Over at Techworld, they're reporting on an astonishing wireless broadband product.

The magazine's reporters attended a demonstration of a wireless product capable of delivering blistering throughput -- better than 3Mbits -- over an 18-mile wide area using little power and unregulated frequencies.

On an apples-to-apples basis, the techonology claims to deliver 1,000 times more bandwidth than existing WiMax approaches.

Furthermore, the company that produces the product -- xG Technology in Florida -- says it can also deliver several megabits of bandwidth over short distances (40 feet) powered by as little as two nanowatts.

And from all appearances, the technology is able to deliver bandwidth to end-users at very low costs.

The company's claims are sufficiently astonishing to invite suspicions of a hoax. But if it is not a hoax and if there is no significant gotcha -- a big if -- what xG Technology is poised to deliver will revolutionize media. The company claims to have a deliverable product by the middle of next year.

Under any circumstances, eventually, we'll see widescale deployment of broadband wireless at affordable prices.

When that happens it will enable a generation of media products unlike any we've yet seen. It will transform television, publishing, movies and games. In terms of new ways of imagining content, it will be as big as the leap from radio to television.

Nearly all of our current thinking on media revolves around the notion of an audience in a fixed location and in fixed circumstances -- at home on the couch, at the office on the computer, in the movie theater, or in front of the game console, etc. Even radio, because it is not random access, assumes a fixed-circumstance listener -- in the car or, say, listening to internet radio

Broadband wireless -- once deployed and cheap enough to be widely adopted -- requires a radical rethinking for existing media even as it ushers in a host of new players. It invites us to conceive content products that are delivered just-in-time or that are geo-specific or circumstance-specific -- or a mashup of all three. Because you will be reaching people on the move and in varying circumstances, local knowledge bases will be king.

Media companies will have to ask themselves not just how many viewers or readers they have, but they will need to measure the footprint in their lives. Media companies will live and die by relevance rather than subsisting on habit as they do today.

None of these new approaches will usurp many traditional modes of media consumption. Certainly some functions today ill-served in today's static-circumstance model will migrate to broadband wireless. However, for the most part, this is a process of addition rather than subtraction on the content side.

Even though this change is coming at us with all the sublety of a freight train in a tunnel, almost no media company is preparing for the day. A hint on the first baby step: start getting your archives of content ready to present in a new form.

And there's this: while it will be a process of addition on the content side, the implications for advertising and commerce are a different matter.

A personal terminal connected to wireless broadband networks will permit the arrival of the ultimate advertising product. All existing advertising models will be turned upside down.

Movie sold out and can't decide what to do next? Check the listings on the move, listen to an MP3 of the artist performing in the jazz club down the street, make a choice and go.... And in point of fact, when the revolution arrives you will seldom encounter a sold-out movie -- you'll either have tickets waiting for you or be notified long before you hit the theater.

Checking out one car and want to compare it with a competitor's model instantly? Want to check the latest prices for a washing machine you're considering while you're in the store? See an attractive camcorder on sale but want to check what other owners say about it? You have two restaurants in front of you, which one has the better review? Done. Done. Done. And done.

If the xG Technology short-range approach works as promised, it will offer exciting prospects for narrow-casting location-specific broadband ads. Walking through a store, one might be able to browse through all kinds of enhanced content about the offerings for sale.

Plus there will be new presentation modes as well -- a publisher might well have wireless terminals installed around cities like ATMs. And the visual noise of billboards will reach a whole new level as they learn to shake their booty and animate themselves with internet content. The branding (and migraine inducing) potential is breathtaking for advertisers.

Of course, more advanced personal data terminal technology -- likely some form of electronic ink or flexible LCD -- will be important too. However, even the existing personal data terminals such as PDAs, Blackberries, laptops and cell phones will be good enough to start. Inevitably, Apple will dream up the iPod Communicator -- the uber chic design in personal data terminal -- and this will cement the transition.

So while presentation is important, it isn't the core issue here. Transport is. The media transformation can't begin without the efficient, inexpensive delivery of significant wireless bandwidth.

That's the big magilla. And no matter what, it's a problem that will be solved in the next couple of years. WiMax is OK, and if the xG Technology works, it's even better because it means the revolution starts next year.

Current wireless broadband options are fairly feeble. Technology with truly wide coverage barely provides real bandwidth. Existing high-bandwidth solutions have range issues and a host of practical impediments. That's why what's happening in Florida is so interesting. Even if xG winds up being vapor, affordable broadband wireless is coming. Bank on it.

Google gets this. The company clearly recognizes this will be the platform for advertising products to trump all others. That's why Google is so interested in providing municipal wireless. Magazines, radio, television and newspapers will see an exodus of advertisers in this direction once widely deployed.

And yet, almost anyone can play and prosper here if they are smart. It is by no means apparent that Google will win in this space, although clearly if you look at their product mix everything they're doing is getting ready for this day and the will be a power player.

The question for existing and new media companies is this: will they be ready when the revolution hits? History will be unkind to those asleep when this change arrives.

As predicted here in August the FCC ruling that defined DSL providers as "information services" is getting closer to introducing a new wave of internet tariffs.

Today, the net is abuzz about a Bay-Area company -- Narus -- that has released software it claims can monitor traffic on a network to block -- or bill for -- specific types of traffic with a degree of detail heretofore impossible.

First on the list to traffic to monitor and block? Voice Over IP (VOIP) providers like Skype, naturally. Skype's customers sidestep phone tariffs and therefore sit squarely in the cross-hairs of the telcos and cable providers ...Don't want to have too much customer choice, do we?

Even more, Narus' prodigious claims for its software promise network providers the ability to charge for a whole range of traffic. Lovely.

I believe only about 1/3 of Narus's claimed functionality -- I'm skeptical about how it scales to widespread deployment -- but that scarcely matters. The brute force approach of port blocking alone can accomplish what the telcos/cable companies want without Narus' high-end schmutz.

The FCC could have prevented all this, but it chose deliberately to let the big companies tighten their lock on the market. Indeed, in a dazzling moment of doublespeak, it claimed the ruling was "pro-consumer" choice even as the beneficiaries of decision where planning on choking off competitors.

How many carriers will deploy Narus' software? No one knows. But this first shot across the bow on tariffed traffic suggests a new -- and vastly more expensive -- internet could be on the way.

Smart content providers would be well-advised to keep a close eye on this. It's well within the realm of possibility that a national telco in Europe will try to charge, say, Amazon or CNN a fee for inbound traffic originating from their networks.

Of course, none of this will happen without a fight to keep the net free. As the battle warms up, we'll all get to pick a side: in this corner Narus, select network providers and their pet politicians determined to make the net less free, in that corner everyone else in the ever-loving world.

The always with-it Guardian as an article on E-paper -- essentially super thin, super cheap LCD screens -- that promise to bring moving pictures to printed media.

Interestingly, people aren't talking about it as an E-Ink competitor. My guess is that E-Ink wins the resolution and power consumption battle while the new E-paper offers faster refresh rates (hence video). I certainly would like to understand better how they imagine providing power to the magazines using E-Paper.

But no matter what, the the prospects for new display technology just got a lot more interesting.

Assuming the prices quoted in the articles are right, you can also expect to see moving picture billboards in cities within two years. Visual noise everywhere. Motion sickness served hot and fresh on every corner. The whole world looking like Times Square....It's just all so Bladerunner, isn't it?

Of course, many of us can be forgiven if a future city stitched from a mosaic of thousands of TV screens inspires a "stop the future, I want to get off" moment.

In any event, this looks like interesting technology. Certainly we can expect fashion magazines be early adopters. For other media, the prospects it raises for new narrative forms and new advertising models are striking.

It's also a boon for people drafting sign-code legislation...

The Delaware Supreme Court yesterday delivered what one hopes is a watershed decision when it definitively extended First Amendment protections to an anonymous blog poster who attacked an elected town councilman in Smyrna, Del.

More importantly, the court set the bar high because the unknown posters' comments were filled with obscenities and innuendo about the councilman, Patrick Cahill. That's the bright line for significant First Amendment rulings -- when you see judges protecting loathesome speech, you know they're serious.

A PDF of the rulling may be found here. Download it. Frame it. Savor it.

Considering the drift in our nation lately, one gets the feeling that certain people -- and pretty much everyone in the Bush administration -- have forgotten that America is about inconvenient freedoms.

Convenient freedoms are easy. They cost nothing and they withstand no assault. Standing up for the inconvenient freedoms in the most difficult times is what defines you as a patriot.

Every member of the Delaware Supreme Court deserves a kiss on the cheek today for reminding us that this is America, afterall.

A lower court had held that poster's ISP, Comcast, should be compelled to release the name of the person who submitted the offensive remarks to the blog.

An interesting twist is that the protection was extended to mere comments in the blog. Even more intriguing, the remarks sent to the Smyrna-Clayton Public Issues blog run a newspaper company: the Delaware State News. The poster, "John Doe 1," was represented by the ACLU, of course.

Finally, in one of those moments that makes you happy that the world exists in all its raw peculiarity, Delaware Online alleges that pretty much everyone in Smyrna believes that the anonymous poster was none other than the mayor himself.

Oh, let this marvelous irony trickle down your cheeks like sweet peach juice on a summer day while you smile stupidly at the sheer joy of being alive. Yes, yes, yes: it might have been a public official himself who created the curse-filled rant that led to the lawsuit that clearly establishes the precedent that other public officials may be subjected to further (heartfelt) curse-filled rants from constituents. Forevermore!

That, dear friends, is why we should wave our flags high today. When we protect this kind of speech, all the rest is a trifle.

Additional background can be found in these remarks from a lawyer about the lower court's decision to compel Comcast to reveal the name of the anonymous poster. It was that decision that the Delaware Supremes reversed yesterday.

In the ruling, Delaware Chief Justice Myron Steele wrote that the internet was "a unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before" and compared blogging on the net to the pampleteers of old.

The comparison is apt -- indeed, I've made it in the past myself. It's worthwhile remembering that the pampleteers of the American 17th and 18th century, often working entirely alone, laid the groundwork for modern news organizations and the press freedoms we now enjoy. And those pamphleteers were anything but polite.

Steele continued: "We are concerned that setting the standard too low will chill potential posters from exercising their First Amendment right to speak anonymously...The possibility of losing anonymity in a future lawsuit could intimidate anonymous posters into self-censoring their comments or simply not commenting at all."

In a variety of lower court cases, it appeared that contemporary courts are reluctant to extend established press protections with regard to commenting on public officials, etc. to individual bloggers. The troubling suggestion has been that these protections apply if you're a media company but not if you are an individual.

Equally troubling, many of the nation's leading media companies largely have been absent from the fight. They appear to have little interest in helping to secure for individuals the same protections they enjoy as companies. When Apple goes after a blogger for posting a legitimate news item about new products, the nations media should rise up as one to fight on behalf of the blogger.

This is the first time a high court in America has clearly extended the same protections to individuals posting on the net -- specifically with respect to libel and defamation -- as enjoyed by the traditional press. Furthermore the language of the decision suggests that all meaningful press protections should be extended to individuals on the net. This ruling will be cited in trials across America and it will prove to be very influential.

Certainly with outstanding issues like shield laws and the like, there is still much work to do and many more precedents to establish. And some of this might wind up in the US Supreme Court , although I would be amazed if they had the gall to reverse the reasoning in the Delaware opinion.

That work is for another day, though. For the moment, the dancing in the street may now commence.

In Delaware, they've got some heroes on the bench.

When you get an e-mail from Susan Mernit, you simply must pay attention. She's a dynamo and one of the True Good Folks of the fresh wave of media.

This message, about the live blogging of a conference sponsored by Yoga Journal magazine, intrigued the hell out of me. It was an e-mail blast -- not a bit of personalization -- in which Susan alerted everyone on her contact list about her live blogging effort for the conference.

Apparently, the Colorado conference is a big deal because one of the sainted figures of western yoga, B.K.S.Iyengar, will be honored. The blogging plans include all manner of multimedia streaming geegaws, text of course, and you know, the usual. So far, so good.

I imagine the streaming geegaws will be essential because, unless you stream something, a yoga conference blog threatens to consist of one blissed-out text confessional after another. A pure text blog likely winds up packed with entries about how "I felt I was in the presence of the greater grandness of the harmonious metauniverse..."

That's fine for the participants, but generally speaking satori is between the individual and the universe. I'm not clear on how blogging helps in that regard.

Worst case: you're experiencing bliss and you immediately fire up a web browser? How messed up is that? Next thing you know Google will market instant satori as a web service. Exploits just around the corner from the script kiddies... Dude, there's a buffer overrun exploit for Google Satori (tm).

Of course, Google being Google, the Satori product would be in permanent beta. And I kind of like that idea of satori always being in beta. Sweet. But I digress (in beta).

While there will certainly be a little shared text bliss, it looks like the main point of the Yoga Journal blogs will be to allow remote visitors to experience bits of the conference for themselves. And that's a wonderful thing. Here you find a magazine that is trying to stay in direct touch with its readers. Yoga Journal deserves applause for the inspiration.

Susan's point in her e-mail -- and it's a good one -- is that live blogging is a staple of the tech conference so why not make it a staple of other kinds of conferences?

That said, too often the official tech conference blogs (as opposed to independent, unsanctioned, live blogging) wind up as little more than PR devices for the conference organizers and tend to get filled with unvarnished promotion of product launches, etc.

The irony of it is that legitimate publications -- like Yoga Journal or computer magazines -- are often the sponsors of the events. If they let live blogs become wholesale PR machines, they toss media ethical issues out the window. However it's a young field and, as such, mistakes are made. Mistakes that can be righted.

At the moment, the notion of "official" live blogging nearly ensures that we're going to get PR. Unless, that is, we get something that looks like community service. That could be the case here. From the perspective of a Yoga Journal reader, even a PR laden "official blog" is likely going to be of interest and welcome. It's a self-identified community, so a little pro-yoga spin isn't going to hurt anyone, right?

Yet, there this: Yoga Journal organized this conference to make money, so what's the likelihood of someone posting an entry that says they felt ripped off? Zilch.

You need the balance of a yogi to determine whether this is a good, honest exercise or callous marketing disguised as frank discussion. Because Mernit is involved you can simply assume the best and I'll place my bet on it being an honest exercise any day. But the overall issue remains.

As live blogging of events develops, it would be nice to see a high premium set on "official" event blogs including disparate independent voices. At the last Democratic and Republican conventions live bloggers from all political stripes worked their trade. But that was a result of an open press-credential process. Private conferences are not obliged to play by those rules. But private conferences run by media companies should gladly hold themselves to these requirements.

Going forward, transparency from private events run by media companies will be important. I'm not sure the Yoga Journal blog could find a detractor. I mean, how can anyone be against yoga per se? However, one might be against the business of yoga today. I don't know.

Ultimately, only the social pressure from readers will ensure that live event blogging remains honest, open and adhers to the same ethical demands of regular journalism.

They call it Black Tuesday at the New York Times and Boston Globe where the layoffs come because the margins are squeezed.

The don't even have a name for the buy-outs at the defiantly anti-margin San Francisco Chronicle, where leadership can neither grow revenue nor circulation and thus always loses money.

Staff reductions are also taking place in Philadelphia, and more soon at a newspapers near you.

It's only September. For real fun, wait until October hits. You see, September and March are when the audit periods take place for the all-important "Publishers Circulation Statement" at newspapers across America. The September statement is published in October and those results are what support ad rates.

Just so there's no October Surprise for Corante readers, here's next month's headlines today: In October metro newspapers across the country will post astonishing year-over-year declines.

The circulation fall-off at large metro papers will be between 9% and 15%. Smaller market and mid-sized market newspapers will fair slightly better. But across America, the average decline will be somewhere between 3% and 5% year-over-year.

Those bleak numbers will be a best-case scenario. Why? Katrina. Newspapers are the accidental beneficiary of the the Gulf Coast's torment -- readers eager for Katrina news in September will provide an offset to even the darker baseline circulation in the month. Katrina won't help much, though, because it's mostly a television and web story.

When the circulation numbers hit, general industry panic will ensue because they come at a time when advertisers finalize budgets for 2006. National advertisers, in particular will recoil from metro newspapers' inability to sustain readership, much less grow it. Advertisers bet the winner. Newspapers are not acting like winners right now.

As advertisers chill, the pundits will get worked into a lather. It has already started in one quarter. And financial analysts, formerly sanguine because even weak newspapers deliver a decent margin, are sharpening their knives too. Warren Buffet himself looks to be cooling on the sector, despite his massive holding in the Washington Post.

Faced with admitting that readers duck and cover as newspapers get thrown at them, the industry will provide spin and false comfort. It will talk about "high quality readership" and suggest the fall-off is really because newspapers are dumping low-quality (i.e. free or sponsored) fake circulation.

Ummm, does that mean advertisers will get a refund from an industry that sold ads based on what it now admits was hallucinogenic circulation? No? Didn't think so.

The "high-quality readership" blather gets scary when you ponder it at length. But we'll leave that for another day.

The pro-industry spin will talk about combining web-site and print readers, which is disingenuous in exactly 1,465 ways. For example, does someone from Islamabad dipping in for one story on your web site have equal value to a seven-day-a- week local print subscriber? No? I'm shocked!

Nationally, the average time people spend on newspaper web sites is under four minutes. Clearly, people are reading a story or two and leaving. That's not to say that online readership doesn't matter -- hell, online readership is my religion -- but let's be honest about how people use newspaper web sites. You can't transform the media by lying to yourself about it.

To put the cherry on top of the "bad news is really good news" sundae, the industry will talk about "platform shift."

Good old platform shift. It's a popular idea among editors who, in reality, couldn't attract a new reader with a free back massage.

The notion of platform shift -- people moving from print to web just, you know, because -- is a comfort to the media establishment as it suggests people still really, really, really love their product, they're just selecting a different distribution mechanism.

Nonsense. The platform shift doctrine is a dangerous -- and for some media companies, ultimately fatal -- illusion that blinds the industry to necessary changes in the core product. Platform shift is the argument for the status quo: We don't have to do anything different. We don't have to change. We just take our super-wonderful content and shove it down a different pipe and everyone can retire happy.

Hey, platform shift is a no-brainer! Problem is, you need brains now to save newspapers. Active brains. Big ones. With fresh ideas and no fear.

Why? Because as readers flee and advertisers follow and confused newspaper executives fiddle with their Blackberries the one thing that almost certainly won't be discussed as the cause for readership decline will be the product itself.

Of course, there is statistical support for the platform shift argument. Study after study demonstrates that readers are replacing print media with online readership of essentially the same content. The results are irrefutable. And these results are damned comforting if you're after business-as-usual.

Unless, of course, one steps back and challenges the context in which the studies take place.

All of these studies -- sincere as they are -- have a pre-defined outcome. Of course people replace print with the same content online because they have no other option today. Nearly all online efforts of print companies are little more than shovelware. Media companies have not provided meaningful product differentiation between print and the web, leaving aside the odd multimedia package here and there.

Newspapers, in particular, position their online offerings as perfect substitutions for their print products and then they knit their brow at the results. Platform shift? Try platform monotony instead.

The spin of the traditional media continues: "It's really all about brand anyway. We're a trusted brand and we'll blast that brand at you through any hose you want. Brand, brand, brand...."

Business thinking tends to run in generational cycles. For the last 15 years or so, the fashion in business thinking has focused on the ascendency of The Brand. Instead of being product oriented, modern companies tend to be brand driven. There are precious few companies left that fuse the two orientations -- think Apple, which defines itself entirely by its products and thus gets a brilliant brand in the process.

Brand logic is the bulwark of defending the status quo. Product logic is where the revolution comes.

When it comes to a war between products and brands, products almost always win in the end.

A few examples:

• Ford and Chevrolet had the great brands in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the Japanese ate Detroit's well-branded lunch by focusing on products
  
• Sun Microsystems assured us it was the "dot in dot.com" and could rightfully claim to be at the core of the early internet. But the company collapsed becaue its products didn't meet the needs of the marketplace. We all used Sun. And then we all stopped using Sun. And now, some us are returning to Sun again because -- amazingly -- it is becoming a product-oriented company once more.
  
• Sony was exciting when it was all about products. It became passe and complacent when it started to think too much about what the Sony brand meant. Now Sony is in a panic because while it's still "the lifestyle company" it has discovered that innovation is thwared by brand logic. Sony tosses in its sleep mumbling: "Apple. Ipod. Samsung. Apple. Ipod. Apple. Apple. Apple."
  
• Microsoft has one of the best-known brands in the world and yet finds itself flailing against the open source movement, which is all about product.
  
• And indeed, the internet itself is all about products. The notion of brand in this space is much more fluid than it is in other places. Brands don't confer protection on the net, products do.
  

Traditional media in general, and newspapers in particular, shall pay a grievous price for excessive brand consciousness. In a worldview filtered by brand, it's logical to take what you do in print and plaster it unaltered online. In a brand-driven universe, constistency matters above all. Don't want to violate that brand promise, do we?

And if print readers migrate to the web because you've given them nothing else to do, at least the brand is intact.

Or it will be until barbarian products arrive to sack your neat little branded cities.

So what if....

...newspapers were to become product focused rather than brand focused? The old modes of thinking will crumble. The print problem and the digital opportunity will be viewed as separate, but entwined, issues.

Digital media will be recognized for exactly what it is: a full medium in its own right, with its own internal logic, unique advantages, specific shortcomings and opportunities. Newspaper companies will begin to ask the proper questions about digital media, instead of simply mumbling about cannibalization and print.

What are the right questions? Just a few starters: what form should storytelling take online, what is the natural and robust role the community plays, what does geo-focused and just-in-time news delivery loo