A Barking Dog

It was a typical late summer night, the Thursday prior to Labor Day in the year 2000. I was sitting in a suite in the Wall Center Tower Two. thirty floors above downtown Vancouver. The two “special friends” that I had met earlier that night at the club in the Cecil Hotel had already showered, packed and headed back to the club. It was still early, just after midnight. On what should have been one of the happiest days of my life, tears filled my eyes. Earlier that day I’d just sealed the biggest deal of my life. I’d sold the Live-Audio_Board site and secured a rather well paying job after several weeks of negociations. As my normal custom over Labor Day for the last few years, I made the trip to Vancouver for the Molson Indy Vancouver race. I knew things were going to change, little did I know how much. I was in for the ride of my life, I just hoped I could hold on.

That was the beginning of the end, though perhaps the beginning of the end was really about the time I started looking for a buyer. I’d had a few offers, none I took too seriously. While the revenue from banners at the time would have made for an OK part time endevor, I wanted something more. In retrospect I was probably being greedy, caught in dot com era heyday. I wanted the LAB and it’s newborn cousin ProSoundWeb.com to become the Amazon.com of pro audio on the Internet, if you will. The other attempts by the media giants were miserable failures at this point. They just couldn’t find the formula and were busy trying to apply the manufacturer driven content model of the trade pubs to the Web. It wasn’t working. They missed the fact that interactivity was the whole point of the Internet. Even though the Internet bubble had burst the previous April when I was in Europe, there were still some people willing to play.

What really hurt the LAB was not so much the pressure from some manufacturers once we started selling more ad space, was that due to increased publicity there were more and more coming to the site. In fact, far more visitors than there were people doing sound for a living. At first it wasn’t that bad, there were still a fair amount of Old Skool LABsters (OSL) that could come in and help set things straight. One thing I’ve found that’s instrumental in a community such as this is that the participants at least respect the moderators of the community. In turn the mods have to be fair in the moderation and fairly knowledgeable about the community interest or at least know where to go for the answers. A moderator must do more than tell errant posters to follow the rules. The key components of a sucessful online community are leadership, trust, honesty and integrity.

It is absolutely important that the moderator have the trust and respect of the community, else the lunatics start to run the asylum. Too often when that happens it’s not the “alpha loons” like Randle Patrick McMurphy, but lesser know, less capable, less respected inmates. What they lack in knowledge they make up for in shear number of posts and greatly add to the noise, without adding substance to the community. Another plague is what I call the “drive by” posters. That’s where a poster has no interest in the community other than as a one-way research forum. Often, if not most time they have a sense of entitlement. They are typically younger, less experienced members of the community and are being raised in a digital world. They feel they are entitled to answers for mearly having access to the resource. If the answer isn’t the one they were looking for some get argumentitive even though they have not one basic clue as to the subject matter. This “info on demand” phenomenon is one of the great benefits of the Internet. It’s also an achilles heel when used in a disrespectful manner.

There is a thirst for knowledge on the subject. One has to make an effort to find it. There is no short cut for hard work. Having a browser and a cable modem is no substitute for experience, hard work and experimentation along with a healthy dose of mentoring. Kids, you need to get off your asses and work. It’s true, many of you do, and if you keep at it and get some of the right breaks, things will come your way and you’ll have a rewarding career in the business. Even if you do all that, some of you will not make it. Sorry, that’s the the way it is. The transition into the industry can be difficult and not having another means of support or willing to make the sacrifices required will most certainly up the risk of failure. The industry did just fine before the Internet and will continue to do so. The Internet is just one powerful tool. By no means the only tool available to a student of audio.

I’ll stop short of proclaiming the LAB dead for the moment. The LAB is a patient in critical condition, though there still continues to be some of the type of discussion that built the repuation of the LAB. The cancer of newbieism continues to slowly kill the patient, forcing it onto life support. All while the surgeons debate over what color to paint the operating room.

‘Til next time….

Dave

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2003 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.