The Hottest of the Hot: The emerging Anoto paper Web interface Website Garage: Check your download speed Optimize your Site: Webmonkey tells you how Media Skins: Apple's newest way to look way kewl	Outbox Web Marketing Newsletter, Volume 1, #2 , March 19, 2001 Copyright 2001, Paul Stokstad. All rights reserved.
	Wow, two issues. Who would have thought last week that we'd still be publishing in a week, but here we are! Amazing. This week's topic is: Dance With Who Brung Ya If we are looking at a tree with some exotic fruit, which has developed due to grafting this or that branch onto the original trunk, we can learn a lot by studying the original tree. Whoever successfully grafted the new branches on had to do some research, had to know what kind of a tree he/she was dealing with, and just how far the grafted branch could differ from the original and still survive. On the web we started with an information-sharing culture. We had large universities sharing research information, databases, and sending e-mails back and forth. It was a collaborative environment. Then some businesses that work closely with the academic sector wanted in. Let's say I'm a scientist over at Boeing, and my former professor at Stanford is doing some cool research, and I want to talk to him. So I hear that he is sending electronic messages back and forth via "e-mail." Maybe Boeing and Stanford have a little funded research project going on together. So Boeing gets in to the fledgling web. For e-mail, file sharing, etc. Then somebody wants to know if there is any way he could get this electronic information over a dial-up network, just in case he can't come in to the office. So, the modem/web server technology evolves. And someone sees a business opportunity to charge for the dial-up servers, and hooks them up to the original academic network of servers, and the first ISP, or Internet Service Provider is born. Not long after this, Mark Andreesen releases his Mosaic code on the world, and hypertext linked information can be enhanced with the colors, font sizes, graphics, and photos of a visual interface. But it's still information sharing. Research graphics. Charts. Graphs. Finally, someone suggests that he'd like to sell something to some of these people. Can he sell something online? It's a big question, because the Internet pipe and all of the servers are provided by the government via grants to Universities and the consortium that runs the whole network. Government money and academic research has in most cases funded the technical specifications to make the web happen. People laughed at Gore's "claim" to founding the Internet, but in a way he did, since he was involved with the original government-funded research that made the web possible. Plus, he did coin the phrase "information superhighway." So it wasn't clear that you could sell online. Luddites Are Everywhere The Luddites were an anti-machines group in England during the Industrial revolution. Now the term has gone through what is technically termed semantic generalization to mean anyone who bemoans the expansion of technology and longs for "the way it was." In some ways, it's amazing to think that this can even happen in an environment as high tech as the Internet. But it does, since there are people that wish that the web had never become commercialized. Your web purists will occasionally pop up with their disdain for the rampant disease of commercial websites selling everything from sex to socks. In other words, there are those online Luddites who have never adjusted to ANYTHING being sold online. Keep this in Mind It will be good to keep this in mind if you are relatively new to the web. And relatively new means that you arrived online with e-mail sometime in the last three years, and got your website up in the last year or so. It explains a lot if you understand this one thing. It explains why spam is hated with a virulence usually reserved for the organizers of Kristallnacht back in Nazi Germany. It explains why many websites fall on their faces and nobody visits or buys anything, or if they do visit by some minor miracle, they "bye," and never come back. The Web Is A Potluck The fact is, the root of this tree called the web is a gifting culture. It's not a selling culture. It's built out of people GIVING stuff to each other. Out of people sharing information with each other for FREE. It's hard to compete with free. Imagine a potluck where someone brought the potato salad, someone else brought a main dish, another guy (bachelor) brought chips or drinks, there's jello, cookies, pie, salad, paper plates with people laughing and helping themselves, and then, into the middle of the party walks someone selling hot dogs. It just doesn't fit. Everyone else brought something to give, and this one guy is hawking his wares, "HOT dogs! Get your sooper HOT dogs!" Is it surprising that the people that came to the party first get a little offended? Still, it's a concept. Some potlucks suck in terms of things you'd want to eat, depending on your particular diet (let's not get started). Maybe if you set up your shop out on the street, or show up later in the afternoon when everyone is playing softball. Dance With Who Brung Ya Maybe you didn't make it to the afternoon potluck. Maybe you just got invited to the dance, a little later in the day. If you came to the dance with a nice guy, a giving guy, it's good to dance with him at least to start out with. Hence the street level, "motha-wit" title of this article. As a phenomenon that started out with a gifting and sharing mentality, the core user base of the web bought into an informal, non-confrontational, casual environment where the USER is king. So, it really doesn't matter to the core web user WHAT you are trying to sell him. What the primordial web user wants to know is, what do you have on the table? He wants to know if you are here at the celebration or not. Are you AT the party, or are you SELLING to the party. Are you just the caterer (in which case please do your work quietly and stay out of the way, and please clean up your mess), or are you here to party? Join the Party If you say that you are here to join the party, then we have to see you on the dance floor. At the potluck we wanted to see that you brought enough food to serve eight or ten people. You had to give something back into the mix. If you are at the dance, you would do well to be out there shakin' it on the dance floor. not just cruisin the scene for babes. We want to see you sweat a little, adding to the FUN. You have to show INVOLVEMENT. You would do well to be a web USER. As a web USER you would be expected to understand the web, to understand people's feelings, to understand the game. If you don't understand the game, you are an insidious version of what used to be called a "newbie." A newbie was a new web user, not always a popular guest in a chat group. But sometimes they were encouraged and coddled. For a while. The new, insidious version is the web culture-insensitive marketer out stinking up e-mail in-boxes with artificially flavored ground-up dead stuff. That nobody ordered. But you don't have to bring Spam to the party (and charge us for downloading it). You can be a highly desired guest. A sophisticated web user can probably tell whether you and your website are involved, giving, helping enrich the world and the web, or just selling. Are you telling a cool story? Are you entertaining? Do you have some great stock tip or story or life-enhancing wisdom to throw in to the conversation? If so, welcome to the party. If not, I don't think whoever brung ya will want to dance with you anyway. Thanks for reading... Paul Johan Stokstad March 18, 2001 Comments? Next Week: Couch Potato to Couch Participant