Magic Jewball

Hey, remember this? The Ticketmaster battle? The search for a code? The back-and-forth with the commenter I’d never seen before who thought I was an idiot? The morning spent on the Interweb getting my seats?

Well guess what? The Cure have postponed their tour until mid-2008. Fat Bob, you owe me!

Yes, this was the day I was supposed to see The Cure.

The Cure – The Last Day Of Summer

I know it’s a really cheap shot to look back at predictions of the past and make fun of how un-prescient they were (Hip-Hop is a fad! The dot.com boom will last forever! Poor Steve Jobs will never have a successful product, Why telephone when you can shout across the prairie, etc.) but I can’t help myself. I came across an article in the NY Times archives from 2002 entitled “Internet experts wonder if Weblog technology is a powerful new media species, or just another fad.” Yes, quite. But it had these fabulous final paragraphs:

But even among those whose Weblogs have gained notoriety, there are some who see this trend as ephemeral. Take Mark Hurst, who created a Weblog, goodexperience.com, in 1999 that he said attracted thousands of readers. Mr. Hurst, the president of Creative Good, a Net consulting firm in New York, eventually stopped posting daily remarks on the Web site and instead simply e-mailed a compendium of comments to a subscriber list that now numbers nearly 50,000 people.

”If you want to communicate with people, e-mail it to them,” Mr. Hurst said. ”Don’t force them to come to your site every day to read what you’ve written.”

God, I would never want to do that. So naturally I had to go have a look at goodexperience.com. As you might have guessed, it has a blog. I guess that whole “e-mail 50,000 people” thing didn’t end up being the zenith of communication.

Social Distortion – I Was Wrong