My last column on broadband data caps rubbed the wrong way my old friend Brett Glass, an Internet Service Provider in Laramie, Wyoming. “Your most recent article regarding ISPs and bandwidth caps is misleading and inaccurate,” wrote Brett. “I hope you haven’t joined Bob Frankston’s ‘kill all service providers’ camp, because it sure seems like you have… Our bandwidth costs are $100 per megabit per second and are going UP due to increasing charges for middle mile bandwidth from Qwest/Centurylink and the FCC’s failure to act on special access.”

“My situation is absolutely the norm. Bandwidth is expensive, and anyplace you have to use the (monopoly) telephone company to get to it — which is most places — it is getting more so due to lax regulation by the FCC. At the same time, users are cranking up the duty cycle, attempting to leave streaming running as they once left the TV or the radio on even when they weren’t watching or listening. Add that to the fact that unicast streaming is the most inefficient possible way to deliver media (millions of times less efficient than broadcast), and people should expect to pay much more, not less, for media to be delivered that way than for the same content delivered via an efficient mechanism. Don’t demonize the ISP! He’s trying to make technology and protocols work in ways they were never designed to and which they were intentionally made bad at doing”

I feel for Brett and for any ISP in his situation, but does that situation apply for most readers of this column? No. Your ISP is likely a Comcast or Verizon or some other enormous telco or cable company, not Lariat.net. The numbers I referred to in my last column were exactly right for huge ISPs and exactly wrong for tiny ones like Lariat.  But that doesn’t make those earlier statements incorrect.

Last year Brett characterized himself to me as a telco, while this year he contrasts his operation with that monopoly. The fact is there’s class warfare taking place between big and small business not just on the Internet but everywhere. Maybe Brett is a little dinosaur. Certainly he has terrific challenges.

In the conflict between big and small I tend to come down on the side of small. We’re recovering from the worst recession in a generation and big companies aren’t doing a damn thing to help. They don’t pay taxes, they don’t create jobs, they don’t spend money, and as a result the economy is under-stimulated. Large U.S. corporations have restructured themselves to avoid taxation, they see their primary function as increasing productivity which means decreasing employment, they have their highest profits ever and are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that they aren’t going to spend.

In contrast to this, small and medium-sized businesses, which are responsible for all new job creation in this country, can’t get banks to loan them any money to fund those new jobs.

The priorities of American big businesses are completely screwed-up while small businesses are, for the most part, ignored.

ISPs like Brett bring the Internet to places where the big guys don’t want to be bothered. We have had over the years various programs to encourage the development of the rural Internet — programs funded to the tune of $200 billion — that have had little impact on service with the big companies just syphoning the money while leaving little guys like Brett to do the actual work.

Which class of ISPs do you think is viewed as “too big to fail?” Not Lariat, even though in many cases there is no alternate provider.

It’s a bad situation, but also a dynamic one. The problems Brett cites today will be exchanged for different problems down the road. He makes the good point of how inefficient unicast is for media delivery, yet unicast costs are continuing to drop (maybe not in Laramie, yet, but in larger markets) and it is easy to predict that even inefficient old unicast will eventually be cheaper per viewer than broadcast with its higher fixed costs.

So the situation is changing. It might not be changing fast enough to save Lariat, but that’s the nature of business.  Brett has to ask himself whether Lariat is what he should be doing with his life just now?

No business has an innate right to exist.

In some respects this big-versus-small issue comes down to how you view your operation. Brett wants to be a telco but he doesn’t have the scale. Maybe his business would be better if he changed his point of view.

I’m reminded of an interview I did years ago with Jim Knopf, a pioneer of shareware software.  Knopf’s company, Buttonware, published PC-File, a very successful shareware database. Just across town, Bob Wallace published PC-Write, a very successful shareware word processor. Both men were hiring at the time and Knopf told me about the help wanted ads they placed in the local paper. Knopf’s ad read: “software company seeks marketing professional.” Wallace’s ad read: “mail-order company seeks experienced salespeople.”

It was clear to Knopf that Wallace had written the better ad because it was based on reality rather than ambition.

The reality among Internet Service Providers is that their market has matured. Cable companies and telcos today make more profit from providing Internet service than they do from television or telephones.  Scale has become everything and Brett Glass is just another customer to squeeze.

Fortunately I think the market is ripe for another transformation and transformations are never led by big companies.  It’s time to change the world… again.

Internet Service Providers in the USA are trying to apply bandwidth caps to their users, with those caps being 2, 4, or 5 gigabytes-per-month for wireless users at various price levels and generally 250 gigabytes-per-month for home users. Most of the press coverage of this issue comes down on the side of consumers but lately the ISP publicity machine has been revved-up and we’re being told that bandwidth caps are necessary, even inevitable. This is, as my 87 year-old Mom would say, BS.

Provisioning is what ISPs call the amount of Internet backbone capacity they buy per subscriber. This number is always less than the amount of bandwidth we think we are buying because most of the time Internet connections aren’t used at all and ISPs count on this to keep costs under control. If you are buying an 8 megabit-per-second connection from your ISP, he in turn provisions you with around 50 kilobits-per-second of backbone. This data arbitrage is part of what makes being a broadband ISP so profitable.

The reason this is an issue, we’re told, is because ISPs fear we are changing our consumption patterns. If we all switch to getting our television and movies over the Internet then there’s no way 50 kilobits will be enough.

So they’ve taken to publishing charts like the one above, which came from a blog here. It shows the massive increase in data consumption at an arbitrary ISP. Arcing into the heavens it looks like ISP costs are exploding and will shortly become infinite unless data caps are applied. If the ISPs can’t make money, we’re told, then we’ll all lose our Internet service.

They’ve become “too big to fail. ”

Remember that one?

Fortunately, at the same time bandwidth consumption is going up, backbone costs are going down and have been doing so for many years. The basic unit of ISP backbone expenditures is called IP Transit. Here’s a chart I found showing IP Transit prices per megabit in several cities over a period of years.

There are a couple interesting points I can make about this chart. You’ll notice for example that backbone costs in Tokyo, where broadband connections typically run at 100 megabits-per-second, are about four times higher than they are in New York or London. Yet broadband connections in Tokyo cost half what they do in New York, and that’s for a connection at least four times a fast!

So Softbank BB in Tokyo pays four times as much per megabit for backbone capacity and offers four times the speed for half the price of Verizon in New York. Yet Softbank BB is profitable.

No matter what your ISP says, their backbone costs are inconsequential and to argue otherwise is probably a lie.

Now let’s try an apples-to-apples comparison of these two charts by adjusting them to cover the same time period like this:

Consumption went up and prices went down. In terms of backbone cost per subscriber, ISP costs have been flat for years.

That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8.

That doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Capping consumption at 20-times the provisioning level doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it sets a dangerous precedent.

These data caps are actually a trap being set for us by the ISPs.

Data caps that may make logical sense today make no sense tomorrow, yet once they are in place they’ll tend to stay in place.

IP Transit costs will continue to drop. That $8 price will most likely continue to fall at the historical annual rate of 22 percent. So what’s presented as an ISP insurance policy is really a guaranteed profit increase of 22 percent that will be compounded over time because consumption will continue to rise and customers will be for the first time charged for that increased consumption.

This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.

Most U. S. broadband customers don’t get anywhere near that 250 gigabyte cap. The few who do hit those limits are big gamers or file downloaders for the most part. Maybe they do take unfair advantage of the system, but the question is whether this is the proper way to control their consumption?  I don’t think it is.

In time we will all bump into these caps and our Internet bills will suddenly double as a result, circumventing competition and ending a 15 year downward broadband price trend.

ISPs win, we lose.

Almost eight months ago in my annual predictions column I made a big deal about Bufferbloat, which was the name Bell Labs researcher Jim Gettys had given to the insidious corruption of Internet service by too many intelligent network devices. Well I’ve been testing one of the first products designed to treat bufferbloat and am here to report that it might work. But like many other public health problems, if we don’t all pay attention and do the right thing, ultimately we’ll all be screwed.

At the risk of pissing-off the pickier network mavens who read this column, Bufferbloat is a conflict between the Internet’s Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and various buffering schemes designed into network devices like routers and modems as well as into applications on PCs and mobile devices.

TCP was designed in the Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf era to support devices with very limited memory connected over links that maxed-out at around 50 kilobits-per-second.  Network reliability was paramount, trumping speed, the idea being that if there was an ABORT LAUNCH signal sent by the White House it had darned well better be delivered.  So flow control was very robust.

But then memory got cheaper, networks got faster, and we started sending new data types like Laverne & Shirley video streams that were intended to be delivered without interruption — something that had never been imagined for a best effort network like the Internet. Our method that eventually emerged for watching TV and other bandwidth-intensive Internet activities was through the clever use of datagram protocols and pre-buffering. Connect to Hulu for an episode of Glee (or to Netflix to watch Cliff Robertson in 633 Squadron as I did last night) and you can watch that buffer fill, making us wait half a minute or so in exchange for an implied guarantee that there will be no further stopping and starting once the video starts to play.

Yet pre-buffering often isn’t enough and the show stops for more buffering or even a change of network connections or speeds — that’s Bufferbloat.

Bufferbloat becomes a problem when you have a buffer in your application (say a video player) a buffer in your PC network connection, another in the router, and another still in your cable or DSL modem. Add to this at least one and sometimes two levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and things start to get ugly. All that filling and emptying of buffers defeats TCP’s own flow control algorithms leading to the wholesale destruction of network connections that are so confused by cascading buffer effects they don’t even know they’ve been destroyed and so take even longer to be reestablished — up to seven seconds in cases I’ve measured at home.

The solution is to keep buffers as small as possible and to be looking constantly for network performance issues. That’s what happens in Cerowrt, experimental Open Source firmware for certain Netgear N600 routers that I’ve been testing. The N600 is one of the few routers in the market with Open Source software so it is an easy platform for experimentation. And having experimented now for several days I can report that it might even work.

I think my network is running better but there are no good benchmarks yet for this stuff. And to really show obvious effects we should all be running Cerowrt or its closed source counterparts.

One of the issues here is network speed. We need a new marketing term. Broadband connections that clock in excess of 20 megabits-per-second (mbps) yet carry with them latencies in excess of a second aren’t fast at all.  In practice, by turning on bandwidth shaping latency can be easily reduced but that comes at a bandwidth cost.  Your connection may be faster at 20 mbps but much snappier throttled back to 1-2 mbps. “Speed” has been stolen from us as a useful term.

In fact our fixation with Internet speed tests may well be hurting us all in this regard.

I know this problem is both real and within our capability to fix. Hopefully as modem and router manufacturers and network application vendors become more aware of these systemic issues they’ll do the right thing to minimize Bufferbloat in their new products.  The cable industry has already updated its DOCSIS spec to allow a CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System of course) to centrally control buffering in downstream cable modems.  Modems that support the change will probably be in stores later this year, though not broadly deployed for two years or more. This will reduce the bufferbloat problem (though not solve it; you need Active Quality Management for that).

In my example, this DOCSIS change (and a new modem for me) would take latency from 1.2 seconds down to around 100ms. One hundred milliseconds is still too much, but it’s a Hell of a lot better than where we are today.

And if we do nothing? My fear is that sections of the Internet will succumb to a sort of TCP standing wave, large files will become effectively untransportable and Cliff Robertson will never grace my Roku box again.

Who will buy Hulu, the IPTV streaming service and why should we care? I’m not sure I do care, now that Lie to Me has been canceled, but in case you are an American who feels the future of series television is important, here’s what I think is going on.

The Wall $treet Journal says Apple is thinking of making a bid for Hulu and Seattlepi.com says Microsoft’s is no longer interested, which leaves Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and any unnamed parties. I can’t think of any unnamed parties, by the way, so I’m guessing one of these will walk with Hulu, which went into play a couple weeks ago following an unsolicited (and still unidentified) bid.

Of course the three big network owners of Hulu will guarantee five years of continued program access with the first two years exclusive. That’s because they have no money in Hulu and each stands to walk with $600+ million from the sale, but only if there is a sale. Without such an exclusivity period there will be no sale and no $600+ million. None of these networks can buy out the others for antitrust reasons so the “networks might balk” story is just to sell newspapers (or electrons). Hulu will be sold.

It will be interesting to see how much Hulu will cost the winner, though. The company appears to be managing the press brilliantly to generate buzz. Any of the interested parties could do the deal all in cash, no problem. But who will end up with it? Here’s my score sheet.

Apple will buy Hulu if the price is right, but how much higher than $2 Billion they will go? I suspect Apple may actually be just meddling here, trying to make it more expensive for the eventual winner.

Microsoft has already telegraphed that $2 billion is too high, but since they probably can’t afford to not be in this business that suggests they will put some smaller amount (still $1+ billion) into content deals.

For that matter, all the losers will be looking for content, so I’d say $4+ billion is up for grabs in Hollywood beyond Hulu. New cars all around!

Amazon just did a content deal with CBS (so did Netflix — remember them?) so buying Hulu would round out their content for Amazon Prime, likely bringing-in millions more customer accounts. But there, too, it depends on what is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ price target. He and Jobs are very similar in that they will have a maximum in mind and probably won’t go higher.

My gut suggests that the auction will finally come down to Google and Yahoo, if Google can get this past the feds despite its dominant position with YouTube. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz probably sees this as her best chance to avoid being fired so I think she’ll bid high. I suspect, too, that Yahoo’s unsolicited interest was what started Hulu in play in the first place, though that’s just a guess on my part.

Buying Hulu could also be Bartz’ undoing, though, because she could blow half her cash or more (I suspect Google will go to $3 billion and Yahoo will beat that) and then find herself in a position where she can’t make a profit on her purchase, especially since she’ll have to do her own CBS deal at that point and CBS CEO Les Moonves won’t make that cheap. Amazon reportedly paid $100+ million to CBS, but Moonves will try to hold out for closer to the $600+ million he would have received had CBS been a Hulu owner, seeing anything less as charity.

The fascinating scenario here, of course, is that Yahoo way overpays, damaging itself fatally in the process and ends up being acquired by one of the others, probably Microsoft.

No wonder Ballmer pulled out of the bidding, he’s playing the long game.

Roger with his axe

Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.

The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and HTML5. His point was that Microsoft is going down and that is freeing-up money from a decaying enterprise software business that can go to support new businesses based on HTML5. Google won’t be the beneficiary of Microsoft’s fall, according to Roger, because they’ve lost, too: the mobile transition effectively eliminates Google’s tollbooth on the Internet because smart phone users hardly search at all. So Apple wins by providing all the devices and Facebook wins, I guess, by providing the most popular destination.

Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong, but what I took away from this speech was first an image of Microsoft as the Roman Colosseum being mined for marble after the barbarian invasion, and second a sense that while Facebook is certainly a huge social, cultural, and business phenomenon, I just don’t see it being around for very long.

Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.

Each era of computing seems to run for about a decade of total dominance by a given platform. Mainframes (1960-1970), minicomputers (1970-1980), character-based PCs (1980-1990), graphical PCs (1990-2000), notebooks (2000-2010), smart phones and tablets (2010-2020?). We could look at this in different ways like how these devices are connected but I don’t think it would make a huge difference.

Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.

Does this feel wrong to you?  Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.

Roger may not care since he will have already made his Facebook fortune and then some. But I think this foreshortening is important because it makes Facebook the winner, yes, but the winner of what? Super-IPO of the decade? Yes. Dow-30 company of 2025? No.

My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us reclaiming our personal data, possibly through our embracing the very HTML5 that Roger loves so much. The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Apple. Black swan.

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Today, if you have a few million bucks to spare, the Federal Communications Commission will be auctioning wireless licenses in the 700 MHz band — primo space in many respects because it is lower on the RF spectrum and offers longer range. But Auction 92, as it is called, is anything but primo, since it is for licenses that either received no bids in the previous Auction 73, held in 2008, or were sold in that auction to organizations that never paid in full. That earlier auction, which I covered at the time, is a sad story of opportunity lost, especially for Google.

Remember how that freed-up spectrum was up for auction and Google made loud noises about bidding. I even predicted that they would bid, because that’s what I was hearing from inside the Googleplex.  Google wanted to set up a national wireless network to rival anything from Verizon or AT&T. Only Google didn’t follow-through on its threat to bid and the frequencies were cherry-picked, instead, primarily by the big wireless incumbent carriers who have for the most part done little with them.

They bought the spectrum primarily to keep it out of play, to keep a viable competitor from emerging.

That decision not to bid back in 2008 seemed very short-sighted of Google. But now I hear from people who were inside the FCC at the time that Google was privately told by the Bush Administration not to bid.

What if Google had defied this government nudge? I guess the threat was they’d have it taken from them anyway through some regulatory action or legal challenge. But had Google succeeded, we wouldn’t be seeing bandwidth caps being imposed today on wireless data plans. And wireless data would be cheaper everywhere.

Our tax dollars at work….

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I don’t often respond to other bloggers but today I was asked to do so by my friend Dr. Steven Berglas who blogs for Forbes and is quite an expert on executive and entrepreneur psychology. Steve wrote recently about President Obama’s call for shared sacrifice in the current budget fistfight with Congress, claiming this was exactly the wrong message for the President to send to American entrepreneurs, effectively discouraging entrepreneurism. He asked a number of bloggers including me to comment for a follow-up post. My response (Steve’s wrong) ran so long I figured — what the heck — I might as well make a couple bucks from it. So here goes:

Dear Steve,

I don’t think either you or President Obama will like what I write here so you may not choose to use it.

President Obama has a message problem, true. He’s simply out of his depth.

Here’s a guy who has always been the smartest in the room, noted for his Teflon smoothness and turn of phrase. But in order to turn the right phrase, no matter how smart you are, still requires an understanding of context — an understanding he simply doesn’t have. And why should he? Obama was always a political operative. Michelle has more real world experience.

He’s not dumb, he’s not shallow, but he is inexperienced.

Shared sacrifice (and calling for it) works when you have no easier choices, when the alternative isn’t just a different policy but military defeat and potential annihilation. That’s why Churchill could make so well those very calls that Obama is frankly attempting to emulate now. Only this isn’t the Blitz — it’s the Great Recession — and the GOP isn’t Hitler, just a bunch of pols. So this was a misstep on Obama’s part.

But you are wrong, too. You know a lot of entrepreneurs, but I’m not sure you have ever been an entrepreneur. I have. I started and helped to start several companies that failed completely. I also helped to start three companies that have a combined market cap this afternoon of more than $500 billion.

One question I am frequently asked because of my background is if this is a good time to be an entrepreneur — a good time to start a company? Understand people have been asking me this question for 30 years — a period of time that encompasses some major booms as well as two of our deepest recessions. And the funny thing is that my answer to this question never changes: it is always a great time to be an entrepreneur and start a business. And with the passage of time I tend to think it has only gotten better, even today.

The sort of entrepreneurism I know, which is technology entrepreneurism, is acyclical. It doesn’t matter what the economy is doing, what interest rates are, even the mood of the venture capitalists. People will still start new technology companies to develop their great ideas. Understand that they do so with a 95 percent chance of failure, again no matter how the economy is doing. Against an obstacle that huge, factors like government policies and political talking points are inconsequential.

Entrepreneurs start companies compulsively. It would take medication to force them to stop, thank God.

So what we have here with President Obama and Congress is at best positioning and at worst posturing and it will have no impact whatsoever on entrepreneurial energy in this country.

Entrepreneurs have more important things to worry about.

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Not so sick after all?

This may seem an odd topic, but stick with me. Yesterday Disney’s ABC television network said it was licensing two canceled daytime TV soap operas to a production company that would be moving the shows to the Internet. I seem to be the only one who thinks this is a brilliant move. In fact it might be the Internet’s next killer app.

All My Children and One Life to Live as killer apps? Yes.

A killer app, remember, is the Silicon Valley term for an application that all by itself justifies to certain users the acquisition of hardware needed to run that app. People will go down to the store and buy hardware just to be able to use that application, whatever it is. VisiCalc was the killer app for the Apple ][, Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for the IBM PC, Halo was the xBox killer app, and Bonanza was the killer app for U.S. color TV.

Every new platform needs a killer app to get beyond the early adopters and reach a broader audience. Some experts are arguing that Netflix is the killer app for Internet TV, which might be right. But I think it might just as easily be All My Children.

ABC had nothing to lose in this deal. The two soaps in question were already canceled, winding down their casts and story lines. I’m sure they were acquired for a dollar each or less. If moving online saved ABC some costs from closing-down the series they may have actually paid Prospect Park to take the shows off its hands. So these iconic brands were cheap to acquire.

But they are expensive to produce, right?

Not so fast.

Nobody outside the shows and their networks knows for sure but a $50 million figure is often thrown out as the annual production cost of a major soap, so let’s work with that.

Fifty million dollars is $192,000 per episode or $4,370 per finished minute based on 44 minute shows. That’s a lot of money but a lot less than primetime TV budgets. It’s also the absolute most any soap has ever cost with most costing less. Certainly there are some savings to be found in there. Let’s claim a 20 percent labor savings from moving to the Internet, bringing per minute costs down to $3,496.

Actually, there are plenty of additional savings. Some savings will come from lower labor costs as actors accept smaller paychecks as an alternative to retirement or unemployment. But an even greater savings will come from any Internet soap’s ability to offer online every episode ever broadcast — the long tail — at an effective production cost of $0 per hour.

If a third of Internet viewers are watching old episodes that drops the effective cost of new episodes by a third, so we are down to $2,342 per finished minute.

Don’t forget potential subsidies from hardware companies. As a killer app for Internet-connected TVs, for example, All My Children might get some cash from TV manufacturers. Bonanza got money from RCA that way and many popular shows were moved to HD production with financial support from HDTV makers. Why not the same for Erica Kane?

Our All My Children budget is now down to $26.8 million per year, so let’s figure $4 million of that might come from Samsung or Panasonic or maybe even Google TV if any of those platforms can be somehow uniquely linked to the shows, possibly through additional or interactive content.

Heck, what if All My Children could be accessed solely through its Facebook page? How much would Mark Zuckerberg pay for that?

I don’t know what Zuckerberg would pay, but I do have one number to work with — the rumored production budgets at YouTube’s upcoming professional channels. According to Variety, YouTube will shortly bring some professional channels to its service with budgets of $1000-$3000 per finished minute.

Our straw man budget for All My Children, which now stands at $22.8 million per year, just happens to work out to $2000 per minute — right in the sweet spot of those rumored YouTube numbers.

I am not saying that All My Children and One Life to Live are headed to YouTube as the basis of a Soap Channel, but I am saying that they’d be profitable both for their producers and for YouTube if they were headed there.

Each show has about 2.5 million daily viewers — each a potential buyer of an Internet-connected TV. That’s $2.5 billion worth of TVs and well worth a $4 million production subsidy.

If YouTube or any of its competitive services could reliably get 2.5 million viewers per original episode they’d see that as well worth the money, too.

This is long form video with commercial breaks going to a dedicated audience which can now be global (that last part could be huge). Remember 2.5 million viewers of a 44-minute soap opera is the equivalent of 36 million typical three-minute YouTube video views. As professional content with a 40 year heritage that’s an easy sell to advertisers — a no-brainer for P&G.

So contrary to all the skepticism, moving soaps to the net could easily become a goldmine — one with a lifespan far longer than that of VisiCalc.

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There is no good aspect to cyber bullying, but maybe there’s a little light to be found in the underlying idea that people interact differently online than they do in person. That’s not all bad if it gives a voice — an academic voice — to students who might otherwise remain silent in class. This is certainly the experience of Democrasoft, a startup I have written about before that seems to have stumbled on a whole new class of software for education.

Democrasoft’s Collaborize product began as a way for communities to discuss issues online with the idea that the core groups would be cities or local governments. But the Santa Rosa, CA-based company found some of its earliest adopters were teachers — a group the company had never even considered. More than 6600 teachers are presently using Collaborize, which is still a very small percentage of American classrooms. But the adoption growth rate is a very viral 30+ percent per month, according to Democrasoft CEO Richard Lang, so this application is going to be significant.

A lot has changed about Collaborize since I last wrote about it. The business model for education is now free, for example, and there is a custom version, Collaborize Classroom, just for schools — the company’s largest present market.

The idea behind Collaborize is simple. It is a structured conversation. Any participant can pose a question for discussion, eliciting responses from the group or taking a poll. You can look at it as a quiz or a test but grading doesn’t have to be a part of what’s essentially an online Socratic dialog.

Yes, you can do this with a wiki, Mr. Smartypants, but the significant point here is that people generally don’t do this with wikis. Collaborize is more structured than a wiki and requires little customization.

One of the most important aspects of this tool, according to the teachers who like it, is that it has a social leveling function that brings students into the online conversation who might say little or nothing in the classroom. This is good.

What’s changed most recently with the product, though, is the addition of some social networking functions and especially the development of a library of discussions available to anyone.

Here’s the deal with the library. Some teachers are better than others at designing discussions. These can include video and audio clips to spur discussion and each becomes a little lesson in its own right, providing information, eliciting responses, and even measuring comprehension all at the same time. That’s powerful. But if you are a teacher who is intimidated by the whole question design process, why not use some other teacher’s discussions, either in their entirety or as the basis for your own derivative work?

The library already contains thousands of discussions in nearly every subject area.

Social networking provides both the door to this library and something even more important — peer review. Maybe a discussion could be improved or maybe it is just plain misguided: responses from other teachers will provide that context. If a discussion from the library gets a lot of positive responses from teachers whose opinions you respect that makes the discussion more valuable.

I think this is great, especially because we Cringelys are embarking now on our own experiment in home schooling, where I’ll be borrowing shamelessly from Collaborize Classroom (my only connection with the company, by the way).

The more tools I have on my belt the better I feel.

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I have domains from Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and Register.com, but there are many other registrars — some of which must be better than these. Network Solutions is too expensive and difficult to work with, GoDaddy is annoying and greedy, while Register.com may be great but I don’t have a good comparison.

I am thinking of consolidating all my domains with one registrar. Where should I go and why?