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*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
*                                                            * 
* Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
* All Rights Reserved                                        * 
* Direct comments and questions to:                          * 
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Whassup? I'm tired of whassup. That's whassup. So whassup with 
whassup?

Since the debut of Budweiser's Super Bowl ad about a group of 
friends sitting around talking on the phone, their unique way 
of asking each other "what's up" has entered the popular 
lexicon. Of course due to CRTC regulations that require cable 
stations to substitute parallel Canadian programming on 
American channels, yet another historic Super Bowl ad was lost 
on the Canadian public.

Budweiser made the ad available via its web site and, much like 
how people started passing around that link to Mahir's "I Kiss 
You!!!!" page, pretty much everyone in the English-speaking 
world became acquainted with "whassup" within a matter of 
weeks.

It didn't stop there. Soon after two netizens created a parody 
using the soundtrack but substituted images from the Saturday 
cartoon Superfriends. Superman and Wonder Woman were calling 
each other on their batphones shouting "whazzup".  It was 
clever enough.

Clever things on the net, from web browsers to dancing hamster 
pages, spawn endless imitators. The quality (or lack thereof) 
of these parodies is less surprising than what actually gets 
parodied. A leisure suit wearing man in Turkey? Dancing 
hamsters? A Budweiser beer commercial? Who'd have thunk it!

There's an archive of  the various whassup take-offs at 
www.floridastuff.com/bud. For anyone thinking of making a 
whassup parody there's a list of well-considered do's and 
don'ts at www.ugo.com/channels/filmTv/whassup. Whatever you do, 
it's critical you don't copy the Monty Python style of 
animation by using still photos with moving cut out mouths.

                         eBooks

Stephen King is a somewhat famous horror novelist who tends to 
retell the same story about strange things happening to a nice 
New England family. Each new book uses an increasingly larger 
and larger number of pages to describe a family being 
slaughtered by vampires, family pets, mechanical psychic space 
spiders, or Jack Nicholson. The real horror here is the large 
parts of North American deforested to satisfy readers anxious 
for an "original" story from King.

In March the author released a 66 page story specifically and 
solely for the emerging eBook format. It proved immensely 
popular. The official site's download page was clogged with 
people anxious to charge a measly $2.50 to their credit card to 
read King's  thin yarn. Online book retailers like Amazon.com 
swallowed the $2.50 fee and used it as a loss-leader to 
generate traffic.

In the computer world there's a saying that goes "it's the 
software stupid". Software drives hardware sales. A computer 
without great software is just a hunk of beige plastic. There 
have been a number of attempts to create dedicated electronic 
book devices but they've all been dismal failures despite the 
availability of great "software" (i.e., popular books released 
in electronic format).

Clearly trying to get the public to accept an eBook is 
something more than having the right hardware and software. 
With King's successful release and with everyone running around 
these days with palmtop computers it seems the eBook concept is 
worth another look.

I think, however, the eBook concept will always be doomed to a 
niche market . First, there's the dork factor. Years ago I used 
to download articles from Wired's web site to my Apple Newton 
and read them on the subway to work. I always felt like a dork 
doing it. You see more people obsessively tapping away on their 
palm computers these days but now you run up against the cool 
factor. If I'm on the subway and sitting across from me is a 
cute woman in smart eyewear and she's carrying a Kangol 
messenger bag, I want her to see I'm reading Love in the Time 
of Cholera. With an eBook and my looks, she's more than likely 
to think I'm reviewing notes on how to install new server 
hardware.

Reading text on an LCD screen makes reading more difficult. 
Kurt Vonnegut believes you have to make reading as simple as 
possible. Everyone can appreciate an abstract artist like 
Picasso but few can ever appreciate an equally abstract book 
like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It takes society about 
twelve years to teach a human being to read and many never 
catch on. 

When Vonnegut formulated this idea, he didn't consider a third 
way. MP3Lit.com (www.mp3lit.com) marries the downloadable book 
idea, MP3 technology, and books-on-tape which are popular with 
idiots. You can download a number of free works of literature 
at the site. Right now there's not a lot of complete novels. 
Most of it is public domain short stories and poetry or excerpt 
from popular current works like Harry Potter.

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