keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Uh...sorry for getting a bit lost here, but I've been hearing about
this "walled garden" a lot, and I was wondering if someone could
explain it to me.
You made some excellent points in the remainder of your post, and I
largely agree, but one thing about a garden is that it is 'tended'. There
is some 'selection process' and 'weeding' from the 'gardener'.
So although the imode menu is basically just a shortcut at the phone end
to a portal with special billing facilities, the fact that the sites
there have to undergo some selection process, pass some kind of quality
threshold and - presumably, be largely honest, does give it a particular
value (whatever we may think of the criteria and practices of the
"gardener").
I think of the imode menu not as a WALLED garden (the "walled" part is
the bit people have most problem with I guess) but just a garden,
surrounded by a very wide, dynamic, jungle of vegetation.
I suspect that people who do not have direct experience of imode simply
do not fully grasp the fact that an imode phone can attempt to browse ANY
website on the net. Of course, if you try and browse Slashdot you won't
get far down the page, it is too heavy and uses too wide a range of tags,
but you can certainly try.
So garden, yes, walled, no.
With reference to "walls" - I saw some stats. recently suggesting that
some huge percentage (80% ? something like that - feel free to post the
correct figure) of www page impressions are on just 60 sites.
The other thing to note is that jphone and (I think) ezweb phones can
also access imode sites.
Nick
Received on Sat Dec 29 14:49:51 2001