- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Has the media unfairly focused on Monica Lewinsky's sexual history? Join the debate in Politics

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Under the Covers
By James Poniewozik
Reports of Spy magazine's death are greatly exaggerated
(02/18/98)

Bestseller Hell
By Jon Carroll
James Patterson's "Cat & Mouse"
(02/17/98)

Hollywoodland
By Catherine Seipp
Option this column!
(02/13/98)

Like watching ice freeze
By Daniel Radosh
Bring on the cheerleaders! The anorexic gymnasts! CBS's Olympic coverage is a snooze
(02/12/98)

More is less
By Charles Taylor
"Titanic's" Oscar stampede points to a Hollywood future full of bloat and mediocrity
(02/11/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

"The two most compelling things about the Web are search and interactivity," says Sabot, the Tripod chairman now poised to sit on the Lycos board of directors. "So if you can put together navigation in the form of Lycos and community in the form of Tripod, you have a new generation of online service. It makes a ton of sense to have it all integrated in one place."

Tripod is a typical Net community in the sense that, although Tripod is also a content provider, the essence of the site is found on the personalized home pages of each of its members and in the conversations between them. The model here is not top-down, as in more conventional online sites, nor is it passive, in the way that the search engines have traditionally been. In fact, it isn't really bottom-up, either, since you don't get the sense that the members are leading Tripod in any one direction in particular. Call it instead horizontal, since almost everything that makes the site valuable takes place between the members.

"One of the presumptions underlying Tripod right from the beginning was that digital text was a loser," says Sabot. "Go back to the origins of television. When television first started, what people did was do radio on television, and that's what a site like Pathfinder is doing. But what we're doing is television on television. This goes right back to the origins of the Net, but it's still true that the idea of individual participation is alive in cyberspace. The ease with which individuals can publish themselves and reach a mass audience is something that people have found compelling right from the beginning, and it's what the Net is really about."

Sabot's words, with their invocation of the Net as the democratic medium par excellence, sound oddly old-fashioned -- whatever that means in an online world that's still only four or five years old. But the truth is that even as large media companies have attempted to incorporate Net life into traditional business models, the Net's real growth has occurred outside the parameters set by Time Warner, Microsoft and their corporate cohorts. Something like 80 percent of all Tripod's members come back once a week, and the site is now adding members at the rate of 4,000 to 5,000 per day. At that rate, it will have more than 2 million members by the summer, each of whom is going to build his or her own home page, each of which will no doubt provide a showcase for advertisements.

"With Tripod, we have a million people with a million and a half home pages that have some sort of particular interest," Philip says. "What we're going to be able to do is go to music retailers and create little networks, so that people will be able to have a mini-music store on their site. If someone has a part of their home page that's about Garth Brooks, you might be able to click on that name and immediately be able to buy a Garth Brooks CD."

Asking whether this is a good thing or a bad thing seems somehow beside the point. (Are the links to Amazon.com or Borders at the bottom of online book reviews good or bad?) The point, really, is that the Net has scrambled our ideas of the proper relationship between individual identity and commerce; or perhaps it just made an always complicated relationship explicit. The paradox of the Tripod-Lycos deal, after all, is that community of the Tripod form can only thrive in a commercial context. It's the community that will make the advertisers come, but it's the advertisers that allow the community to grow.
SALON | Feb. 19, 1998 

James Surowiecki writes for the Motley Fool and Slate.