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- Jun 22, 2001
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Man, Jude's gotten long winded all of a sudden!
Actually, I’d like to point something out: I believe Jude’s gotten long winded because he’s just turned his professional attention to the long term problems of how the best home for headphone enthusiasts is going to look ten years down the road, and it’s a complicated and fascinating problem, one that takes a lot of words to describe. For those of you who don’t know; Jude runs a successful Internet service distribution company, and surviving the last 1 ½ as an web based company is no laughing matter. In my opinion, he managed it because he’s smart, he understands how the web works, and how it can affect people. I mention this not because I want to complement Jude (anyone who wins the worlds most difficult headphone naming contest can only be considered a total geek), but because the very nature of what the web can be for people in the future is amazingly beautiful and complicated at the same time, so you have to have all the above characteristics to even SEE at all what the web future can look like.
Now, I could wax poetic for a moment, but I should get to the point of how I think HeadWize and Head-Fi could move forward into a productive and future that is beneficial to all. Unfortunately, I never do what I should, and I am going to wax poetic---so print this thing out and get a cup of coffee.
How can a thing be both beautiful and complicated? Isn’t elegance found in simplicity? Doesn’t the chaos of complexity obscure the pure harmonic resonance of a thing needed to elicit the subjective beauty response? (Phew!) Isn’t the right answer for any Internet community, a simple answer? I’m afraid I have to contend that it is not. I will argue that Beauty can be found in complexity, and the right solution for the Phonehead community in the information age will be simply beautiful in it’s ability to deliver an intensely authentic subjective experience of community for each member, but it will also be intensely complex in a number of ways. (Hardware, software, reliability, redundancy, etc will all fit under the technological umbrella; things like contests and debates and who knows what will fit in it’s governmental and sociological management; and last but not least, somehow over the next five years all that improvement will have to be paid for resulting in a need to for an effective economic system with gain to be in place.)
“Wait!” you scream, “All we need is a place to talk.”
That would be true if all HeadWizeFi is is a bunch of headphone geeks, but it’s not. The nature of the Information Age is that it allows for the efficient means of communication. But I feel the Information Age would be better named the “age of great meaning” or “the age of shared consciousness” because the real value to us human beings is the Web’s ability to allow the efficient movement of meaning from person to person. In our case, it has a unique ability to provide the infrastructure of community involvement; more importantly, it permits us to enjoy the fun of being together over a wire. Another characteristic is that as people learn how on-line communities work, more advanced communal feature will be developed. You guys are already hooked on surveys and personal messages; what happens when you get video posts, or an built in MP3 e-mail exchange club? What happens when HeadRoom can serve the community by making our measurement graphs available right inside the forums so you guys can select headphones to compare and talk about it with the graph right in your post. It’s hard to imagine all the cool things that will be available to an on-line community to make it more fun to be together in the next ten years. I think it will be a blast! But remember, all that improvement has to be paid for!
What the Internet gives Humankind is the ability to distribute meaning efficiently over it’s whole. The advantage gained by this talent is the reduction in inefficiency due to the need for so much personal learning. For example, if I wanted to make a quilt for my new baby, I could go to my computer, click-up the world greatest quilting geeks community, who would give me advice and point me to all the resources I needed, maybe even e-mailing me printed instructions and patterns and having someone watch with me on video chat as I start putting it together. In other words, the world doesn’t need to have as many people learn to be expert on each topic of interest and distribute the experts around physically because, with the web, each citizen will have access to the experts right at home. Therefore, the value of this or any other enthusiast community to society-at-large is its ability to act as it’s center for knowledge-holding and opinion-making for a certain topic. The Web makes the world like a giant brain---and this community is the headphone synapse. The word “convergence” may be overused, but I believe it correctly describes this process of gathering, by means of communication technology, all the available meaning about a particular topic in one place, and then letting every body at it at once. The Internet lets us have centers for everything, and then distribute the center itself widely. The nature of a center is that there is only one, and I believe in the long run there will be…no, can be only one center for headphone enthusiasm. I believe is true no matter what Head-Fi and HeadWize do. The Internet not only enables the opportunity for a single opinion-making center for headphones, but requires a single center for it.
The problem I see with the current situation is that if two boards continue it weakens the community and allows for a third competitor to gain a foot hold. You guys in the little town of Headphone Heights are sitting on $200,000,000 worth of Internet real estate. (There are $200M (dealer price) headphones sold each year in the U.S. $150M is headphones of $25 or less.) You, dear Canaddicts, are the world’s greatest headphone experts, and the world of people making money selling headphones are becoming ever more interested in your opinions. The Vice Chairman of Sennheiser USA was here yesterday and we talked a lot about Head-Fi and what it meant. He wrote down the URL and took a few notes. You represent the possibility of something very important in the future of headphones. A LOT of people make their livelihood building and selling headphones and are seriously interested what the internet will do to headphone sales. You guys WILL build the singular community in which live the world’s greatest headphone geeks and by which all true opinions held to be true by human kind about headphones are formed, or someone else will.
Let’s not beat around the bush: if Sony came along and put up a super-cool discussion area and bitchen features---like the ability to earn credits for CDs and DVDs by posting, or paying people for the number of views their headphone reviews got---they could get a LOT of traffic. Maybe not from you and I, but a lot of traffic none the less. Maybe, if they’re really smart, they would make a place truly fun enough for most of the people here to at least go inhabit their community, too. And they would win the traffic war, and there is where that common Joe looking for headphones is going to be told NOTHING about Grados.
Now, my argument begins to break down if I don’t switch tracks for a little while. Consider the plight of Main Street USA: Fifty years ago Mom and Pop hardware and apparel stores flourished. There, in the center of town, sat all the little stores in a row, and around it, all the houses where the people who worked and shopped in the stores in town lived. Then along came the mall; it’s alluring air-conditioned and florescent-lit communal space calling; it’s artificial but compelling sense of community, where people are transformed into empowered shoppers. It was too much for them, and we abandoned Joe’s Eats and Bob’s Books for McDonalds and Borders. Downtown almost died before it started to figure out that people want a sense of togetherness when they’re together. They started kicking the cars off Main Street and building walking malls with benches and little coffee stands and trees and fountains. People started returning to the downtown area for it’s opportunity for authentic togetherness, and Main Street became profitable again. The lesson to learn here is that it’s actually the authentic experience of community that holds the most attractive focus for people; but you HAD to have a healthy economic structure as well.
Jude has said that he doesn’t want Head-Fi as a job; he also knows that Head-Fi has to support itself financially. Chu was choaking on the bandwidth costs, and if HeadWize gets more popular he will just have to cough up more dough. Chu will be a victim of the success of what he built. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Chu for years of costs and slave labor just to keep this community going. But, in many ways, it’s gained a life of it’s own, and it wants to be so much bigger than Chu’s wallet. I applaud Chu loudly for his work over the years, but I am also frustrated by his unwillingness to embrace a commercial dimension. I’ve volunteered a number of things a number of times to Chu and he thought about them, but couldn’t bring himself to do them. I understand his motives of not wanting to expose this community to the risk of influence and bias from commercial interest, but in his reluctance he essentially is abdicating the possibility to whoever comes along. I must admit, if Jude hadn’t put this board up, I would have had one up within two more days. I bought the software and have it loaded on my new web server already. (it was the same software, BTW, vBulliten.) But I didn’t really want to do it because I know that it’s best for the community that it be run NOT by a headphone business. Thank God, Jude came along!
Now, I too, have had some private talks with Jude. And I think he’d do a great job of getting this community and it’s growth paid for. And I don’t actually get along with him all that great. We clash a good bit, and we develop a good bit of tension about how we see the future. But, if it was any other way I’d be uncomfortable ‘cause I know Sony will be knocking on our door one day, and Jude would do the deal just fine.
But what about Chu and HeadWize? Well, I think he already has the best headphone resource site. I think he ought to continue to grow and polish HeadWize as an on-line headphone news and resource site. He already does news reports; he does all the DIY pages; sheesh, you know all the stuff he has over there. And his articles are already strongly indexed. People here could contribute by writing articles and such rather than posts. And the name HeadWize already has the right connotation for that purpose. Then he should put a link to Head-Fi on the bottom of each page and vice-versa.
For me the exciting thing is that this community could be a great fun-building place for headphone enthusiasm. I want it to be as real as possible because I intend to build and sell the really best stuff, and I can only benefit from such an honest community. But more than that, I have to admit that deep down inside I’m a headphone geek, and I like the fact that both Chu and Jude and all of you have built a place of authentic grass roots passion, and I LOVE it. I may not participate as much directly as a lot of you guys, but I really enjoy spending my work day relating my productivity in significant measure to this community.
Sorry to be so long winded, but hey, it my job.
Cheers,
Tyll
Actually, I’d like to point something out: I believe Jude’s gotten long winded because he’s just turned his professional attention to the long term problems of how the best home for headphone enthusiasts is going to look ten years down the road, and it’s a complicated and fascinating problem, one that takes a lot of words to describe. For those of you who don’t know; Jude runs a successful Internet service distribution company, and surviving the last 1 ½ as an web based company is no laughing matter. In my opinion, he managed it because he’s smart, he understands how the web works, and how it can affect people. I mention this not because I want to complement Jude (anyone who wins the worlds most difficult headphone naming contest can only be considered a total geek), but because the very nature of what the web can be for people in the future is amazingly beautiful and complicated at the same time, so you have to have all the above characteristics to even SEE at all what the web future can look like.
Now, I could wax poetic for a moment, but I should get to the point of how I think HeadWize and Head-Fi could move forward into a productive and future that is beneficial to all. Unfortunately, I never do what I should, and I am going to wax poetic---so print this thing out and get a cup of coffee.
How can a thing be both beautiful and complicated? Isn’t elegance found in simplicity? Doesn’t the chaos of complexity obscure the pure harmonic resonance of a thing needed to elicit the subjective beauty response? (Phew!) Isn’t the right answer for any Internet community, a simple answer? I’m afraid I have to contend that it is not. I will argue that Beauty can be found in complexity, and the right solution for the Phonehead community in the information age will be simply beautiful in it’s ability to deliver an intensely authentic subjective experience of community for each member, but it will also be intensely complex in a number of ways. (Hardware, software, reliability, redundancy, etc will all fit under the technological umbrella; things like contests and debates and who knows what will fit in it’s governmental and sociological management; and last but not least, somehow over the next five years all that improvement will have to be paid for resulting in a need to for an effective economic system with gain to be in place.)
“Wait!” you scream, “All we need is a place to talk.”
That would be true if all HeadWizeFi is is a bunch of headphone geeks, but it’s not. The nature of the Information Age is that it allows for the efficient means of communication. But I feel the Information Age would be better named the “age of great meaning” or “the age of shared consciousness” because the real value to us human beings is the Web’s ability to allow the efficient movement of meaning from person to person. In our case, it has a unique ability to provide the infrastructure of community involvement; more importantly, it permits us to enjoy the fun of being together over a wire. Another characteristic is that as people learn how on-line communities work, more advanced communal feature will be developed. You guys are already hooked on surveys and personal messages; what happens when you get video posts, or an built in MP3 e-mail exchange club? What happens when HeadRoom can serve the community by making our measurement graphs available right inside the forums so you guys can select headphones to compare and talk about it with the graph right in your post. It’s hard to imagine all the cool things that will be available to an on-line community to make it more fun to be together in the next ten years. I think it will be a blast! But remember, all that improvement has to be paid for!
What the Internet gives Humankind is the ability to distribute meaning efficiently over it’s whole. The advantage gained by this talent is the reduction in inefficiency due to the need for so much personal learning. For example, if I wanted to make a quilt for my new baby, I could go to my computer, click-up the world greatest quilting geeks community, who would give me advice and point me to all the resources I needed, maybe even e-mailing me printed instructions and patterns and having someone watch with me on video chat as I start putting it together. In other words, the world doesn’t need to have as many people learn to be expert on each topic of interest and distribute the experts around physically because, with the web, each citizen will have access to the experts right at home. Therefore, the value of this or any other enthusiast community to society-at-large is its ability to act as it’s center for knowledge-holding and opinion-making for a certain topic. The Web makes the world like a giant brain---and this community is the headphone synapse. The word “convergence” may be overused, but I believe it correctly describes this process of gathering, by means of communication technology, all the available meaning about a particular topic in one place, and then letting every body at it at once. The Internet lets us have centers for everything, and then distribute the center itself widely. The nature of a center is that there is only one, and I believe in the long run there will be…no, can be only one center for headphone enthusiasm. I believe is true no matter what Head-Fi and HeadWize do. The Internet not only enables the opportunity for a single opinion-making center for headphones, but requires a single center for it.
The problem I see with the current situation is that if two boards continue it weakens the community and allows for a third competitor to gain a foot hold. You guys in the little town of Headphone Heights are sitting on $200,000,000 worth of Internet real estate. (There are $200M (dealer price) headphones sold each year in the U.S. $150M is headphones of $25 or less.) You, dear Canaddicts, are the world’s greatest headphone experts, and the world of people making money selling headphones are becoming ever more interested in your opinions. The Vice Chairman of Sennheiser USA was here yesterday and we talked a lot about Head-Fi and what it meant. He wrote down the URL and took a few notes. You represent the possibility of something very important in the future of headphones. A LOT of people make their livelihood building and selling headphones and are seriously interested what the internet will do to headphone sales. You guys WILL build the singular community in which live the world’s greatest headphone geeks and by which all true opinions held to be true by human kind about headphones are formed, or someone else will.
Let’s not beat around the bush: if Sony came along and put up a super-cool discussion area and bitchen features---like the ability to earn credits for CDs and DVDs by posting, or paying people for the number of views their headphone reviews got---they could get a LOT of traffic. Maybe not from you and I, but a lot of traffic none the less. Maybe, if they’re really smart, they would make a place truly fun enough for most of the people here to at least go inhabit their community, too. And they would win the traffic war, and there is where that common Joe looking for headphones is going to be told NOTHING about Grados.
Now, my argument begins to break down if I don’t switch tracks for a little while. Consider the plight of Main Street USA: Fifty years ago Mom and Pop hardware and apparel stores flourished. There, in the center of town, sat all the little stores in a row, and around it, all the houses where the people who worked and shopped in the stores in town lived. Then along came the mall; it’s alluring air-conditioned and florescent-lit communal space calling; it’s artificial but compelling sense of community, where people are transformed into empowered shoppers. It was too much for them, and we abandoned Joe’s Eats and Bob’s Books for McDonalds and Borders. Downtown almost died before it started to figure out that people want a sense of togetherness when they’re together. They started kicking the cars off Main Street and building walking malls with benches and little coffee stands and trees and fountains. People started returning to the downtown area for it’s opportunity for authentic togetherness, and Main Street became profitable again. The lesson to learn here is that it’s actually the authentic experience of community that holds the most attractive focus for people; but you HAD to have a healthy economic structure as well.
Jude has said that he doesn’t want Head-Fi as a job; he also knows that Head-Fi has to support itself financially. Chu was choaking on the bandwidth costs, and if HeadWize gets more popular he will just have to cough up more dough. Chu will be a victim of the success of what he built. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Chu for years of costs and slave labor just to keep this community going. But, in many ways, it’s gained a life of it’s own, and it wants to be so much bigger than Chu’s wallet. I applaud Chu loudly for his work over the years, but I am also frustrated by his unwillingness to embrace a commercial dimension. I’ve volunteered a number of things a number of times to Chu and he thought about them, but couldn’t bring himself to do them. I understand his motives of not wanting to expose this community to the risk of influence and bias from commercial interest, but in his reluctance he essentially is abdicating the possibility to whoever comes along. I must admit, if Jude hadn’t put this board up, I would have had one up within two more days. I bought the software and have it loaded on my new web server already. (it was the same software, BTW, vBulliten.) But I didn’t really want to do it because I know that it’s best for the community that it be run NOT by a headphone business. Thank God, Jude came along!
Now, I too, have had some private talks with Jude. And I think he’d do a great job of getting this community and it’s growth paid for. And I don’t actually get along with him all that great. We clash a good bit, and we develop a good bit of tension about how we see the future. But, if it was any other way I’d be uncomfortable ‘cause I know Sony will be knocking on our door one day, and Jude would do the deal just fine.
But what about Chu and HeadWize? Well, I think he already has the best headphone resource site. I think he ought to continue to grow and polish HeadWize as an on-line headphone news and resource site. He already does news reports; he does all the DIY pages; sheesh, you know all the stuff he has over there. And his articles are already strongly indexed. People here could contribute by writing articles and such rather than posts. And the name HeadWize already has the right connotation for that purpose. Then he should put a link to Head-Fi on the bottom of each page and vice-versa.
For me the exciting thing is that this community could be a great fun-building place for headphone enthusiasm. I want it to be as real as possible because I intend to build and sell the really best stuff, and I can only benefit from such an honest community. But more than that, I have to admit that deep down inside I’m a headphone geek, and I like the fact that both Chu and Jude and all of you have built a place of authentic grass roots passion, and I LOVE it. I may not participate as much directly as a lot of you guys, but I really enjoy spending my work day relating my productivity in significant measure to this community.
Sorry to be so long winded, but hey, it my job.
Cheers,
Tyll
