1. Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry)
2. 2010 Mario AI Championship -- three tracks: Gameplay, Learning, and Level Generation. Found via Ben Weber's account of his Level Generation entry. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels.
3. Wave in a Box -- Google to flesh out existing open source Wave client and server into full "Wave in a Box" app status.
4. 3D Sound in Google Earth (YouTube) -- wow. (via Planet In Action)

For an agency that is charged with regulating communications, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has been a bit behind the curve in evolving its online presence. FCC.gov was launched in June 1995, redesigned in 1999, and relaunched again in September 2001. Since then, it has remained a largely static repository for public notices and information about the agency's action.

According to FCC officials, that's going to change, and soon. There was already some insight offered into redesigning the FCC website back in January on the agency blog, informed at least in part by discussions with Sunlight Labs on redesigning the government.

Yesterday, I interviewed FCC managing director ‪Steven VanRoekel at FCC headquarters about what rebooting FCC.gov‬ will mean for the agency, businesses and the American people. "The new site will embrace open government principles around communication and participation," said VanRoekel. "Consider OpenInternet.gov, where over 30,000 ideas were generated, or Broadband.gov. Comments there go into the official record and are uploaded to the Library of Congress. You will see that in a much more pervasive way in the new FCC.gov."

Our short video interview is below. An extended interview follows.

Redesigning FCC websites for public comment

In January, the FCC launched Reboot.gov and asked for public input on improving citizen interaction. The site, which was touted as the first website to solicit citizen interaction with the FCC, followed the launch of Broadband.gov and OpenInternet.gov last year. All three websites are notable for their clean design and integration of new media components (blogs, Twitter, etc). Chairman Julius Genachowski's introduction to the site is embedded below:

Improving public access to the FCC's operation is part of a new mentality, according to VanRoekel: "Last year, the chairman talked about entrepreneurs taking a rotation through government. We think a lot about bringing in great leadership and managing people around leadership. We were third from the bottom last year in rankings for the best places to work in federal government. We hired a new team to bring in a new culture, which means looking at citizens as shareholders."

One of the stated aims of Reboot.gov was to gather feedback on how FCC.gov itself can be redesigned, a project that, as noted above, is long overdue. The announcement of the new site, for instance, showed up in email but was not posted in plain text on FCC.gov. Like other releases, it showed up as a Word doc and PDF on the site. That said, the FCC has picked up the pace of its communications over the past year, as anyone who has followed the @FCC on Twitter knows.

Aside from the cleaner design of the new microsites and an embrace of social media, open government geeks and advocates took note of FCC.gov/data, which is meant to be "an online clearinghouse for the Commission's public data." The FCC has posted XML feeds and search tools for its documents that allow users to sort data by type and bureau.

Under the Media Bureau, for instance, visitors can explore DTV Station Coverage Maps, a key issue to many given the transition to digital TV earlier this year. But the maps are on the old FCC.gov. For those who don't enjoy good public DTV reception, they'd have to find the tiny icon for DTV.gov below the fold and click through to get more information.

That kind of reciprocal citizen-to government interaction is precisely where the potential for these sites can be best realized, and where good design matters. So-called Web 1.0 tools like static websites, email and SMS used to share information about the quality of services. Web 2.0 services like blog comments and social media have, in turn, been deployed to gather feedback from citizens about the delivery of said services. The FCC began to pursue that potential in earnest in March, when the FCC went mobile and launched iPhone and Android apps for crowdsourced broadband speed testing.

The potential for empowering citizens and developers with open data s where VanRoekel focused first when we talked.

"We'll be announcing a couple of things next week at the Gov 2.0 Summit," he said. "Since we launched the speed test, we've gathered over a million data points. That continues to grow each day. We're going to launch a web services API where people can write apps against the speed test data. You'll be able to send us a GPS coordinate and we'll give you data against it."

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Managing Director Steven VanRoekel will discuss their experiences turning FCC.gov into a 21st-century consumer resource at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 7-8). Request an invitation.

If incorporated into Zillow.com or the thousands of online real estate brokerages, that kind of interaction has the potential to give people what they need to make more informed rental or buying decisions. "When I click on a house on a real estate site, why don't I see what broadband capabilities are there?" asked VanRoekel. "We're approaching .gov like .com. We're not only setting up data services and wrapping the API, but we're building apps as well, and utilizing the same APIs we expect developers to use."

A consistent challenge across government for releasing open data has been validation and accuracy. The FCC may employ crowdsourcing to address the quality issue. "Think about a map of broadband speeds," VanRoekel explained. "I would love the ability for users to show us what's valid."

Balancing transparency and open government

As a regulatory body, the FCC has both great power and great responsibility, to put it in terms that Stan Lee might appreciate. Despite the arcane nature of telecommunications law, the agency's decisions have the potential to affect every citizen in the nation. As VanRoekel pointed out, the FCC must follow administrative procedures and publish drafts of rulemaking for public comment, followed by a vote by the commissioners. In the age of the Internet and the open government directive, that process is due for the same reboot the FCC.gov will receive.

"Once approved, language in the APA [Administrative Procedure Act] says government will open up the notice of draft rules to enlighten public decision-making," said VanRoekel. "In the past, what that's meant is us putting it up on a website, in PDFs. Law firms would send clerks, who would photocopy folders and come back with comments at the draft rule. There was no way for an educator or an affected family to get involved. It's our vision that every rule that's up for decision in this agency will be opened for public input."

The first draft of that effort has been on display at OpenInternet.gov. "We made it so that an idea entered into our engines was entered into the public record," VanRoekel said. "An interesting fact there is that you, as a citizen or industry body, can see the comments and hold us legally liable."

The FCC is faced with difficulties that derive from handling the explosion of online feedback that contentious issues like net neutrality generate. "The volume of comments becomes our problem," he said. "When you have 30,000 ideas coming in and comments on top of them on the record, and we have a limited number of people that oversee the effort, that's our biggest challenge."

"There's a role to play on certain meetings where ex parte comes into play," said VanRoekel. "We tend to use ex parte as a mechanism for understanding. We ask vendors specific questions. Many times there are questions that involve their intellectual property."

The agency has since ended closed-door meetings, but the episode highlights the complexity of enacting new regulations in the current media climate.

Yesterday, in fact, as the New York Times reported, the FCC agency released a public notice seeking more input on open Internet rules, which the agency duly tweeted out as a PDF. The document is embedded below.

Ars Technica and others criticized the agency for asking more questions instead of taking action.

Will the FCC get net neutrality right?. Hard to say. The Center for Democracy and Technology, by way of contrast, endorsed the FCC focusing in on key issues in the net neutrality debate "as a good sign that the FCC is rolling up its sleeves to grapple with the most contentious issues." As my colleague Andy Oram pointed out this week, the net neutrality debate depends upon what you fear. The only safe bet here is that OpenInternet.gov is likely to get a fresh batch of public comment to take into the record.

Addressing the digital divide

Online debates over net neutrality or the proposed broadband plan leave out a key constituency: the citizens who do not have access to the Internet. The information needs of communities in a democracy were the focus of the recent report by the Knight Commission.

To that point, VanRoekel spoke with the Sunlight Foundation's executive director, Ellen Miller, earlier this year about how everyone is changing everything. Their conversation is embedded below:

In our interview, VanRoekel focused on how mechanisms of community activation can be used to include disconnected people.

VanRoekel pointed to the growth of mobile access and social media uptake in communities that have been traditionally less connected. That's a focus that is substantiated by Pew Research that shows citizens turning to the Internet for government data, policy and services, particularly minority communities.

Traditional outreach is still viable as well. Community organizers can reach people on the ground and involve key constituencies. "We also can go back to 800 numbers," he said. "Using voice to offer access and adding the ability to enter into the public record."

Related:

• Web 2.0 risks and rewards for federal agencies
• Opening the doors of government to innovation
• The Network Neutrality Debate: It All Depends on What You Fear

Three significant trends in the local sector -- deals, check-ins, and place pages -- are on a bender and headed for an exciting convergence. When they meet we will see one of three things: a train wreck of incompatibility, an awkward confluence, or a very powerful alignment. I'm hoping for the latter, a sort of local syzygy, because a well-conceived orchestration of these trends will benefit the consumer and it has real potential to take us entirely out of the Yellow Pages era and into exciting, unexplored territory.

This is a two-part post: here I look in more detail at check-ins, deals, and place products (including, briefly, the adventurously named Facebook Places) with an eye to what might follow. In a following post I will discuss how we may more actively ease their convergence with linked data and some basic adherence to extant standards, specifically how these efforts will affect the local consumer.

Place pages and check-ins

The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience but, for now, it works, and this is what is most important about any product. However successful it is now, the check-in will remain an interim solution for identifying long-term customer/business affinities and physical point of presence. So what's next?

I've written about check-ins previously: since then, Facebook has thrown its hat into the ring with their own place/check-in product, offering little feature distinction outside the problematic ability to check-in your friends on their behalf . Thanks to Facebook, the "Ferris Bueller Problem" -- in which a friend checks you into (say) the Von Steuben Day Parade when you are officially at home, sick -- may soon find its way into mainstream parlance. Expect a rise in just-for-larks in absentia check-ins to the local "gentlemen's club" and similar places of sophomoric amusement.

More interestingly, casual requests for a similar product from LinkedIn, and the introduction of a third-party check-in offering for Twitter demonstrate that geo and social products are becoming more integrated in the mind of the consumer, and corporate product strategies: Greg Sterling remarked on this trend recently in yp.com's new eat, play, live marketing campaign which attempts to transform the brand from its staid origins into "a lifestyle guide that also happens to feature contractors and plumbers." He is spot-on: some lines of business will not fit within the check-in model, but they nonetheless must be accommodated in any successful business-to-consumer product.

I have no desire to see another check-in clone arrive anytime soon. Jeff Holden, the founder of Whrrl, recently noted that the check-in will shortly be a commodity, and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley believes it already is. If you are an entrepreneur or developer thinking of building a new check-in service, please don't. Instead, consider some of the more exciting challenges that provide real consumer benefit:

• Divorce the business from user authentication and social network: Social/local apps are entirely insular: you must be a Foursquare user using a Foursquare app (or the Foursquare API) to check into a Foursquare venue. I can see why this is, but it need not be. For example, consider an alternative platform where users supply instead an authenticated OpenID and an hcard. Authenticated user-to-venue relationships could be exposed across multiple social networks under the user's control, and the access control list could even accommodate attribute criteria such as place type or business category. This is not simple aggregation or shimming, but a lower-level, cross-platform integration.
• Auto check-in: Manual check-ins are so 2009. Instead, think toward the endpoint where a geo-commercial footprint will be created automatically as an artifact of our day-to-day activities, should we wish it. The first steps in this direction will be toward improving the consumer's retail experience. Shopkick is effectively an auto check-in service. Other efforts toward this end will include credit-card geo traces, perhaps combined with a "local favorites" list used to prescribe which businesses may be checked into automatically. There are critical privacy implications here, so this footprint must be controlled by users, and employed by small and medium businesses (SMBs) to engage their customers on their own terms -- offering deals and events rather than advertising. As sharing your location with others becomes more codified, it will place demands on forthcoming products and start-ups that expose this under very granular, controlled conditions. This includes timestamps, geofences, disparate social networks, and leveraged venue classification.
• Micro beacons: Expect over the next two years a bloom of micro-positioning products: sensor-and-platform combinations that assist with indoor navigation (malls), determining when a user is genuinely "in store," and guiding the consumer directly to a product on-shelf. Shopkick's iPhone product uses the device's microphone (simple, clever) to do this, but "Bluetooth beaconing" and QR codes are other low-energy, low-hassle options. We shall see both passive and active implementations to assist with the auto check-in and location disambiguation, depending on the particular use case.

Advances along these tracks should obviate the check-in as we know it today. This is a good thing -- check-ins are something to get over, an intermediate solution to tolerate until we have something that works better. Foursquare certainly knows this. The excitement -- for Foursquare's business and users -- lies wholly in their ability to deliver utility, novelty, and serendipity beyond the check-in.

Get it here: the deal

Groupon's $134 million series C funding in April and its estimated $1.34 billion valuation woke investors and entrepreneurs to the monetary value of group buying, and local deals more generally. There are now hundreds of variants and multiple aggregators, while "Groupon clone scripts" can be purchased (caveat emptor) from any number of freelance developer sites.

Groupon and its ilk tend to get bundled under the "group buying" or less-apt "social couponing" monikers, but -- in regards to Groupon certainly -- there's little that's actively social about the products. The less charitable may argue that Groupon's success is due as much to the severity of discounts on offer. However, Groupon and others have raised awareness that advertising is no longer the only solution. Specifically, SMBs are slowly gaining access to tools to engage their customers on mutually favorable terms. Examples:

• Just-in-time delivery: Businesses increasingly have the ability to deliver discounts, incentives, and upsells to consumers in a highly relevant, just-in-time manner. Think of services that provide attractive discounts when tables are open at a restaurant, when spare inventory is available, or the business simply requires immediate revenue to help with cashflow. These new approaches secure short-term, incremental revenue for the business and offer great value to the user. Win-win.
• Topical content: Most of these products now deliver deals based on city and zip code with little accommodation for either personal preferences or current location. Expect "relevance" to become the new watchword in deal and coupon delivery. Relevance will be obtained via platforms that exploit an accessible selection of local business favorites: Facebook is in a position to deliver, as is Hunch local, or my former shop, LikeList.
• Coupon organizers: Digital deals are big, and will become only more common as delivery channels are improved. Jim Moran, co-founder of daily deal aggregator Yipit, records more than 100 companies offering deals in the U.S. alone, most recently Yelp. With these numbers, digital deals threaten to become as unmanageable as their hardcopy equivalents. In the same way that local favorites will assist in filtering the signal from the noise in the forthcoming local clamor, I would expect that intelligent, digital coupon wallets will be employed to remind or introduce users to deals that are relevant to their immediate location and circumstance. One coupon vendor called Savings Sidekick (apparently not related to the Shopkick iphone app) is doing something similar by using the tip feature in Foursquare to remind users of nearby deals from their coupon books. This particular implementation is as interesting as it could be annoying.

Part 1 wrap

Local is huge and only getting bigger. As a litmus, Borrell's recent ad forecast notes that "local online advertising should grow by almost 18% [...] to $16.1 billion, in 2011." Money follows money: we can expect further me-too products around deals, check-ins, and place products, but there is huge scope for investment into products that contribute genuine value to the consumer experience and enhance SMBs' ability to connect to their customers.

Much of this will take place at the data and platform levels. In my next post I'll take a look at how linked data might help cross-platform integration, and join deals, check-ins and place pages to the benefit of the consumer.

Related:

• Why check-ins and like buttons will change the local landscape
• Where's the map?
• Foursquare wants to be the mayor of location apps
• What you need to know about local search

Note: Data Week is a new series that collects notable stories and developments from the data world.

Data visualization and art

Artist and scientist Stephen von Worley announced the launch of a new blog, Data Pointed, showcasing his data visualization research. "One part magazine and two parts blog", the site tells the story of von Worley's own data visualizations, and surveys choice picks from others.

The lead story covers the results of the XKCD color name survey, illustrating the entertaining differences in the way different genders refer to colors.

Across the top, witness the nuanced verbal repertoire of feminine color differentiation. While us men are busy grunting, guzzling beer, and shoving our hands down our pants, women get specific by mixing fruits, animals, spices, flowers, and other such familiarities with finely-honed modifiers like neon and dusty. The result? A vast panoply of warm-fuzzy color names that seemingly trounces anything our Y-chromosomes have to offer.

The visualization shows colors organized horizontally by hue, and vertically by gender preference. Immediately obvious is the contrast in nuance between female, at the top, and male. Click the graphic below to reach the full article and interactive visualization.

Becoming a data scientist

The community Q&A site Quora is rich with information about data science, analytics and computing. An especially illuminating answer was given this week to the question How do I become a data scientist — how does someone with a computer science background get the math and statistics knowledge required for data science?

Providing an extensive reply, Alex Kamil gives eight points from his perspective as an undergraduate student. Many of these reference statistics and math, and Kamil provides an excellent list of papers, websites and technologies to tinker with.

Several of Kamil's suggested starting points struck me as common themes among those who define themselves as data scientists:

• Start learning statistics by coding with R: whatever the size of the data you're working with, many data analysts perform and prototype investigations using the R language. Some will later translate these into larger map-reduce jobs to be run on Hadoop, for instance. R provides a hands-on way for developers to teach themselves statistics in practice.
• Linear algebra: a grounding in linear algebra is common among many data scientists, and important because matrix math underpins many data mining applications, such as the famous PageRank.
• Machine learning: allowing computers to alter behavior based on input data is fundamental to many innovative data-based products and services. Many developers start this ad-hoc, but there is much available literature. Kamil references Bradford Cross' extensive list of machine learning resources.

There are many more starting points referenced in the full answer.

The field of data science is a place where book learning meets code and produces results. In the words of Kurt Lewin: "There's nothing so practical as a good theory."

CouchDB clusters and particles

Cloudant, providers of hosted CouchDB infrastructure, have released their clustering technology, BigCouch, as open source . CouchDB is a document-oriented "NoSQL" database, noted for its replication features. Use it as part of your application and you can count on database replication "for free."

As part of offering cloud-based CouchDB services, Cloudant has developed software to create clusters of CouchDB instances, distributed among many servers. In Cloudant's words, "Instead of one big honking CouchDB, the result is an elastic data store which is fully CouchDB API-compliant."

The most direct comparison to existing technologies is with Amazon's Dynamo, according to the announcement:

The clustering layer [features] consistent hashing, replication, and quorum for read/write operations. CouchDB view indexing occurs in parallel on each partition, and can achieve impressive speedups as compared to standalone serial indexing.

You can download BigCouch from its Github Project Page, and collaborate on the #cloudant IRC channel on Freenode.

Elsewhere this week, ReadWriteEnterprise reports that scientists working at CERN are using CouchDB to support their work on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) on the famous Large Hadron Collider.

Chief among the attractions of CloudDB to the scientists is the ability to manage petabytes of data, the built-in replication features, and an easy compatibility with Oracle. Simon Metson of the Data Management and Workflow Management group at the CMS project reports that CouchDB has a shallow learning curve, but is harder for those with deep SQL backgrounds: "The more you know Oracle, the harder it is to pick up."

Strata: The Business of Data

If you enjoyed any of the previous items, stay tuned — we're excited to announce the launch of Strata, an O'Reilly conference focusing on the business and practice of data. The conference will be held in Santa Clara, Calif. from Feb. 1-3, 2011.

At O'Reilly, we believe that the future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their data successfully. There's a change in both the skills of data analysts and the technology they use that's sweeping through industry and science. Our aim with Strata is to be the defining event for that change: for practitioners, businesses and data vendors.

The call for participation is open until Sept. 28. We're looking for proposals from practitioners, business leaders, analysts, designers, and developers covering the spectrum of data business and practice. Suggested topics include:

• Distributed data processing, Hadoop ecosystem
• From research to product
• Streaming data processing
• Becoming a data-driven organization
• Data science best practices
• Data acquisition, cleaning, distribution and markets
• Machine learning
• Training and recruitment of data scientists
• Applications, case studies, and cautionary tales
• Visualization and design principles
• Augmented reality and immersive interfaces
• Data protection, privacy, and policy
• Changing role of business intelligence

Send us news

Email us news, tips and interesting tidbits at dataweek@oreilly.com.

1. Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic.
2. v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability.
3. Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter project to fund a 6-hectare/14.8-acre off-the-grid artists retreat, cultural preservation and technological education space in the remote Pacific island of Vanuatu. Kickstarter is incredible. (via BoingBoing)
4. Orbiter (XKCD) -- names are human artifacts, as every Internet mapping company knows. I'm reminded of how Gracenote, who run CDDB, store every datum submitted to them, and consequently have nearly fifty spellings of Britney Spears.

I am a veteran of the format wars. I started as an innocent civilian, caught on the side of Beta while the DVD army pushed the front closer and closer to my home. Later, I joined the motion picture special forces, dutifully accounting for units of Laser Discs, Beta tapes, and endless VHS videocassettes. I don't think a truce was signed as much as the other formats faded away, though Beta did manage to live on as a professional favorite until just a few years ago.

As I moved up the ranks, I saw industries die. I saw them resurrect. I saw panic. I saw salvation. I saw resignation. I saw false hope. I saw belief. I saw consumer indifference.

The first death -- arguably -- was the rental store. Back in the olden days, you'd go to a store and rent a video. You'd find it on the shelf*, fork over some money, take the video home, watch it immediately, return it. If you failed in either of the last two steps, you'd be dinged with a late fee.

This market was ruled by scarcity. Stores paid big bucks for those units. Retail price was in the neighborhood of $80, higher for some titles. The videocassettes (and yes, we really called them that) could circulate a certain number of times before they were worn out. Only the popular titles were repurchased.

Bookish lesson. But the market was growing, growing, growing, and smart minds were figuring out how to make it bigger. The studios messed with their major markets, introducing a whole new revenue stream. This impacted everyone from theaters to airlines to pay television channels to television networks to local stations. Yet those markets adapted and thrived. Imagine the joy in the finance ranks!

Then, around July 1992 (give or take), the rental industry was destroyed. The studio I worked for released its first major sell-through title, and the world was never the same. Quick definition: in publishing, sell-through is the percentage of actual units sold versus units shipped. In motion pictures, sell-through is defined as direct to consumer sales (versus rentals). Today, we include "electronic sell-through (EST)" or "digital sell-through (DST)" in our jargon. I prefer the latter, the guilds seem fond of the former. I will win this battle.

Sell-through titles were attractively priced for consumers. Under thirty dollars, under twenty dollars. More titles were available; the dollars involved made it financially viable to release more titles to video. Suddenly, it was feasible to own your own home movie library (as opposed to, oh, home movie library). Sales boomed. Rentals crashed. Businesses had to rethink their models: no longer could a store get away with buying one or two copies and forcing consumers to wait. More investment in inventory was required. Oy!

Just when all was hunky dory, along came DVD. Consumers immediately got the superiority of the format, the permanence of the format, and they -- amazingly -- rebought their home libraries in DVD format. And, of course, title selection increased even more; studios digitized their entire lists. Yep, they bit the bullet and made a project of it. Those legacy rental businesses that figured out how to get into the sell-through game suffered some new costs (turns out a DVD package is very different from a videocassette package), but they did okay.

Until the day DVD sales started slipping. I have my theories on this, but there came a point when consumers weren't buying like it was going out of style. Or maybe buying just went out of style. Luckily, the studios were ready with a plan: they reincarnated the rental market, only this time it was called revenue sharing.

(This model was the result of a lesson learned from the previous incarnation of the rental market. I mean, why wouldn't you want to take a share of those rental dollars? Seriously...let the store keep it all?)

Alas, rev share, despite consumer love of Netflix, wasn't enough to fill the sales gap. Probably because consumers saw the next big thing: digital downloads. They'd already started the shift with music, and those darn early adopters were circumventing geographical restrictions by downloading episodes of, oh, Dr. Who via the torrents. Not that I know anything about that.

But wait! There's more. Hollywood had a plan. Two plans, actually. One plan was called Blu-ray. The other plan was called HD-DVD. One or the other would save DVDs and the business model and maybe even the world. Hurrah!

Bookish lesson. This is called trying to preserve your legacy business, even if that legacy is barely two decades old. See also: turning a blind eye to reality.

Except...Beta, VHS, DVD, next big thing on the horizon. Consumers weren't particularly interested in repurchasing their libraries in yet another new-and-improved format. They were particularly uninterested in getting in the middle of a format war that would leave angry consumers on the losing side. In mid-2008, I attended a conference panel where a publishing executive noted overall sales of players for both formats were in the 500,000 range (cannot confirm this number, but  sales of HD units were pretty meager).

Oh, if you care about wars, Blu-ray won. Enough studios realized creating a false format war wasn't good for their business. Consumers were sitting on the sidelines. They had perfectly good DVD players, and couldn't justify purchasing new, higher priced players. In the early days, HD-DVD and Blu-ray selection wasn't that awesome even if the technology was greatly improved, and, of course, there was that next big thing just around the corner.

So sales kept declining. Netflix kept gaining customers. People loved the selection and convenience. But Netflix could not do it alone. DVD sales, while huge by book world standards, were decelerating. For consumers, it was no longer an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Which leads us to today. Sales are still declining; Blockbuster is considering bankruptcy. To get a sense of what this decline in sales means, look at the fate of MGM. Once, a catalog like theirs was fresh meat for sharks. Now we are witnessing the slow, painful death of a studio. When all you have is the home entertainment and television markets to sustain you, and those markets are essentially played out, you don't have much.

Bookish lesson. Obvious.

What Hollywood has is digital. DVD will remain a solid revenue stream for a while yet, and people will buy Blu-ray players as their old machines die. Maybe. But the glory days are over. Digital is growing. Netflix's recent deals, such as with Epix will bring more streaming content to consumers. There is great hope that another switch in business models will fill the gap left by lower DVD sales.

(I once had a meeting with a high-level executive at my company, and after he showed me his cabinet of DVDs [mind. out. of. gutter.], he said, quite seriously, "You know, video on demand will never happen. It won't." I think this was supposed to be my "plastics" moment. He was wrong. Very wrong.)

Bookish lesson. Hollywood thought it understood the psychology of consumers, and bet huge on (ahem) enhanced DVDs saving a business that had been very, very good to many people. Hollywood bet wrong. Consumers weren't interested in something they didn't really want and definitely didn't really need.

Looking back at this, I am somewhat impressed by Hollywood. Their business followed a predictable path for a few decades. A new market disrupted the flow. Everyone regrouped and repositioned. More disruption happened. Those with a survivor mentality thrived. More disruption. More survival of the fittest. Add in some evolution, some new species emerging, investment in new media, new ideas. There were deaths. There will be more.

There were mistakes. There will be more. To my mind, the most fascinating aspect of all this is how the studios managed their existing business while investing in new business. No consumer was left behind. Okay, maybe the laser disc folks were deserted.

Bookish lesson. Change will happen. Fight for the future, not the past.

* -- Side note: our local video store was organized, as near as we can tell, by cats. There was no rhyme nor reason to the shelving process. Unless you were seeking a martial arts movie. That section was immaculate.