1 Comment I love the inevitable technobabble on many television dramas, and tonight’s “24″ served up a few doozies. The CTU agent Chloë O’Brien had escaped from holding and was helping Jack Bauer by accessing the systems from a remote location. A Homeland Security operative assured the station chief he could find her saying, “I can trace her physical location by examining the binary.” I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny, since even my puny English-major brain knows nearly any binary code would be practically useless. Chloë is certainly accessing the system through some kind of VPN system (or as she called it “a subnet”) which would encrypt the data. Looking at the binary would hardly be a workaround for encrypted transmissions.
The operative’s technique apparently worked, however, since another civil servant later said, “Tell her he used a machine-coded matrix to find her.” Darn those machine-coded matrices, standing in the way of truth, justice, and the Jack Bauer way.
New York magazine has an interesting piece by Inside.com founder Kurt Andersen on the business side of the current generation of internet media. I’m hesistant to call it Web 2.0, since that term implies a raft of technologies and design philosophies that don’t necessarily apply to some of the projects he describes. (For example, I’d admit the blogging phenomenon as Web 2.0, but for-profit blogs just seem like niche media properties, a low-overhead version of the trade press.) The primary point he makes, which others have made elsewhere, is that the new businesses like YouTube resist taking a lot of venture capital money. I do wonder, however, how a business like YouTube, which is heavily dependent on bandwidth and server capacity, can operate for long without a serious cash infusion, not to mention the inevitable intellectual property litigation.
Andersen quotes John Battelle, a founder of the Industry Standard saying “I have the same tingly feeling I had with magazines.” I’ve got to say, that some of these projects give me the same feeling of dread I have with magazines, but I worked at a technology publisher during the dot-com crash. At the end of my three-year publishing career, I was the only editor out of a dozen that was still working in the office where I started. Oddly, Folio, a trade magazine for trade magazines, named the CEO of my former employer one of the executives of the year, saying he turned the company from a “dot-com disaster to a new media player.” Fair enough, but it was no fun being mired in the wreckage of a failed business plan.
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