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Jason Kiesel
Founder & CEO
http://www.freedomspeaks.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee

This time around, you can't look at the internet structure, or look at the economy, and say " Yea – whatever."

Although it is great motivation, people have to remember to have a good idea of just how the world works. It isn't even that hard to look beyond the fodder:

1. Barrel was up $120. Business models couldn't survive. Manufacturing went up.
2. Small letdown in growth; people didn't buy as much to pay for housing.
3. Tightening credit as more people couldn't pay loans; gains sheet for companies based off loans.
4. Every product imaginable becomes 2X more expensive ( Corn, oil, plastics, gas, cereal, fruits.). Multiple that by everything you buy for business or pleasure or sustaining.
5. All of this killed the housing, where most of the bank money is at. People don't buy houses, and some can't afford it with the 50 dollar barrel lifestyle.
6. Those people can't pay, and the banks can't survive.

Now for the future:

7. The spiraling will force a have vs. have-nots model of internet business.
8. Certain things that were free from the ISP end will start withering away or become more expensive ( ie: Bandwidth caps ).
9. Servers that handle sites will need more money for energy use. This will hurt some companies already struggling in the ad revenue dept.
10. Companies will balkinize, breaking into smaller fragments as it becomes more of a concern to be a "leader" than to keep up with a crumbling revenue-dry network.
11. Bigger companies will take advantage of the long-tail, buying the smaller companies or recreating business models and keeping them in-house ( ie: ESPN develops its own ad network, ties with parent company Disney ).
12. Offline structures become more important, but a little precarious as there is much more tension due to the recession.

I can go on and on, and I can be wrong, but I make sure I list the bad, then I can go about creating the good. Never say " Yea – whatever." to any forecast. Be a leader, but have a head on your shoulders. Alan Greenspan just apologized for doing the exact opposite of the latter.

It's also a great opportunity to focus inside yourself and your company instead of out at your industry (where there's really nothing to look at). Now you have time to slow down a bit to take your customers out for a drink and wife to a movie.

Now is the best time to get together with cool people, think, experiment and develop. When things pick up then it's time to sell and grow. What are you doing today to be first in line at the next party (hint-hint)?

– An addicted Entrepreneur

And don't get me started about the old media hype machine on this issue.

It is perhaps best put by Louis Rosetto, WIRED magazine's founder, in a letter he wrote to his kids: "Faced with fierce competition for… eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse."

He goes on to channel John Perry Barlow and remind us that the purpose of media is "to sell our eyeballs to advertisers. And how better to do that — if your monopoly is being eroded by this newfangled Internet — than to scare the shit out of us? Then we're so paralyzed that we stick around through the commercials."

You can read the whole letter here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-06...

Okay, remember: "Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.".

So, it's another version of Hollywood. Instead of fan and celebrity magazines, they have the TV 'news'.

As in Hollywood, they like 'stories', and these are by people who liked Beowulf, Chaucer, morality plays, etc. Beowulf was about some big monster, right? The newsies give us as many big, hairy, scary monsters as they can find.

Morality plays? Yup: Look for scandal, greed, sin, corruption.

Real information? That wasn't in Beowulf, Chaucer, and the morality plays and is not in the news.

Should we just laugh at it? We can laugh, but it's serious. My long time view is that citizens need solid information and the news based on 'stories' as in Beowulf and the morality plays instead of solid information misleads the citizens and, thus, is the worst problem facing civilization.

E.g., the 1929 crash caused the Great Depression which caused WWII which killed maybe 100 million people. The current crash, if not handled well, could lead to WWIII with total nuclear war and kill 1 billion people.

The problem is, the newsies didn't clearly provide the information to let us see this coming.

Hooray for the Internet, the best solution so far to this worst problem.

Now with some millions of 'news channels', need a way for each person to find the news they will regard as "cool" (thanks, Henry) for each of their interests. Working on it.

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." – Ann Bradstreet 1655