What stops us from innovating online

Kak Teh, a wonderfully energetic lady who got me started on Blogger, has on several occasions voiced her interest in audio blogging. Radio, she calls it. She posted something in March 2006 called "Kak Teh Radio - Cuba, Try, Testing tengok...", but unfortunately the audio portion of that day's blog is not there anymore or else you could have heard for yourself how innovative she can be.

Anyway, last month when I was going through my Robert Palmer love-fest, I myself wanted to do an audio blog using bits and pieces of his music to illustrate my points. But it was hard to find free hosting for streaming audio files, and my amablogger status (opposite of problogger) does not justify paying money to blog.

Last night I stumbled on this months-old post — "Verizon and Time Warner want to break the Internet" — on a website by a guy called Rik. Don't know him; just happened to be blog-hopping. In the post, he talks about the role of telecommunications companies in creating tiered Internet access, in essence making it hard for content providers (us) to broadcast our thoughts in new, innovative ways because the Internet Service Providers (the people who own the wires) are now charging a fee for us to make use of the more complex features of online communication. Yes, there is a lot of junk in cyberspace and maybe it's good that these toll booths exist, but on the other hand one person's junk is another person's junk — so who's to say what junk should exist and what junk shouldn't. Like Rik, I don't want the Internet to end up like television, where we have cheap public TV on one end and the most innovative shows on the other end, transmitted via expensive premium cable or satellite services.

Tangential thought: Most of us create a lot of junk before we come out with something brilliant. But sometimes it's junky simply because it was built on poor technology. However, junk that's built on poor technology is different from junk that's produced as a result of poorly grasped premises — which is real junk.