Scripting News for 11/28/2006

Thomas Hawk: “I’m scared of Google’s stock price.” 

Yahoo says they improved Yahoo TV, but imho, they broke it. The listings page, which until today was the only page I knew or cared about (they just added a bunch of community features) took a few seconds to load, now it’s an Ajax thing, and it loads as you scroll. Great. There’s a delay every time I hit Page Down. Now instead of finding out if there’s anything on in seconds it takes minutes. That’s an improvement? 

Mark Cuban explains why it’s going to be a long time before our computers connect up to our HD TVs in HD. 

Wes Felter says that “most people” don’t want to connect their computers to a TV. Well, most people, in the day in horses and buggies, didn’t want to ride in an internal combustion engine-driven mobility device, but today it’s impossible to live in modern society without using the darned things. I want to connect my Mac to a TV, and in fact I bought a Mac just to be part of my home entertainment system, and Wes, get this, I watch it a lot more than I watch the danged settop box, even though my Mac can’t produce an HD signal, and I love HD. Go figure. Maybe I can do things with my Internet-connected Mac that I can’t do with a settop box? Wes, open your mind, stop thinking about connecting PCs to TVs and think of computers that are part of a home entertainment system, and it’ll all of a sudden start making sense. Even better, spring for a few hundred bucks and get a Mac Mini, and stare at the the back of it and the back of your TV for a few minutes and you’ll see what’s missing. Or save yourself a few bucks and re-read Cuban’s piece and think he’s a smart guy instead of a dumb asshole.  

New feature. Every time I save Scripting News, the content system chooses a header graphic from the collection of 78 previous graphics. It’s random. You never know what you’re going to get. (Update: I found a 79th. I expect I’ll keep finding them for a while. I wasn’t always so careful about noting the new ones.) 

And then there are the header graphics that never ran. Like this blowup of the white on orange XML icon. An inversion of my grandfather and his friends. A Thomas Hawk masterpiece. 

Emily Shurr of News.com thinks Hedy Lamarr should be one of the ten girl geeks. Makes total sense.  

BBC: “Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.” 

Paul Boutin offers “a couple of rules I learned in my career as an evil mainstream media writer.” 

Bubble Burst 2.0 

In the late 90s, the period of irrational exuberance, we knew the end would come, and we knew what the end would look like — a stock market crash of the dotcom sector. So, if Web 2.0 is a bubble, and if like all bubbles it bursts, how will we know when it happens?

I almost wrote a piece yesterday saying that since the Web 2.0 companies aren’t going public, they’re safe from busting in a visible, dramatic way. I almost said it will be hard to tell when the bust comes, it’ll be softer and slower, you won’t hear a crash or even a pop. But I was wrong, and today we got the first rumblings of the shock that will signal the end of the bubble.

Google stock will crash. That’s how we’ll know.

When I realized this, I should have known, because I’ve been saying for almost a year that Web 2.0 is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google. Startups slicing little bits of Google’s P/E ratio, acting as sales reps for Google ads, and getting great multiples for the revenue they generate by fostering the creation of new UGC to place ads on. When Google crashes, that’s the end of that, no more wave to ride, no more aftermarket, Bubble Burst 2.0. And the flip of this is also true — as long as Google’s stock stays up, no bubble burst.