Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | internet
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August 22, 2006

CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who've been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon -- the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them -- will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song. Apple's iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over 70 percent of the (legal) digital music market. Meanwhile, CD sales have been dropping steadily. The era of the compact disc is over, it seems.
August 17, 2006

When I wrote last week about the death of AOL, I may have been premature. Maybe it's just the start of a new chapter in AOL's lifespan. Take this Washington Post story today, for proof. AOL last week screwed up and released private information about its users and how they use the company's search engine. Significantly, the top search term entered by AOL users is "Google."
August 7, 2006

Truly, it's the end of an era. My first online job, way back in 1996, was as Content Editor of AOL's Digital City Denver. It was a great time to be working on the Internet -- there was a palpable sense of excitement. Everything was new, and everything was possible. Never mind that AOL wasn't exactly the "Internet" (many 'Net folks pooh-poohed AOL even then), we were all missonaries preaching the online faith. Like the other handful of online companies at the time, we spent more than half of our long days meeting with potential partners, advertisers and content providers, as well as anyone who would spend the time to listen, to tell them about the Internet and how it would change their lives.
March 15, 2006

I get a lot of inquiries about podcasting because DenverPost.com has had podcasts for a year, from newspapers interested in starting podcasts, consulting companies researching them, and from students working on papers. I recently received a note from a student in England, and I thought I'd post his question and my response:
July 8, 2005

There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday, about a woman in South Korea whose dog pooped on a subway. She refused to clean it up, much to the consternation of other passengers nearby (what the hell is a dog doing in the subway anyway?). One passenger took a digital photo and put it on a citizen journalism Web site, and then all hell broke loose. Everyone started calling her the "Dog Poop Lady" and chattering back and forth online about how awful she is. Bloggers joined in, and the search for her identity began (her face was obscured in the photo).
May 11, 2005

(Note: I worked for DenverPost.com from 2003-2006.) No, don't barf. I know a lot of people -- especially the kind of people who read blogs, who I think are by nature technologically savvy and opinionated -- hate even the concept of AOL and everything the company stands for. But hear me out, because I truly believe that without AOL and its millions of users, the Internet wouldn't have evolved as quickly as it has into an everyday part of our lives. Washington Post technology writer Robert MacMillan wrote today in his "Random Access" column about RSS feeds, and how RSS is too complicated and technical to become mainstream, even though there's a huge buzz about it in the online media. I agree completely with him. RSS is bogged down deeply in geek quotient.