Friends of Quattrone dot-com bubble
ring... A Ponzi scheme, even... but it's also something really new in the world. This is an attention-economy entrepreneurial class.
They're taking teeny-tiny garage notions, puffing them up,
and bumping them over the hump from a laboratory
question mark into a rising commercial star. They're
making a de-centered, radically distributed business out of accelerating tech development.
Maybe that'll work, maybe not. But! If yes, then it's gonna be really interesting to see what these revolutionary protocrats make
of the problems of a success. Managing cash cows. Even Google and Skype are still inflating radically. What is "the
movement" gonna do when and if it's not "moving,
but in power?
"The Revolution eats its young," that's the usual answer. But blogging was invented by unemployed dot-commies who've
already been stung once in Web Bust 1.0. You'd think maybe they
would anticipate that development, this time.
Maybe I'll understand it better next month at the
ETech conference in San Diego, which looks like protocrats
wall to wall.
Blog Buzz on High-Tech Start-Ups
Causes Some Static
By REBECCA BUCKMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 9, 2006; Page B4
"When Spanish Internet start-up FON Technology SL tried to generate some buzz this past weekend about new funding it had snared from Google Inc. andeBay Inc.'s Skype Technologies, it pitched stories to traditional media outlets.
"But the tiny company also got publicity from another source: influential commentators on the Internet who write blogs – including some who may be compensated in the future for advising FON about its business.
"Most of the nine members of FON's U.S. advisory board, including former newspaper journalist Dan Gillmor, technology author David Weinberger and Internet-law expert Wendy Seltzer, wrote about FON on their blogs late Sunday. That was right after FON founder Martin Varsavsky revealed on his own blog that the closely held company had raised $21.7 million in funding from Google, Skype and others, declaring it "a dream come true."
(...)
