Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
|
Category Archives
January 16, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Check out /Message, my new solo project. Among other things, I finding out how fast you can go from zero on Technorati, back to something like what I have achieved here at Get Real.
Comments (163)
+ TrackBacks (10) | Category: Technology
January 12, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Spread throughout my recent writing, a certain latent idea is lurking, incompletely articulated, which I summarize in the title: the individual is the new group.
About a decade ago, the one of the then-current terms of art for social tools was groupware, and the term was intended to impart the core metaphor: groups need to collaborate, and tools need to be defined with that in mind. As a result, we saw the rise of application platforms like Lotus Notes, intended to counter the flaws of operating systems and applications that were organized around an earlier, less group-oriented metaphor of use.
The central motif of groupware solutions was the need for groups to have a shared repository for online documents, and a collection of communication and collaboration tools to enable a distributed team to collectively accomplish goals. These tools included email, group calendaring, discussion forums, shared to do lists, and real-time support, in the late 90s and early 00s, for instant messaging, chat rooms, and web conferencing.
This model of group collaboration has become the basic form factor of work in many large organizations. However, I have come to believe that this model is being eclipsed by a new epicenter of social context: the individual, rather than the group.
Contrasting group forums with blogging is a good example in which to make the distinction between group- and individual-oriented social tools. In group forums, members of a closed group can post threads and comment on them. It is a closed model. When individuals blog in the open web, trackbacks and comments allow discussions to take place that are -- in many cases -- logically equivalent to forums, but since each individual blogger decides where to turn their focus, and what other blogs to comment on, bloggers are members of many groups at the same time. More importantly, the structure of blogging supports that model directly. In a group forum, you are a member of that one group, and not a member of any others: the fact that you may be a member of other groups is not explicitly supported.
Another driver of this change toward the individual is the rise of instant messaging. I have said many times recently that "the buddy list is the center of the universe 2.0" -- meaning that the presence and real-time proximity of the most critical individuals in our lives is the center of our social interaction. The fact that a particular contact on my buddy list is the member of several groups in my life is less relevant that our social connectedness, individual to individual. While I am IMing a buddy about work related issues, I may veer off into personal issues. I am constantly switching context while in communication with individuals, and real-time communication supports that directly: its natural to do so.
So the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.
The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to "soloware" shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability. In the old groupware model, a company would buy a groupware platform and applications, and roll it out across all the users. It was standardized because everyone was using the same rev of the same product. When the issue of interoperability and standards were brought up, it was approached from the perspective of inter-company communication, or different sites within the same company. But in the "soloware" model, individuals may be using completely different tools, and share nothing in common but certain standards. But the glue that connects the dots in the "soloware" world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.
I envision a time where even in the largest organization, our lives as individuals will define the norm for computer-assisted work. The model of "soloware" will displace the 90s ideals of groupware in exactly the same way that the pre-groupware assembly line models were dethroned in the 90s. In our work lives, even in the largest, most conservative companies, we are instantaneously involved in dozens of projects, with teams of people that are constantly changing, with outside consultants and partner companies, and there is no end in sight. When everything fractures away from stable, long-lasting, closed teams toward the exact opposite, what is left are individuals in contact with each other, through soloware: individual needs first, group needs second, by extension.
We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let's put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.
Comments (44)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
January 11, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I stumbled upon 1000tags.com today (pointer from Tech Crunch), and I think there is something interesting going on there. The company is experimenting with a commercial tag cloud: people can pay to claim a tag exclusively, or can pay much less to share a tag.
[from the FAQ]
Why should I book (buy) a tag?
1000tags.com is - that we know - the very first project that offers booking and buying tags from a "tag cloud". Or in other words, it is the first commercial tag cloud. That means that it could be the proof of concept demonstrating that folksonomies can be an effective way to advertise.
As I understand, 1000 Tags will stop at 1000 tags, so it will be an artifically limited tag cloud -- along the lines of the Million Dollar Page, which was limited to a specific number of pixels.
Hmmm. This seems to hinge on the notion that people would go to 1000 tags as the starting point of a search, which seems strange to me. Perhaps if the people who pay for the placement also present the tagcloud at their websites, if might lead to traffic.
But even if the experiment doesn't directly work, I am sure that tag-based advertising -- either directly, like 1000tags.com is trying to do, or something more implicit, like a tag analysis service that serves up contextual ads -- is something destined to happen.
Comments (38)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A thought provoking article on decision making in technology design by Richard Devon, which suggests that technology should be designed more democratically if it is to actually serve many constituencies:
[from SPT v8n1: Towards a Social Ethics of Technology: A Research Prospect by Richard Devon]
Taking a social ethics approach means recognizing not only that the ends and means of technology are appropriate subjects for the ethics of technology, but also that differences in value systems that emerge in almost all decision-making about technology are to be expected. The means of handling differences, such as conflict resolution processes, models of technology management, and aspects of the larger political system, must be studied. This is not to suggest that engaging in political behavior on behalf of this cause or that is what ethics is all about. That remains a decision to be made at the personal level. Rather, the ethics of technology is to be viewed as a practical science. This means engaging in the study of, and the improvement of, the ways in which we collectively practice decision making in technology.
[Pointer from Anne Galloway, who has more to say.]
Comments (35)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Another page in the on-going hoo-ha about the evils inherent in online social networking, from the New York Times, where Nancy Hass reports on the ways that universities are starting to try to shut down the Facebook because of the fear of cyberstalking, or students posting pictures of themselves that show them drinking, or acting sexually provocative:
[ from In Your Facebook.com - New York Times]
"Every girl I know has had some sort of weird experience," says Shanna Andus, a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley. "Someone gets on a 'friend list' of one of your friends and starts to contact you. They met you at a party or checked out your picture online or went to high school with someone you barely know. It's just a little creepy."
Some colleges have taken action: in October, the University of New Mexico banned access to Facebook on its campus system, citing numerous concerns, including student privacy. Campus officials say they will restore the service for this semester. Mr. Hughes, the Facebook spokesman, says that when the site could not be accessed via the university's networks, half the users continued to sign on through outside networks.
Apropos of this cyberstalking thread, the US has recently enacted legislation that makes cyberstalking a criminal act punishable by up to two years in prison (see Anonymous Trolls, Beware: You Are Breaking Federal Laws). These are more manifestations of the growing conservatism of the web, a trend that has me worried.
Comments (238)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
January 09, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Guy Kawasaki continues his streak of killer posts with The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs. At the heart of Guy's list is the strange dynamic that goes on in the entrepreneur/VC dance. VCs are in business to make investments, which is risky. But they must take risks to get the kind of returns they are looking for, which are BIG returns. At the same time they know that not all their investments can be big winners: that's why they have a portfolio and distribute their risk over a bunch of companies. But they have to judge companies relative to the idealized model of a winning company.
Guy's Ten Lies cuts to the heart of this by trying to straighten out the preconceptions of entrepreneurs, which, to cut to the chase, means that you shouldn't tell lies:
- Don't lie about yourself and your team. If you dropped out of college because this fleabag company is your dream, just say so. If you were a billionaire, you wouldn't be asking for money.
- Don't lie about competition. Don't say it doesn't exist, that no one else can do what you do, that no one else could ever dream this stuff up, or that you have an unshakeable lead on other, larger competitors.
- Don't lie about growth rates. Sure, by all means you have to predict growth rates in your market, and uptake of your product. And you have to base those projections on the assumption that your product or service will find willing customers. But don't fall back on "if we only get 1% of ..." or a strategy based on getting every breathing mammal on the planet to buy.
Comments (34)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Fred Stutzman, a PhD candidate at UNC, wrote an interesting analysis of adoption of Facebook by freshmen at that school. Amazingly quick adoption, and potentially sheds some insight into what goes on in the freshman year: people gain a lot of friends.
[from Student Life on the Facebook - chimprawk.blogspot.com]
While the actual number of nodes (the freshmen) in the network did not grow substantially over the course of the semester, the number of edges (friendship connections) in the network did expand remarkably. As the freshmen made friends over the course of the semester, their social network size grew from 144,319 to 373,651 connections. The average number of friends a freshman on the Facebook had on day one was 46, and at the end of the semester, he or she had 111 friends. This might give us a picture of how many friends a freshman might make the first semester of college: 65.
Gets very close to the so-called Dunbar constant (after author Robin Dunbar, of the inestimable Gossip, Groomin, and the Evolution of Language) of 150, the number of people we can maintain relationships with and not forget who are second cousins.
[pointer from Tola Oguntoyinbo]
tags: dunbar+constant, fred+stutzman, facebook, social+networks
Comments (79)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
January 08, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Peter Saint-Andre joins my call:
[from one small voice]
Boycott Microsoft!
The rebrobates [sic -- reprobates?] of Redmond and the butchers of Beijing.
The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has, at the behest of the Chinese Communist regime, removed the weblog of Zhao Jing (who blogged under the pen name "An Ti") from its MSN Spaces service, without even providing him with the deleted files. A while back Microsoft was keen on calling Linux and other open-source software a form of communism -- I guess now we see who the true communist sympathizers are (perhaps it's because both Microsoft and the Communist Party are dinosaurs). Does Microsoft think that its much-touted freedom to innovate implies the freedom to censor? Stowe Boyd is right: it's time to boycott Microsoft.
Update: 8 Jan 2006 9:40am -- Found another advocate of boycotting Microsoft, Peter Wall. I guess I am still amazed that there isn't a demonstration in front of the company's headquarters.
Comments (40)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
January 07, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Considering the changes I have been going through lately, I am very sensitive to nuance. But You do not have to be Zato Ichi or the Daredevil to read someting into Jeneane Sessum's declaration of independence:
[from ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum: I'm Not at The Content Factor]
Although my name and bio currently appear on the site, I am no longer associated with The Content Factor. As I've indicated previously, information relative to my business can be found on my current sites: www.jsessum.com and www.sessum.com, and the number of blogs and other publications I write for.
I wish J success and happiness in whatever she turns her hand to.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I noticed the "Lotus Notes Sucks" meme has resurfaced and is actively being pushed under by various Notes stalwarts (see here and here), principally because of the Lotus Notes Sucks website:
[from Lotus Notes Sucks]
Why does Lotus Notes suck? Except for security, the reasons include:
- The user interface is by far the worst there is for professionally written software. This doesn't mean every other email application is good, just that Lotus Notes is terrible. Having used about a dozen email applications over the years, I can authoritatively state that Lotus Notes is the worst. Which email applications have I used?
- Unix mail
- Zmail
- Pine
- Some ancient WordPerfect product from the early 1990s
- Outlook
- Outlook Express
- cc:Mail
- And others I can't remember.
- It displays useless and incomprehensible error messages.
- Lotus Notes is slow, ugly-looking and violates all sorts of GUI conventions.
- It deletes mail messages when you don't expect it to.
It a confusing, horrible mess. It is truly awful. I don't use Lotus Notes for anything but email—and only because I have to. I avoid using Lotus Notes as much as possible. Its scheduling, calendar, messaging, to do list—everything about it just sucks. Don't take my word for how much it sucks. Go to the examples! The examples show flaws from Lotus Notes version 5.0.8.
The author is purportedly an employee of some company where he is forced to use Lotus Notes, and it really, really irks him. Bad.
The defense of Lotus Notes is jui-jitsu-like, requiring agility and indirection. The argument runs like so.
Lotus Notes is a great technology/product. It was designed to be a platform on which collaborative applications can be developed, to do all sorts of things. It, as a result, has a very complex and sophisticated core, which is truly a marvel to behold, if you are the sort of person -- tool developer, for example -- who can appreciate such things. It isn't fair to evaluate Lotus Notes, the platform, based on the email and calendar applications that run on that platform. They may be less than wonderful, but Lotus Notes is great.
This is a lot of mealy-mouthed bait-and-switch.
First of all, Lotus Notes is a hog. It is huge, an application platform with pretensions of being an operating system. Ozzie, the architect behind Notes, clearly decided that the operating systems in wide use at the time of its design, just before the rise of the Web, were based on the wrong model, and he decided to rectify that (like he tried to do again, later, with even less success with Groove... although he managed to sell that to Microsoft. Go figure.). What were the flaws he wanted to fix? In a computer network, people will naturally create local files on their PCs, and this is an impediment to collaboration. But the operating systems know nothing about human striving toward collaborative goals, and they make it difficult to share files and the information within them effectively. And so, the answer? A big collaboration platform, that will support collaboration by putting a big, fat, slow abstraction layer above the operating systems being used.
And oh, by the way, let's stick an email solution on there too. And a calendar.
The problem is, in the world of the 90s and into the present day, email was the centerpoint of everything, even for people using Notes... because most people in the world don't have Notes, and you need to collaborate with them, too.
So, naturally, Notes The Platform is judged by comparison with alternative solutions that allow you to communicate and coordinate with anyone, anywhere... not just with other users of the same collaboration product you are using. The point that is missed by the Lotus Notes advocates is that people want to be able to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with anyone, not just those who are using the same programs as them. That's why email was the killer app of Web 1.0 -- it worked that way. And Notes has fallen by the wayside, an asterisk in the collaboration chronicles, but all being said, not really very successful -- aside from the acquisition by IBM as a counter to Microsoft's enterprise email dominance.
[An aside: I happened to be in the IBM headquarters the day that the Lotus acquisition was announced, walking around with a Lotusphere PC bag, and I didn't understand for several hours why people where giving me the thumbs up as I walked around.]
Ozzie was right and he was wrong. Yes, the OSes of the day were badly designed with regard to our need for collaboration; but building a big, fat, slow platform to build collaborative apps on is the wrong approach. Even building a small, not so slow platform is the wrong approach. The right thing to do is to build collaboration into the apps that people are using. Or build small, focused collaborative apps that do one thing right. This is one of the lessons of Web 2.0.
Of course, today, we have the modern web infrastructure to exploit, and better OSes, and more bandwidth, and faster PCs. So I am willing to cut the Notes guys some slack since they were developing back in the pleistocene, but I still think they took the wrong fork in the road. That's one of the reasons that something as uncollaborative as Outlook kicked their ass, no matter how much "better" of a platform Notes was.
Comments (22)
+ TrackBacks (3) | Category: Technology
January 06, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
OpenBC, the professional social networking solution, today announced that Skype is now integrated into each user's contact page, if they have created a Skype account and entered that information into their profile. This mechanism enables all Skype communication: IM, voice, but not video as far as I can see.
However, I couldn't get the Skype call to work. I even reinstalled the most recent version of Skype for Mac OS X. Everytime I hit the 'chat' or 'call' button I was taken to a download page within OpenBC, and when I clicked to download the 'Skype Setup' file, it turned out to be a MS DOS exec. Obvious Windows bias, but I presume it works for Windows users.
Looks like this is major theme: the integration of real-time communication capabilities into social platforms. I just wrote about the Newsvine blogging community that includes real-time chat on every blog post. Expect to see more of this.
[update: Only a few minutes later, I am reading about Nuvvo, a new AJAX-based learning management system, and it has announced Skype integration as of 4 Jan. Wow. It's happening everywhere. tags: nuvvo]
[Update: 7 Jan 2006 -- Bill Liao of OpenBC left this comment:
Hi Stowe,
Couple of points;
We love macs and I am a MAC user and we have a mac in the devcentre.
Skypes Mac Client is behind the PC one so there will be updates to the site for mac once we lay our hands on a later version and figure out how the mac client works for external calls.
The video for skype video is automatic once you are in a voice call there is no separate video call call function that is in the skype: call.
The video does not yet work for the skype Mac or Linux builds and I am told it is coming soon.
Hope that clarifies what is going on.
Bill
My point is that OpenBC should clearly state the situation re: Mac users, so other won't go through the fruitless attempt to try to use Mac Skype with OpenBC.]
Comments (40)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was invited to the beta of Newsvine, an extremely interesting and fully-featured blog community.
The basic concept is to harness the swarmocracy of infovores and put it to work. Users are given the ability to vote on the importance of any stories that they read, either from syndicated news sources, users posts, or 'seeds' -- references to stories or posts outside Newswire. This screenshot is a 'seed' that I created:
The most popular stories work their way to the top, like the model at Always-On-Network, which is the community that this is most likely to be compared to.
I created a post in my new blog in only a few seconds, and fooled with the embedded chat rooms, which is an idea that I think is long overdue. However, since I had no one visiting the post, I was merely talking to myself. But the notion has real merit in a situation with more readers.
As I suggest in the post at Newsvine, I was worried about the business model. Do Newsvine users own their posts? Are the going to get a share of the action? So I went and looked at the user agreement:
[from Newsvine - Newsvine User Agreement]
User Content
By transmitting or submitting User Content to the Site, you hereby (a) grant Newsvine a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display and perform such User Content throughout the universe in any media, now known or hereafter devised; (b)grant Newsvine, its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name, identifier, or any portion thereof, submitted in connection with such User Content, if they so choose. You represent and warrant that (i)such User Content is either original to you, or all third party rights have been fully cleared for use as contemplated by this Agreement; (ii)the User Content does and will not, in any way, violate or breach any of the terms of this Agreement or the Code of Conduct, and (iii)Newsvine shall not in any circumstance be required to pay or incur any sums to any person or entity as a result of its use or exploitation of the User Content unless otherwise agreed by Newsvine.
Without limiting the foregoing, Newsvine reserves the right to use the User Content as it deems appropriate, including, without limitation, deleting, editing, modifying, rejecting, or refusing to post it. Your submission of User Content is subject to the terms our Code of Conduct. Newsvine may, but is under no obligation to, offer you any payment for User Content that you submit or the opportunity to edit, delete or otherwise modify User Content once the it has been submitted to Newsvine. Newsvine shall have no duty to attribute authorship of User Content to you, and shall not be obligated to enforce any form of attribution by third parties.
If it is determined that you retain moral rights (including rights of attribution or integrity) in the User Content, you hereby declare that (a) you do not require that any personally identifying information be used in connection with the User Content, or any derivative works of or upgrades or updates thereto; (b) you have no objection to the publication, use, modification, deletion and exploitation of the User Content by Newsvine or its licensees, successors and assigns; (c) you forever waive and agree not to claim or assert any entitlement to any and all moral rights of an author in any of the User Content; and (d) you forever release Newsvine, and its licensees, successors and assigns, from any claims that you could otherwise assert against Newsvine by virtue of any such moral rights.
Hmmm. Seems fairly draconiam. They have rights to use everything, for ever, and the right to censor you or block you altogether. But that might be acceptable if they are paying me. Are they? It looks like they are:
[from Newsvine - Newsvine User Agreement]
Advertising Payments
Advertising Revenue. Our services may permit registered users to post User Content to a portion of our Site that is identifiable by a third level domain name selected by the user (username.newsvine.com) called a "Subdomain". [this is the user's blog, although not named as such] As with other areas of our Site, we may post advertisements in the Subdomain ("Ads"). In the event that we post Ads of a third party to a user's Subdomain, we will pay users as follows:
- ninety percent (90%) of the Net Advertising Revenue derived from a Subdomain that we receive from third parties (the "User Earnings") will be paid to the registered user of that Subdomain;
- ten percent (10%) of the Net Advertising Revenue (the "Referral Earnings") will be paid to the registered user (if any) that the Subdomain's user listed at registration or that we have otherwise identified as the party that referred the Subdomain's user when the account was set up with Newsvine.
In the event that a referring party is not identified, Newsvine will retain the Referral Earnings. For purposes of this User Agreement, "Net Advertising Revenue" means (a) the amount actually collected by Newsvine from a third party for each page view or impression of an Ad, (b) less any allocated overhead costs, commissions, fees paid to third parties, taxes, bad debt, returns, discounts, royalties, credits, and any other costs and expenses arising from the sale and placement of such Ads.
Payment Terms and Conditions. Within 45 days of a user's request, we will pay the User Earnings and Referral Earnings that have accrued to a user's account for any period in excess of 30 days. In other words, a user is not eligible to receive payments for an Ad displayed in a Subdomain until at least 30 days follows the display of the Ad and we receive payment from the advertiser for that Ad. Further, we shall have no obligation to pay User Earnings or Referral Earnings until and unless such earnings exceed $10 in the aggregate. All payments will be made in U.S. dollars by PayPal where possible or otherwise by check or other method selected by us. Checks will not be issued for amounts less that $50. As a condition of payment, you agree that if you fail to cash any check or otherwise collect any amount payable to you within one hundred eighty (180) days of the date payable, then our obligation to pay such amount shall be void and such amounts shall vest in Newsvine. You should regularly access and review your account to monitor accrued and payable amounts.
Only active user accounts are eligible to receive payments. If a user does not log in to his or her account for a year or more, the user account will be terminated and any accrued earnings will be forfeited. If a user terminates his or her account for any reason or if we terminate the account for cause (including violations of this User Agreement or our Code of Conduct), any accrued earnings that the user has not yet redeemed or requested for redemption will be forfeited. Once an account is terminated, any correlation between the terminated user account and any other existing user account is terminated so no further Referral Earnings will be paid.
No Guarantee. Newsvine does not guarantee that any user will receive any minimum level of payment as a result of the placement of Ads on our Site. Newsvine has sole discretion as to the selection and placement of all Ads and the look and feel of the Site, including any Subdomain. Earnings are paid as an incentive for the continued use of our Site and are not in consideration for the submission of any User Content. We reserve the right to add, remove, modify, rename, move, delete or discontinue the Subdomain or any Materials or User Content therein at any time in our sole discretion. We further reserve the right to change or discontinue the payment of Earnings or Referral Earnings at any time. Your continued use of our Site and maintenance of an account with us after any such change will constitute your acceptance of the new terms. In the event that you do not agree to such change, your sole and exclusive remedy is to cease using the Site and to terminate your account with us. Any such termination will not alter any of our rights under this User Agreement, including our license rights described above.
All of a sudden it looks a little more interesting. If I post within Newsvine, and thousands of people a day come to my site, I could potentially get 90% of the ad revenue. Just as important, it's a referral game: if I bring others into the fold, I make 10% of their ad revenue (if I read the legalese correctly).
A fully featured, web 2.0 era blogging community that includes reputation, ranking, real-time chat, tagging, and 'seeding', on top of a business model that encourages people to add their value to the swarm and to bring others in... looks like it is hitting many of the important buttons.
The challenges for Newsvine?
- The cost of transitioning if you are already blogging 'in the wild' on Typepad or Wordpress -- in my case, I have thousands of posts that I don't want to abandon. They would have to develop an import capability to convince others like me to come inside.
- The possibility of censorship -- a real problem.
- Changing people's way of doing things -- I buy in on the unified field theory of active readering, where you read, tag, bookmark, and post all in one unbroken context, but this is one of those cases where you have to 'move' into the community to get the benefits it offers, even while you are already invested in the community outside Newsvines walls.
[An interesting idea occurs to me: what if Newsvine were willing to provide a context in which blog networks could operate as independent companies? They would in essence be acting as a landlord and business partner, since they would be driving the marketing and ad network side of things, and then the blog networks could simply leverage their blogging and develop an independent brand identity under the Newsvine tent. They would have to modify things somewhat, and perhaps provide some specific tools to support the networks, like branding of networked blogs, but otherwise it would assist the growing number of blog networks that are springing up on all sides.]
At any rate, I am going to watch Newsvine closely. I have come to really like the tech.memeorandum style of blog 'piling on' although I do agree with Nicholas Carr's recent criticism of the too tight and too narrow selections of stories there. Shouldn't there be hundreds of tech stories of interest, not just a dozen or so? But the fact that memeorandum readers can't rate what they are reading explicitly is a real flaw, from my perspective. So, I favor the Newsvine model in that regard, although the contributors at memeorandum are those with big reputations, and no small fry... which has both positive and negative characteristics.
This then may turn out to be a question of democratic and open sourcing versus autocratic and closed. On one side, we have memeorandum, Corante Hubs, and other solutions that start with a roster of highly successful writers and then use a closed algorithm or editorial decisions to determine what's hot or not, while on the other side we will see Newsvine and other swarm-based communities, where everyone -- in principle -- starts on an equal footing and everyone -- before the karma gets baked in -- has an equal voice in deciding what's interesting or not. The power laws suggest that relatively soon it might not matter, since karma will accrue, and the best writers will rise to the top. But when the system is open, and is based on collective decision making, the results are likely to not only be different, but better.
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I let the poll run a few weeks, in a sense hoping the tide would turn my way, or that we would at least get a majority for on side or the other, but here's we we stand:
A little more than half of the respondents to the poll think we should drop the term "Web 2.0" but I don't care, I still plan on using it anyway. As I said at the outset, it is a useful abstraction.
Comments (34)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
January 05, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Om Malik cut right to the chase regarding the Microsoft CES announcement of partnership with MTV on URGE:
[from Om Malik on Broadband : » In Digital Music, Its Gates Vs Jobs]
So in the end it will boil down to what is by now a familiar story: Bill versus Steve, Microsoft (add partner name here) versus Apple, windows media versus iTunes, some device (add brand name here) versus iPod. Justin Timberlake versus the Gorillaz! Dominatrix in pin stripes versus Diva in a black turtleneck.
Who will win? Not sure, but here is one thing which works against Bill G: coolness is not part of his company’s DNA, I mean Justin Timberlake for god sake! Even old farts like me know, he is sooooo over! What works against Apple? Steve being Steve; keeping the ecosystem closed. Come on, even the toughest bouncer outside the hottest club, once in a while lets the plebs in. How about some love for Sony and Sonos? Nothing for nothing, 2006 is shaping up to be a great year: there are skirmishes everywhere and since this is a sequel, well, let the popcorn pop, and enjoy the show!
2006 will be a bad, bad year for Microsoft. This will be another fizzle, since the iTunes/iPod dominance can't be shaken up by partnering with a tired TV channel. On other fronts, Microsoft's partnership with Palm has led to a annoyingly designed Treo (see David Pogue's review: A Marriage Not Made In Heaven) for another place where Microsoft partnerships come up with a mule, not a racehorse.
The imminent Kaliedoscope (the souped up Mac Mini that will become the entertainment hub for the living room) is going to sideswipe Microsoft like a velociraptor tearing into the side of a much larger, less agile T. rex.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"Eskimos agree, Ice 2.0 provides a rich user experience." - Doug Hatfield
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Courtesy of Tom Coates, I stumbled across Technoranki:
[from technoranki.com - blog rankings - home]
What is technoranki?
Technoranki is a blog ranking service. We make a range of measurements for all the blogs in our database (which currently holds over 3000 blogs), calculate a score for each one, and then order and rank them. Our ranking results are available to third-parties via our web service API, and will soon be published live too.
Technoranki is more of a scientific experiment than anything else. Current blog ranking systems all have failings; we hope to work out a way to rank blogs fairly and accurately.
To summarise, this service is experimental and still in development. There is still a little bit to do behind the scenes, and then we can start work on this public-facing side of the service.
I have been been hoping for a service that allows the user to determine what is more important in blog rankings. Are you more interested in finding an authority that has been blogging on a topic for a long time? Or someone with many comments or trackbacks? Or someone extremely focused on a particular subject? Weed out those associated with traditional media outfits? Bloggers in a particular geography?
It would be great if Technoranki, or someone else, would just expose the factors on a dashboard and let me turn the dials.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A pointer from Steve Rubel led me to Clipfire, a social search shopping app that helps users find good deals:
[from About Clipfire
]
Clipfire is powered by you.
Clipfire searches websites and products submitted by users. Users can search submitted sites and products and "clip" the ones in which they are interested. It is easy to find the best deals because clipped products show up higher in search results than those that have not been clipped.
As I have said many times (see here), in the future, all ecommerce will be socialized. Clipfire is another example of how we will be able to harness our own collective knowledge to take advantage of variability in the markets for goods and services.
I glanced at the service, and it has a very minimal and clean interface, but it is difficult to judge how good the results are without comparing it with other deal-finding solutions. The benefit of the social approach to search is that as more people join the service and use it, the better it will get. Until that time... who knows?
I already noticed one problem: costs of various products are not normalized to the end users currency. I saw deals for London hotel stays provided in pounds, for example. And the cost of goods are embedded in the text associated with the deal, not pulled out as a primary attribute. There is as a result no way to sort by price, which seems an obvious thing to do.
Comments (34)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
January 04, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jason Fried of 37signals swore me to secrecy a few months back when I interviewed him for the upcoming New Visionaries series. One of the secrets was Sunrise, the company's now-announced but as yet unreleased CRM solution:
[from Sunrise: 37signals' CRM tool for small business is coming soon - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)]
Sunrise is a CRM-ish tool for small businesses. We’re aiming to change the small business CRM market with Sunrise in the same way we changed the small business project management and collaboration market with Basecamp.
What exactly do we want to change? Well, from our vantage point the current CRM offerings for small business are 1. Too complex, 2. Too confusing, 3. Overkill, 4. Detached from the real experience of a small business (aka too “enterprisey”), and 5. Ugly. We’re on the case.
I predict, just based on 37signals history and Jason's handwave during our meeting that Sunrise will have a similar impact on the CRM space that Basecamp has had on project-based collaboration: monumental.
And, oh, we chatted about Campfire, too, but I can't talk about that yet. Huge.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Robert Tebbutt referred to a recent piece of mine (see Living In The Shadow Of Clogs) as being apocalyptic in tone, when I was concerned with the inherent conservatism of corporations with regard to public speech of their employees.
Tebbutt goes on to zoom in on the role that Robert Scoble has played for Microsoft, but suggests that perhaps its time for Robert to move on to other things:
[from Teblog: Corporate blogging: stifling the individual]
Robert has acquired significant personal power. A 'wrong' word now can have a serious impact on his employer or on anyone else he sets his sights on.
Such is Scoble's power just now that Microsoft would have to be extremely careful how it handles him. He is spending lots of time travelling and glad-handing and being the star of 'geek dinners' (ugh!) Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of "letting him go" - encourage the guy to build such a huge personal brand, that he will decide that "outside" is better than "inside".
Problem solved.
Scoble doesn't agree, which is little surprise even if were contemplating a new career outside of Microsoft.
Robert has become a celebrity -- no offense intended -- based on the unique and pivotal role he has had in the 'opening up' of Microsoft, to the extent that he has been able to do that. His fame and influence are not principally derived from his great writing, deep expertise in software development and design, or a unique genius in marketing, like other highly regarded tech bloggers. As a result, Robert is unlikely to use the fame he has gained to take a full-time editorial/writing gig at The New York Times, a teaching job at Columbia, or launch a new Web 2.0 start-up. He could stay on the road, flogging his new book, and capitalizing on his notoriety in that age-old American fashion: the speaking circuit. He has done a lot of that over the past years, although I believe it has largely been done gratis, subsidized by Microsoft largesse.
Robert is a bright guy, very hard working, and has enabled great things in the world of blogging. It's a shame -- from my viewpoint -- that he works for Microsoft, and that he will be typecast for decades to come, if not forever, as the 'Microsoft blogger' instead of whatever he will be doing for the next 20 years... which I can't believe will be blogging for Microsoft.
And don't forget the newest flap -- Microsoft censorship of MSN Spaces Chinese Bloggers -- where Scoble was initially outraged, and now chastened for acting like a blogger:
Working in a big company is interesting cause there are lots of moving parts. Tracking them all down is difficult, especially when you have a full day of meetings and other things to do and when the stakeholders of the decision you’re trying to find out about are on the other side of the world in a time zone opposite of ours.
Blogger time isn’t that easy to live with when you work in a big company. That’s not an excuse, but just a fact. Already there are plenty of people who took me to task for reacting like a blogger and not waiting until I had checked with all the parties. Truth is this thing was going supernova already (it was on Instapundit before I even knew about it).
I have been talking to lots of people today, though, inside and outside of Microsoft. In every instance they asked me to keep those conversations confidential. Why? Cause we’re talking about international relations here and the lives of employees. I wish I could go into it more than that, but I can’t. Not yet. See, it’s real easy as Americans to rattle the door and ask for change, but we don’t live there. Saying “give them the finger” isn’t that easy when there are real human lives at stake. And I don’t need to spell out what I’m talking about here, do I?
One thing I’ve heard is that we spell out our terms of service very explicitly on MSN Spaces. Here in the United States we pull down stuff too at government request, like child pornography or other illegal content.
Being in the content business is not an easy one, that’s for sure.
I’ll pass more along as I can.
Sounds like a corporate-speak post, to me. Yesterday, I said this episode might be the one where Robert gets crushed. It is starting to sound like something like that is happening, or at least he is getting squelched.
Comments (13)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
January 03, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was exploring the Blog Network List :: The Comprehensive Blog Network Rankings which has a very interesting blendo model of developing blog rank based on a large number of measures:
The blog rank index consists of the following metrics: Technorati rank, Technorati blogs, Technorati links, MSN Search pages indexed, MSN Search links, Yahoo! inlinks, Yahoo! pages indexed, Google backlinks, and Google pages indexed.
In the event of a tie with the blog rank index, we use the Technorati rank as a tie breaker.
I discovered that Get Real is ranked 51 of all blogs that are part of networks! Cool!
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Wil Shipley wrote an interesting post that invites other programmers to join him in getting WINE (an open source implementation of the Windows API) to run on Mac OS X. He predicts that with the coming combination of Intel-based Macs and a working WINE implementation, people that stick with Windows because of specific Windows apps -- especially games -- will be able to switch:
[from Call Me Fishmeal.: I invite you to wine.]
When Wine for OS X comes out, it is going to be the end for Microsoft. The actual end. Because nobody is going to want to pay for Microsoft's increasingly draconian licensing for Windows even as Window gets crappier and crappier. What's the average time from plugging in a Windows machine to it getting its first virus? 7 minutes? Windows has kinds of viruses Mac users have never even dreamed of.
His post reads like a recruiting poster: "Get on this project now. Get it headed in the right direction (dump X11, run under Finder/CoreGraphis). Get the glory. Get the job. Get the girl."
But I have to admit, after trying to run Virtual PC on my Mac for the last few months JUST to run Quicken Professional I would certainly welcome running it as a WINE app instead. And it would be the final answer to all those people -- like Russell Beattie, who just switched back to Windows -- who argue that the hot apps are released on Windows first. I am going to keep my eyes on this one.
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Boston globe story about Massport -- they run Logan airport and other transportation sites -- attempting to monopolize wifi spectrum at the airport. This has much larger ramifications: who owns wifi?
[ from Sides chosen in Logan WiFi battle - The Boston Globe by Peter Howe]
Soon after activating its own $8-a-day WiFi service in the summer of 2004, the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, ordered Continental and American Airlines to shut down WiFi services in their Logan lounges. Massport also ordered Delta Air Lines Inc. not to turn on a planned WiFi service in its new $500 million Terminal A that opened last March.
WiFi, which is short for wireless fidelity, offers Internet access at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second over unlicensed airwave channels, within ''hot spot" zones up to 300 feet in radius covered by small Net-connected transmitters. At Logan, subscribers get some free content, including flight and weather information, but have to pay $8 for a 24-hour access to the full Internet.
Massport has consistently argued its policy is only trying to prevent a proliferation of private WiFi transmitters that could interfere with wireless networks used by airlines, State Police, and the Transportation Security Administration. WiFi service providers are free to negotiate so-called roaming deals, Massport officials say, that would let their subscribers who pay for monthly access use the Logan network. But major providers including T-Mobile USA have balked at Massport's proposed terms, saying the airport authority seeks excessive profits.
''What Massport is trying to do is create a monopoly on unlicensed spectrum in the airport, and we think it's blatantly contrary to federal law," said Joe Farren, a spokesman for CTIA, which represents wireless carriers including Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel. CTIA recently disclosed that it has begun informally lobbying the FCC to overturn the Massport WiFi ban, and is preparing to step into the FCC case officially this week, Farren said.
The FCC has been reviewing the Continental-Massport case since July, but has given no indication of how soon it might issue a ruling.
Closer to home, Massport's position has also prompted opposition from Partners HealthCare System, parent organization of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Partners is rolling out many new wireless-based systems for doctors and nurses to check patient records, enter medical chart data, and order prescriptions. Rickey L. Hampton, Partners's wireless communications manager, said the hospitals are worried that if the FCC upholds Massport's ban on airport tenants offering WiFi, it could set a precedent for landlords who lease space to Partners. ''We believe the impact could extend far beyond the aviation industry [and] have a chilling effect on unlicensed wireless technologies as a whole," Hampton said, by empowering virtually any landlord to shut down tenants' wireless networks.
And not just landlords, but perhaps any other property authority? Like my housing association?
This is a terrible precedent, and pushed us directly in the wrong way. I am an ardent believer in free municipal wifi as probably the single best investment that American can make in its future. It will remove one of the most basic barriers to access for the poor, as well as sparking local involvement through ubiquitous access. But where are the visionary leaders who will push this to a national discussion? Municipal wifi will make these sorts of issues moot. Why doesn't the Mayor of Boston join this discussion, or the Governor?
And, more important, as we look back on Katrina and other disasters, a well designed wifi mesh (with redundant cells, battery and generator backups) could allow all sorts of grassroots disaster recovery. But, oh I forgot, talking about disaster preparedness is so last year already. At least until the next one hits.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
January 02, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
MacDailyNews has more dope on Apple's Kaleidoscope:
[from MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home
Apple’s .Mac service has increased the data transfer capacity from 10GB per month to 1024GB (a terabyte!) per month for select users in what may be a methodical rollout to all .Mac users and a sign of something(s) to come at Macworld Expo.
MacDailyNews reader "Snapper" has informed us of the change to his .Mac account as of December 31, 2005.
.Mac user "alphamatrix" has a screenshot of the new .Mac bandwidth capacity here. [Attribution: Om Malik]
Om Malik writes, "The increase in bandwidth for transfer perhaps has been inspired by people wanting to back-up their videos (purchased at iTunes store) or perhaps this is the beginning of something new: like an online PVR?" Full article here.
Apple's .Mac features list does not currently show the increase, it still states: 10 GB of data transfer per month.
Think Secret recently detailed how the new Kaleidoscope online storage approach will satisfy nervous media execs about the security of their content:
[from Think Secret - Road to Expo: Apple's new media experience coming soon
In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology -- for which Apple previously received a patent -- will serve it to the user's computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.
This also circumvents some of the flaws in the current iTunes purchasing model. I buy music on iTunes, but if for some reason I lose the downloaded files -- through a hard drive crash, for example -- I might have to buy it all again, unless I have backed it up somewhere. Ultimately, Apple and others moving into the online PVR space will be well-served to rent us low-cost online storage, as well as simply keeping track of what we have licensed. Shows that we have licensed, but have not viewed for a long time could simply be deleled locally, in out online iDisk storage, only to be replaced on-demand when users seek to access them.
[pointer from Judge Bork]
Comments (14)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Just as I write a post predicting 2006 is the year of the Mac, Russell Beattie gives up on Mac, and defects back to Windows:
[from Russell Beattie Notebook » Going Back Downstairs]
Even though Apple is switching to Intel processors, I decided it still isn’t the right platform for me. First, Apple hardware is more expensive (I can’t believe the power of the Windows machine I got for $850), and secondly the Mac OS will still always be mostly an afterthought in the tech world. This is really the main issue. I always want to play with the latest and greatest tech, and that stuff almost always comes second to the Apple platform. Secondly, as someone in the software and services industry, I need to really understand how 95% of my customers work on a daily basis. Even just using Macs for the past year, I’ve found myself farther and farther away from the mainstream and that’s a very bad thing. Does this or that mobile phone or consumer electronics device work well with people’s Windows computers? I need to know.
Also, hey, I have to admit I’m more comfortable on a Windows platform still. Having used the Windows 95 interface since late 1994, we’re going on well past a decade of familiarity of how things work. And I know how to fix problems when they arise, etc. There are still many, many things I loathe about Windows and Microsoft, but there’s only so many battles you can fight. Microsoft isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither is Windows. Just remember: “msconfig”, Cygwin, and McAfee are your friends. Its kind of bad timing, though considering the WMF virus security issue that's raging right now, as a reader comments in Beattie's post. [Update based on Scoble's observation that WMF is not a virus, but just a security flaw that allows viruses to work.]
And Russell is right, at least when he says that Microsoft isn't going away soon and neither is Windows. They will be here forever, its just not the place where the fun stuff is happening. Russell's analogy -- the two story party with all the action downstairs where 95% of the party goers are, and a quieter, cooler 5% upstairs -- is missing the actual dynamics of what's happening now. Windows v Mac is only one corner of the larger marketspace for software. The hottest activities are where people are looking at the Web as a platform, and your PC (Mac or Windows) is just the OS for your device. Web 2.0 is all about the web as platform!
At the same time, I think Mac OS X is simply superior to Windows vis-a-vis user experience. I am a user experience bigot, so that decision is simply obvious. If you are motivated by which games you can play, well, that's a different set of criteria. As I said in a recent post, I will leave it to the Apple guys to figure out how/when to get into making game machines, if ever. But I am not a gamer, so it's just not a consideration for me.
Scoble wants to get Vista into Russell's hands. Vista may become the winner on tablet PCs (at least until Apple makes one), but my arguments from last week (2006 Prediction #1: The Year Of The Mac) about the upcoming Kaliedoscope -- the retooled Mac Mini/DVR solution -- still stand. I believe that Apple will be able to pull together the threads to rework the entire concept of video entertainment just like iTunes/iPod has done with music. And that will lever a wholesale reappraisal of the suitability of Macs for consumer and business use alike.
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 30, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Yet another enormous Windows security mess, just before the New Year:
[from Windows Security Flaw Is 'Severe' by Brian Krebs/Washington Post]
A previously unknown flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system is leaving computer users vulnerable to spyware, viruses and other programs that could overtake their machines and has sent the company scrambling to come up with a fix.
Microsoft said in a statement yesterday that it is investigating the vulnerability and plans to issue a software patch to fix the problem. The company could not say how soon that patch would be available.
Mike Reavey, operations manager for Microsoft's Security Response Center, called the flaw "a very serious issue."
How long will the 1990s positioning of Windows last, given this sort of nonsense? Why do businesses cling to the idea that the Microsoft stack and Outlook/Exchange are essential cornerstones of modern business life?
I predict that 2006 will be a time when it becomes increasingly obvious that businesses are going to move away from Microsoft, and not return. Aside from the missteps and design flaws of Microsoft software itself, here's why:
- Web 2.0 -- new online applications will provide capabilities that match Office and other Windows apps at a fraction of the price. Expect big announcements in areas like on-line presentation, online web conferencing, CRM, and other traditionally business-oriented sectors.
- Apple and the Battle for the Living Room -- I am predicting that Apple's Kaliedoscope project, which couples a souped-up Mac Mini with DVR software and iPod docking station, will destroy Microsoft's hopes for living room/entertainment center dominance. This product will be a huge, iPod-sized hit, and all of a sudden millions of American hopes will have a Mac in the living room. Game over.
It will become obvious that Microsoft is a dinosaur, that a better Windows won't be enough, whenever they get around to releasing it, and the company will be looking at a long tail business plan, supporting all those companies too slow to transition to the LAMP stack and Macs.
Comments (78)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
December 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Dion Hinchcliffe has an excellent blow-for-blow on the recent 'imbloglio' about the viability of the Web 2.0 term:
[from web2.wsj2.com ]
Web 2.0 has become a polarizing yet strangely magnetic topic du jour. It's a subject a great many people love to grouse about, even as they spend way too much time thinking about it, all the while hating it, loving it, or just trying to figure it out. Web 2.0 has waxed and waned and then waxed again over 2005 as the blogosphere hype/anti-hype cycle has whipsawed back and forth.
If you take the temperature of the status quo, the inestimable Dave Winer currently has the mike with his Busted, Explained article, but numerous others have chimed in recently including quite famously Richard MacManus, who was then called out by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, then Joshua Porter went on to explained why he still uses the term, ad infinitum. It was Russell Shaw however that was the one who really stirred the pot to considerable effect, but even he was then answered in kind by his very own Joe McKendrick. Folks like Stowe Boyd have come out about this latest Web 2.0 brouhaha very level headed, as have a number of others who seem to have some perspective including Marc Cantor, Jeneane Sessum, and Frederico Oliveira. Now Shaw has come back swinging and shows no sign of flagging in his attempt to assert that Web 2.0 has no clothes. An attempt almost certain to fail, I might add, though we'll probably make yet another trip around the blogosphere mulberry bush.
[...]
In more general discussion, the year end prediction lists are making the rounds. John Battelle's 2006 prediction list includes #7, which says "'Web 2.0' will make the cover of Time Magazine, and thus its moment in the sun will have passed. However, the story that drives 'Web 2.0' will only strengthen, and folks will cast about for the next best name for the phenomenon." I do note that he has started quoting his use of the term. Another list making the rounds also weighs in on Web 2.0. Jason Calacanis' 2006 prediction list claims interestingly that the deflation of the housing bubble is going to cool down Web 2.0 investment seriously next year.
[...]
In any case, regardless of what you think of the term, Web 2.0 has been highly effective at making people everywhere think quite differently about the software they create and use. And because of the interest, buzz, hype, and real-world success, 2006 will only continue to see the forces behind Web 2.0 grow. Expect major surpises and new highs and lows as the big players in the software business start releasing wave after wave of online, social software next year.
Personally, I think most of the antihype is driven by the endless introspection and inventiveness of leading bloggers. We have a tendency to run out way way ahead of the herd, and we are constantly trying to create neologisms to explain the changes we perceive are happening. As a result, the visionary types like Winer can actually see the day when Web 2.0 has become so mainstream that the term will lose its power. I maintain that we have a lot of cat herding before that day comes, and in the meantime the term is a useful distinction between what is going on today, and the sorts of things that were going on in the past five years, just as Dion states.
tags: dion+hinchcliff, web+2.0, joshua+porter, richard+macmanus, russell+shaw, joe+mckendrick, marc+canter, john+battelle, jason+calacanis, jenean+sessum, frederico+oliveira
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got an email from Paul Bragiel of Meetro inviting me to fool with the new Mac beta of that geo-IM system. They have it in limited beta at this point, but soon hope to open it up:
[via email]
Meetro has now launched its Mac private alpha and is looking for people to participate. We plan on distributing it to the first few hundred people that email us at mac@meetro.com So reserve your spot now! Also, please include the city/state you reside in as well when contacting us.
I have only messed around with the beta a few hours, but it seems solid so far. I encountered one tiny bug when entering my profile -- it didn't save what I have typed -- but other than that, nothing.
Since I live in the technology hinderlands of Reston VA, I have only come across three or four users in my general area, but I am mostly interested in using this sort of solution when I am in dense urban settings, like SF, NYC, or Chicago. More to follow.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 28, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
David pulled me into his on-going 10 Questions With... series:
[from 10 Questions with Stowe Boyd
How long did it take you to build your base?
Well, I’m 52, so about a half a century.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A great post by Frederico Oliveira on user experience being the make or break element of application development:
[from WeBreakStuff » Fewer templates, more user experience]
Remember the rule: “The key to successful web applications is how much it puts the user in the center of the process”.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 24, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Glenn Reynolds coins a term as part of a long range prediction:
[from Horizontal Knowledge]
There are two lessons here. One is that the skeptics, despite all their reasonable-sounding objections, would have been utterly wrong about the future of the Web, a mere ten years after it first appeared. And the second is why they would have been wrong: because they didn't appreciate what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing. It's the power of horizontal, as opposed to vertical knowledge. As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. I think he means bottom-up when he says horizontal: its the aggregated value of the hundreds of millions of individual acts -- creating web pages, linking to others, making comments -- that have build the web and now are creating Universe 2.0. This worldwide activity is not centrally planned or controlled, it is profoundly counter to top-down approaches that in principle could have been directed toward the same aims, and, thankfully, weren't. But the central thrust of Reynolds obeservation is dead on: we continue to underestimate the potential of a world where we are more interconnected, and hence smarter. The world is getting smarter, as we create these neurons connecting one bit of thought to another. Yes, there are still inequities, disease, poverty, hate, and war. But I believe that the emergence of the web, and its proliferation, is the greatest hope for the planet, and our collective future. Merry Xmax. [Pointer from Seth Godin]
Comments (15)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Robert writes about the upcoming Outlook12 release, which will incorporate RSS integration. He states that this will be a big breakthough for RSS usage, because...
Outlook is probably the most used application in the world after Internet Explorer (and, on my desktop, is used more often than IE). Very likely true in the corporate setting, but surely instant messaging clients -- or just AIM clients -- far outnumber Outlook? The real turning point will be when AOL (or now Google with the Gtalk/AIM integration) will realize the obvious: put RSS reader capabilities into the IM client!
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I just wrote a post at Centrality about the impact that tech.memeorandum is having on the community of tech bloggers:
[excerpt]
The end result of adding this technology into the social network of leading bloggers has been a revelation to me and others. It has immediately and dramatically shifted how I read and write, and has led to an amplification of blog attention around interesting and important stories. My sense is that others also feel a pull toward the collective attention to things that are getting a lot of buzz on tech.memeorandum, in a way that is more urgent than how things proceeded prior to its introduction.
The emergence of this tool has also led to a strengthening of the sense of community across those that are among the 2000 blogs being aggregated into the tech.memeorandum meme pool. I have found a greater sense of connectedness with these bloggers than formerly, although the same techniques for linking and commenting are at work at the blog level: trackbacks, URLs, and so on.
Tech.memeorandum has taking a diffuse, implicit social network -- the leading tech bloggers -- and created a agora, a third space, where we can engage in a realtime discussion of the affairs of the day, or monitor others' public discussions.
Read the full article.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 23, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Shelley Powers thinks my poll on whether we should continue to use the "Web 2.0" term is dumb:
[from Burningbird » Web2.0]
This is about a vote on not using this term anymore–which is about the most silly ass thing I’ve heard all month, even if the purpose for the vote is introducing yet another piece of ‘code’ to clutter our pages. We need our terms, Stowe–if we don’t have our terms, how will we separate the cool kids from the hacks with money? So, if Web 2.0 is now contaminated with all the ‘built to flip’ nonsense about, what about another name? Shelley suggests Web 2.0, which is a pain, and doesn't address the basic issue of whether we need to indicate this transition to a new footing for the web with some easily used term.
The poll that she suggests is 'silly ass' is running just about tied, last I looked, so the world of Get Real readers is fairly split between believers and skeptics.
Comments (5)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have only been using the Performancing plug-in a day, and they have already released an update:
[from Performancing Firefox Update! Technorati Tags, Bug Fixes, More | Performancing.com]
Technorati Tags Are Here! Yay! One of the more persistent requests, and one which was doable in the short timeframe we had was the addition of Technorati tags. You wont notice anything at all on upgrading, but if you hit the settings tab on the left, and then check "show extra publishing features" and optionally, the "Automatically insert technorati links on publish" you'll find a new button next to the title field in the editor. Click it, it's cool :-)
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Joining the discussion about the definition of Web 2.0, Chris Fralic at the Del.cio,us blog takes look at what taggers have associated with the term "web 2.0:
[from What is Web 2.0]
What we actually did was take a look at all the tag data going back to February 2004 (the month of the first use of Web 2.0 as a tag on del.icio.us), and analyzed all the bookmarks and tags related to the term. We can report that as of October 31, 2005 there have been over 230,000 separate bookmarks and over 7,000 unique tags associated with the term “Web 2.0” by del.icio.us users. So for this exercise, we lopped off the really long tail and normalized some similar terms (e.g. combining blog, blogs, and blogging), and came up with this snapshot of what Web 2.0 REALLY is – at least according to del.icio.us users' most popular tags through the end of October 2005: Other notable tags included rubyonrails (1.8%), del.icio.us (1.6%), folksonomy (1.4%), community (1.1%), wiki (.9%), flickr (.8%), free (.7%), trends (.6%), flock (.4%) and googlemaps (.3%). An interesting exercise, and one that demonstrates that -- at least among taggers -- there is a stong association in people's minds about the relationship of Web 2.0 with Ajax, and social tools. The "people are the heart of the Universe 2.0" meme is in there. Also, the association with leading technologies -- Flickr, et al -- and various social gestures like tagging seems to indicate the obvious: people may not know what Web 2.0 is, but they know it when they see it.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 22, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I installed the Performancing blog editor plugin for Firefox today, and it will likely become my default mechanism for blogging.
The basic idea is very much in line with my rave about RSS Readering: I am reading a web page, and I want to write something about it, but I don't want to shift context. With the Performancing plugin, I don't. I right click the page (which on a Mac means option click) which then brings up various options, including the now plugged-in 'Performancing...' option. Selecting this leads to a full featured WYSIWYG blog editor taking up the bottom half of the Firefox browser window, and the blog entry includes a link to the page I right clicked on.
I haven't had much experience with the editor yet, but will put it through its paces for a few days, and get back to you.
Om Malik seems to suggest that this editor doesn't work with Macs, but it does. He also points out that Performancing's editor provides much of the functionality of Flock, which I have tried but haven't warmed to at all.
And the nice people at Performancing have stated that they will soon be rolling a version that will support the creation of Technorati tags, too. Even better.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Richard posts about a report from Ian McAllister, a Microsoft program manager, that some other "Tier 1" Internet company wants to gang up with Microsoft to counter Google's growing dominance in search and advertising:
[from Ian's post]
He was essentially saying that his company would help Microsoft level the playing field with Google in search and advertising.
Richard wants to know who the company is. Yahoo and eBay are two companies that leap to mind, obviously. AOL is now in cahoots with Google, based on a $1B partnership. Who else might it be?
What about Interactive? They own dozens of leading services -- Ask Jeeves, Match.com, Ticketmaster, LendingTree -- and even though they spun out Expedia, they are formidable: 3rd quarter results were $1.4B, a 55% growth over last year.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Wink launched its beta today, entering the increasingly crowded and noisy metasearch/social search arena:
[from Wink Blog by Michael Tanne]
Some people might say “What exactly does Wink search?” Our thinking is that people who are frequent users of del.icio.us, digg and slashdot, who get their information from many sources, and who count on knowing what people are finding interesting right now - those people would like one place to search all those sources. Google and Yahoo are great for the whole Web, and we’ve integrated Google search into our service, but the Wink results - those are a measure of what people are thinking right now, based on their bookmarks and tagging.
I talked with Michael several times recently: at Web 2.0, TagCamp in Palo Alto, and in his office for an interview in the upcoming New Visionaries series (coming in January)! I am one of the people that the new Wink service is targeted toward, since I stay glued to my laptop almost all day, tracking what is happening out there. The beta is open, so it will be interesting to see what happens when a large number of people stream onto the site, and begin to socialize the search results based on their individual notions of what is worthwhile.
The "answers" feature -- where people can add comments to the result of a search -- is a new twist on the idea of "search as shared space" and if it catches on can create real value. The two-way synchronization with Del.icio.us tags and Wink tags will certainly help lower the barrier to adoption.
Looks cool!
[pointer from Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington]
Comments (40)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
December 21, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I just created my first online poll in Quimble, on the subject of the W word: see Should we drop the term "Web 2.0"?, or the javascript version embedded in this post (and in the margin):
It was an amazingly simple activity, and the service supports RSS feeds and email notification as alerting techniques, as well as open comments and trackbacks. A very well-done blog polling solution.
[Pointer from eHub]
[Update: I found a Social Bookmarks poll there, I think started by Chris Messina of Flock. Check it.]
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
As one element of the finalized deal between Google and AOL. the Google talk (gtalk) instant messaging solution will become interoperable with AIM:
[from AOL and Google Formalize Partnership to Include Shared Selling of Ads - New York Times by Saul Hansell
Notably, AOL will allow users of Google's new Google Talk instant messaging system to chat with users of AOL's messaging network, the largest in the country. Until now, AOL has resisted linking its system with those run by its major rivals - including Yahoo and Microsoft, which recently agreed to link their own. It does connect to Apple Computer's message system and several services aimed at corporate users.
There will be a somewhat complex procedure to link the two systems, however. Google Talk users will need to add an AOL screen name to communicate with other AOL users.
Bah, that's not complicated. That's what we do already with iChat.
This will open the door to all sorts of interesting cross-pollination, like the IM presence of the senders of Gmail. Sure, Google could have tried innovating these sorts of things with Gtalk, prior to the integration, but the user base is infinitesimal. All of a sudden, logging into Gtalk or other services in Google -- for email, search history, or any thing else -- could lead to all sorts of presence information about the millions of AIM users out there.
Comments (54)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Michael calls Dave Winer, Richard McManus and Russell Shaw traitors for coming out against the concept of Web 2.0, although he moderates that with a smiley:
[from CrunchNotes � Traitors in our Midst]
Web 2.0 is not a marketing slogan. It is the slogan of a people’s army. Our army. They are words that help us explain the explosion of conversations on the web, and justify our enthusiasm for innovation. Web 2.0 is why I came back from my exodus at the fringes of technology, to explore the frontier of the new consumer web.
What did these "traitors" say?
Russell Shaw [not a member of the workgroup] seems to have been the initial source of this Web 2.0 backlash. He argues that Web 2.0 doesn't exist:
[from � Web 2.0? It doesn't exist | IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband | ZDNet.com
The problem I have with this "Web 2.0" slogan is that it is a contrivance, meant to imply a unified movement or wave toward a better Web. Just the very numbering of the thing brings out my moo-goo detector: 1.0 sounds like a beginning. 2.0 (as opposed to a tenth-decimal, such as 1.7 or a 2.4 implies - by its very roundness, a coordinated, standards-based, like-minded rebirth, reconstruction, renaissance, resurrection, whatever you want to call it. 2.0 is the ideal number for such an impression: it implies a concerted, noble effort at refreshing an inspired, but now aging, creation. even "3.0" implies, well, we didn't get it right the first time, 2.0 was transitory and is getting long in the tooth, so here we are transitioning to 3.0. But 2.0 sounds good.
Well, Web 2.0 is bunk. Not that the elements of this rebirth aren't there. I write about some of them, and Richard has them nailed. It's just that they cannot be classified under a common umbrella. They are forward lurches of various standards and technologies, some compatible, some not. Some revolutionary, some evolutionary, some impractical. Some are collaborative, others are highly competitive with each other.
Baloney. Web 2.0 has become widely used as an indicator that something different is going on with recent innovations on the web. It is being adopted by a wide range of people, including marketing weasels and earnest technologists, each of whom have their own reasons for adopting the term.
Russell looks to a Wikipedia definition for the term as justification for the notion that it was created by marketing propagandists to advance their evil goals: specifically, to create a series of profitable conferences, by which I guess he means John Battelle and Medialive, the folks behind the Web 2.0 conference. Wikipedia as a proof of something? Come on.
Appending a "2.0" to a term does not imply -- at least to me -- that some sort of consensus has been reached about the meaning of the term, or even less that its based on some colleciton of standards. It originally meant a new rev of a product, which implies a redesign and the rollout of new features. And "2.0" has become a useful suffix (like "gate" in the political sphere) to indicate a revolution, where the mistakes and bad design choices of an initial release are fixed, or at least countered. Media products -- such as Business 2.0 and Release 2.0 -- have fixed that notion into the zeitgeist. And Web 2.0 is so widely used that ascribing it to Battelle & Co. is really silly.
But their is a movement, of sorts, toward a different model of web-based applications, and Russell's dissmissive comments are simply wrong.
The treason begins with Dave Winer, who lauds Russell's antihype:
[He's exactly right, and what he says is kind of obvious.
Web 2.0 is a way for certain marketing people to claim they invented stuff that they didn't invent, without actually claiming they invented it. It's the kind of double-talk marketing guys love.
In a sense people are right when they say it's another bubble. It's dishonest like the bubble was. Yet the technologies they're hyping are honest.
Yeah, we're getting fleeced again. It sucks.
And Richard McManus jumps in with both feet, saying that Russell is 100% correct, and more or less promising to never say the W word again:
I've had enough of the hype. I've had enough of cynicism. I've had enough of hate blogs. The nail in the coffin was this post on ZDNet, by Russell Shaw. The thing is, I agree with Russell. The term 'Web 2.0' is distracting from the real value going on in the Web right now.
Read/WriteWeb will be focusing on more media-related web technology in 2006. Enough Web 2.0.
Yikes. My experience -- particularly talking with innovators in the past few months for the upcoming New Visionaries video series (see The New Visionaries: Rebooting The Web) -- has led to the exact opposite insight: there is a new sensibility about web applications -- how they are conceived, designed, built, marketed and sold -- that in aggregate is truly different that what preceded it. Note that Dave at least concedes that the technologies being "hyped" are honest, which means that maybe the technologists are too? Maybe it's just those evil marketing guys again.
This antihype is directed, implicitly, against the advocacy for Web 2.0 by people like, well, me, as well as more well-known figure like John Battelle (I wrote about his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Building A Better Boom), and Tim O'Reilly (see Web 2.0: Compact Definition).
I am not prepared to pen a magisterial debunking of the Web 2.0 antihype that is growing, but I am committed to chip away at it, day by day. Here's a few observations as to why Web 2.0 is real:
- Web 1.0, and its bubble, have come and gone. Many of the innovators in Web 2.0 are young folks who either observed the Bubble from afar or as newly minted hirelings in Web 1.0 companies. Their aspirations and thinking have been strongly influenced by the debacle. As I recently wrote, about the frugality of Web 2.0 companies, a real shift from Bubble excesses:
I was just on a tour, talking with a handful of Web 2.0 tech start-up founders, and the tendency is to stay small, almost humorously small. At Mary Hodder's Bloqx, for example, three developers were crammed into a room no larger than a large closet. Jason Fried of 37 Signals advocates keeping teams small, not just from a desire to reduce the burn, but to increase the likelihood of less features creeping into products. This week, I saw the same reflected in the jampacked three-room office of Podcast.com, where Scott Beatty, the CEO, described the company's plans to the 'rolling beta' model of developing more and more rich services, which rely on small, agile development coupled with an obsession with end-user experience.
It's an austere and highly philosophical era -- which John only tangentially touches on -- but one that is likely to lead to very different outcomes that Web 1.0. I believe that it's also a generational thing. These are either young veterans of the Web 1.0 mess, or those that witnessed the fall out of "irrational exuberance" from afar. And they are at least going to make new mistakes, if mistakes are to be made.
- While by no means universal, and by no means a standard, there are general principles that reappear over and over again in discussions with Web 2.0 application developers. I recently referred to these as "central tendencies":
- Users First -- The user experience is a proxy for the user, and all of the folks I touched base with so far agree that user experience is the pivot point of everything. That means that the norms of human expectations, social interaction, and interface goals become the central motif of these apps. For example, sharing with others becomes a basic principle, not something tacked on later.
- Build from personal need -- In every case, these visionaries have decided to build something because they wanted to exist for their own personal use.
- Build small, fast, and iteratively -- The nature of Web 2.0 app frameworks, and why they have evolved, is to support a extremely agile development mantra. But across the board, I have seen very small teams building the core functionality of some potentially larger product, and rolling it out to real users to see how it works. And then respond to feedback, and roll out the next version. This is not just a technique for the initial development stage of these products: its here forever.
- Build small, focused apps, that could serve as building blocks in larger assemblages -- All these folks are resisting the tempation to bloat apps with more and more features, opting instead to build small, highly focused apps that could be integrated (though APIs) into larger assemblages (mash-ups).
As the world speeds up, the gap between any action and it's inevitable reaction seems to have closed, almost to nothingness. Ideas that have promise, technologies with the power to change the world, products that offer productivity boost, almost anything new -- and therefore threatening -- attracts nay-sayers just as quickly as adherents. The antihype almost arrives before the promise of the innovation can even be experienced by the early adopters. The Spanish have a saying, "May no new thing arise," that suggests the comfort that comes from resisting innovation, or the promise of change. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions observed that those in established roles in a scientific community will resist new paradigms that emerge -- even if they better explain dispartities in observed reality -- because it threatens the cultural and social foundations of the community, and the established scientists' roles within it.
I don't think Russell, Dave, and Richard are evil, just because they aren't swayed by the observations of Battelle, O'Reilly, or me. But I think they are missing the opportunity to learn what the new visionaries out there think, those that do believe they are onto something different, building something different, onto a different era. And the A-Listers of the preceding era may find their influence waning in this new era, especially if they don't perceive the things that make it new.
Comments (13)
+ TrackBacks (4) | Category: Technology
December 20, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I went to check out the Web 2.0 satire site Web Two Point Oh! and found my "pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company" was called Blinkomojo, and the product? Cellphone-based invites via microformats.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 19, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I received an email recently from Ramesh Sripathy of Zoho, a company I have somehow missed even though they offer a collection of web apps: an online word processor, a CRM app, and a virtual office with tasks, file sharing, calendar, and so on.
Ramesh was responding to the Office? What's An Office? post, where I suggested that someone, somewhere must be building a web-based spreadsheet, and it turns out that Zoho is that someone... or at least one of them.
The 'websheet' as they have dubbed it seems a good attempt to simply knock off Excel:
[from email]
Zoho Websheet
- Create web spreadsheet (websheet)
- Export websheet as excel / html
- Import any excel spreadsheet and use it online as websheet
- Use any excel functions (sum, avg, etc)
- Feel the same user experience as using excel
This is not yet ready for public, but will be out soon. More features
such as sharing, tagging, etc are in the works.
Zoho Websheet is definately pre-beta -- various functions don't work, it barfed on dollar signs, server errors pop up -- but considering the maturity of the other Zoho tools I expect that they will soon meet their ambitious goals, and then the last thread tieing me to Microsoft Office -- Excel -- can be cut.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (2) | Category: Technology
December 17, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have running around in Boston, offline almost all of Friday, so I missed the news breaking about Google's move to acquire a 5% stake in AOL. Obviously, as have widely reported, Google is interested in stalling competitors from grabbing its search services within AOL as a defensive strategy. But I am more interested in the possible synergies of the two Giant's social and collaborative tools activities:
[from BBC NEWS | Business | Google 'in exclusive AOL talks']
For its part, Google may be interested in getting access to AOL's e-mail and instant messaging service.
It would strengthen Google's hand against rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, who have well-established webmail and instant messaging services. Google is a relative newcomer to this area with Gmail and Googletalk.
A deal would also allow Google to reach AOL's well-established online communities and benefit from the sale of adverts.
As I have harped on a lot recently, AOL's recent efforts in IM and email have been lackluster, to say the least: more oriented toward increasing user annoyance by installing unwanted browsers and increased billboard space on every interface than innovation.
Google is a hotbed of innovation, tossing out phenomenal products -- like Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Desktop-- regularly.
I hope to see the intersection of AOL's enormous AIM user base with a dramatically expanded Gtalk, and another go at Desktop, heading in the direction of Nerdvana (and please don't forget the Mac client, guys).
Only a few companies have all the bits and pieces to actually develop the Nervana client I have been pontificating about for the past year: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The notion is to cement the concept that the buddylist is the center of the Universe 2.0, and to have all manner of things hanging off that representation of our connections to the world, through all sorts of indications of
- Email from a partner? It would be indicated in the buddylist entry next to her name.
- New post on a friend's blog? RSS feeds would not be sequestered off in some disconnected reader, but instead would be integrated into the same Nerdvana buddylist as IM.
- Ditto email. Instead of a completely different interface to alert you to new email, that information would show up associated with your buddylist, where it would automatically be organized by identity.
At any rate, I can hope that one of the areas that Google will focus its considerable capacity to innovate would be this this one, leveraging the AIM user community. Because, after the AIm Triton release (see Steve Case on Its Time To Take It Apart) it's obvious that AOL isn't innovating enough to hold onto its leadership in instant messaging.
Yahoo's recent efforts are intended as an attempt to out-Skype Skype, and Microsoft also has aspirations to become the 21st Ma Bell.
But Google could have completely shifted the dynamics of the future battle for the control of communications in the future, by tapping into the AIM userbase, and launching some truly innovative attacks on what has become increasingly a ho-hum battle. Sure, I want to be able to talk -- voice talk, not just text -- with people on phones, but I don't think that should mean that instant messaging needs to be as tired as the cell phone companies have made the software for cell phones.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 15, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Buried in the comments of a Micropersuasion post about using Del.icio.us to keep track of all the comments we leave behind us in the blogosphere -- a nod to Elisa Camahort -- I found the perfect solution to this issue, courtesy of Des Paroz:
[from Micro Persuasion: Using del.icio.us to Track Blog Comments]
1. Add to your del.icio.us account, and tag with "mycomments" (or similar).
2. Then go to the page for that tag.
3. Right click on the RSS button to get the feed for that tag
4. Go to the RSS-to-Javascript converter (http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/) and input your address, and set the paramaters you want.
5. Copy the code returned
6. Paste this into your site's page source somewhere
I intend to start tagging my comments this way, and as soon as I have enough amassed that it makes sense to do so, I will follow the recipe -- using FeedDigest instead of rss-to-javascript -- and yet another cool widget will grace the pages of Get Real.
Comments (0)
| Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Paul wades into the structured blogging discussion, arguing that people will stay away in droves, and for reasons other than my post (see Structured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy), other perhaps similar at core. He's says people are too lazy to take on even another step in the blogging process:
[from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Structured Blogging Will Flop]
There is simply not enough benefit to the average blogger to compensate for the added irritation of having to pull up a separate form for each type of content you post. It’s a little like the reason why the average Outlook user has around 2,000 emails in their inbox at any time: The cognitive effort of classification is enough to keep people from bothering. The same logic holds for structured blogging.
I worry that paul and his many supporters (read the comments) believe that even one more step is too much work. Personally, I think it will fail because people don't want their music review to look like everybody else's... they want the variablility of the Web that we have come to expect. But I expect we will accumulate dozens of reasons why not in the upcoming months.
Comments (0)
| Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So it looks like Google is provding one of the plugins I was hoping for when I wrote the first RSS Readering piece.. They have released a Firefox Plugin that displays a list of blogs in a hovering tombstone that reference the page you are currently viewing. The tombstone rolls up form the bottom right of the Firefox window, and has a few controls: scroll, close, expand/contract. There doesn't seem to be a way to fiddle with where it pops, etc., but who cares?
This is going to be an enormous boon to me, and I bet to other bloggers or active readers. And it encroaches on the territory that I have really been relying on Technorati for. Now, if they will add any blogs llinks that I click on to my Google Search History... that would be something.
They have also added a button -- "add a comment" -- at the bottom, that allows you to create a post at a Blogger blog, if you have one, referencing the page you are viewing, too.
This is the sort of thing that supports my RSS Readering style -- wandering around and finding new things to read.
[pointer from Steve Rubel]
[Update: Kevin Lim argrees about the plugin's potential: "Overall, I’d rate this Firefox extension as having a disruptive potential as an awareness application for businesses." Note that I discovered his post because of the plugin!]
]
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Just in time for Xmax, Basecamp has added two new features:
- File uploading without FTP redirect -- if you have configured Basecamp in the past you will undoubtedly recall the issues involved with getting the file repository set up. You needed an external server configured to allow FTP access. For some people that was a showstopper. But now 37 Signals allows -- for all but the free plan -- file uploading built in, with limits of course.
- An affiliate program (see the ad over in the right margin):
[from Basecamp Forum / NEW FEATURE: Basecamp Affiliate Program]
The Basecamp Affiliate Program allows you to earn credits that are applied towards your Basecamp account. These credits reduce your subscriptions fees and allow you to earn free service. It's your reward for helping us spread the word about Basecamp. EVERYONE who has a Basecamp account is eligible!
Perfect gift for anyone! Pretty under the tree!
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Steve Gillmor is sharpening his old, old ax: Office is Dead, he says, long live... what, exactly?
[from � Now that we've got your attention | Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter | ZDNet.com]
I was in a conversation last night where the subject turned to Office and whether it's dead or not. You know, the good old Notes is Dead micromeme that I pushed out into the world way back when Ray Ozzie was not the Prince of Redmond. Back before Ray rewrote the Microsoft playbook to stand at the doorway of attention. Back before Bill Gates told the Indian subcontinent that maybe just maybe it was time to cut a deal with–yes, us. Free stuff for attention. And what free stuff might that be? Credits for software! And what software might that be? ooh ooh I know… pick me, pick me.
Office. The Wall Street wisdom is that Google is a media company, their business model is advertising, and they have no business or gain in undermining Office. Right. Gmail, Gtalk, Gcal, Gbase, Gdesk. If you believe that, I've got a Gbridge to sell you.
OK, so of course Google is building the new microOffice. And this gives Ray the opening he needs to neutralize all the heavy hitters back at the ranch. Surely Ray remembered the moment at Web 2.0 when someone asked how many people had Gmail accounts and 80% of the room went up. Who are those hands? Thought leaders, influencers, enthusiasts, PR, media, so-called early adopters. And what did they pay for the right to use the software? No, not nothing. Their attention.
So if the war is already over, then what more does Microsoft have to lose? Only time. Time in which to make the switch to services. But can they just clone search and win share? Entropy rules.
He is characterizing this as a war with two belligerents: Microsoft and Google. And Scoble doesn't seem to argue about the card, settling for a recitation of the stuff that is cool in Office:
[from Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger � 837 words about how Office is dead (from Steve Gillmor)
But, Office still has some kick left in it. I’ve been using Office 12 for the past few days and, I can’t go back. The Excel pivot table feature alone is worth paying hundreds of dollars. Alone.
And tables are finally really cool. PowerPoint is actually something I’ll use again. Creating a chart there is sure a lot nicer than I’ve been able to do on any Web site.
Steve also hasn’t been paying attention to our secret weapon: workflow. Try to stick that in your Linux server and smoke it!
And now I see there’s new extensibility in OneNote 12.
I’m a card-carrying member of the Web 2.0 Working Group, but there isn’t anything as cool as OneNote coming out yet. Sorry. Not even close.
**Ray Ozzie slaps Scoble**
Oh, Ray, knock it off! We all know Gillmor’s favorite toy is Groove. We’re keeping that hidden away here until we need to use that to get Steve to attend another conference. Why? Cause it’s always fun arguing with Steve about whether or not Office is dead. Hell, according to my Word Counter (in the dead Office 2003) we just killed another 258 words doing just that. Heheh.
I think the metaphor of the Office is dead, although the inside-the-walls, enterprise-centric value proposition of Microsoft Office still will find its adherents in the corporate sphere.
But the dominance of Microsoft on the "desktop" (another office metaphor) is over, done, finito. Microsoft Word is being deposed by various RTF and PDF spewing document tools (like Writely and innumerable others) where there is no "document" on your harddrive, but instead a shared space that feels like a memo, or an invoice, or an expense report. [By the way, how come no one has developed a Web 2.0 expense reporting app?]
There are a few niches where the superiority of Microsoft Office tools has not been overcome by the value of collaborative, social architecture:
- Excel: Yes, no one has developed a web-based solution to replace the venerable spreadsheet. Although I bet there are a clutch of start-ups out there working on it.
- One Note: it is a cool tool, because it breaks the Windows "desktop" paradigm of folder and documents, and replaces it with a webbish collection of pages and links: sort of a mini-web, or a wysiwyg wiki on your PC. Very cool. If fact, I recommend that Microsoft built a web version of it ASAP.
- Powerpoint: I am over PPT. I am temporarily happy with Keynote, but expect that web-based presentation systems -- perhaps with a small client for display -- will put an end to the PPT dominance in this sector. Especially since sharing of decks is central to the whole idea of presentation. [I envision a new dynamic, where online presentation systems allow you to edit and share presentations, incorporating materials from other web apps -- Google Maps, Flickr, AudioBlog, etc. -- and also to support real-time webcasting integrated with low-cost VoIP telephony for a much needed revolution. Watch out Webex!]
Google may in fact be the source of many of these tools, or the acquirier of them, at any rate. But I expect that we will see a widespread explosion of new approaches, and not just a knocking off of the core 20% ot Office apps functionality in web apps. And in this setting, we will see the displacement of models of use, not just a shift to the web.
Basecamp is a drastically different metaphor for project management, and has displaced the Microsoft Project model. Its a social media model, based on communication and coordination rather than micro-analytical management of time and resources. Basecamp is the product a small startup, 37 Signals, not Google or any other giant competitor of Microsoft.
So, while I believe that Microsoft and Google are in deadly conflict for the well-defined battlezones like email, blogging, browsers, and the like, in the area of social tools we should look to small innovators to upset the Office metaphor, with tightly focused and easily used web apps that do specific things well. That's why I expect an expense reporting app (perhaps one similar the the way Blinksale works for invoices) to come out and become widely used before seeing a complete and general spreadsheet tool.
tags: steve+gillmor, ray+ozzie, robert+scoble, microsoft+office, basecamp, 37+signals, blinksale, powerpoint, excel, writely, google
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Burningbird is dead on when she writes
[Burningbird � The Meta Wars
She who controls the metadata rules the world [...].
But when I suggested (see Stuctured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy) that there is a choice to be made between the use of Structured Blogging and Microformats -- and note that advocates of both positioned the comparison between the two as a choice (see Microformats v Structutred Blogging: A Small War With Big Consequences) -- Shelly goes on to say
My first reaction was to say that Stow Boyd [sic] wouldn’t be able to find a leafy, green vegetable in a field of lettuce, but that wouldn’t be civil and god knows, we all need to be civil.
So instead what I’ll say is that microformats, which are adding tags to existing elements such as links, and Structured Blogging are not an either/or; same as neither is incompatible with my own RDF efforts. All efforts are bottom up; all efforts are top down; all support a semantic web because at some point, someone has to make a decision to attach a bit of metadata to a chunk of web space. How you do so is irrelevant.
Ouch. Yes, Shelley, let's try to have a kinder, gentler blogosphere.
Rather than arguing from first principles at length, I think I will wait and comment on the first actual uses of these various approaches, and we'll see what the adoption is, and so on. And we'll see, then, who is trying to capture the high ground in the Meta Wars.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 14, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Richard MacManus (see Read/WriteWeb: Structured blogging is here) and a long list of others are heralding the announcement about Structured Blogging at the Syndicate conference as something like the second coming.
But I don't buy it, as I said in this recent post (see Microformats v Structured Blogging: A Small War With Big Consequences ). My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn't like some of the consequences -- such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on -- but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging.
Because blog posts don't have to conform to any structural standards, they can be used to do anything: nothing is out of bounds, because we haven't created the boundaries. The messiness of the world we are living in is one of the reasons that it is such a rich and rewarding experience.
I am not sure who is benefitted if everyone falling into line and adopting consistent standards for the structure of blog posts. Perhaps companies like PubSub -- one of the driving force behind all this -- who would like to be able to sort out all the blog posts about hotels, gadgets, and wine out there, and aggregate the results in some algorithmic fashion, and then make money from the resulting ratings and reviews. But I am not sure that it would be a better world for bloggers, or even blog readers.
So I favor the microformat approach, which is messy, puts more of a burden on the blogger, and will require a host of tools to be built to make it all work. But microformats will work bottom-up -- tiny little tagged bits of information buried in the blog posts -- as opposed to structurally. And I am betting -- as always -- on bottom-up.
Comments (49)
+ TrackBacks (3) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I guess I knew something like Technorati Explore was in the wind, based on informal and irritatingly obscure discussions with Dave Sifry and Peter Hirshberg in recent months. In particular, the interview I had with Dave a few weeks ago, for the New Visionaries video series that will debut in January, raised some tantalizing points regarding the convergence of blog search and new media.
Explore allows a user to see the most recent posts from blogs about any subject, such as "social media" as shown in this screen shot (hey, that's me!):
The unveiling of Technorati Explore lays to rest any questions I may have had. This is the first glimpse of Technorati 2.0: the media company.
Michael Arrington [thanks for the pointer!] compares it to the upstart Memeorandum, but doesn't generalize much beyond praising Gabe Rivera for what he's done:
[from TechCrunch � Technorati Explore Smells Like Memeorandum]
Here’s what Explore doesn’t do as well as Memeorandum: It’s nowhere near as real-time as Memeorandum (although Technorati is indexing the entire blogosphere whereas Memeorandum only indexes a few thousand blogs). Also, Memeorandum is advanced enough to cluster related items even when they don’t necessarily link to eachother - Technorati doesn’t do this. Finally, Memeorandum includes news items (NYT, etc.) and press releases as headlines, which Technorati isn’t doing.
Here’s what it does better than Memeorandum: It works for any tag - just search on http://kitchen.technorati.com/explore/[TAGNAME], whereas Memeorandum today only has sites for politics and technology. Also, Technorati automatically includes all blogs in the conversaiton, whereas Memeorandum only includes its few thousand indexed blogs. With Technorati, even the smaller bloggers can get in on the conversation.
And more importantly, Technorati can scale to support as many conversations as there are topics, or tags. Gabe is working harder than a one-armed paperhanger just dealing with Tech and Politics as subdomains. And this is exactly what we are trying to do at Corante's Hubs, like the ones we have launched for Web, Media, and Marketing (see web.corante.com, media.corante.com, and marketing.corante.com). And like Memeorandum, we are aggregating the insights and thoughts of pre-selected group of contributors.
And Michael is right, there is tremendous value in the real-time updating and graphical agggregation that human editors can do in almost real-time, none of which is in evidence here. But I predict that Technorati -- and its inevitable competitors -- will begin to roll more of that out.
Certainly, discovering the blogmobbing that goes on around a hot story should be possible for smart search engine technology? So at least some of what makes human-edited services like the Corante Hubs and Memeorandum interesting to return to during the course of the day can be automated, and will be, in the future.
But I also think that Technorati will have to add editorial capabilities, to actually become more of a newspaper than an encyclopedia. There is a hint of what might be coming. In the screenshot above, notice the small area that says, "What’s this? This page shows what blogs about social media are talking about right now." Imagine that replaced with a running commentary from a human editor, in this case knowledgeable about what's happening in the social media space, commenting and calling out the coolest stuff.
Imagine the opportunity: Technorati has the world's largest tagspace, and all of a sudden all those hot tags -- that we have lovingly created for them -- now become communities where people come to exchange views and learn. I predict that T'rati will start bringing more social tools into the mix: why not let people comment directly in the tagspace, for example?
And if taggregations can become destinations, like Memeorandum and the Corante Hubs are, then the one with the most destinations can become very big.
So this is an important threshold we are passing over, where the companies -- because Technorati is just the first in this frontier -- that are providing the search tools to find blog writing by topic, authority, and timestamps, now will become the context in which such blog writing is experienced.
And how -- if at all -- will they share the revenue with the authors? Do they envision setting up some sort of royalty scheme like that used in radio for music? Like we have done with the Corante Network? Because right now, whatever revenue is gained from those Google ads is not being divided with me.
You can argue that one hand is washing the other, since they are presenting only the smallest of excerpts [and, oh by the way, it would be smart to filter out those "[IMG ]" fields, guys] and therefore leading more traffic back to my blog. But I am starting to believe that whatever agreement I am making with Technorati when I agreed to have my blog indexed by them needs as radical a revamp as their aspirations seem to have had.
At the same time, it is a compelling vision: every interesting tag serving as the nexus for a community, and the largest and most active served by human editors. Imagine a Gabe Rivera equivalent for every one of 100 or 1000 of the most popular tags, laboring daily to help us make sense of the deluge of information being generated by literally millions of bloggers.
That should sell some ads.
[tags: gabe+rivera, memeorandum, technorati, technorati+explore, technorati+kitchen, corante, corante+network, corante+hubs, blogmobbing, michael+arrington, peter+hirschberg, david+sifry]
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The Feds are worried about a spate of text messaging stock scammers:
[from SignOnSanDiego.com > News > AP News
Securities regulators are warning investors about a new twist on the "pump and dump" stock-fraud scam that uses text messaging on cell phones to tout stocks.
The National Association of Securities Dealers, the brokerage industry's self-policing organization, issued an "investor alert" Tuesday advising people to ignore such messages with "hot" stock tips on their cell phones.
In so-called "pump and dump" schemes, the perpetrators tout small, thinly traded stocks to investors to inflate the prices and then sell their own shares at a profit. Ordinary investors can suffer losses when the stock prices tank during the share dumping.
During the stock market boom of the late 1990s, the touting often was done by posting e-mails about companies on Internet message boards or with write-ups in financial publications. In recent years, telephones and faxes also have been used.
And I bet that in small newspapers across the country, staff writers are using this as grist for yet another foray into how dangerous text messaging, instant messaging, and the Internet are, while in fact it is merely a testament to human stupidity.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 13, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The nice folks at Feedburner have added a new capability called Feedflare, which basically allows you to instrument your RSS with all sorts of feedback widgets that front for various web services:
[from Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: No Feed is an Island: Introducing FeedFlare]
FeedFlare is initially launching today with seven simple options, including:
* most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us
* tag this item at del.icio.us
* Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post
* Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickr photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.
* number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by Wordpress)
* email this item
* email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or repurposed on a site).
Shortly after this launch, we'll also integrate a "more like this" option from Sphere which will link to a list of related posts at Sphere.
So I have turned on just about everything available in the Get Real feed. (While I was there I noticed that Get Real has climbed above 1000 RSS subscribers!)
Pretty cool. Rejiggering the paradigm of RSS as a feedback system -- thanks to interlacing these widgets into the mix -- holds some interesting issues. Just like advertising in the RSS stream, the blogger immediately asks "can I use the same widgets on my blog, and have a single mechanism to manage these sorts of interaction?" As soon as Feedburner offered Feedblitz -- the email notification service -- integrated with their feed management, I immediately dropped using the MT embedded solution for email notification. So, I can extrapolate: as soon as Feedburner stabilizes the implementation of FeedFlare, I would likely want to use the same stuff on my blog, so that the user experience -- wherever -- is as similar and rich as possible.
Played out to a logical conclusion, Feedburner and its competitors might be taking a new role as the medium through which not only is RSS streaming out to the readers, but all manner of social gestures -- clicks, views, tags, ratings, rankings, comments, tags, and links -- might be streaming back. And not just streaming back to be statically analyzed, but to be displayed and reincorporated into the user experience: rewiring the social architecture.
It looks like a small feature, but it's secretly huge.
[pointer from Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, who thinks the big deal here is opening up the solution so that any company can be offering a competitive solution to Del.icio.us. Yes, I likt that too, but the "feedback through the feed" -- capturing social responses that have been entered on the other end of an RSS pipe -- is going to be bigger, still.]
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (3) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The response to my recent piece on RSS 'readering' (see RSS Readering: Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Me (And You, Too, I Bet)) has been really overwhelming. I thought I would wander through some of the comments and recommendations that folks sent along, as well as describing some new tools that have cropped up that I am trying out.
- Todd Tweedy pointed out that the recent release of AIM supports media bots pushed into the buddylist, without any opt-in by the user. He suggests that in the future AOL may not let you delete these bots, and that's bad, if it turns out to be true. Note: despite for my calls of an integration between RSS readering and the buddylist, I have had no response from anyone working on IM for one of the major IM players. Sigh.
- Anil Bawa responded with a description of some of the things he has implemented in Clippr which was his master's thesis project at Imperial University. Clippr is a really cool prototype, but not open for general use:
[from the Clippr.]
Show me the money
Here's the feature list:
- OPML import/export of feed subscriptions. Folders are flattened to tags and imported automatically into Clippr.
- Firefox plug-in and bookmarklet to facilitate clipping stuff from your web browser.
- Tag clippings, tag feeds, tag like a demon.
- A community oriented article base formed through user subscriptions, refreshed periodically. Full text RSS/RDF/ATOM formatted feeds are supported.
- Text analysis (article clustering) on incoming articles, in order to extract Top Stories and article keywords.
- Context analysis (tag clustering) used to recognise related tags.
- Change your tags whenever you want. Clippr handles merging/splitting of tag-spaces.
- Power editing using batch actions thanks to a gmail style dynamic dropdown.
- Tagging combined with keyword extraction to produce automated classification of articles. Text analysis and folksonomy reconciled.
- A search engine supporting a query syntax for folksonomy - search by tag (intersection/union), feed, keyword or any combination of these. Implemented as Live Search for desktop style responsiveness (it behaves like Apple Mail search - wipe the search field and return to where you were)
- RIS export for using web references in bibliographies
- RSS export of your Clippings archive.
- Mail an article to a friend or recommend it to a fellow Clippr user.
Hot damn, I thought. So I contacted Anil, and we spoke this last weekend. He is interested in pursuing the ideas in Clippr, but the system isn't really scaled to handle more than maybe a dozen users at the moment, so he'd have to rethink it and reimplement if he wants to go forward with it. But he is plotting doing something in this area, so I have dubbed him a new voice, and plan to keep my eyes on him. I also plan to meet him when I jump to Europe in the new year.
- Danzigstorer turned me on to the Maxthon browser, which I had never heard about even though it has had 30 million downloads. I haven't had a chance to fiddle with it, or review its many plugins, but there may be something there. More to follow. He also mentioned Sharpreader, a Windows only RSS reader tool that plays nice with W.bloggar, apparently.
- Ian Kennedy of Yahoo pointed out that the announced Yahoo Alerts integration with Yahoo Messenger is now working. I will look into that later today.
- Dylan mentioned both You Control for the Mac, which basically allows the user to put all sorts of controls into the menu bar, like being able to open folders, recent documents, iCal events, and this includes a small RSS reader. Looks interesting, but I stumbled across RSS Menu first, so You Control loses out.
RSS Menu is a simple program that allows you to display RSS feeds from a menu on the Mac menu bar. The tool supports folders, so that feeds can be logically aggregated. And when you mouse over a specific post, there is a hover display of the story excerpt. The feeds and folders display unread items. Its a very minimal but usable RSS jumping-off point, which is what I really want. As I said in the earlier piece, I don't really want to park in a reader, and have posts pushed at me one by one. I usually jump to a post, then from there to other things linked, and so on.
This would be reason enough for me to adopt RSS Menu. Having the RSS feeds always available in the Mac menu is a huge advantage -- I don't have to switch from email to a newsreader, for example. I just reach up, scroll down the list and see if there is something I want to read. If so, I click on the item, and there I am.
Even more importantly, relative to my desire to be alerted about new stuff, RSS Menu is integrated with Growl, another Mac program that I knew nothing about until the past week. Growl's creators call it a "global notification system for Mac" -- and the product can be used to notify Mac users about all sorts of system and application activities. In my case, I have turned on notifications for new RSS feeds and Gmail.
Now, whenever someone I read posts something new, I get a floating, transient tombstone in the upper right corner of my desktop, indicating the name of the feed. I can -- if I want -- pull down the RSS Menu and slide over to see what it is without having to change context from one program to another. I emphasize that last point because it's very big for me.
So, that's a big digression in response to Dylan's recommendation about You Control -- perhaps should have been a post all on its own -- but needless to say, one piece of the puzzle that I wrote about in RSS Readering Part I has been mostly satisfied.
- Just Mohit and Pablo Ibarrolaza suggested I try Bloglines, but that's the inward looking sort of RSS reader experience I don't want. I have already tried Bloglines.
- Michael suggests using email alerts, and use the standard email filtering/foldering approach. Gack. I don't want to spend more time in email, I want support for an active, blogging-by-wandering-around style of RSS readering.
- Greg Cangiolosi pointed me toward immedi.at, which is an RSS-to_IM alert solution. More to follow, once I test drive it.
- Julian Ellison says that his group is going to take at least some of my recommendations to heart:
Seriously, we're digging into this in our Tablane browser. Won't help you yet because we're based on the IE engine in our current incarnation (sorry), but in our next beta release due out before the end of the month we are adapting our (bookmark) Collections XML framework to comply with the RSS XML standard. This should give us a platform to pursue some of these ideas. Another browser I had never heard of! Yikes.
- Mark Wilson suggests that a website might be a better place for dealing with RSS feeds than a reader, and he and his (unnamed) group are apparently at work on something like that. He points to Microsoft.com as his website in the comment, so...
A number of folks referenced the piece and extended the ideas. Here's a sampling (see Technorati, or the trackbacks on the post):
- Jack Vinson picked up the thread and wrote:
Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Stowe
Stowe doesn't want the email-like interface of Outlook plugins, nor does he want the "Pez dispenser feel" of many of the browser-based aggregators (click to read). He goes on to describe a set of features that describes a more natural way of reading the wide array of web feeds that are available today. Such a tool will let him say "this is interesting" and immediately research other materials: trace through links, read comments (and visit commenters), browse through tags, and even find people in my network who know something about the topic. And one might even want to write about the topic in question.
One can almost see pieces of this in the various blog and web search feeds that are available. But they mostly require that I wait to see how the search develops over time. I wonder if what Findory is doing with monitoring my clicks might help over the long haul.
Here's an example: While I am reading, I would like to have a "more like this" option that pulls together materials in my existing feeds that are related to "this." It also goes out to the web and brings back other related materials, maybe via a gada.be-like tool that fires off multiple searches for me. And it should be smart enough to ignore things I have already seen or that I already know about (one of my frustrations with blog search feeds).
- Ian Kennedy said that I laid down
a challenge for RSS readers to do better with some suggestions for improvement which I think make sense.
I think that's the attraction of Memeorandum - we're usually lazy and want to give over control to someone else to sort out the top news of the day. In Memorandum if a story is really talked about, it'll remain the top story all day, there's no worry in missing that one post, it'll remain pegged up there until you're ready for it. Reading your feeds (forgive me, I'm going to take a shot at my own analogy) should be more like taking in an expansive view of the landscape and not like weeding a garden. As Yahoo continues to think about how best to bring RSS to the masses, this is something we continue to think about.
- Scoble commented on my post, which I talked about at length, here, but the real difference is, as I said, "My process of reading stuff is not random, but it is not assembly-line, industrial-strength blog reading like Robert is into. I find that I need to tag, comment, post, and so on, to make sense of the stream. Otherwise, nothing sticks with me."
- Andy Lark said he shares my feelings, which I already noted.
- Paolo Valdemarin says that I am a mutant, but I may be a precursor of what others will do in the future: "I don't know how many users in the world wild web would actually be using an approach similar to Stowe's to dig information today, but I think his list of features could be an interesting foundation to improve tools for intranet-level applications."
Whew. A lot of discussion, a lot of tools to try out, and some measurable success -- specifically with the combination of Growl and RSS Menu -- getting toward what I want. But I still haven't uncovered the various modules that I talked about in RSS Readering Part I, and most of what people seem to be building are new applications that are trying to impose a different context on my RSS readering activities instead of supporting me where I am now: in the browser looking at some post. Tool builders need to drop the premise that we want to sit in a tiny little room (the app) and read snippets of text in an assembly-line fashion. I favor a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer model of web reading: I wander around, looking under rocks and finding new trails all the time. And telling stories about my travels so that I, and others, can find the way back, and, just as important: to learn from the experience.
[tags: rss+readering, rss, robert+scoble, andy+lark, paolo+valdemarin, todd+tweedy, anil+bawa, jack+vinson, greg+cangialosi, julian+ellison, mark+wilson, immedi.at, clippr, rss+menu, growl, you+control, tablane, bloglines, sharpreader, maxthon]
Comments (31)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Peter Cooper of FeedDigest picked up on my recent comments (see Remember The Milk) about using FeedDigest to pipe my Remember The Milk to-do list into the left margin of Get Real. Peter is right when he worries that people are only using FeedDigest because other services don't provide RSS-to-javascript gaskets, and that FeedDigest has to aspire to do more:
[from PeterCooper.co.uk: People use FeedDigest because other things suck]
You might think that people using FeedDigest because other services suck is a good thing for FeedDigest. I'm not so sure.
Take what Stowe Boyd just wrote. He's using a new to-do list system which he loves to bits, but which lacks "a neato-keeno javascript to let me directly post a public to-do list on my blog, so if I want to do that I have to resort to an RSS-to-javascript gasket like Feeddigest." FeedDigest is a 'resort'. This is true in many cases. A lot of users only use FeedDigest because their existing tools are lacking.
FeedDigest can do more. For example, the service has very limited options for reformatting feeds. And they offer no capability to filter feeds based on keywords or tags, which would be very helpful. But with the attitude he is expressing in this post, I am sure that Peter will be working on it.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Yesterday's USA Today had a piece about Trip Hawkins, the founder of Elctronic Arts and now Digital Chocolate, who has had something akin to a religious conversion. As he puts it, "I realized I had been doing the wrong thing for 30 years." He now thinks the pivotal element of games' attracting and holding onto users is not fidelity to the real-world -- great graphics and so on -- but their support for the social dimension. Aha! People are the heart of the Universe 2.0!
[from USATODAY.com - Tech guru dials into gaming's social side by Kevin Maney]
Hawkins started to feel that something about video games was lacking. Madden Football might be astoundingly realistic, yet it's played by only about 5% of the people who watch the Super Bowl, Hawkins says. Participants in fantasy leagues — a very low-fidelity activity based on statistics from real football games — outnumber video game football players 3 to 1.
[...]
So, Hawkins spent time thinking about what people need, not just want. As we become more mobile, "There's a loneliness we feel in our society," Hawkins says. "We want to grab onto what we've lost."
And that's connection and community. People want to go to Super Bowl parties or interact while playing fantasy football, Hawkins concludes. Fidelity is important to an elite segment of the market, but social connection is important to just about everyone.
"I took the wrong branch," he says. "I thought it was all about fidelity, but what people want is the social aspect."
[...]
In this nascent segment, Digital Chocolate ranks in the top 10 gamemakers, according to research firm M:Metrics. The company has sold about 8 million of its early games. Prices vary, but subscription games can cost $2.99 a month.
Yet Hawkins' big bet is on the low-fi social games, and that's just beginning. MLSN only launched on Cingular and Sprint Nextel subsidiary Boost Mobile this fall. This month, MLSN will launch on Verizon and Sprint. AvaFlirting and a sibling game, AvaCars, won't come out until 2006.
I haven't played these games -- in fact, I don't play video games or phone games, in general -- so I can't comment on the play aspects of what Digital Chocolate is up to. But the basic philosophy is dead on. People want to connect with people, and games are just another means to do that.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
When the next enormous disaster hits, you can be sure of one thing: relying on the regional or federal government to respond is stupid. But how can we train local people to be first, and maybe final, responders? Abby Christopher writes at Wired about video games that help people learn what to do in various disasters:
[from Wired News: Games Tackle Disaster Training
Don't worry about bird flu -- video games will come to the rescue.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding a series of computer games to help prepare health workers and other first responders facing bioterror attacks, nuclear accidents and pandemics.
Backed also by Chicago's Department of Public Health, a University of Illinois at Chicago research team is developing a series of games that simulate health-related emergencies as well as biological, chemical, radiological and natural disasters.
The new approach is expected to save money -- but it can also prepare many professionals and volunteers quickly in the event of a health emergency, like the potential bird-flu pandemic.
This is the sort of thing that I think is essential for preparing for the inevitable Disaster 2.0, like a bird flu pandemic, biological terrorism, or a 100 year storm hitting Manhattan. Instead of overbred bureaucrats holding endless planning sessions and writing voluminous reports about our lack of preparedness, the US Government or Bill Gates should throw a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into a massively parallel online game system where those who get to level 100 will get their college paid for, or $50,000/year, or some other NBA-level inducements. We could have millions of people learning what to do in an emergency, and the top 10% or 15% could make serioius coin.
And in the case of an emergency, when you are standing knee deep in the rising water in a New York City subway, and someone starts telling everyone what to do, you'd be much happier knowing that she is a level 100 adept of the Disaster 2.0 game instead of some political appointee with a flair for office politics.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Joi Ito writes that bloom is off the rose as far as conventional blogging goes, at least for him: blog fatigue has set in. The light at the end of the tunnel? Moblogging!
[from Joi Ito's Web: Will more moblog help?]
It dawned on me that what I really want is better moblogging. Now, when I am in front of a computer connected to the Internet, I'm mostly immersed in IM for business or Warcraft for fun. When I am mobile, I have idle time that I could spend reading blogs and writing to my blog. I guess this is a sign that, at least for me, blogging has moved from my primary online activity to my idle time filler. However, considering how much idle time I have with my phone, I think I could still blog at a relatively consistent rate. Also, I wish there were better ways to read and write when I am with my computer without a connection.
Anyway, I'm going to have to think about how I can have more moblog... Also, maybe my site needs a redesign too.
I think Joi is facing what we all feel, when blogging becomes just the daily grind. And second, I have great hopes for moving into video blogging and moblogging, to rethink the entire experience of blogging.
Once I get over issues involved with downloading Nokia Lifeblog software to my loaner N90 (requires a Windows box -- hiss), I will be trying to expand my blogging to include a completely different use of Flickr -- not as a periodic uploading of pictures from my cell phone, via the computer, but a real stream of pictures and posts daily. By the way, when is Flickr going to support video?
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Steve Case has a piece in today's Washington Post where makes a case (haha) for breaking up Time Warner, and in particular, taking AOL in a new direction.
I am not persuaded by Case's spin on the history of the Time/Warner AOL merger: neither is Om Malik. But his three reasons why an unfettered AOL could do better than a captive one are worth thinking about:
[from It's Time to Take It Apart]
Three initiatives, each grounded in AOL's storied past, could be the basis of the company's resurgence.
First, there is no firm better positioned to become the preeminent Internet-based phone company of the 21st century. With nearly 100 million instant messaging users, sending billions of messages each day, AOL is already one of the nation's leading communications companies. While I have respect for the talented entrepreneurs at Internet phone companies like Skype and Vonage, an independent AOL should be able to have many times the number of Internet phone customers as these upstarts (neither of which even existed when we announced the merger of AOL and Time Warner). While AOL is now, at long last, finally getting an Internet phone service off the ground, a spun-off AOL could make this its highest priority, without any anxiety about conflicts with Time Warner Cable (which offers competing services).
Second, given that AOL has always fostered a sense of community and encouraged interaction between like-minded people, it is well positioned to lead in the booming field known as social networking. Indeed, AOL was facilitating social networking before anybody called it that; now this is one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet, as shown by the surging interest in (and valuations of) companies such as MySpace and Facebook. There's no reason why AOL should be falling behind these new entrants -- except that, within a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, emerging opportunities are often ignored until it's too late.
And third, the current drive to make AOL.com a general interest portal is great, but the value of general interest Web sites may have already peaked. The bigger opportunities are likely in the area of vertical portals, Web sites that draw people into specialized channels about things like sports or health, and that host multimedia content as well as video search tools, which blur the lines between the Internet and television. AOL's huge audience gives it a tremendous advantage here, not just to sell ads, but also to build valuable, durable interactive media brands and franchises.
It is true that in each of these three areas, and many others, there are initiatives already underway at AOL. My point, however, is that AOL must go beyond merely "doing" these things; it must reach for leadership in each area. And to do that, it must be freed from its corporate shackles and return to its entrepreneurial roots, identifying ideas early and promoting their widespread acceptance.
Regarding AOL's instant messaging opportunities, I agree that the company could make a credible VoIP run against Skype/eBay, Yahoo, MSN, Vonage, and Google, based on the penetration of AIM. And Case is right, that AOL needs to focus on that right now, or the tide will have turned. The presumed internal conflicts with other arms of the media giant could in fact hold back necessary focus or resources. Given the innovation going on at the competitors and the ho-hum stuff being done in AIM today, something needs to happen.
Here's what I was writing two weeks ago in a review of AIM Triton, their newest version of AIM, that I never finished:
Until today, I had only peeked at the AOL Triton project from afar, but because of my increasing hostility to apps that only run on Windows, I still haven't really fooled with it. I did post Stewart Henshall's comments here, where he basically states that they failed to do very much that's innovative. A complete "lack of vision,"
he said.
So, after reading a lukewarm review in the Washington Post this morning, I fired up Virtual PC and downloaded the thing. (And, oh, by the way, reclaimed my longlost "stoweboyd" screenname! Years ago, when I dropped my AOL account, they appropriated my login and told me -- in various tech support interactions -- that I would never be able to regain it. This was a policy based (supposedly) on protecting people from others spoofing their identities after releasing screennames or login names. "But," I protested, "I am me. I am not spoofing." Tough luck. However, today, I was able to generate the "stoweboyd" screenname. Hmmm. Maybe its the statue of limitations has elapsed... whatever. But I am glad to regain it, and I plan to switch over to using it.)
My expectations were low, despite the hoopla about the new video capabilities being a Skype killer. Sure they are. What I expect is the increased commercialization of the AIM experience. More ads, more real estate devoted to pushing AOL services, and during the download and installation, all sorts of attempts to own my desktop. And they did not disappoint.
Couple that with the ongoing brain drain at AOL, there are obviously systemic problems, there:
[from WSJ.com - AOL Loses Executive Who Led Instant-Message Unit's Revival
The America Online executive who led a turnaround at the online company's Instant Messenger division has quit a week after AOL introduced its latest version of the product. Chamath Palihapitiya, 29 years old, plans to join a venture capital firm next year.
Mr. Palihapitiya's departure comes as AOL parent Time Warner Inc. is in the midst of negotiations to sell a minority AOL stake to either Google Inc. or Microsoft Corp. Those negotiations have been dragging on for months, leading to a sense of uncertainty among many AOL staffers. In August, Neil Smit, who was head of AOL's subscription business, became chief executive of Charter Communications Inc.
AOL hasn't named a successor to Mr. Palihapitiya, who plans to leave at the end of the year. He will join Mayfield Fund, one of Silicon Valley's most established venture firms, with $2.3 billion under management, as a principal in January.
Good news for Mayfield, perhaps, but another question mark about the future direction of AIM.
Case's arguments about social networking, or perhaps to generalize, the emergence of social architecture upon which interesting new apps will be built, are convincing to me. With gazillions of AIM and AOL users, AOL should be better positioned than they are today in that arena. And, despite the buzz around MySpace and Facebook, I think we are only seeing the start of a social application explosion. These are SNA 1.0 companies, and there really aren't any SNA 2.0 companies out there, unless you blur your focus and look at Flickr or Last.fm (obvious candidate to be acquired, soon, btw), where people are sharing their obsessions with media. AOL should be doing more, here.
And finally, the argument that AOL could become a leader in social media is a real possibility. It's a wide open marketplace, and the company recently acquired Weblogs, Inc., which is a serious step in that direction.
So, leaving aside the "who struck John?" arguments about how AOL got mixed up with Time Warner in the first place, and not even trying to dig into whether its good for the other parts of Time Warner to be divorced from AOL, I am willing to nod along with Steve's message. Whether he can make it happen, or happen quickly enough, I have no idea. But there is no doubt in my mind that a smaller, more focused AOL, capitalizing on AIM, and perhaps adopting my mantra -- The Buddylist Is The Center of the Universe 2.0 -- is a better play than whatever it is Time Warner thinks it is doing with AOL right now.
[tags: steve+case, aol, aim, om+malik, time+warner, google, yahoo, vonage, msn, yahoo, stuart+henshall, Chamath Palihapitiya, Universe 2.0
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Yahoo has announced that it will be hosting MT for small businesses. Kind of wild, considering they acquired Blogger, but I guess MT has such a big lead in the powerblogger end of the spectrum that they just had to... or is it a stalking horse? [correction: Adrian Holovaty points out that it was Google that bought Blogger. Duh. I guess my coffee hasn't hit yet.] Considering their acquisitiveness, why didn't they just buy Six Apart? Maybe the price couldn't be hammered out.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Improbulus seems to be having problems simialr to mine re: Technorati tags getting lost, stolen, or strayed:
[from A Consuming Experience: Technorati: how to check when Technorati last indexed your blog]
And while it's good that they are regularly indexing, I wish they would fix the problems with their tag pages (or maybe tags indexing or tags database), which clearly people are still experiencing - I've found myself that my post on how to offer different lengths of feed to your subscribers isn't showing up on their tag pages though it's clearly on their index. I don't know if it's because I included code in that post, but some guidance as to what can break their system would be helpful so we know what to avoid.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A fascinating riff on the economic transitions in the media industry (based on "coordination asymmetries") comes to a dead stop with an offhand comment about MySpace that reminds me that we are in the very earliest days of where social tools are heading:
[from Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
My kid sister is young enough to think that MySpace is corporate and lame. How do you think her generation is going to express and define itself?
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I am endlessly fascintated with organizing my digital life (or is it digitally organizing my life?), and so when I bumped into Remember The Milk I signed up for an account.
At core, RTM is a to-do list manager: a basic coordination tool. But the thought that has gone into it is captivating. RTM provides the core capablities that you might expect of a to-do list tool: creation of tasks, with deadlines, and so on, but it supports a wide range of sharing options. RTM is a social tool, supporting groups and the delegation of tasks to individuals -- through an "inbox/outbox" metaphor -- and the opportunity to publish to-do lists via URL, RSS, or iCal mechanisms.
I like being able to assign a time to a to do, not just a date, and a time estimate -- although much of that information is not exported via iCal or RSS, alas. The system supports mutiple timestamped notes associated with a task, which provides almost a mini-blog feel: imagine a shared task, where various individuals can post notes re: the status of the activity, for example.
But best of all, from my viewpoint, is alerts mechanism, which includes email, text messaging to your phone, and (yay!) instant messaging.
The only negative about RTM is that they don't provide a neato-keeno javascript to let me directly post a public to-do list on my blog, so if I want to do that I have to resort to an RSS-to-javascript gasket like Feeddigest (see left margin).
So, now I have tried to switch over. I am creating to-do lists in RTM rather than in iCal, and I have subscribed to those lists. iCal is becoming more and more a display for stuff I am creating elsewhere (like my public travel calendar in Eventful (see the left margin)).
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 10, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Steve interviews Josh via IM (see Micro Persuasion: Yahoo Buys del.icio.us).
Josh says Del.icio.us and MyWeb won't be integrated for the near term, but that obviously has to change.
It might have been better to publish the whole chat log, but its nice to see the iChat client being used with Yahoo's newest employee.
[Aside: I published a bunch of IM interviews a year or so ago, using Gush. They had worked out a contraption that allowed the chat to be scrollable, which was cool. But is was a pain to use. What I would like, I guess, is some way to take the transcript and make it scrollable in place, so it looks like the chat client. Ideas?]
Comments (33)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 09, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Techcrunch (Michael Arrington) reports that Del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo (see TechCrunch � Yalicious? - Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us). No other news seems to be available.
[Update: 2:52pm -- Joshua Schachter confirms, and pointed out this entry at the delicio.us blo:
[from http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html">Y.ah.oo]
y.ah.oo!
We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)
We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.
I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo! ]
[Update: 3:00pm -- Here's Jeremy Zawodny's take on the acquisition.]
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I noticed that the Technorati ping page has been updated, so that it knows who I am, and let's me know the last time it updated its information about my blogs:
Until today, I would have to type in the URL of the blog to send the ping. [Note: I seem to have some ping bug, so I find I need to ping T'rati manually, despite having it set in the blog configuration for Get Real.]
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 08, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The recent announcement by Yahoo regarding their entry into the increasingly busy VoIP marketspace -- and the rapid commoditization of that market because of the battle that is shaping up between Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, AOL, and soon, I expect, Google -- is just one puzzle piece clicking together in what promises to be the realignment of the central communication metaphor of the online universe, or what I hereby dub as Universe 2.0.
The instant messaging model of communication, based on synchronous messaging and continuous presence status, is displacing the store-and-forward, asynchronous email model, at long, long last.
I have argued for the past decade that instant messaging in simply better than email, for a long list of reasons. Add to the growing list of reasons the fusion of voice, and soon, video messaging on your cellphone, with the online messaging architecture.
One outgrowth of this transition toward instant communication will be the realization that email should be used as a last recourse, only when real time communication is not possible or unavailable. For example, I want to ask you a question about a project: in this presence enabled Universe 2.0 (leaving aside the niddling, tiny, little detail of interoperability between the services for later) I determine that you are online and available to talk to me. Obviously, I want my answer as soon as possible, and being a textual sort of guy, I type the question, and a few seconds later, I have my answer.
Alternatively, if you are not available, on many instant messaging solutions I can simply send an offline message, using exactly the same user interface: the instant messaging client. On your return to the office, or upon turning on your cell phone asfter exiting a meeting, you'd recieve the message, and perhaps return to a synchronous form of communication with me to reply, or perhaps determine that I am unavailable, and leave me an offline message, too.
But today's mishmash model, switching back and forth from IM client to email client, with two unintegrated repositories of messages -- on one hand, emails, and on the other, IM logs -- that has got to end.
My prediction: instant messaging will become the domininant metaphor for Universe 2.0 -- which subsumes Web 2.0, by the way, but reaches out past the Web to include every connected communication device, like cell phones, entertainment systems, games consoles, and the connected refrigerators and cars of tomorrow -- and email will become a footprint on the path of this communications evolution.
Brad Stone, who broke the Yahoo announcement in Newsweek, collected some new data about instant messaging adoption:
[from IM's New Calling - - MSNBC.com]
But instant messaging, in case you're not already addicted to it, is the preferred communications medium on the Internet, more popular for many users than e-mail. Teens spend hours pinging their friends after school, business folk use it to avoid unpleasant or inconvenient conversations with colleagues and bosses employ it to summon underlings to their offices for face-to-face meetings. Three hundred million people around the world, including 80 million Americans, send 12 billion instant messages (IMs) a day, according to research firms comScore, Media Metrix and IDC. The IM networks allow you to see if your friends or colleagues are online, active and available for conversation. And short text-only IMs usually draw immediate responses, rather than sitting unread in someone's cluttered e-mail inbox.
By adding the ability to make voice calls from the IM networks to outside lines, and vice versa, the Internet companies are turning their IM networks into the kind of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service that Danish startup Skype popularized over the last two years. Starting this week, Yahoo users will be able to buy credits of $10 or $25, then use Yahoo Messenger on their PC to call anywhere in the United States or, at a slightly higher rate, to more than 30 countries. For $3 a month or $30 a year, Yahoo will also give users a personal phone number for their PCs, which will let them receive calls from regular phones on their computer. They can pick their area code, so U.S. users with relatives in London, for example, could choose a London phone number and allow their relatives to enjoy local rates when they call.
Yahoo's announcement was not entirely unexpected. Yahoo bought Internet telephony company Dialpad Communications in June, foretelling its entry in the VoIP arena. Microsoft bought a similar VoIP firm, Teleo Inc., two months later, and will surely soon add phone service to Microsoft Messenger, used by about 22 million people in the U.S. EBay bought VoIP leader Skype for a whopping $2.5 billion in September and plans to integrate Skype phone calls and instant messaging, which could allow buyers and sellers to more easily get in touch after an auction closes. And last month, domestic instant messaging leader AOL, with 53 million users, began offering a VoIP service called TotalTalk that allows users to make Internet telephone calls using a broadband telephone adapter that they can connect to their home phone.
In this way, telephones are becoming one form of end point of the instant messaging-based communications network that is linking us all together. Old, dumb phones don't broadcast presence information, but all cell phones do -- is the phone on or not, where in the network is the individual, and so on -- and depending on how the cell services wish to make that information available to the instant messaging networks, we are likely to see a restructuring of the world's communication DNA around this revolutionary concept.
And, it's about time that the world's governments -- and especially the US government -- wake up to the need for imposed interoperability of the instant messaging networks. It is clearly in the public interest for us to be able to access the presence status of anyone, on any service (so long as each individual can opt in, and manage access in suitable ways). As these networks are likely to become the dominant force in telephony, and will rapidly eclipse the old telephone systems, it is time for the Internet giants to move past their outmoded rationale for a fragmented collection of incompatible networks. The parochical interests of Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Google, and AOL should not be holding back the emergence of Universe 2.0, but in the absence of governmental interference there seems to be no appeal to reason that could stimulate those competitors to put aside their conflicting interests and structure the standards and infrastructure necessary to insure a unified communication space.
Think how strange it will be if I have to call you on your phone , via my Yahoo Messenger account or Skype, because the phone system is the only piece of the growing real-time network where government regulations have imposed interconnectivity and interoperability of networks.
It's time for a public outcry against the oligarchy whose intransigence in this regard represents a monumental hindrance to what could otherwise be an enormous benefit for us all.
The buddylist is clearly the center of Universe 2.0, and I would like to have one buddylist, not four or five, and if that requires the Majors to make nice, and to work out the complexities in a fair way, then so be it. There was a time in America when Ma Bell owned the network, including the phone on your kitchen wall, and you couldn't replace it with a cheaper version. And there was a time when the phone companies owned your phone number, and if you dropped the service, you lost it. And in the not too distant future, we will be telling teenagers about a time when the Giants owned our buddylists, and we couldn't communicate across the services because Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, and AOL thought it was better to have a fragmented world. And they will laugh at how stupid the old fogies were, back in the day. And they will be right, because it is stupid, and if we continue to put up with it, we are stupid.
Comments (162)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
December 07, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Dave Sifry explains the new "View in Mini" chicklet that just recently appeared in Technorati. Basically, you can keep a search window open in a minimized form factor, and see new entries that fall into the search. It's another example of search as a shared space, but it's not very shared yet. There is no way to communicate with others who might be keeping a "Les Blogs" Mini open, yet.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Robert turns out to be a contrarian (or am I the contrarian?) regarding my beefs with RSS readers:
[from Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger � More from Ireland]
Stowe Boyd puts some RSS backlash out there (he doesn’t like the feed reading experience). I keep hearing this too when I give speeches. But almost always these are people who don’t try to keep up with a large number of sites and just visit randomly. I take a more structured approach to my feed reading and hate reading sites on the Web, for the most part. Although with Digg and Memeorandum I certainly do my share of random poking around too.
One thing, though, is even if you hate the RSS experience, there are benefits for having all that stuff stored up. Desktop search works a lot better than even Google on the Web does. If I remember I read something on a feed a few months ago I can find it instantly by using desktop search, but it often is hard to find on the web-based search engines like Google, MSN, or Yahoo.
It’s interesting that some people actually like seeing a blog’s design. I don’t. It impedes readability. Imagine if the New York Times had a different font, a different color backwash, and a different font size for each author. It’d make reading a newspaper really a poor experience, wouldn’t it? Yet we put up with that on the Web. RSS frees me from that system and makes it a lot easier to read a large amount of information very quickly.
I agree with Robert in part:
- I would like to have a log of things I have read, but I would like that to be a journal of all the places and bits I have visited, stamped by time and tagged, as well. So when I am wandering around -- like right now -- catching up with many peoples' comments on the RSS Readering post, I could be tagging the journal entries. I do that now with my posts with Technorati tags, and some of the places I go with Del.icio.us tags. But Del.icio.us makes me do too much heavy lifting.
- Unlike Robert, I don't find fooling with blog layout that much of a hassle, and appreciate a bit of randomness. The endless pellets of info in RSS readers drive me batty.
- My process of reading stuff is not random, but it is not assembly-line, industrial-strength blog reading like Robert is into. I find that I need to tag, comment, post, and so on, to make sense of the stream. Otherwise, nothing sticks with me.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (8) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
David W wonders if we need a replacement for the subjective/objective truth dimension:
[his post, Joho the Blog: Massively Multiplayer Online Truth, in it's entirety]
In some of my talks, I've been suggesting that the ability of people with different subjective viewpoints to talk with one another (via blogs, email, Skype, etc.) creates something new. It's not objectivity. It's not subjectivity. I've been calling it "multi-subjectivity."
Someone at my Oxford presentation pointed out that "multi" is entirely the wrong modifier because it implies many individuals, rather than focusing on what's occurring between them. But "intersubjectivity" carries baggage I don' t want. So, how about "Massively Multiplayer Online Truth."
Yes, I'm being cute, although I think it gets at something serious: The old, romantic view of truth was lonely. This one is social, and thus is joyful.
[Flame retardant underwear: MMOT is not a replacement for other types of truth. We need all of 'em.]
Ok, I propose "sojectivity" -- the understanding that arises from individuals with different subjective viewpoints exchanging their views -- using the "so" of "social".
Comments (29)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Doc Searls and the Cluetrain bunch have been swept into the Wikipedia neutrality wars:
The Doc Searls Weblog : Wednesday, December 7, 2005
The Cluetrain entry in Wikipedia, my wife just pointed out to me (incredibly, I'd never read it) is one of those the neutrality of which is disputed, complete with a warning on top. She also pointed out cluetrainmanifesto.com, which is making money, presumably, for a squatter.
The Wikipedia backlash must be stopped.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Lee Gomes at the WSJ zooms in on the revolution that has happened in the tech world: the shift of power from conventional media to a small elite of tech bloggers:
[from WSJ.com - Portals]
The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.
The easiest way to follow this world is via a useful blog-tracking service called tech.memeorandum.com. The site runs off software written by Gabe Rivera, a former Intel compiler programmer. It sifts through hundreds of technology-oriented blogs to find the hour's hot topics and who is saying what about them. The results are presented concisely in a single place, updated every few minutes. Another site, blogniscient.com, offers a similar service. (It is apparently important in the tech blog world to pick a name that is as awkwardly unspellable as possible.)
The thing that is interesting in this revolution is the number shift: it is not necessary to reach millions. A blogger can be enomously influential with only a few thousand daily readers, if those readers are themselves influential. As we break away from broadcast media conventions, mass influence is less relevant. What appears in its place is social relevance: what matters is who you are influencing.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
It's a strange convergence: On one hand Jeremy Wright is criticizing Web 2.0 companies for not scaling -- he names Technorati and a bunch of others -- but at the same time B5 hits all sorts of scaling issues themselves:
[from Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog � Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale]
Maybe I’m just spoiled, having worked in high performance, high availability apps before, but it constantly astounds me what some folk consider “scaleable” and “available” applications. I’ve spent about 10 hours this month working with really, really high profile Web 2.0 ish companies nearly yelling at them about their lack of true infrastructure.
...
[from b5media.com - the blogger's blogging network]
Over the last week or so, it’s becoming quickly apparent that our current hardware resources aren’t enough to keep the network up. We’ve been working on another solution, but we’ve been waiting until we’ve paid our bloggers for November before we go and spend gobs of money.
Our hope is that in the next week or so this will be fixed. Sorry about any recent (and upcoming, until we get new hardware in) downtime.
A bit schitzoid, although in principle the two issues can appear totally unconnected.
[pointer from tech.memeorandum.com]
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jenny Attiyeh interviewed David Weinberger, Chris Nolan, and me just after the Symposium on Social Architecture, and she's posted that at Thoughtcast: (see The Web 2.0 and beyond — a conversation).
Her first question was directed to me, where she asked whether the growth of the Web was uncontrolled, like evolution, or was it instead following some intelligent design. I replied that the Web seems to be proceeding like an orgy: its headed somewhere, but no one is in control. David was peeved because of a series of hardware problems (PC, not human) that day, but he doesn't seem it. Chris was funny, despite the fact that we were missing the first half of the symposium cocktail party.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Seth Godin's newest project, Squidoo, that I wrote about a few months ago (Seth Godin on Squidoo) went live today. Heath Row helped me put together a so-called lens on Social Architecture.
The weird thing is I can't find it by searching at the site: neither a search for "stowe boyd" or "social architecture" seems to work, although I pop up periodically on the www.squidoo.com web page occasionally as a "featured lensmaster." Looks like the beta has a glitch or two in it, at least in search capabilities. I searched for 'blog' and found only three lenses, but when I clicked on the 'blog' tag I got dozens of hits.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
December 06, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I received a rather unclueful email today, touting a new online service:
Hi
As a journalist seeking knowledge experts, I am sure you will find this of interest. Today, Sonic Foundry launched the industry's first searchable Website of rich media expert presentations (www.mediasite.com). Complete with audio, video and rich presentation graphics, some of the business leaders, politicians and knowledge experts you'll find here include:
Jack Welch, Jeffrey Immelt, Michael Dell, Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Kerry and Scott McNealy, to name a few.
I am *not* really a journalists, and I am not seeking 'knowledge experts' -- at least I don't think I am. And the 'rich media expert presentations' look to be powerpoints. Millions and millions of powerpoints. Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!
Powerpoint, like email, is a place where knowledge goes to die.
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was having coffee with Ian Kennedy and Havi Hoffman of Yahoo this morning in Palo Alto, just catching up, and Ian asked me for a short definition of "social media". I temporized, saying I would root around in the archives and see what I had in the way of elevator-speak on the subject.
Here's an attempt:
Social Media are those forms of publishing that are based on a dynamic interaction, a conversation, between the author and active readers, in contrast with traditional broadcast media where the 'audience' is a passive 'consumer' of 'content'. The annotations or social gestures left behind by active readers, such as comments, tags, bookmarks, and trackbacks, create an elaborate topology resting on the foundational blog posts, and this enhanced meta-environment, the blogosphere, is the context for and the realization of a global collaboration to make sense of the world and our place in it.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Bill Brown levels a really good complaint about the lack of standards around what I call tag punctuation: the delimiters that are used to separate a list of tags:
[from Tag formats: Can't we all just get along? - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)]
What if I want to tag something “white house” instead of with the separate tags “white” and “house” (which changes the meaning) or “whitehouse”/”white+house” (unintuitive)? Enter comma delimited tagging.
He goes on to list a variety of services -- Flickr, Amazon, 43Things -- and there is little consistency.
At Technorati, I use "+" to tie words together, like "compound+phrase", because I am creating the tags in HTML URLs, and blanks don't work well there, but T'rati changes the plus to a blank. Some services won't allow plus signs in tags, which is a pain. Some people use "wikiword" style, with all the words smooshed together.
It would be good if a standard emerged for punctuation, so I propose the following:
- All tag solutions should allow blanks and other special characters in tags except for comma. [Then I could forego the use of "+".]
- commas should be used to delimit tags in a list.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I mentioned in passing the other day that I have reclaimed the AIM handle of "stoweboyd" that was stolen from me a decade or so ago when I dropped my AOL account. I still have "stoweboyd - at - mac.com" and the "boydstowe" handle I used for years, but for symmetry I am going to use "stoweboyd" on AIM since it matches my handles at MSN (which I never use anymore, really) and Yahoo (which I seem to only use to talk to folks at Yahoo).
Please update your buddylists, because I am switching over!
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 05, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have had my own tiffs with Dave Winer -- he is an easy guy to dislike and/or piss off -- so I tingle with schadenfreud to watch the mess roiling about the can of worms that his relationship with Adam Curry has turned into. Recently, Curry has been accused of editing the Wikipedia entry on podcasting to inflate his role (hey wait... it's Wikipedia... can't anyone edit anything?) in the development of podcasting, and now, apparently, Curry has caught Winer deleting a post that claims Curry should turn over 50% of Podshow to him.
[from CURRY.COM: Adam Curry's Weblog
In January of 2005 I met in a Miami hotel with Dave, Ron Bloom and 5 other people in the course of the week about starting a podcasting business. For days we had heated discussions about the future of Podcasting and it was clear that the differences of opinion were vast.
It was also clear that no one from the group (which included 2 investors) wanted to work with Dave but me. It was a very uncomfortable time for me, and at the end of the week I told Dave I wasn't interested in setting up a business anymore if we couldn't get the business people on board. He freaked out (in a restaurant) and demanded that if I got a television show out of the press at the time, that I would have to pay him his 'share' and drove away without saying goodbye. That event made me realize I had made a wise decision. Some people you just don't want to be in business with.
Podshow, which was started months after the Miami meeting, is not the company Dave and I discussed and it wouldn't be where it is today if we had followed Dave's vision. In fact, he shunned the entire idea and even the name outright. We made a clean break in Miami and Dave apparently can't accept that.
Part of the 'work' that Dave and I did under our so called 50/50 agreement was on audio.weblogs.com, which I promoted relentlessly. Where's my piece of the $2.3 million that Dave received for it? He didn't even have the courtesy to toss a bone to the server admin he promised to 'make whole' upon a sale for setting up the infrastructure gratis. And there are more Winer stories like this flowing into my email box.
Doc Searls, where are you? Can you calm these guys down before the pioneers of podcasting turn themselves into a laughing stock?
[Update: A little birdy pointed out that I misspelled Winer's name as Weiner throughout. Thanks!]
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Just noticed that Gmail now checks attachments for viruses:
[from About Gmail]
What's new on Gmail?
Just Launched!
Virus scanning is here!
Get an automatic check-up every time you open or send a message with an attachment. We even try our best to remove viruses so we can protect you against all the ones we find. You're on your own with the common cold (try chicken soup).
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Yikes! I was searching for something I wrote a long time ago via Google, and discovered that my Google number is up to 268,000! (see "stowe boyd" - Google Search).
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Taking a week of vacation -- real vacation: no blogging at all -- means I am late to the party on all sorts of things, like Om Malik's slap in the face to Skype's predatory (or cannibalistic?) technology strategy, such as the recent Skype Video release that basically ends the business of various small firms in the Skype ecosystem (or is it just a foodchain?):
[Om Malik on Broadband : � Skype 2.0 eats its young]
The standard features make it harder for many developers to make a fiscal argument to stay in the Skype ecosystem. As they flee, the system breaks down, and new ideas stop flowing. (Of course that would also mean, some great stealable concepts would never materialize.) These same guys, start supporting Gizmo Project, which uses open source, then the momentum can quickly shift away from Skype.
At the very least they could have acquired one of the contenders, which at the least turns it into a lottery instead of infanticide.
I was very turned on about Skype early on, but I have drifted back to text IM. I can keep a bunch of text IMs going in parallel with other activities, but voice demands foreground attention. Also, the flakiness of the service is an issue when you really want to talk.
Still, I believe there is a killer VoIP app to come, and yes, it will hinge on getting video right, by which I mean video on the phone, not just on the PC. I don't think Skype can make that happen. So I am waiting and watching the other players, and I will revisit the Gizmo Project, too.
Comments (14)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 03, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A group of researchers working at Microsoft Research have developed an email tool to help with email triage -- which email messages should you read first, and which can you safely ignore -- based on social network analysis:
[from Too Many Emails? SNARF Them Up!]
SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed by Microsoft Research and available for download, is designed to help computer users cope with precisely such scenarios. SNARF, a complement to e-mail programs such as Outlook, filters and sorts e-mail based on the type of message and the user's history with an e-mail correspondent. The result: a collection of alternative views of your e-mail that can help you make sense of the deluge.
Makes sense. The importance of a relationship is strongly linked with the frequency of communication, and other social clues buried in the email system. Those who respond more quickly to your emails are likely to think more highly of you, and vice versa. SNARF exploits these tidbiits and other evidence of relationship strength to order email in something other than reverse chronological.
[read entire piece at Centrality]
I like the Nerdvana-ish buddylist-style presentation of email. I hope Google gets around to doing something smart like that in Gtalk (are they ever going to get serious about Gtalk?) because I really like Gmail's tagged email metaphor, but I would like to order my world around people, not the chronology.
And, of course, its in the Hall of Shame for being Windows only (but strangely enough, it works for Lotus Notes as well as Outlook...)
Comments (14)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
December 01, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I am constantly fiddling around with RSS readers and various strategies for "RSS readering" -- William James remarked that you coin a new word at your own peril, so verbing "RSS reader" may be dangerous for me, but I do so with a plan.
I want to be an RSS reader: by which I mean to say that I would certainly rather (in theory) receive alerts about posts and -- perhaps even the posts themselves -- within some some window of time of their being posted. However, I haven't generally liked the various RSS readers I have tried. And I have tried gazillions.
I tried NewsGator integrated with Outlook when I was still (hiss) living on a Windows laptop. Yes, in principle I keep my email client open all day, and, yes, in some way getting email is similar to RSS-transmitted posts. But the email metaphor, of folders and messages doesn't quite jibe with my experience of browser mediated blog reading. So, ultimately, I dropped it.
The same is true of standalone RSS reader tools, like NetNewsWire and Fire. I tried them for a time, and then dropped out. These annoy me for similar reasons: I don't like the Pez dispenser feel, where all posts are like another, and you assume the role of a pigeon in a Skinner box, hitting the button to make the pellets roll out.
I have been lusting for something, a new solution, that actually parallels my most rewarding reading experiences. The way this generally works is like so:
- I stumble across some link, or reference -- perhaps in an email, or in the midst of reading a post in a browser -- and I decide that I would like to invest some attention to this concept, or meme. Note: I am not just deciding to click a link and go to a specific page -- which is all typical browsers do. I am deciding to investigate the theme, thread, meme, or whatever, and assimilate and collate information about it.
I then use a variety of techniques to uncover what I am interested in:
- I might click on tags embedded in the post, that take me to Technorati, or I might simply decide to search at Technorati or Del.icio.us for references to the piece or for tags to the topic or the names of individuals writing about it.
- I might follow backlinks, from the post back to earlier sources: other posts, or articles.
- I might ask specific contacts of mine what they know about the object of my interest.
- I might write a post, summarizing what I have uncovered, and offering some thoughts on the subject
But what I seldom do is just sit there reading a stream of posts, based on their chronology, or other intrinsic factors. No, I am on a hunt, skipping from place to place, and these tools constrain me more than they free me.
What I would rather have is what I imagined Flock might be (and well might be, in later incarnations): a browser-based solution, perhaps a suite of plugins, that augment the browser-based "readering" experience. One part of that might be a buddylist-ish sort of minimal RSS tool that would simply remind me that people I like have posted something somewhere. I have a strong bias that this should be implemented along the lines of what the geniuses at 2entwine implemented in Gush, about which I have written a lot in the past, including various posts this year about the Nerdvana client. I have stopped using Gush because I find the Mac version painfully slow, but I loved having a multi-headed instant messaging client that included an RSS reader. I had tried to persude them to strip down the RSS reader to be just an alerting tool, and to conflate the IM buddylist and the RSS alerts into a single list, rather than two separate worlds, but, alas, the Brothers Carr never did get around to those tweaks.
So, when I recently was alerted to RSS reader doings at Yahoo, my mind filled in all the gaps, and I dreamed that dream again. However, while the new Yahoo Mail Beta does in fact include a now conventional RSS reader integrated with it -- and it appears to work as it should, given the email metaphor -- it won't actually fit in with the model of readering I am chasing after. However, Yahoo is rolling out feed alerts, as part of Yahoo Alerts (although I didn't see it running, yet), which may implement part of what I'd like, since these alerts can be sent through IM. But Yahoo and the other major IM players don't want to provide IM capabilities as Firefox plugins: they want us to use their proprietary clients.
The rest of the browser modules might include these:
- A tag browser: given a tag, or a boolean expression involving tags, present an ordered list of sources (both authors and blogs). This could be a Technorati plug-in, perhaps.
- A backward link and forward link sniffer: give the current webpage, collate other pages pointing to that page, and a list of the pages referenced. This I envision as something like the radar widget found in video games, in a way. But instead of being displayed in a circle, two ordered lists would be fine.
- A Del.icio.us module: given the current page, who of my friends has bookmarked the page, and what have they said? And I would like to get away from the javascript contraption that I use for Del.icio.us now, where bookmarking a page moves me to Del.icio.us, and creates a problem with use of the back command.
- A journaling module: I would like to drop an anchor in my clickstream when I decide to start some exploration and to drop a second one when I stop, and be able to retrace my steps at some later point, or to pick up the thread again, and add more stuff to it later on. I have written a bunch about "search as a shared space" vis-a-vis various services like Jeteye, but I would really rather have something embedded in the browser experience that I could also publish in some way, to allow it to be shared with others.
- A IM presence module: I'd like to be able to share the location I am currently browsing as my iChat/AIM presence, and I would like to have my circle of friends do the same. Of course, people would like to turn this off when they are reading Fleshbot (not me, but others might), but in general it would be a simple source of new sources of clueful information.
There's more modules that could be conceived, but I think I have waved my hands enough to get across what is profoundly off about RSS readers: they don't work the way I read. I need support for active reading, or "readering" as I dubbed it, which is a very social activity, not a solitary one. I am no pigeon in no cage.
It could be argued that my needs or wants are wildly atypical -- I am a blogger, I have more time on my hands than others, blah blah blah. I maintain that because I am a blogger, and heavily invested in it, I am willing to do manually what others don't have time or patience to do, even though in the final analysis it leads to a much richer experience of the web.
Now all I need is for inventive souls out there to start building the bits and pieces of my dream world. It shouldn't be hard for someone to build an RSS alert plugin for Firefox, should it? Maybe someone already has done that. But I suspect that the other pieces of the puzzle have yet to be built. I can dream, can't I?
[tags: RSS, RSS readers, readering, rss readering, Gush, Yahoo Mail Beta, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Firefox Mail Beta, Nerdvana, Newsgator, NetNewsWire, Fire, Flock]
Comments (78)
+ TrackBacks (5) | Category: Technology
November 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The folks at Think Secret have leaked the blueprints of Apple's plans for the home entertainment market: A revamped Mac Mini with DVR capablities, bigger hard drive, and iPod dock, codenamed Kaleidoscope.
[from Think Secret - Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room]
Specifics surrounding Front Row 2.0 and Apple's DVR application are limited at this point, although sources with knowledge of the project have dubbed the latter a "TiVo-killer." The moniker might not be without some bias, however, as sources report that talks of an Apple-TiVo deal recently fizzled, prompting TiVo to independently announce this month that it will soon offer customers the ability to copy stored content to a video iPod.While Apple surprised watchers when the company delivered Front Row alongside updated iMac G5s recently, Apple's media center intentions have become startlingly clear in the past year since Apple first delivered the Mac mini and customers first started connecting the system to home theaters and installing it in automobiles. Sources have hinted that additional media announcements will further propel Apple's strategy, and with the hardware, software, and iPod sales behind it, Apple now seems poised to firmly plant its footprint in living rooms.
The only thing missing is an Apple game system...
Comments (18)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Even though he says he doesn't want to define web 2.0, Joshua Porter does a pretty good job here, and avoids the complexities (ineffabilities?) of Tim O'Reilly's now famous diagram.
These four aspects I broke down as follows:
I agree, mostly. Web 2.0 is the convergence of a number of trends, and the emergence of something more than the sum of the parts.
Comments (16)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 18, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
John Battelle makes a strong case that the Web 2.0 resurgence is not a bubble, but represents a structural change in economics, technology, and society, and that in the final analysis, Web 1.0 led to a tech boom and bust because critical factors weren't in alignment then which are now:
[from Building a Better Boom - New York Times by John Battelle]
But regardless of all this deja vu, we are not in a bubble. Instead we are witnessing the Web's second coming, and it's even got a name, "Web 2.0" - although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies - with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others.
And ubiquitous broadband, wifi in every cafe, and incredibly cheap hardware and open source software, which has made the cost of entry for innovators almost zero.
He addresses the notion that the web is an application platform -- although he doesn't use the Web OS term -- and the missionary zeal that seems to pervade the Web+2.0+osphere (yes, you saw that here first). People involved in this movement -- and it is a movement, having a lot in common with others, like open source, emergent democracy, and those who are trying to keep governments away from Internet regulation -- are, as John puts it, "decidedly missionary - from the communitarian ethos of Craigslist to Google's informal motto, "don't be evil.""
His final point isn't as compelling to me as those that precede it, but may help to convince finance types: it's not a bubble because there is little public financing through IPOs. That may come back to haunt him -- and us all -- if that bubbilicious model begins to be used.
But the natural economics of Web 2.0 development argue against that. I was just on a tour, talking with a handful of Web 2.0 tech start-up founders, and the tendency is to stay small, almost humorously small. At Mary Hodder's Bloqx, for example, three developers were crammed into a room no larger than a large closet. Jason Fried of 37 Signals advocates keeping teams small, not just from a desire to reduce the burn, but to increase the likelihood of less features creeping into products. This week, I saw the same reflected in the jampacked three-room office of Podcast.com, where Scott Beatty, the CEO, described the company's plans to the 'rolling beta' model of developing more and more rich services, which rely on small, agile development coupled with an obsession with end-user experience.
It's an austere and highly philosophical era -- which John only tangentially touches on -- but one that is likely to lead to very different outcomes that Web 1.0. I believe that it's also a generational thing. These are either young veterans of the Web 1.0 mess, or those that witnessed the fall out of "irrational exuberance" from afar. And they are at least going to make new mistakes, if mistakes are to be made.
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
November 17, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was invited to fool with the closed beta of a new service from Aperto (Felix Petersen, of Plazes and other projects) and Readspeaker called read.io. The idea is to use trained speakers -- not synthesized speech -- to automatically generate podcasts from your blog posts.
The sample posts I listen to demonstrate some of the issues with this approach:
- There are problems with specialized stuff, like "del.icio.us" -- which we pronounce without the dots, but which becomes something like "del-i-cio-us" in read.io.
- read.io doesn't handle punctuation very well. I would expect a longer pause after periods, and some indication of paragraph breaks. And it should be possible to handle parenthetical phrases with pauses, too.
- The tools doesn't make a distinction between blog junk and content. It's kind of strange to hear the voice reeling off the technorati tags... but i don't know exactly what I would like as different behavior.
All in all, a very interesting experiment, and -- given a few tweaks -- I would be likely to include it as a permanent widget in the margin of Get Real.
Comments (30)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 10, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Doc jumps in with both feet on the new zeal with which Microsoft's Gates and Ozzie are trying to do a landgrab on the Web OS/Apps/2.0 revolution:
[from Microsoft in Reality — a look at the latest memos from Gates and Ozzie | Linux Journal]
Now that everything is being built by everybody with fewer and fewer dependencies on any one vendor as a sole source of technology, it will be harder and harder to build silos for people and companies that are losing their willingness to live in them.
Which is why I see this whole thing as an adjustment of Microsoft to reality, rather than a call by Microsoft for the reverse.
Doc, as usual, cuts like a scalpel. And, no surprise, harmonizes with my recent post, Scoble on Google, on the same topic. [In fact it was a recent Scoble post (see Paying Attention To The Post-memo Blogs) that drew my attention to Doc's piece.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
AOL has released the results of its annual instant messaging survey, and among other results, IM is up 19% in the past year:
[from AOL's Third Annual Instant Messenger Trends Survey
IM has taken over as the communications vehicle of choice with 25 percent of users saying they would also like to consume entertainment content within their IM service and 20 percent saying they would like to use IM to make voice calls to landlines and cell phones alike.
More top level findings:
[from email press release]
 Email is Old School: Thirty-eight percent say they send as many or more IMs than emails, and the younger users are, the more likely they are to favor IM. Two-thirds (66 percent) of teens and young adults (ages 13-21) say they send more IMs than emails, up from 49 percent last year.
Meet the Parents: More than half (53 percent) of teens (ages 13-17) surveyed say their parents now issue guidelines and rules about instant messaging. Teen boys (55 percent) are more likely to have parental IM rules than are teen girls (50 percent), and fully 65 percent of teens who have rules say they follow them.
Hit the Road: One in three (33 percent) IM users send mobile IMs or text messages from their cell phones at least once a week. This is a dramatic increase over 2004, when just 19 percent said they do so, and 2003 when the figure was 10 percent.
IM Too Busy: At-work IM users now send IMs to communicate with colleagues (58 percent), to get answers and make business decisions (49 percent) and even to interact with clients or customers (28 percent). Twelve percent have used IM at work to avoid a difficult in-person conversation.
I Want IM TV!: One in four (26 percent) IM users say that live streaming television is the one feature they wish was available on their IM service. Music on demand came in second (25 percent) and video on demand was third (21 percent).
The Sound of Your Voice: Meanwhile, 20 percent say they currently enjoy, or would like to try, making live voice calls to other computers, landlines and cell phones directly from their IM service. Another 12 percent say they would be interested in an IM-based VoIP service that could replace their primary household phone line.
Another Day, Another "Away Message": Half (47 percent) of those ages 13-21 change their away messages every day, to let others know where they are (71 percent), to list a cell phone number or alternate way to be reached (47 percent) or to post a favorite lyric or quote (47 percent). Seven percent have even posted a call to action, like "Please donate to the Red Cross to help hurricane victims."
"Instant messaging is a part of everyday life, with more and more people using their IM service as a starting point for all communications, from sending mobile messages to friends on cell phones to placing VoIP-based phone calls," said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president and general manager, AIM and ICQ, America Online, Inc. "Usage is spiking, and not just among teens. Parents, grandparents and professionals are all using instant messaging to stay in touch and enhance their day-to-day communications."
Nationwide and around the world, instant messaging use is growing, with nearly 12 billion instant messages being sent every day worldwide, according to IDC. ComScore Media Metrix reports that there are more than 300 million people across the globe and more than 80 million Americans who regularly use instant messaging as a quick and convenient communications tool.
Maybe I will start to see more attention to the idea that the buddy list is the center of the online universe, now that these results clearly show IM is mainstream and pushing out email. This takes me back to the flap I caused at Supernova last year when I asserted that "email blows" and said IM was going to displace it, along with technologies like blogs and RSS. Ha!
My Nerdvana client idea -- which is something like what Google is doing with their desktop client (for Windows only -- hiss...) but not quite -- is still an awesome idea, if there are any Web 2.0 hungry developers out there who are just looking for a cool product to build.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Go Flock Yourself is an unabashed Web 2.0 antihype engine. It's not at all tongue in cheek, which makes it almost a self-parody:
[from Go Flock Yourself
Oh no! Some people are seeing through the Web 2.0 hype! Obviously they just don’t “get it”!
Those who say we’re just being reflexively hostile simply don’t realise that we’re in on the ground floor of this bullshit. We see this every day. The majority of the latest leet “Web 2.0″ sites are nothing more than gimmicks angling for bubble capital.
It sounds like the author is an insider -- or at least he appears to be -- laboring within the bowels of a Web 2.0 company, but deeeply unhappy about it.
GFY has become the #10 blog on Wordpress. No surprise, with a tagline like this: "This is newer media. News clouds. Tag me. Splog is an aggregate noun."
[pointer from Bingo]
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 09, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Beth Kanter blogged the recent Berkman Center interview of Joshua Schachter by David Weinberger. One snippet before the live broadcast:
[from Beth's Blog: Joshua Schachter: Future of Tagging
Weinberger: “What irks you?”
Schachter: “I’m labeled as the Web 2.0 poster child and I don’t know what it means. Oh, maybe I do, a logo with a gradient or diagonal lines in the header and CSS forms.
More antihype. And Schachter dismissed David's contention that he is "the poster child for Web 2.0 and folksonomy," syaing that he doesn't use the term folksonomy, and believes that Del.icio.us is more about rembering that sharing.
Hmmm. I really need to interview him myself.
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
NIcolas and a bunch of other folks in Munich have been stirred up by a recent Bruce Sterling presentation on Shaping Things to Come:
[from [Future] My notes on Bruce Sterling’s talk in munich]
Shaping Things to Come: there are six trends, convergent and integral part of a general concept, six sides of a black box:
1. interactive ships, objects can be labelled [?] with unique identity
2. local and precise positioning systems
3. powerful search engines
4. 3d virtual models of objects
5. rapid prototyping of objects
6. cradle to cradle recycling
One outgrowth of this is the interesting prospect of everyday household objects that blog:
[from pasta and vinegar -- Objects that blog!]
Tonight I had an interesting debate with Julian about the notion of ‘objects that blog’ (he calls them blogject), that is to say artifacts that would upload their story up to web. They would report the history of interactions the object had with people. It’s something very intriguing and close to Bruce Sterling’s idea of spime. Julian wrote an insightful post about it. This is part of a project he’s carrying out for his seminar on Location-Based Mobile Media.
He goes on to mention a lamp that does this.
I would personally like a whole host of gizmos to blog. Think of all the value I have gotten from sharing the 'blogging' of iTunes at Last.fm? While it might be less interesting to me to have the contents of my refrigerator blogged, daily, it might be interesting is I were a real foodist, and interacted with a circle of other foodists. Likewise, a blog track of what movies I have watched on my DVD player, or blog history of (public) IM interactions.
Autobiographing objects, apps, and appliances are coming.
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Hmmm. More and more of the mainstream Web 1.0 voices (yes they are, and if they don't like it, tough) are lining up against the Web 2.0 moniker. Joel Spolsky is just one of the newest ones:
[from Joel on Software
The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.
[...]
Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it!"
I'll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term "Web 2.0" on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You're welcome.
Very interesting.
So, this reminds me of a great session (I only attended two, and they were both great) at Ad:tech this week. My old friend Charlie Buchwlater of Nielsen was chairing, and he had three fabulous panelists: Jorian Clarke, CEO, SpectraCom; Kathleen Gasperini, SVP and Co-Founder, Label Networks; and Mary Meehan, EVP and Co-Founder, Iconoculture. The session was The Internet According to Kids and the 21st Century Woman. The session was intended to focus on the thinking of interesting groups: the young (my thrust, here) and various sorts of women, segmented by age and identity.
One observation that struck me, and which is relevant to this Web 2.0 antihype, is that young people are not stuck in a long historical perspective. They are inventing what they do, what their interests are, and what they think is important. They do not listen when older people explain away their style choices as stupid or unbecoming. They listen to themselves, and to others who authentically seem interested in the process involved.
I predict that people like Joel, who intentionally distance themselves from a bottom-up movement like Web 2.0 because it is fuzzy and incomplete, are in fact labeling themselves as out of touch with the new segment for whom such terms make sense, if only as a means of self-identity. The fact that they don't make sense to other, older people and outsiders is part of the appeal. It worries me that Joel sounds like a troll here, like PC Magazine's Dvorak, howling at whatever newfangled stuff is coming down the pike. The message from curmudgeons like that is that everything important has already been invented, catalogued, and understood.
Other people that I admire, like David Weinberger, have trouble with the Web 2.0 moniker too. David seems to say that many of the characteristics attributed to Web 2.0 are in fact things that have been operational in the Web all along, and therefore the term may be superfluous.
I maintain that -- from the viewpoint of those involved in Web 2.0, the visionaries pushing it at the nuts-and-bolts level -- the differences are stark. On the other hand, Web 2.0 builds on Web 1.0, it doesn't replace Web 1.0. Just like the mammalian brain didn't leap into existence all by itself: it incorporates the reptile brain, and extends it. And the earliest versions of the mammalian brain looks amazingly like reptile brains: but we were on the road to something truly different.
People who don't get the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 aren't idiots, but they certainly aren't out there creating and promoting Web 2.0 apps and concepts: they are commenting, looking in from afar, and reading and repeating the comments of other uninvolved, or actively hostile, watchers. I would rather talk to the people doing it, rather than those saying its just the same old junk recycled, and focusing on the term instead of the spirit of what is happening out there. And I am sure that others close to the Web 2.0 vanguard will do the same.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Socialtext continues to snap up brilliant people:
[tags: Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Jonas Luster Joins Socialtext]
Jonas has played an active role in OSS projects including Apache, mod_ruby and Drupal. He is has worked with Lycos, CollabNet, Technorati and Blizzard Entertainment. He got his doctorate in Social Psychology and Criminology from the University of Amsterdam, and is an occasional guest lecturer at UofA.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jeneanne Sussum does a great rewrite of an Ad Age poll about all those bad, bad employees frittering away company time blogging when they should be back at the work bench doing piecework (she includes the original, too):
[from ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum: Stone Age
Help Us Feel Useful in the Age of the Net - VOTE IN THE AD AGE WEEKLY ONLINE POLL BACKGROUND: A report last week by one of our guys who's hanging onto his MSM title for dear life noted that about 35 million workers -- or one in four people in the U.S. labor force -- spend an average of 3.5 hours, or 9%, of each work day educating themselves without dipping into your "professional development" budget while at the same time escaping the tedious mindlessness of watercooler chitchat. This blogification of workplace time is no minor concern -- when the slaves find out they can make money without living in the quarters out back, your business stands to lose 551,000 years of indentured servitude, which means fewer workers to fire just before retirement. Another important point was that the time spent reading blogs on the job was in addition to the time already spent surfing the Web looking for jobs at clued companies, not yours. The debate appears to be one of reasonable limits. At what point, or at what length of time, does the use of company assets for building tighter connections with your markets become a problem? And is the problem likely to become an even greater one as more and more of our print subscribers use the publication for toilet paper, potentially in your own office bathrooms? Do employers need to find new ways to police their computer systems? Because we're having to find new ways to seem interesting. THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: Should employers allow their staff to read blogs in the workplace?
And man, the tone of the original is offensive: "This blogification of workplace time is no minor concern -- the total losses across the national work force are estimated to be the equivalent of 551,000 years of paid time that is being spent on blogs via the employer's own computer systems." Gasp!
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Tim O'Reilly, who asserts that he is not fond of definitions (hmmm... what a strange world that would be, without at least approximate definitions) offered this as a handwave at Web 2.0:
[from O'Reilly Radar > Web 2.0: Compact Definition?]
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
In my recent travels interviewing a batch of incredibly focused Web 2.0 folks, I have uncovered a few central tendencies in their approach to developing Web 2.0 apps:
- Users First -- The user experience is a proxy for the user, and all of the folks I touched base with so far agree that user experience is the pivot point of everything. That means that the norms of human expectations, social interaction, and interface goals become the central motif of these apps. For example, sharing with others becomes a basic principle, not something tacked on later.
- Build from personal need -- In every case, these visionaries have decided to build something because they wanted to exist for their own personal use.
- Build small, fast, and iteratively -- The nature of Web 2.0 app frameworks, and why they have evolved, is to support a extremely agile development mantra. But across the board, I have seen very small teams building the core functionality of some potentially larger product, and rolling it out to real users to see how it works. And then respond to feedback, and roll out the next version. This is not just a technique for the initial development stage of these products: its here forever.
- Build small, focused apps, that could serve as building blocks in larger assemblages -- All these folks are resisting the tempation to bloat apps with more and more features, opting instead to build small, highly focused apps that could be integrated (though APIs) into larger assemblages (mash-ups).
More to follow, but I thought I would offer some bottom-up thoughts on the 'spirit of Web 2.0' discussion raging these days.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Scoble has peered deeply in to the archaic model of Microsoft, and seen the light: Google.
[from Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger � The new Robert Scoble Services agenda]
Larry Page told me last week that teams inside Google often try to create projects to copy Microsoft. And he kills them. Why? Cause he knows that he will never get a big audience by copying something we do.
He says that Microsoft is basically running the '80s model of software: target the business buyer, the guy making the decision inside a company about purchasing software. Google is looking at the influentials, the artists, the young and hip: those whoe are inventing the future of software use, and by extension, the future of monetizing software.
One of the things I have turned up in my new series -- The New Visionaries: Rebooting the Web -- is this obsession with getting software into the hands of those most interested in fiddling with it, not business managers trying to make company buys. In particular, Satish Dharmaraj of Zimbra talked about departing from the old software model: making them buy a server license for tens or hundreds of thousands, and them charging 15% per annum for support. He argues that such a model is dead, for all intents and purposes.
Google knows that, and Microsoft doesn't.
Scoble's observations support my contention that Microsoft will be regarded, in the not-too-distant future, as one of the last of the industrial era companies, who struggled mightily to quash the Internet revolution, and lost. The fact that they are now trying to get hip to Web apps is another attempt by them to keep their constituency bottled up. But it won't work, and eventually (a few years down the road?) they will fall, just like IBM, DEC, and Sun fell, trying to hold onto an eclipsed model of business. There is a long tail for Microsoft to ride, but its really unlikely that they can get out in front of this revolution, and they certainly can't stop it.
[pointer from Evelyn Rodriguez to Hugh McLeod to Scoble]
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 06, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Early in 2005, David Weinberger, danah boyd and I were involved in an interesting project, called The Operating Manual For Social Tools -- something that might be thought of as the predecessor for the upcoming Symposium on Social Architecture. I recently came upon an interesting project called Groop.us (that I will write about later on) and they had a great quote of David's highlighted, having to do with the social vlaue of tags, a quote that I did not remember. It was actually in a post at the Operating Manual blog:
[from Operating Manual for Social Tools: By their tags shall ye know them]
Tags matter for social reasons. They allow the grassroots to create the way in which stuff is classified, instead of having to file things in pre-built categories. But the words we use to tag things depend on our intentions and our social context. Find people who tag items the same way as you do and you've now found a social group based not around shared interests but around shared wayas of thinking and shared ways of speaking: Communities of tags.
David is kicking off the Symposium, on the 15th, setting context and framing some of the big questions that we are trying to deal with there. It's going to be a great day.
Comments (32)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Over at Microsoft Watch, Mary Jo suggests that Microsoft should stick to it's knitting, and resist the temptation to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon:
[from Microsoft Needs to Say No to Web 2.0
Only a few Softies seem to be all caught up in the Web 2.0 hype. The majority of them seem oblivious to the weak business ideas, buzzwords and bloviation that make me think "Bubble 2.0" every time someone mentions "Web 2.0."
Some Microsoft watchers may characterize Microsoft's failure to talk the Web 2.0/Internet economy lingo as proof that the Redmond software vendor has fallen behind the times.
Undeniably, Microsoft has had some infamous near misses when it comes to capitalizing on new industry trends. The company almost missed the Web/browser revolution. It came dangerously close to letting Google and Yahoo completely dominate search.
[...]
But just as there were some folks in the tech industry who wisely decided against trading their real, tangible jobs for spots at DrKoop.com, Kozmo.com and Pets.com, there are thousands of Microsoft employees who seem interested in building less-glamorous but more useful products like Visual Studio, Office and BizTalk Server.
[...]
If Microsoft officials tout any of its pending MSN services as examples of Web 2.0 deliverables, I'll take it as a sign that management has lost its way. There's no doubt that Microsoft needs to find a way to continue to grow in a world where its top two brands, Windows and Office, already have cornered in excess of 90 percent market share in their respective categories. And extending these applications with services is a sensible way to do this.
But Microsoft doesn't need to snap up a bunch of Web 2.0 startups, out-scour AJAX or invent the 38th signal to do this. The Redmond software maker just needs to stick to its knitting by developing new ventures that mesh with its established businesses. Microsoft needs to just keep saying no to Web 2.0, at least until Web 2.0 means something more than just "we want venture funding."
I think Mary Jo is wrong -- this is yet another opportunity for Microsoft to miss the changing of the tide -- but on the other hand, they have years to fall down that particular set of stairs, and even if they do misstep and fall, it doesn't mean they'll break their necks: there is going to be a long tail for Microsoft's existing products, even if the Web 2.0 revolution becomes really real, and not just a buch of cool experiments.
I'm betting on the innovators, and it's clear that Gatea and company are at least hedging their bets by investing in a "live" -- meaning Web-based -- version of Office. The buzz around Web apps that support Office-like functionality -- like Basecamp, Writely, Gmail, Google Base, and a slew of other offerings -- are obviously getting Redmond's attention, especially when growth rates on the Web can be astronomically fast.
Ina Fried [from Gates: We're entering 'live era' of software]
Gates likened the services push to other major strategy shifts at Microsoft, including its December 1995 move toward the Web and a June 2000 commitment to Web services.
The idea of an online adjunct to Office and Windows is not entirely new. The company already has its Office Online Web site that gets about 55 million unique users a month and offers items such like downloadable templates.
And in years past, Microsoft has attempted to build online alternatives to Office. One widely rumored project, developed in the late 1990s under the code name "Netdocs", was never made available.
One reason: Infighting between Office executives and Web advocates, according to sources at the time. David Smith, an analyst at Gartner, says that same tension still exists within Microsoft.
"There are different factions within the company, like before, and it is unclear what the corporate strategy is going to be," Smith said.
My hunch is that this is the outcome of the power struggle within Microsoft that recently led to the reorganization of 8 divisions into 3, and Ozzie's consolidation of pawer as the CTO instead of a CTO there (see Ray Ozzie and The Regrooving Of Microsoft). You'd be crazy not to stall this market, and not to try to provide your own off-ramp from desktop Office to web office solutions. Once they're gone, it will be hard to get them back, and Bill and Ray know that. Whether they can direct the energies of the company toward that goal, without ongoing infighting, remains to be seen.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (24) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The smart, smart folks at 37Signals have been building on the 'Getting Real' theme for some time (no relation to Get Real, by the way, just convergent evolution at work). I interviewed Jason Fried last week for the upcoming New Visionaries: Rebooting The Web series, and we touched on those ideas at some length (along with some interesting news about features they are planning to roll out at Basecamp over the next few months -- you'll have to wait for the show though!).
This recent observation at Signal vs. Noise is just one example of the value of their less is more, just in time philosophy.
[from A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
Don’t sweat stuff until you actually must. Don’t overbuild for scalability. Increase hardware and system software as necessary. If you’re slow for a week or two it’s not the end of the world. Just tell your customers you’re experiencing some growing pains. They’ll appreciate the candor.
Bottom Line: Make decisions just in time, when you have access to the real information you need. In the meanwhile, you’ll be able to lavish attention on the things that require immediate care and feeding.
Comments (18)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
November 03, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Chatted yesterday with Eric Rice about the future of Audioblog and video podcasting. Oh, and his new boat.
This Get Real Show is sponsored by GoToMeeting.com.
Comments (13)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I stumbled across a thread started by Shelley at BurningBird, where she introduces what she calls 'tagback': the creation of a more-or-less unique tag, based on the title of the post (I think). She also prepends a 'bb' to the tag to indicate 'BurningBird'. (For the original post, see Burningbird � Introducing: Tagback).
Needless to say, this is not what I meant by tagback in my recent post on the subject (iTags = Open Tags?). My definition of tagback is much more akin to the meaning of trackback: a blog-program supported ping mechanism, so that one program signals to another a trackback relationship between two posts. In tagback (my version), there is a ping from the taggregation service, like Technorati, to the blog application hosting a tagged blog post.
As I said inthe earlier posts (the earliest on this subject were in the spring, I think), open tagging should include tagback, so that the tagged entries can accumulate a list of those tagspaces where the content is aggregated. How can an author know, at the time of writing, the location of these tagspaces? Sure, you can pick one -- Technorati likes that -- but that's just a de facto tagopoly emerging.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
November 01, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
While on this protracted road trip (headed back tonight, at last), I got the chance to spend some time with one of my favorite polymaths, Mary Hodder. I was in Berkeley, yesterday, interviewing her for a new video series, The New Visionaries, where she was outlining what her new company, Bloqx, is up to (and you'll have to wait for that show to find out since she hasn't announced much of anything publicly yet). That show is likely to be posted in mid to late December.
Mary was also at Tag Camp on Friday, but I missed her session on iTags. (One of the things I would like to fix in the Tag Camp format is dropping the multiple tracks in favor of shorter presentations -- just as many, but only 10 minutes. This would allow everyone to hear everything, and if someone is really howling-at-the-moon crazy, you'd only have ten minutes of it. You could institute some anonymous voting system to allow the best 3-5 presenters to do an encore, near the end, of longer duration.)
She's been noodling with Drummond Reed for the past six months (and more recently with who was introduced to her by Kaliya Hamlin, who has also been involved in this whole effort) on the issues around open tags (see Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World).
This group has advanced a new approach, called iTags, that leverages the proposed XRI standard as a means of gaining what it is I was clamoring for: a way to denote that a post relates to a concept, without necessarily pointing to a particular tagspace, such as the one managed by Technorati. My point re: open tags is that we -- the authors -- can't know where in the future our posts may be referenced based on these tags. But Mary and her co-conspiritors go further:
[from Napsterization]
The idea is that a user could tag an object (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post), where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn't now exist in tags. That tag and object would include the user's identity, the licensing for that object (presumably people would use this more for rich media objects than for just a blog post, as most blogs already have licensing generally for text on the blog) if needed, and the tag. It would remove the requirement for a tag to be coupled with the originating URL (blog post URL) because identity would be inside it. It would allow individual CC licensing which rich media producers want to do sometimes, in order to differentiate the rich media object from the rest of their blog, which may have different licensing.
They are proposing a microformat approach to collating the tag, the author, and the license to use the context and the tag. Hmm. Very endeavorous. My sense is that they may be reaching too far.
My hunch is that it is going to be hard enough to just get the various taggregators, like Technorati, to invert the basic model, as I suggested they ought to. What I mean by inversion is this. Instead of declaring the tag by pointing to the technorati page associated with "Thai" for example, I would like to use some contrivance that points to the place on my post where that tag will be displayed when posted:
<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/2005/07/24/name_of_post.php#tag_thai" rel="tag">thai</a>
This seems purely self-referential, but imagine the rest of the scenario: taggregators like Technorati should switch to a trackback model of use. That is to say that once they spider a site (or read its RSS feed, or whatever) and discover a new tag, they would send a trackback ping to the underlying blog software. That would lead to the association of the trackbacks, for example, that point to the "thai" tag on my post. A reader looking at that post could also see a list of trackbacks from various taggregators that have picked up on the "thai" tag, and they would be free to wander there.
This might look like this:
[tags: thai
technorati, taggregator2, taggregator3 cohiba cigar afficionado, other ]
At some point, listing the various taggregators won't make sense, perhaps, or may need to be displayed in a different fashion. And of course, the blogger would have control as to which trackbacks he/she wants to display. But the reader would be presented with an array of other locales to browse based on the tag terms.
Alternatively, as I have outlined in earlier posts, the blogger could create (via plugins or builtin blog functionality) a local tagspace, where all the entries that mention a tag would be listed, much like existing category archives (which is conceivably one way to implement it). Taggregation could be simply achieved by taking RSS feeds from such local tagspaces, and consolidating. For example, we could create a Corante tagspace by instituting local tagspaces at all Corante blogs, and aggregating those into a Corante-wide tagspace. But current blogging tools don't support this sort of 'tagback' -- just trackback. Trackback can be used, but the trackback reference should be back to a specific tag, not to the post as a whole, although the URL of the post would be likely what would be displayed at Technorati and elsewhere.
But the tag trackback mechanism is critical for open tags, from my viewpoint. And it is the thing still missing from all the efforts I have see. I applaud Mary, Drummond, and Kaliya for their proposal, but I wonder about people's willingness to adopt XRI, and I still want the tagback mechanism in place.
Comments (41)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 31, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Over a year ago, Clay Shirky and I got into a complementary blog thread about the spammish emails that social network application, Multiply, was sending out: (see The Ten Commandments of Social Networking). This interchange led to me laying out the first seven of the Ten Commandments of Social Networking, which spawned The Operating Manual for Social Tools project.
I haven't really heard a peep from Multiply since, but today got an email alerting me to their having received some investment, which is leading them to develop a Japanese version.
I haven't heard much since I dropped out of all the social networking apps... is anything happening out there, or is the bloom off the rose?
Comments (18)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I caught up with Rick Klau, of Feedburner, and he shared his insights on the exploding market for RSS solutions, and with specific discussion around podcasting and Feedburner's direction.
This Get Real show is sponsored by GoToMeeting.
Comments (43)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 30, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Guido van Nispen alerted me to this cool Technorati applet that calculates the value of your blog:
Inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I've created this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.
But based on Get Real's Technorati rank of 1,220 (1,373 links from 500 sites), the value should be more llike $775K, based on the lowest value at Tristan's post! Must be a glitch in the calculation, or he rejiggered the value of a link way down.
So... if this metric is way off -- as Jason Calacanis makes a good case for, here, basically saying that other factors are just as, or more important that links, like traffic, demographics of readers, and so on -- Guido wants to know what should be a general metric of valuing blogs, if any?
I'm not certain that there is such a tool, although any time that a blog or blog media firm is purchased, something is going to be dreamed up. But I doubt that I could actually command thre quarters of a million for Get Real.
Comments (0)
| Category: Technology
October 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I had the opportunity to chat with Lee Wilkins, VP Products & Strategy for Podcast.com, to get his take on podcast directories and what his company is trying to accomplish.
The Get Real show is sponsored by GoToMeeting.com.
Comments (37)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 26, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
AIM is working hard to collar the all-important youth market, and has respun the AOL tools into a Nerdvana style client (see various Nerdvana postings) where everything is based on the buddy list. Although (for shame!) it is not available for Mac OS.
I expect this to be one of the areas of future battle between MSN, Yahoo, Google, and AOL: who will develop the best integration of communication, collaboration, and coordination tools based on the "buddy list is the center of the universe" motif?
They are focussing on communication first (leaving aside blog-style, asynchronous style stuff, which doesn't look like it is integrated yet). What is missing to date: calendaring, media sharing (real-time or slow-time a la Flickr and Last.fm), and project collaboration (a la Basecamp). Inevitably, these will all coallesce. No one has the who story, and whoever releases the critical mass beta will likely destabilize the marketplace.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 25, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Stan James has created a fascinating fusion of social networks and web experience in a project and technology called Outfoxed. James has developed a plug=in for the Firefox browser to allow users to rely on their networks of trusted advisors before taking any actions that could have major consequences.
James' descriptions of his motivations (the whole thing is the outgrowth of his master's thesis at the University of Osnabrück, Germany: Trusted Metadata Distribution Using Social Networks) and how the technology is intended to work are -- honestly -- more compelling than the implementation, today [... read full post at Centrality]
Comments (20)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 24, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Over the past months, I have been in contact with a growing roster of really amazing visionaries, those that are making Web 2.0 a reality. People like Catarina Fake and Stuart Butterfield of Flickr, Dave Sifry of Technorati, Jason Fried of 37Signals, and Felix Petersen of Plazes.com, to mention just a few.
I am launching a new project, one that will open up the interactions I have been having with these people, and allow me to also return to video, a format I haven't used very much since the late '90s. Starting this week, I am starting the production of "New Visionaries: Rebooting The Web" where I will be conducting interviews with people who are advancing what people are calling web 2.0.
I like the image of rebooting the web: not just adding a teensy bit more to it, but messing with its internals so seriously that you have to restart the machine to use the new stuff. Steven Johnson recently used a similar sort of analogy in characterizing this web 2.0 shift:
[from Web 2.0 Arrives, pointer from 106 Miles to Chicago]
The result is the equivalent of a massive software upgrade for the entire Web, what some commentators have taken to calling Web 2.0. Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.
Yes, a dense, rich, and interconnected collection of newly tooled applications, that build on what others offer and give back to the system, allowing others to build on them in turn.
Who are these visionaries? What do they share in common? What is driving them? Where is it heading? Can the big companies -- like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft -- channel whatever these forces are, or will they simply keep on snapping up smaller, more innovative web 2.0 companies as they emerge? What are the business models? Who will be the winners in this newly recast race, and what does winning mean?
[tags: web+2.0, new visionaries, Dave Sifry, Felix Petersen, Plazes.com, Stuart Butterfield, Flickr, Catarina Fake, Jason Fried, 37signalsdel.icio.us, Joshua Schachter, Steven Johnson]
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (4) | Category: Technology
October 21, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jon Udell is surprised that the blogosphere didn't megalink to Clive Thompson's Sunday New York Times piece, Meet the Life Hackers, an attempt to dig into the issues and answers to living in an interupt-driven world. I riffed on it (see Meet The Life Hackers), but I think that Clive Thompson merely turned over a bunch of rocks -- mostly Microsoft projects -- and added a few shallow insights from the conventional wisdom jar. So I disagree with Udell's surprise at the blogosphere not bubbling about it all:
[from Jon Udell: Attention economics]
You'd think that Clive Thompson's article Meet the Life Hackers, in this week's New York Times Magazine, would have produced a storm of commentary. After all, it's a major mainstream outing of Linda Stone's evocative phrase "continuous partial attention," Danny O'Brien's seminal talk on the seven habits of highly effective geeks, and Merlin Mann's 43 Folders. Yet the blogosphere has reacted less vigorously than it would have a year ago.
The CPA meme has been around a long time, and despite the recent reappearance of Linda Stone at Supernova, neither Udell nor Thompson comment on the fact that she advanced the concept of continuous partial attention as a disorder, something to be struggled against, not as a workable response to the world. Likewise, 43 Folders and O'Brien's thoughts are not new revelations, and Thompson's piece seems to poke at the issues but not come to any real conclusions.
And Udell sort of trivializes the fact that younger people are more likely to split attention across various media or activities at the same time:
It's often suggested that this [interruptibility] isn't a problem for generation X, Y, or Z, the new breeds of post-humans who've adapted to continuous partial attention. I don't completely buy that argument, and neither does Clive Thompson.
And why don't they buy it? All the recent evidence about concurrent media exposure (see Concurrent Media Exposure: Another Form Of Continuous Partial Attention) demonstrates a strong age polarity in this regard: the younger you are, the more likely you are to split your attention over mutliple forms of media at once. Udell's handwave argument is so anecdotal as to be immaterial: some researchers who had some students reply in an informal discussion that they wanted to be "saved" from interrupts and split attention.
This is another battle in the war against continuous partial attention, which is a culture war. Various forces -- mainstream media, large organizations, and others threatened by a dimuition of their power -- would like us to focus just on one channel at a time, especially when that is their channel. The recent example of the WSJ's D3 conference requiring attendees to not multitask on their laptops while attending is a great case in point:
[from The War On Continuous Partial Attention]
But this is just another attack on continuous partial attention, which is, at its core, an allegiance to broadcast, mediated, unsocialized communications. In this case, the WSJ -- although you can replace it with any institution, such as a corporation laying down rules for behavior in meetings, for example -- wants full attention on the official speakers, and no side channel discussions. But in a many-to-many world, where individuals want to participate in unmediated discussions, and who believe that their social connectedness is more important and strategic than the task at hand, as a general rule, The WSJ's iron-fisted approach to stamping out back channel IMing will anger the most connected and ruin the conference for us.
I am all for being "productive", but I want to be able to define what it means. And any piecework model -- where my productivity is solely measured by the number of pins I crank out every day -- will be a poor picture of productivity. I am open to being distracted by my social universe, and I am willing to accept that interrupt to help them make progress, at the expense of personal productivity. I IM during meetings, because I want to remain in touch with the larger world.
The backchannel may be of the foremost interest to me, and what may appear to be the foreground activity may actually be on the back burner, for me.
These are all indications that the war for attention is a power struggle, and those that couch it in terms of personal productivity and manners are actually trying to slow or counter a revolution in the making. We are rejecting the centralized control of our personal agenda. I am willing to pay the costs of remaining socially engaged -- through continuous partial attention, remaining interruptible, and exchanging social capital with others along the way. Make no mistake about it, it's a struggle for attention freedom.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 19, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have completely gone over to Gmail, Google's online email service. I don't even try to use Apple's Mail app anymore. Principally, I love the tags ("labels") that Gmail provides as a simple technique of organizing, plus the lightning fast search. But, what about offline access?
There are rumors that Google is at work on something more sophisticated than the existing Google Desktop ( a Windows-only app, which is one of the reasons they are in the hall of shame), which would allow offline caching of all sorts of Google related information... in my case, most specifically I want what Kottke called a "Baby step: make Gmail readable offline" -- but I also want to be able to create emails while offline, too.
Why doesn't some enterprising soul build a Mac widget to do this? Isn't the API available? There must be six hundred Gmail notifier apps and widgets, all doing the same thing: why doesn't someone build a mini-tool to do this:
- Let me sync the email in my inbox to my Mac before going offline
- allow me to read it while offline
- let me create replies while offline
- let me post the offline replies when I go back online
I would even tolerate someone charging me for the tool, or pushing their ads at me while I am synching up.
Yes, I realize that I could (possibly) configure Apple Mail, or Mozilla, or something to sort of do this. But it seems more attractive to have a small, llightweight, dedicated app to do this, rather than fool around with a big fat app.
[Update 20 Nov: I realized this morning I left out a few things off my wishlist. I'd like the tool to retain Gmail goodies like the 'labels' I use to tag everything. For example, if I am reading an email offline, I would like to tag it as 'Blogon' and then when I later on sync the offline cache back to Google, the label would be applied there. I really don't need the app to act like a mail client -- I don't want it to support posting emails through Comcast or other ISPs, for example -- but just to sync with Gmail. If I create a reply to an email, I want the tool to sync that into the outbox in Gmail when I get back to the Web, not to send it itself.]
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 18, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Nick Carr wrote a great piece, The Amorality of Web 2.0, intentionally throwing cold water on the Web 2.0 party. His central point, to my mind -- after suggesting that Web 2.0 is a cultish mindset, that Wikipedia is inadequate, and amateurism leads to shoddy products -- is the contention that Web 2.0 is amoral:
Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.
But, here, Carr is really howling at the moon. All technological advances that are driven by individual user adoption are chaotic, and unreflective. Individuals decide to move farther from the center of town, pushing urban sprawl, increasing our collective reliance on fossil fuels, and causing traffic jams. And our society zigs in a direction that some applaud and others lament.
His arguments are true but not helpful. The individual choices that are being made -- for example, individuals opting to upload pictures to Flickr or creating tags in Technorati -- are not explicitly attempting to put librarians or newspapers out of business, and they are not reflecting on the potential long-term impacts that could arise from seemingly modest and personal decisions made to better their own lives in a small way. Not do I think that thundering from the pulpit about the amorality of the eventual impacts -- if indeed they turn out to be so -- will make a whit of a difference.
Om Malik read Nick's piece, and attacked the same issues in a different key, arguing about ownership of all this volunteer effort in enriching the web with web 2.0 gestures:
[from Om Malik’s Broadband Blog — � Web 2.0, Community & the Commerce Conundrum]
if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!
Here, Om gets down to something I think is potentially amoral: the appropriation of the new commons -- our shared space on the web -- by the folks that create the web 2.0 tools that are allowing us to populate it.
It is essential that we devise some point of leverage, perhaps a mechanism something like creative commons or copyleft, for the myriad social gestures we are strewing across the web. Yes, I would like Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and others to be able to aggregate my tags, comments, links, and mutterings wherever I leave them on the web. But to the extent that they dream up ways to make money from them, I would like my share. And most important, I don't want to have to pay to gain entry to the world that we all are creating.
Om is dead on: "This is something we need to discuss."
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Clive Thompson wrote a good piece at the New York Times on our interrupt-driven world (although there is a leetle too much Microsoft in there). Thompson doesn't provide a pointless list of conventional wisdom how-tos, but instead examines the real imperatives of how we live now, splitting our attention across a bunch of different projects, activities, and goals, and responding all day long to an endless series of interrupts.
[from Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times]
Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.
As we switch to a real-time basis for our work and lives, we will need to adopt new strategies for coping with the disruption this causes. Rejection of real time is not a successful strategy, because business is moving onto a real time footing, and people have to move along, or be bounced. We are all part of a new ethos, rapidly emerging in the world of instant messaging, RSS feeds, VoIP presence, blackberries, and always-on-cellular communication. Finding a balance between complete interruptibility and complete inaccessibility is core to our success in accomodating the new pressures on our time and attention.
Thompson's focus on gizmos -- like bigger computer screens -- as a means to better deal with life's complexities, is interesting but ultimately not relevant. The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology's impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt the five cardinal rules of IM:
- Turn on your IM client, and leave it on. (The Turn It On rule).
- Change your IM state as your state changes. (The Coffee Break rule.)
- It is not impolite to ping people. (The Knock-Knock rule.)
- It is not impolite to ignore people. (The I'm Busy rule.)
- Try IM first. (The IM First rule.)
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I emailed Seam O'Malley, director product management, Yahoo messenger, about the MSN/Yahoo deal, trying to get the skinny on what it means:
[via email]
Stowe: Will the interoperability be more than text messaging?
Sean: In addition to exchanging text IM messages, people will be able to see friends' presence, share select emoticons, add new contacts from either service. There are also plans to extend interop. to PC-to-PC calling capabilities. People do not need to have two separate IDs for both services to take advantage of interop. E.g. A Yahoo! Messenger user will be able to log in and take advantage of the above features with MSN Messenger users.
Stowe: Specifically, will voice, video, and multi-user chat be supported?
Sean: There are plans to extend interop. to PC-to-PC calling capabilities.
Stowe: Is there any plan for general interoperability? Namely, interoperability with AIM, Skype, and others?
Stowe: Right now we are focused on the complexities around connecting these two communities - which will take months to implement. This is a non-exclusive deal and we look forward to exploring opportunities to interoperate safely and securely with other IM communities.
Stowe: What about integration with other Yahoo contact list oriented solutions, like Yahoo 360?
Sean: While this will not be a part of the initial launch in Q2 2006, we will continue to evaluate new features and innovate and deliver enhanced services to our users.
So it does look like an attempt to consolidate in response the the Skype/eBay colossus, and the growing threat of Google: Gtalk is just the tip of an iceberg.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Yahoo seems to be sucking up a lot of good people recently, like Ian Kennedy (who I bumped into yesterday at BlogOn) and now, Tom Coates:
[from Farewell BBC - and hello Yahoo! (plasticbag.org)]
I'm leaving the BBC to go and work for Bradley Horowitz in the Tech Development Group at Yahoo! (alongside Simon Willison and Jeremy Zawodny among others). My particular special skill - I gather - is going to be the power of my social media mojo, undercut with my feral design instincts. I'll be based in London but out in the States pretty regularly - and here's the best bit - playing with the Flickr team and the Upcoming crew and all the folks over at Yahoo Research Berkeley (among others). Anyway, as is probably fairly evident, this is not the kind of opportunity you turn down without a very good reason, and I've wracked my brains and I sure as hell can't think of one. So wish me luck!
So, now that Yahoo is amassing all this talent in one group, what can we expect to see bubbling out in the next little while? I have to get in there and find out.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Chris does a good job of recommending simple policies to help decrease spam blogs from taking over the universe:
[from Ten Suggestions for Google's Blogspot (Chris Pirillo)]
Probationary Period. Only allow new users to create a limited amount of blogs. Say, only one for the first three months. Then, if that goes well, let 'em create six. Then, if THAT goes well, let 'em create six more.
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 15, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A comment in a recent post alerted me to YAW2.0A (Yet-Another-Web-2.0-App -- yes, it was bound to happen) called Blinklist. At first glance, it looks like del.icio.us meets Ajax, with a number of cool tag cloud options.
I imported my del.icio.us bookmarks with no hiccups, although the default is to make all bookmarks private. There is a 'powertool' to turn them all public, which I did. Then I hit a snag that stopped me in my tracks. While all my tags were imported without a warning, all the compound tags I have created with a "+" in them, like "Fred+Wilson", don't work. If you click on one you get a "can't find 'Fred Wilson'" messgae, where the "+" has been turned into a " ". That's a show stopper for me. I am not going to manually hack all those plus signs into something else, and I hate the wikiword style of mushing words together.
Other things look good, like RSS export, sharing with people, organizing bookmarks into groups, and more.
I hope they fix this so I can try a real experiment for a week or so.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Over at Centrality, I posted a new piece about XFN:
[from Centrality]
I spent some time last week at the Web 2.0 conference chatting with Tantek Celik, of Technorati, about microformats, the XHTML approach to adding more sorts of information into HTML URIs: the hyperlinks that weave the Web together. I wrote a longish post at Get Real about the use of microformats for providing various sorts of personal or corporate information, like event and contact information. But one of the standards being developed under the microformats banner is XFN, or XHTML Friends Network, which provides a means to denote the nature of social relationships within hyperlinks in a way that could be automatically accessed by XFN-knowledgeable tools.
Read the rest...
Comments (73)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 14, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I installed Feedblitz at Get Real yesterday to get away from the flood of spurious, spammer email addresses. Since yesterday afternoon, I have accumulated 5 valid and 20+ bogus emails. Definitely a great set up, where Feedblitz confirms the email addresses on your behalf.
[Update: really long and detailed review of Feedblitz at Improbulus, here].
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jeremy goes nuts for how great plugins are in general, and specifically the new plugin for listening to Yahoo Podcasts (see Yahoo! Podcasts Plugin for Yahoo! Music Engine) but never mentions its a Windows executable. I guess it's not so awesome for Mac users, eh, Jeremy?
What I am getting is a big barf from iTunes on all Yahoo podcasts: "playlist format is not recognized." I'm sure I'll discover this requires an upgrade of something, but isn't it just supposed to work?
Comments (12)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Michael Graves at Verisign has immediately picked up on the "pingwidth" term I introduced the other day, and more importantly, chimes in on the likely demand for fatter and fatter pings:
[from Welcome to the Infrablog: Word of the Day: Pingwidth]
As Stowe Boyd suggests in his reply, there is demand and usefulness for fat pings. Pings that come not just with the URL-based information contained in the basic ping above, but also metadata like:
- geo-location (where the blogger is posting from)
- geo-referencing (places mentioned in content)
- people names
- author’s tags
- trackbacks/pingbacks
- comment notification
- digital signatures & trust assertions
- media/attachment metadata
That’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea – much more pingwidth. All of this information is useful in some consumption context, and much more efficient if submitted with a ping rather than having to be discovered by URL dereferencing and crawling.
‘Pingwidth’. Wish I’d thought of that…
Well, people like Verisign are in a much better position to benefit from the new ping economics. All I am going to get is a footnote for coiing the term. Grumble.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (69) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I pinged Jason Fried of 37Signals about including Writeboards into Basecamp, and (d'uh) he told me they are already integrated.
[from Everything Basecamp: NEW FEATURE: Writeboards]
Last week we released a new product called Writeboard. Writeboard is a simple collaborative (or solo) text editor with simple revision history and change comparisons. It lets you write, share, revise, and compare. Writeboards are great for drafting and collaborating on text with clients or your own internal team.
We spent the week after launch integrating Writeboards into Basecamp. And now they're live. Look for the Writeboards tab in any project.
Free Basecamp accounts are allowed to create 2 Writeboards. Paying accounts (all levels) can create unlimited Writeboards.
Candidly, one of my surly, uncooperative partners (just kidding, Francois!) started to move us away from Basecamp -- which I had been using to manage everything at Corante -- because it lacked a collaborative document capability. We have been trying to use wikis instead (Jotspot).
I think that the inclusion of Writeboards may swing us back (I hope).
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Google has quietly enabled tags to My Search History, as reported by Inside Google.
I guess what I need is more like Del.icio.us functionality, though. The current mechanism does support bookmarking and tagging of Google search results, like this:
The tagging is ok, but using the mouse click of the star to denote bookmarking is kind of off. I would rather have a more obvious "bookmark" text field to click on, or an icon that looks like a bookmark. The editing in place is interesting, but obviously Ajax hasn't been used throughout, because there are various points when screen refresh takes place.
Most obviously missing: integration with groups or the public. I want to share my bookmarks, and search is destined to be a shared space. Integration with Google contacts and groups should be next. And I need a bookmarklet so I can bookmark random locations, not just those I have found through Google. Is that hiding somewhere that I can't see?
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
October 13, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Eric Cogan informed me that Meebo, the web-based multi-headed IM client now supports Jabber and Gtalk, along with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (79) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Big (long rumored) announcement from Apple's Steve Jobs on the Video iPod: an experiment with big impact:
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (3) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Got an email from Peter Frietag, alerting me to SwagRoll, which is a neat-looking service that allows to accumulate directories of stuff -- books, music, DVDs, kitchen junk -- that we own or want to own.
I created an account, and the whole thing, including tagging entries, is amazingly easy. Looks like their aren't many users yet, so the whole social side -- meeting people with similar taste in movies, for example -- is only implied at the moment.
I would like one of these gear-ownership sites to provide a way for people to actually indicate that they are buying something from your wishlist. Last year I had three people by me the same CD, since it was first on my Amazon wishlist.
Also, it appears that the developers of Swagroll want us to use tags: tisk, tisk, indeed:
I am not certain that there is enough there for me to undertake the work involved at Swagroll. Why can't they capture my iTunes directory, and what I have rented trhough NetFlix, to prepopulate my world?
[By the way, I am starting a tagspace called Get Real Apps 2.0 to denote all the reviews of Web 2.0 Apps. ]
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a move that was certainly not anticipated, Microsoft and Yahoo have announced
an agreement to connect users of Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.
My take -- prior to talking to any of the players -- is that this is an effort to counter the presence of AIM, the established leader in the space, and the threat posed by Google, whose Gtalk solution was only recently announced. [Update: oh, and Skype! I was running out the door when I wrote the earlier paragraphs.]
I personally have given up on IMing by MSN or Yahoo, so if I am any indicator, this will be a good idea: once they interoperate, I might be willing to put one of them back on my desktop, although both companies are in the hall of shame for their policies regarding Macintosh.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In response to my recent comments about ping economics at Verisign:
Slowing down “ping cycles” or otherwise degrading the performance of the service isn’t appealing to me at all. The goal is for all pings to circulate through the system quickly and accurately. Rather than thinking about changes in latency or timing, I’m thinking the “value-add” here will pivot around the depth or richness of the ping itself.
For example: if a blog submits a “full content ping” – a ping that is much more than just the URL notification of new post, but the full content of the post itself, the infrastructure layer, either as an extension of the ping server itself, or perhaps in conjunction with a partner, can skip the URL dereferencing and crawling process, provided it establishes nominal trust with the submitter. So, if the whole post is attached with the ping – including really useful metadata like that addressed in the Atom 1.0 spec – the post can be processed and indexed, and therefore surfaced to the user much more quickly, and cost effectively than the “basic ping”.
On the outbound side, if a service is offered that not only provides ping signals, but attaches a rich set of metadata along with it – tags, keywords, place names, geo-references, etc. – that would be a highly useful upgrade from the information provided right now, which is basically a title and a URL for the source content. That may be an area where service and application builders will find a fee for developing and delivering the needed metadata on pinged content is easily worth the fee charged by the service.
So, think about pings becoming more deep and rich as a way to add value that can be charged for, rather than “dumbing down”, or “slowing down” the existing basic pings so that what is now considered a basic ping can be monetized as a “premium”. That’s not what I'm talking about at all. That’s bad mojo, IMHO.
I agree. It is very bad mojo. But we still are going to wind up with a 'pro' version -- for extra cash -- with all the fancy bells and whistles (geolocation, etc.) and more 'pingwidth' than the basic stuff. (Yes, I did say 'pingwidth'. You heard it here first.)
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I saw that Feedburner, who handles the feeds across Corante, are providing an intergrated email service from Feedblitz (see Back to the Future: Introducing Email Subscriptions). Looked like a way to avoid the spammers' email addresses that have accumulated in Get Real's guts (2800+ at this point). But then, of course, looks like Feedblitz has been hammered by all the Feedburner users signing up, and the system is down.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So I am experimenting with the new Qumana blog editor release, and it seems workable, although they join the hall+of+shame by making me use Windows.
I am mostly fiddling with it for the integrated post-centric ad solution from Adgenta. See the embedded ad, below. The idea of post-centric ads has real appeal for those bloggers who don't have access to their underlying blog templates or who don't want to mess with them even if they do. It remains to be seen whether Adgenta has a large enough selection of ads to compete, or if the keyword based matching works. I will try some tags before embedding the ad to try to help out.
Even with the tags and the many keywords sprinkled around (blog, Windows, ad network) I still wind up with a mortgage ad. Doesn't look too promising on that score.
Oh, and when I tried to bring up the blog editor help file, the link was broken, so I couldn't confirm how to separate Technorati tags, and, of course, my guess was wrong, which meant I had to edit them here, in this post. But the editor seems to work well, although I have migrated away from blog editors: too much unnecessary html generated in general.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ross make a great point on Email 2.0:
The reason we are building Web 2.0 is because we were not able to build Email 2.0. The first web didn’t support our social needs, so we used email for everything. But we couldn’t really hack it. Most social software has by now adapted to email, but email could never have adapted to it.
Beautiful.
Speaking of email's inadequacies, it was only a year ago, more or less, that I led the ill-fated panel on The Future of Email at Supernova. Several folks mentioned that flare-up out at the Web 2.0 conference, and how antique the whole controversy seems now. I basically stated that email blows, and that other forms of communication were going to replace it, until nothing was left but the stuff that looks suspiciously like spam. Man! that seems so ten years ago.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I found a post by Tristan Louis, entitled Doing the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc deal, that does just that, and establishes a baseline valuation per link tracked in Technorati of $564.64 at a $25M valuation on the deal.
With today's 1,223 links, that would value Get Real at $690,554.74! Now we're getting somewhere!
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I am a great believer in the power of technology to transform business and society. However, the manner in which this transformation works is emergence: a gazillion small decisions by millions of individuals making personal choices translates into a world reworked by wholesale technological changes. The same, however, is decidely not the case with the centralized, bureaucratic planning that seems to pervade the discussion around disaster preparation and recovery. This seems to be true even of the digerati seeking to figure out how the web and its denizens might help in the next disaster.
Jeff Jarvis, a man for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, held a meeting at the Web 2.0 conference last week, entitled Recovery 2.0. A bunch of folks showed, like Evelyn Rodriguez (who was washed into prominence by the tsunami), Michael Powell (former head of the FCC), and Craig Newmark (of Craig's List), to name only a few of the two dozen or so folks there. Oh, and me. Jeff started by making the joke that he had almost called the activity "Disaster 2.0" but thought better of it. But as the evening wore on, I began to wonder.
Other disasters are inevitable. Witness what has occured just since Katrina: Rita, mudslides in Guatemala, the earthquake in Kashmir, and a flood in New Hampshire. This is, of course, ignoring the endemic privations in the Third World which we have grown inured to. However, when disasters strike the heart of developed countries, and we are unable to do much, it shatters many of our preconceptions about our capacity to control events, and we are undone by that paralyzing awareness.
We -- despite the cultural folklore of omnipotence -- are living on a faultline. I am not specifcally alluding to the recent 25% estimate of a Richter 7 earthquake hitting the Bay Area in the next 20 years, but to the fabric of our society. We are not actually applying either market forces (for the free market types out there) or government control (for those who believe the public sector should be calling the shots) to really organize ourselves to survive these disasters, and as a direct consequence, when these disasters occur we can expect the results to be worse, not better, than in the past.
I will avoid a long polemic about the nuttiness of the status quo regarding disasters, which can be summarized in this way:
- Disaster strikes
- We are unprepared
- Devastation demonstrates how unprepared we are, and everyone wrings hands, points fingers, etc.
- Large upwelling of charitible response
- The dispossessed try to get on with their lives, and are soon forgotten
- Infrastructure is rebuilt at public expense
- People put head back into sand
I will also avoid a jeremiad on the increasing likelihood of ever more large scale disasters: hurricanes of greater length and severity (how about a thirty foot surge hitting Manhattan?), the imminent avian flu pandemic (and we are using the wrong approach to doling out the vaccine) , or terrorist dirty bomb at the Super Bowl. Even with the same old disasters we grew up with, why are we so unprepared, and why do we follow these patterns?
The web is a place where ideas can catch on, and infect the world. I would like to throw an idea out there, and see if it can catch.
First, we are culturally unwilling to accept the need for collective preparedness, even in the face of monumental disasters. Technology -- even the Web -- will not allow us to collectively leap into action and save the day with three days prior notice of a hurricane touching shore. Given the certainty of other disasters, you think we would move to a new footing, culturally. But the reality in that most people just want to get back to business as usual.
Until we have a cultural revolution, or a complete revamping of the models of civil authority, when a disaster strikes you are going to be completely and profoundly on your own. We will fall back to friends, family, neighbors, and the kindness of strangers. That collection may include people far away, connected to you by the Web, but we can't expect those who are supposed to be reponsible for our safety and welfare to be able to do very much, because the role of civil authority has eroded. People today are profoundly ambivalent of the role of government, even local government, even during emergencies. And that clock won't be turned back.
The transition we are going through, ushered in by technologies like the Web, is bringing people back together after decades of the unraveling of civic involvement. Participation in groups like the Kiwanis and the Rotary, even the PTA, is at a low ebb. The rise of the exurb has let people self-affiliate to the point that cultural divides are more deep and entrenched than ever before. The Web may be a real hope in this regard, unless it just winds up being a place for us to self-affiliate, again. And even if it offers a way to reboot civic involvement, it may take decades before that impact percolates through, and this quiet revolution reaches out past the early adopters. In the meantime, we are in a shadow zone, where the Web acts as a secondary means to organize and respond, but not yet the primary solution. And the primary mechanisms are failing -- radio systems don't intercommunicate, civic organizations and governmental agencies have little or adversarial interactions, special interests push back hall deals with politicos, and the poor are moved into trailer parks and disenfranchised. The Web hasn't transformed that. Not yet, anyway.
We can't look to government or other large organizations, per se, to help the revolution along. They are directly threatened by a new notion of civil authority, one that is distributed, and out-of-control, in the Kevin Kelly sense. And we are so divided in our worldviews that it is impossible to imagine getting consensus on a national or international level as to how we should move forward to diminish the impact of disasters. All we can expect -- again -- is the intensification on the status quo: more planning commissions, more reports, more white guys in dark suits speaking earnestly into the microphones on Sunday policy shows, more layers of bureaucracy, more moving of the chairs around the conference room table.
Here are the preconditions for the new model of civil authority, and what we should be doing to get there:
- Push hard for municipal/local wifi in every location. Push for political candidates who favor this. Push for a wifi mesh in your area that is disaster capable: where there are enough wifi nodes to continue to cover the area even in the face of disaster, where long-lived battery systems are in place, and the wifi elements are safe from the elements.
- Get civic organizations onto the Web, courtesy of the municial/local wifi. Work to get them intercommunicating using web-based solutions.
- Indoctrinate the children in the schools on how to use Web-based solutions in emergenices. They can teach their parents when the time comes.
- Municipal/local wifi -- when widely available -- will lead to an explosion in wifi capable devices, specifically, a next generation of wifi-capable cell phones. We can expect low-cost offgrid rechargers to become available -- solar, hand cracked, whatever -- so that individuals can actually remain online during disasters in this era: Disaster 2.0.
I think it will take years to get to Disaster 2.0, but it's coming. It won't make the storms blow less hard, and -- human stupidity being what it is -- it won't stop people from rebuilding homes on the side of the volcano, eroding the barrier islands and marshes, or living among millions of others on an island that cannot be evacuated in the face of any of the predictable disasters likely to strike. But Disaster 2.0 infrastructure can provide a new means of civil control -- and potentially a bottom-up, flexible, and adaptive one -- when disasters do strike: unlike today, where top-down, bureaucratic approaches are simply incapable of keeping up with the world in which we live.
That is the key meme that needs to be spread: today's techniques for responding to disasters are release 1.0, and totally obsolete. So obsolete that they will not work, and will actually cause more problems than they solve, and partly because people expect them to work. We need a pervasive investment -- at the local or municipal level -- in disaster-resistent wifi mesh technologies. Once that is in place, the rest will follow -- organizations and individuals will be able to tap into and participate in organic civil response to disaster, and a bottom-up, adaptive, and flexible response will be possible. Without Disaster 2.0, we will continue to fumble, flounder, and fail.
But don't look to the Feds, or even regional government. Do it locally. Get your homeowners association to do it. Or the Neighborhood Watch. Or The Kiwanis. Or elect new folks into onto the school board who roll it out as an educational tool -- with disaster preparedness as a secondary goal. Or build it into the libraries. Whatever. Just get on it. Act like the next one is only a week away.
Comments (5)
+ TrackBacks (2) | Category: Technology
October 10, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
It's only Windows and IE, no Mac!
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
At the web 2.0 conference. I was able to sit down with the leading advocates for two very different advocates for two very different approaches to enriching the information embedded in blogs. The two were Tantek Çelik, of Technorati and Bob Wyman, of PubSub.
Let me explain what I mean with an example. Say you write a blog entry with information related to an upcoming event, like this:
Symposium on Social Architecture
Just a reminder that space is limited at the upcoming Symposium on Social Architecture scheduled for 14-15 November 2005 at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge MA, held in collaboration with the Berkman Center.
In this example, I have provided certain information -- name of the event, date and location -- but if readers want to use that information they would have to cut and paste it, for example, if they want to add the event to their personal calendar. Imagine if there were some way for the author of the post to add some additional information, meta-information, about the content of the post, so that the information embedded can be extracted automatically by tools, and/or presented in a distinctive way. In this case, the appropriate tool would 'know' about embedded calendar information, and the display might somehow indicate that the post held calendar information. The same arguments hold if the post was a movie review, or contact information.
I first sat down with Tantek, who walked me through the microformat approach to this problem. This approach is based on adding specific CSS classes to URLs associated with the embedded information, and using an XHTML (extended HTML) approach. In the case of adding event info to the post, it would be annotated like so:
<span class="vevent">Symposium on Social Architecture
Just a reminder that space is limited at the upcoming <a class="http://www.corante.com/events/ssa"><span class="summary">Symposium on Social Architecture</span></a> scheduled for <abbr class="dtstart" title="2005-11-14">14</abbr>-<abbr class="dtend" title="2005-11-16">15 November 2005</abbr> at the <span class="location">Harvard Law School, Cambridge MA</span>, held in collaboration with the Berkman Center.</span>
The class names are derived from the attributes associated with iCalendar format, so class="summary" indicates the name of the event, class="dtstart" the starting date, and class="location" the location.
Once posted on my blog for example, this information could be extracted by microformat knowledgeable tools. Some of these tools are avaiilable at the www.microformats.org site, such as a javascript "add to Calendar" button (or favelet) that you can drag to your browser's toolbar to extract calendar information from microformatted web pages.
(Note: I tried to create a calendar of events in the left margin using this approach, and I have a few problems in importing the entities into my iCal. They import, but the dates don't always seem to work. The culprit may be the the specific XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) file that is being used to convert the XHTML encoded calendar information into an iCal file. This is not a flaw of the specification, or the approach, but the particular implementation available at this point. Update: Turns out I just had a conceptual problem: I was thinking that dtend worked differently. If an event is intended to run on 15 Nov, without a tipulated hour of ending, then you should encode dtend as 16 Nov!)
My natural inclination is to adopt the microformat model, perhaps because I have already delved deep into hacking my MT templates, and manually encoding Technorati tags on posts. Those who are less handy with the technical feel of xhtml may find this microformatting intimidating, however. In the future, blog tools that either create microformatted information using forms or other user-friendly approaches will decrease the complexities involved in microformats, and some of these are now becoming available.
Bob Wyman wants us to go a different way, avoiding the microformat embedding of information into xhtml classes, and instead relying on an XML-based approach called Structured Blogging. Unlike microformats, structured blogging relies on blog plugins, which makes it easier to use, but limits its application to things that blogging tools support, like the creation of blog posts.
I don't use Wordpress -- the only platform for which a structured blogging plugin is available -- but the website demonstrates the neat look of book and music reviews encoded by structured blogging. Note the 'four out of five" graphics.
Structured blogging relies on the specification of an XML layout for each of the associated forms of posts: reviews, calendar entries, and the like. These correspond, more or less, to the reapplication of calendar and address book standards in the microformats approach.
Tantek's arguments for microformats include the adoption of the approach by a bunch of different companies and individuals: an argument for openness. Bob suggests that structured blogging is just as open, since others can collaborate in the process. My viewpoint is that it is almost impossible to disassociate the interests of these individuals and their respective companies from the discussion of the pros and cons of these approaches. Tantek and Technorati have been very successful in getting adoption of the Technorati tag format, which is a microformat based on the use of the 'rel="tag"' attribute as a means to indicate that a URI is a tag reference. Technorati now has one of the largest tagspaces in the world, if not the largest. Perhaps they would like in the future to develop databases bursting with contact and event information, too. Bob and Pubsub would like to get people creating structured blog posts so that Pubsub can more easily make sense of reviews: for example, determining the average review of "Understanding Comics". As a result of this conflict of interest, we need to discount the arguments of the proponents.
My gut feel is that structured blogging requires too much formalization of what people do on their blogs, and microformatting tools are more likely to be adopted in a dynamic, bottom-up, changing, and innovative environment. However, adoption of structured blogging will certainly be accelerated by the roll-out of other blogging tools plugins, which are in the works. It may come down to a battle of the tools -- who creates a better set of tools for authors -- rather than the pros and cons of the models themselves. My bet is on microformats, but there is definitely an important footrace going on in this corner of the blogosphere.
Update: I just noted that Upcoming.org provides microformatted calendar information for all its events.
Comments (135)
+ TrackBacks (4) | Category: Technology
|
