Saturday 30 March 2002

Pic of the day: Are we all going to be nodes in a great network? (Actually just another fractal. Cheap, easy, pretty.)

Non profit Net prophet

I got an e-mail today from Infogate. This company is the successor to some other company - Entrypoint, I think - who was the successor of Pointcast, of which I have written repeatedly before. There may have been one more generation inbetween, I'm not sure. Anyway, they told me that they had closed their free service, but would deliver USA TODAY news at a price.

In one of my other Internet venues, online comics, there is a fairly new business model being tried on for size over at ModernTales. You subscribe, at the modest price at ca $3 per month, and can read the archives of all the comics that belong there. Advertising just doesn't cut it in these troubled times. (Not that it ever did, for most online comics.)

This may be a good idea, in principle. It is just too bad that only one and a half of these comics are worth reading even for free. The good one is The Circle Weave, which has both plot and professional quality drawing, in color no less. The Makeshift Miracle is not too bad either, though the plot is either hazy or slow-moving: From the start and up to now, it has consistently failed to make sense. The drawing is unique in style, though, and the characters intriguing. Still, I doubt I would have paid for it, much less $3 a month, even if I could. And I can't. The payment options don't work for a foreigner such as I am. I have tried to use Paypal before (to pay for my LiveJournal account), but got rejected without any explanation. My best guess is that I have non-standard characters in my address, but it's hard to say for sure.

I'm sorry, but "professional webcomics" implies not just that you want to be paid, but that you are good enough to pay for. Almost all of these are of such poor quality that I didn't even bother to read them when they were free. You'd have much better luck going to The Nice. Several of these are actually quite good. There are also some gems among the clods on Keenspot. Usually you can tell at a glance ... mostly the ones with the good drawing also have the good plot, for some obscure reason.

***

The dotcom death is announced, accepted and archived. Yet e-trade is growing fast, and here in Norway at least Net banking is rapidly becoming the norm. (As well it should, when Skandiabanken offers more than 6% interest on deposits and no transaction fees, while the traditional banks offer 0.5-2% and fees on payments and withdrawals. If you have the choice between paying or being paid for the same thing, you'll tend to consider after a while.) With pervasive e-banking comes e-bills, fully paperless payment.

Net shopping is still hampered by the clumsy interface, where customers can hardly find out whether they have already ordered the goods or not, much less what it will actually cost including freight and billing costs. Even experienced Net users have trouble with this. No doubt this is another heritage from the time you could just stand in the street crying "Internet!" and people would come throw millions at you. No need to make a product that actually worked. I bet that will change.

***

Hmm. I thought I was going somewhere with this. Something about how the old law of economics don't count anymore (but not in the way people imagined - you don't get free money, you get free stuff!) and something about the guy who fed thousands of people with a few bread and fishes because there was more left the more he shared ...

But I don't remember how to get to there from here. So I'm just going to share what I have, and let you do the rest.