• by Bill McCloskey , June 26, 2001

One day after watching the movie Glen Gerry Glen Ross I went out and bought one of those Tony Robbins motivational tapes. Listening to it in the car, I actually physically cringed when he quoted a Neil Diamond song and claimed it was pivotal in his self-development. Right there and then I swore I never quote a song lyric in anything I wrote.

Well, I lied: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, " said Joni Mitchell, when she wrote songs you could hum to.

The reason I'm thinking of this lyric is due to the news that the High Court has ruled that online publishers and database companies have infringed on freelancer's copyrights by including their articles in online databases without paying them or even informing them that they had been archived.

Six writers sued the New York Times and Newsday back in 1993 claiming they should have received extra pay for work that ended up on CD-ROM's and in databases like Nexus-Lexus. This was of course before the Net was THE NET and all that information was freely available at the touch of keypad for free.

As a result of this ruling hundreds of thousands of articles are being deleted. The New York Times alone is dumping more than 115,000 articles in the biggest purge of information since Attila the Hun sacked the libraries of Greece. Of course, I'm sure that's not what the writer's wanted: they wanted to be paid, not deleted. But, as my favorite British Game Show host says: "It's votes that count," so writers just might find themselves the weakest (hyper)link and the rest of us might have to live with the fact that important archives of information have just been, essentially, wiped out forever.

Great online content is drying up faster than dew on a hot tin roof. Every day I search the Net for research and info and every day (more and more) what looks like great content when it pops up in my Google search engine results, turns out (more often than not) to be "Content Not Found" pages. The notion that people won't pay for content, combined with the advertising crash has made interesting online content scarcer than hen's teeth.

When CNet originally introduced the Messaging Plus unit, I applauded it as a boost to online advertising. One of the smoking emails I received was from a guy (a direct marketer no less) who said he would never agree to this invasion of his private reading space by something as crass as advertising. He would go find his content elsewhere. After all this is the Net: information is everywhere, right? He'll just go to the next online pub for his tech info.

Well, maybe not.

The greatest communication medium since the Guttenberg Press is fast becoming an online world of junk mail and strip malls. Everyone seems to be reveling in the downfall like angry mob looting stores in their own neighborhood.

Oh well, paradise was nice while it lasted.

And while I'm grousing...

Hey vendors out there! (You know who you are.) For Pete's sake, make sure your stuff works before you show it to me. I probably see demos of more rich media technologies than anyone on the face of the planet. The good thing is that I'm a great audience. The bad thing is that I know all the difficult questions to ask and I ask them.

Don't get me wrong: I don't expect something to be perfect when I see it. In fact I'm a great person to show stuff too when it's in development phase. And I've done enough demos to know how bad things can get.

But lately, I've been getting the kind of vendors that prep me by telling me their stuff is not only great but they have deals pending with God himself. And then they proceed to show me stuff that hasn't even been tested in the most rudimentarily way: it crashes my browser, it looks bad, it freezes, it claims to be able to sniff my connection speed and then treats me like I'm on a 28.8 modem when I'm really on a Cable modem. You name it.

If your stuff hasn't been tested, its not good for rich media: it makes everyone's life more difficult, especially those great vendors who are doing things right. Take my advice: take your time; get it right the first time. You may not get a second chance.

Okay, I promise: next week I'll be feeling much, much better.

- Bill McCloskey is Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, an organization dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging technologies. He may be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.