Waiting for King Content Analysis/Commentary If data holds the same relationship to software as text and images do to the Web, sooner or later some Web writer somewhere should be seeing a paycheck. For the most part this hasn't happened yet, and even Stephen King has pulled the plug on his electronic novels, distributed by on-line installment. But Internet researcher Michael Ponder sees a silver lining in the clouds overhead. His recent report, "The E-Commerce Future," forecasts a time when content will sparkle -- not today, when the Net still has a haze around it, but later in the decade, when content has become device-impervious, ubiquitous, and interactive. Come the advent of King Content, says Ponder, consumers will slice and dice their information in new and unusual ways, and they will have it when they want it, 24 hours a day, come rain or shine, on Earth or on Mars. Finally, they will expect a dynamic, "immersive" experience, defined by an enriched reality or pseudo-reality. Ponder writes: "Multimedia and hybrid forms of content, community building, shared real-time interaction, with information and commerce capabilities integrated everywhere [will] create an experiential gumbo, unique to the on-line realm." Clearly a visionary, he anticipates a time when the hurdles of bandwidth will shrink and when commercial interests will learn to pay a revenue percentage to purveyors of original subject-matter. This last development may already be happening at some Websites. Diet sites are beginning to derive a profit from subscriptions, just as financial consultants and pornography providers have in the past, according to The New York Times staff writer Bob Tedeschi. And in Hollywood, the Writer's Guild of America, negotiating with television and movie studios, has voiced a demand for residual payments on content repurposed to the Web. The difficulty in monetizing content might involve the credibility of Web writing. Since writers for the Web tend to lack the socio-economic stamp of approval imparted by big media, publishing houses, or academia, their products, however popular, lack institutional authority. May 2, 2001