Marty-Lee, "A Nation of Net Merchants"
Care to pull one up of your classics for the ZDNET readers in the Talk Back Articles?
zdnet.com
Nobody does it like you do.
Best Regards,
Brian
Note the final sentence…
By Jim Louderback, ZDTV
March 5, 1999 9:36 AM PT
Brian's a painter. He's been painting abstract
and surrealistic canvases for as long as I can
remember. After a degree in painting from
Bennington and an MFA from Hunter, he
teaches art at a private New York school. And
he keeps painting, turning out 30 or so
masterpieces every year. He's had a few shows,
sold a few pieces, and developed some fans.
But it's hard being an artist in the age of Martha
Stewart.
When the Internet first
hit, conventional
wisdom predicted that
it would turn us all into
publishers. No longer
would the printed word
be the domain of
ivory-tower editors. Let a thousand million
Websites bloom, pundits cried, liberating the
prose and poetry locked up in the common man,
woman, child and dog.
Kimberly likes to paint furniture. She visits
garage sales and rescues old pieces with
substance. Using a palette of bright, childlike
colors, she turns furniture into folk art. Her house
is full of charming, unique pieces, and her
friends urge her to sell them. But it's hard to be a
craftsman in the age of Pottery Barn.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the
Internet forum. Literacy rates dropped, Oprah
started a book club, and only a few sleazoids
like Matt Drudge actually started successfully
publishing themselves. We all forgot one key
aspect of American culture: Not many of us
really like to write. And even fewer of us are any
good at it.
Jon, Erik, Reid and Luke have a band. They're
pretty good, and have made a few fans along
the way. They play fun music, hold intricate jams,
and please a good bunch of people wherever
they go. But the odds are long that they'll strike it
rich on the rock-n-roll slot machine. Labels today
are shedding bands, not adding new ones. It's
hard to be a musician in the era of MTV.
So today, most of the words we read on the
Web are penned by either a group of publishers
who've made the successful transition to the
Web, like Ziff-Davis, or new publishers who've
built big enterprises out of delivering words via
browser. Although independent publishers
abound, and some are even quite good, they've
mostly usurped the newsletters and fanzines of
the pre-Internet era.
John's a chef. He's pretty darn good, but living in
the wilds of Alaska makes it tough to build a
name for yourself. He's created some amazing
dishes from the fruits of that land. He hunts and
fishes, and can put together a meal for two or 20
that will amaze you. He could even send those
meals anywhere in the U.S., overnight. But no
one knows who he is. It's hard to be a chef in the
age of Emerill.
Nope, we aren't a nation of writers. We're hardly
a nation of readers either. But what we are,
undoubtedly, is a nation of merchants. We
create things, refurbish things, or just collect and
sell stuff made by others. We're a lot more like
Sam Wall than Sam Clemens.
Pat really likes garage sales. Weekend
mornings will find him bombing around San
Francisco in his old pickup, a cup of coffee in
one hand, and a tattered copy of the classifieds
in another. He'll swoop in, pick the treasure from
the trash, and head off in an instant. When he's
not visiting garage sales, he's throwing his own.
Sooner or later the Internet's going to turn most
of us into merchants. E-commerce is big, but
most of the attention has been on huge cluster
sites like Amazon and Buy.Com. I think the
ability for each of us to open our own stores is
even more compelling. Inside most of us or
around us in our house, is something we want to
sell. Some of us will do it sporadically; others will
keep the store open 365 days a year.
The Internet is the great leveler. Sure, those big
commerce sites will dominate mass-produced
goods. But there's so much more that you and I
want to sell. And that's why I'm excited about
Web sites like iCat and eBay, where anyone
can create their own store, or sell their favorite
junk.
As Internet searching tools become better, and
as continuous Internet connections become
standard, those shops may end up inside our
homes, rather than hosted by someone else.
Maybe WebTV 2001 ought to have a built in
Visa validator.
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