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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 07, 2006
From the Archives: eBay essay
One of the up-sides of keeping a blog (the downside being that it's like a marriage you never signed on for) is that if I suddenly get a surge of pride about something -- a moment of "hey, I wrote that, and it's pretty neat" -- I've got carte blanche to inflict it on you, dear reader, at length. Because what are you going to do? Complain? No, you're going to get sucked into the pretty neat prose too. And like it. So there. (Which all recalls one of the many, many wise things my J-school guru Judith Crist taught me -- you've got to have an ego the size of Norman Mailer's to be in this business, because why else would you want to inflict your prose on innocent strangers who never did you any harm?)
Here, for example, is an essay I wrote for Time Europe about eBay back in 2001 (and never posted before; I don't think American readers would have had a chance to see it, and given poor sales of Time Europe at the time, few of my British friends will have seen it either). It's another one of those I-capture-the-zeitgeist kind of dealies that Time does so well (and it illustrates the difference between my job then and now; then I was supposed to capture the zeitgeist, now I'm hunting down the next zeitgeist). I've long known that journalism well done is the first draft of history; well, here's a page or two of the several dozen I'd like to contribute to that first draft. None of what is below will be news to you now, of course, but it was then, and I hope you'll get a sense of the almost boyish optimism that one company could do so well in the middle of such hideous dotcom decline. Remember, this is back when people thought no dotcoms would survive the turmoil.
Forget about black monoliths. If the late great Stanley Kubrick had known what was going to be really cool by the year 2001, his seminal movie would have opened with 25 million ape-descendents clustered silently round an awe-inspiring and somewhat unreal auction house. Then to the tune of the Blue Danube, we’d see some amazingly diverse items shooting weightlessly through the ether– Sterling silver Jaguar cars, Sherlock Holmes first editions, Xerox networked printers, a pair of Madonna concert tickets, an ostrich-egg incubator – moving at a rate of five million purchases per day. The climactic scene, perhaps, would feature astronaut Dave and arrogant computer HAL bidding furiously against each other for a highly collectible Beanie Baby.
The unreal auction house in question is, of course, eBay, and it is in many way the most powerful pure-play Internet force on the planet Earth in 2001. It has recently become the top e-commerce destination, growing at a rate of roughly one million users per month. While its brethren in the legendary website club (namely Yahoo and Amazon) suffer alarming slowdowns in growth, eBay posts quarter after quarter of stunning profits (its latest: $21 million, an increase of more than 150% on the same time last year).
It has done so on the back of a few phenomenally simple ideas, all of which owe allegiance to capitalism in its most raw and ancient form. Anyone can be a buyer and anyone can be a seller. Price is determined by the number of buyers and how much they’re willing to pay. Haggling is not only mandatory, it’s automated. Sales have a deadline; everything must go. And most importantly, the quality of the bazaar increases exponentially with its size. There are rival online auction services – Yahoo and Amazon again – but eBay still has the lion’s share of the market, about 85%. Put simply, they maintain the lead because they have the lead. If you’re a seller, there’s nowhere better to go.
Unchecked by any complex laws of economics, eBay spreads itself like a virus. There are few geographic restrictions; Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, New Zealand and Swiss-specific versions of the website are available. There are practically no legal restrictions, especially since a San Francisco court recently declared the auction service could not be held responsible for pirated or bootlegged music sold on its site (Napster should be so lucky). Its name has entered the global lexicon; “I bet you’ll find that on eBay” has become the punchline to a thousand jokes. For the media, eBay is a bottomless treasure trove of news items, from the boy who tried to sell his soul to the convicted killer who capitalized on his rapidly evaporating minutes of fame by trading in his follicles and calluses. You could argue that such disreputable excess is bad publicity. Then again, there are a million corporations out there that would kill to have such anecdotes attached to their name – to be known as the place you can buy absolutely anything, and at potential bargain prices.
Which helps explain why corporations from IBM to General Motors are falling over themselves to do deals with the web auction giant. Disney auctioned off the “D” from the original Disneyland sign. Technology titan Sun Microsystems sold server hardware on the site with million-dollar starting prices. Yet despite such big-league partnerships, it’s still the little guy that counts here. Unlike your local mall, eBay would not survive for a second without mom and pop operations. Its entire success is predicated on extreme diversity. And you can forget about the pernicious influence of Madison Avenue here. In this hypermodern arena of hardcore capitalism, big business is forced to squeeze its wares into the same one-line classified ad as the rest of us. The site’s internal search engine is the kind of leveling tool Karl Marx never conceived of. Ask for an automobile and eBay is just as likely to turn up your neighbors’ five-year-old Pontiac as GM’s latest top-of-the-range four-wheeler. The effect is as pleasing as browsing a bookstore where new and used titles mingle democratically on the shelves, arranged by their content and not by the glossiness of their covers.
The average eBay user stays on the site for an hour and a half, which is an extraordinarily long time by Internet standards (considering even the bookish Amazon.com user only hangs around for 18 minutes). That’s because they don’t just bargain-hunt or post pictures of their mint-condition pool table; they build communities. Trust is a tangible thing in this world, with each seller receiving an all-important democratic rating based on how often they delivered the goods as promised by the agreed-upon date. When suspect auctions like supposed organ sales slip unseen into the massive melange, it isn’t eBay staffers who spot them first – it’s the auctioneers, vigilantly policing their own neighborhood. More controversially, veteran buyers employ special software that helps them jump in and snap up items in the last seconds of an auction. But mostly the instinctive acquisitiveness of the denizens forms the kind of lasting bonds that are too often lacking in offline society. They meet and swap tips in the chat rooms, they build friendships over sales, they sometimes even wed. Spend any amount of time hanging out here and you’ll get the impression of a vast, virtual citadel under rapid construction; a tower of Babel with street hawkers on every level, most all of them kept honest by the gaze of their neighbors.
If this is a flea market, as some detractors say it is, it’s the most extensive flea market in human history, covering most of the planet’s surface and many centuries of our past. Our collective memories are inventoried here, albeit briefly. A quick search reveals current auctions for an ancient Roman coin, a chunk of the Berlin Wall and a Florida voting machine. They won’t stay there for long. Items on eBay move at the speed of humanity. We may not be flying Pan Am jets to the moon in 2001, but with eBay’s help we’re constructing something much more meaningful to the average ape-descendent.
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