RIP Old Media

I laughed the other day when I read that the Chairman of AP, Dean Singleton rattled his sabers at Google and Yahoo. Poor guy, he just doesn't get it. "AP Fighting to Reclaim Revenue From Web Portals"

In 1996 Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Lab published "Being Digital". It is still a great read and highly recommended.

Being Digital opened my eyes to what the future held. It is still a great read and highly recommended.

Negroponte taught me the difference between atoms and bits. It is not atoms that we want, it is bits that we want. We don't want a CD (atoms), we want the music (bits) that is on the CD. We don't want a DVD (atoms) we want the content on the DVD (bits). And we certainly don't want a newspaper, we want the content that is printed on it.

To much ridicule (I'm 61) as most of my contemporaries thought I was nuts, I proclaimed the Internet the backbone of the future. "CB radio of the '90's" I heard. "A passing fad" they said.

About the same time I heard a radio interview, Fresh Air I think, with Andy Grove then Chairman of Intel. In the interview Grove said that by the following year more individual Email's would be sent than letters through postal mail. A few days later I mentioned this to a VC that I was pitching and he laughed in my face.

Executives in the Music, Movie, Newspaper and Magazine industries apparently didn't read Professor Negroponte's book and if they did they didn't understand it or laughed at it.

At the time I recognized the need for a catalog of Web sites (we got Yahoo! and LookSmart)and was having the conversation about what the economic model for the Web would look like. I was assured that Web sites linking to content would have to pay publishers for the right to link to it. I didn't see it that way because I believed that the Internet would dominate media, communications and much more from that point forward.

I would love to see Google and Yahoo! grant Mr. Singleton his wish and stop linking to AP headlines for a week or so. AP better keep the paddles handy, Mr. Singleton's reaction would be interesting.