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
October 07, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
How had completely missed the emergence of this term?
[from Splog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the Neologism splogs, are Web Log (or "blog") sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites and/or get ad impressions from visitors. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I read that Dave Winer was selling Weblogs.com to Verisign, which was not a tremndous surprise, considering the size of the competitors he is confronted with, and the investments necessary to scale with the blogosphere these days.
What did catch my eye was on of the pledges that the Verisign people are making:
[from Welcome to the Infrablog: Weblogs 2.0]
1. Free
Basic pings, the messages processed by weblogs.com, will remain free to submit, and free to retrieve from the service. Over time, we plan to offer value-added services to publishers and consumers that we can charge a fee for, in much the same way companies like Yahoo! provide basic email services for free, and offer premium “upgrades” for a fee (e.g. extra storage, domain hosting, integrated website, etc.) But pings will remain free; our goal is to make weblogs.com the best, most widely used ping server available.
>
I guess I am a bit slow on these developments, but the notion that pings could be separately from the weblogs.com service as a whole and discussed like an additional element of the service -- kind of like call forwarding for your cell phone -- seemed strange. I mean, aren't pings just an essential? But then I noticed the subtly important word "basic" that precedes ping in th efirst sentence. Basic pings will remain free, so I am intuiting that non-basic pings are going to cost. So if you need a quicker ping cycle, or if your blog receives more than some basic number of pings, you are going to pay. Perhaps you will purchase a basic plan with so many pings in it, and you will pay for extra pings. Especially during peak hours.
A new economics is appearing before our eyes.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 05, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
PubSub is proposing a structured blogging model, which is now implemented as a Wordpress plugin, but could be more broadly used. They demoed Joe Reger's blogging solution, which incorporates the Wordpress plugin, and shows the combination of traditinal blogging plus structured data, such as a rating for a restaurant, abook, or a piece of music.
They have hired Marc Canter's Broadband Mecahnics to build equivalent plugins for MT, and other blog technologies, so that these microformats can be widely used.
Comments (5)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Nice synopsis of the issues associated with web 2.0 Ajax apps:
Challenging programming model
+ asynch
+ ad hoc protocols
+ structured storage of unstrcutured data
Apparently building into Firefox the things that are msissing to make it, the browser itself, the place where web apps run natively, and peer-to-peer. Six minutes is really too short, considering there wasn't a real demo.
Comments (26)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"The social browser."
The web is not a library, but interactions bewteen people.
Open source, on top of Mozilla. Few weeks away from public release of alpha.
Initial focus: social browsing. Favorites/history & blogging.
Treats 'favoriting' as the same as 'subscribing' to a feed.
'Blogging topbar' -- a region above the browser page. Incorporates a blog editor, that interoperates with various blog solutions. Also a Flickr topbar, where you can just drag Flickr photos into the blog editor.
Very intriguing: basically a browser for bloggers, which may be all of us, relatively soon. A fuller review once I get access to the promised Alpha in the next week or so.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Another social search solution - "people-powered search."
Tag aggregation -- from various other sources -- using "tagRank(tm)". Users can also create shared spaces.
Looks great.
[Great rumor in the middle of the demo about video iPod to be released next week?]
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Streaming media from an always on PC to any internet connected device: music, TV shows, photos, whatever. Access your file system, directly, too (although all they support is (hiss) Windows).
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
eLerts is an free RSS alerting service. You can be alerted whenever any new RSS updates take place. This is anonymous - requires no login. Just a toolbar in the browser, which returns you to the specific location where the RSS update occurred: looks like a candidate for the new category of "RSS non-reader". I am definitely going to install this baby.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"The best events solution."
Looks like a massive events database with integration into maps (google maps mashup), and calendars.
Provides blogging widgets: neat mechanism to a/ create events, and b/ paste a javascript into the blog, which enables a scrollable calendar of those events selected. Very cool.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Open source enterprise collaboration suite (looks mostly like email), ajax client open source software.
Supports an api for mashups in email -- examples included maps, browser, and a test of calendar availability (that one got a lot of appreciative groans).
Full indexes of all email and calendar entries. Extensive search capabilities.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"Real Travel is all about real people, real advice, real experiences."
A travel information site -- combines travel blogging and social networking. Internet is the primary channel for travel. Share all elements of experience -- maps, thoughts, venues -- in the site. Online today.
Looks like a mash-up version of TravelPod, plus various social architecture elements: tags are extensively used, exploits the travel domain schema -- geography, hotels, museums, etc. Leverages Google maps extensively.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"Do things with people you know." I got this demo a few days ago, and found it interesting, although the games that dominate this social application platform (think Ning writ small) seem only moderately interesting to me, personally. That doesn't mean that more serious apps can't be built on Bunchball, but (unlike Ning) they didn't populate the beta with two dozen serious apps.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A web office application with mail, contacts, folders, files, calendars, binders, tagging, etc. Completely open - RSS, XML, etc.
Focus is small groups: 2- 20 people.
A unified tagspace across email, calendar entries, and all other objects.
"True group collaboration in the calendar."
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Social search tool, which ties a search with a specific information. Roll-your-own search engine.
Got a bunch of celebs -- Arianna Huffingon, Debra Messing, etc -- to create their own search results.
Can select sources, categorize, tag it -- create your own search "roll".
I have written before about search as a shared space (Jeteye) and this is another example of that trend.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I had a glimmering about Ross' big news, which is that Socialtext -- the wiki company -- is going open source. They will be phasing out UI in open source, and then, gradually, everything.
SynchroEdit.com -- an open source synchronous editor for the web. Also supporting offline editing with Ecto.
One year free 5 person wiki at socialtext by mentioning "web20".
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jeff Clavier and I seemed to come to very similar conclusions about Ning:
[from Software Only: The 24 Hour Laundry has closed, and is replaced by Ning]
So after being offered a large number of social media applications, we are now into the meta-framework to build social media applications. The notion is interesting: as we have come to expect that any consumer application will include some element of social networking, collaborative filtering, tagging, etc., Ning has the first shot at claiming platform status in the social phenomena by offering building consistent building blocks (though wikis could probably claim anteriority).
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The monolithic office suite -- typified by Microsoft Office -- represents the evolutionary peak of a certain value proposition, rooted in the sensibilities of the 90s. Adoption of proprietary, de facto standards for document format (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) and various conventions around coordination and communication (like Outlook and Exchange) led to a monopoly for Microsoft, and the extinction of any serious alternatives. Even on the Macintosh platform, Microsoft apps enjoyed a comfortable dominance.
But the advent of web based applications, like Gmail, blogs, and the explosion of new social apps -- Flickr, MySpace, and the ten zilllion others now coming on line -- suggest a new paradigm is here, and that people will be spending less time working "in" the desktop office and much, much more time using a broad collection of web apps.
Unlike the desktop office suite, this new web office will be a loosely connected and constantly growing collection of social tools:
- Spaces, not Documents -- We are moving past the document metaphor: a computer file, saved locally on a PC or LAN, usually being accessed and edited by one person at a time, and routed around as an email attachment. While various collaboration models emerged prior to today's web app renaissance -- like Lotus Notes and Groove -- none of these actually displaced the now familiar notion of editing a document and circulating it for review in email.
Today, however, the ubiquity and speed of web connections have made it possible for us to move onto the web, and into realtime shared space with our collaborators, and leave behind the era of communicating islands connected by slow, asynchronous email connections.
- Publish/Subscribe, not Edit/Route -- As we leave behind the email and doc metaphor, we are adopting a publish/subscribe mentality. I create a post at Basecamp or on a Wiki to communicate with my partners, and they are pinged by an RSS reader.
- Aggregation, not Embedding -- Instead of collating a bunch of relevant information into a document, I collect various sources of information into a shared location -- a calendar of events from one service, recent blog posts from another, and a web-based spreadsheet from a third -- aggregated into a fourth service, designed for the purpose of rendering (like NetVibes). This is going to build on the glue that makes these web apps connect: RSS, javascript, and various XML standards that will emerge to support microformats (so that one tool can emit an RSS entry marked as a calendar event, for example, and it can be received by another app that can use it appropriately).
- Persistent Participation, not Review/Edit Cycles -- Individuals, in this federated model of collaboration, are more likely to be participants in an on-going process, not just reviewing documents in a workflow.
In effect, this migration of people onto the web and off their desktops is the end of the information age model of files and point-to-point communication. We are moving into a social age, where there are no 'files' -- except when they are created to hand off to those who still have not made the move to the social web, those who still want 'files' to store on their hard drive. Don't misunderstand me: obviously, their are still computer files being managed somewhere by these web apps: but people will not be directly accessing them, or conceiving of 'editing a file' and 'attaching the file to an email' and so on. Instead, we will be focused on the social context -- a shared space with a collection of individuals working on a project, for example -- not a collection of documents being manipulated by team members and routed around.
Again, this is similar to the ideals that motivated the groupware movement in the mid 90s, but today's web environment, and the advent of the unifying elements of web app architecture, have eliminated the barriers to adoption that dogged groupware solutions: everyone can be invited, there is no steep cost or technological threshold to bring individuals into a shared space, and widespread adoption of standards -- RSS, XML, etc. -- break up the monopolistic, fragmented market that we had in the 90s (Lotus Notes v Microsoft Exchange v eRoom v Novell v ...).
The confluence of these changes will be reflected in new patterns of interaction and collaboration in the workplace:
- Augmented meetings -- where participants remain connected to the web, even when meeting face to face -- will become the norm, since individuals will come to rely on web tools as their primary medium for interaction. Everything needed for the meeting -- the agenda, not taking, supporting information, presentations -- will reside in shared space on the web, so meeting participants will stay in the shared web space even while sitting in a shared physical space.
- Federated work -- Organizations are shaped by the communication models in place. Top-down communication of the industrial era led to hierarchical forms, with clear lines of authority and responsibility. Information age communication was dominated by lateral flows, from person to person, and this led to a trimming of many layers of the industrial hierarchy, and a distribution of authority and responsibility into a tree-structured network: a modification of the hierarchy, but one in which authority is associated with controlling the workflows: sign-off, approval, and go/no go decisions at key points in workflows. In this social web era, communication takes place in shared space, and authority is derived from reputation and social trust. Organizations will become more fluid, and individuals will increasingly affiliate with those that they want to work with, rather than being 'assigned' to specific departments (industrial era) or project teams (information era).
Email was the killer meme of the industrial era, and the emerging, composite infrastructure that will support a federation of web apps to be the new office (in several meanings of the term "office") will be the killer meme of the post-everything era we are now trailblazing.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
October 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I must have been dozing, but others have caught the news that NewsGator has Acquired NetNewsWire, which is the sign of the rapid overmaturation of the 'RSS reader' metaphor of user experience in the blogosphere.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The people at 24 Hour Laundry have launched what appears to be a complete platform for social architecture, called Ning, with dozens of social apps already installed:
[from Ning Blog]
For the four out of five of you who don't know what Ning is and came here because you are related to a member of the team, we've built an online service (or Playground, as we like to call it) for building and using social applications. Social "apps" are web applications that enable people to match, transact, and communicate with other people.
With Ning, you can become a Beta Developer and build apps or just enjoy the benefits of using what other people come up with.
In either case, we are just happy you decided to check us out.
I haven't fooled with the developer interface, but it seems that they are trying to make it possible for people to create new app by copying an existing one, and hacking it into something new. I have seen a few random comments that suggest this is a non-programming model. More to follow on that.
I did fiddle with various applications -- a bunch were down for maintenance -- and it seems obvious to me that Ning provides a really deep capacity to leverage the core elements of social architecture -- user identity, social gestures (tags, comments, etc.), and authoring tools -- to support potentially thousands of tools, sharing a common platform and leveraging each other's capabilities.
The Restaurant app is so similar to the Dinnerbuzz solution that I discussed here (Jeff Jarvis on Made For A Distributed World), that it struck me like deja vu.
At any rate: a first look suggests that Ning might accelerate the explosion of serious social tools: not the trivial, implemented-in-an-hour examples that seem to dominate the site, but deep and complex implementations that benefit from the core elements being inherited from Ning's base.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (2) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The much-rumored Google Office announcement between Google and Sun is not happening today, after all. [pointer from PC World.]
Comments (5)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
October 03, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The Web 2.0 Conference this week has engendered a huge spike in posts attempting to define Web 2.0. They range from the brief to the preposterously long. So, here's my sound bite, since I am trying to remain reasonably brief, and also because I believe that an operational definition of anything has to small enough to scribble on one page of college-ruled note paper, even if the thing itself is bigger than a breadbox:
Web 2.0 is the term that we are coming to use to represent the convergence of technology and thought around an emerging paradigm for computing and social interaction. The driver of this paradigm shift is Mazlowian: we have achieved a certain level on the hierarchy of computing and social needs, and now are redefining a new set of goals that are driving us forward. In essence, we have established a computing and social architecture based on information needs -- moving bits around efficiently, and supporting various sorts of communication based on the the social dynamics of the 90s. Meanwhile, we have actually moved onto this platform -- we are living there, denizens of the Web 1.X -- and that shift has had profound consequences: not the least of which is, having made that move, we find the platform, and the thinking that devised it, inadequate for our new needs.
In particular, there is now an abundance of information and communication channels. But we are not searching for better bandwidth, or more streamlined business processes: what we are after is meaning. We are dreaming up a shell of social gestures surrounding and repurposing Web 1.X information, and inventing a new generation of software to capture, render, and remix it. This is how we plan to make sense of the world: not through number crunching, or being told by established organizations, but through the connected conversations of people.
The explosion in new technologies and forms -- tags, RSS, Ajax and so on -- is another effort in democratizing this process, putting more control of our Web experience in the hands of dreamers and fringe innovators, and taking it out of the hands of those with the most investment in existing Web 1.X models.
Like other revolutions, this is both an attempt at changing the place of the individual in social context, and a redefinition of that context itself. This means it is at the same time an intensely personal and societal shift: a bottom-up rethinking of self-identity and a simultaneous, wholesale power shift in technology, media, entertainment, and ultimately, politics. Everything, really.
We will continue to struggle with the specification of what this Web 2.0 thing is, because, even as we are struggling to explain it, the very meaning of the words is changing, the scope of the discussion is spreading, and the stakes are increasing.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Richard McManus is among the growing number of people leaving Bloglines, based on their slow innovation:
[from Read/Write Web: Has Bloglines dropped the ball?]
While I have no issue with Bloglines focusing on the backend, the lack of new functionality and features does leave them vulnerable to losing a lot of their core readers and champions. They're already no longer the market darling amongst bloggers. For example I've now switched to Rojo and am pretty much championing them now, rather than Bloglines (although I still have a picture of me wearing a Bloglines tee-shirt on my About page!). And if you look at the comments in Russ' post, you'll see there are other people who have become just as frustrated with Bloglines' lack of progress.
In times of great innovation, where dozens of competitors are springing into existence, trying out new paradigms for remaining connected through blogs (or reading them, if that's the metaphor that makes you happy), Bloglines has settled on the "RSS reader" model, which is likely to be eclipsed by many others.
Richard favors the Rojo take, which is a social one, at least.
I am dreaming of some arrogant startup that focuses on the individuals behind the writing, rather than channeling feeds.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Anne Galloway debunks conventional thinking about the center of gravity in online community, and does so in a hypnotically reasoned fashion. As part of this seance, Anne has channeled a group of thinkers that I have somehow completely missed:
[from Anne Galloway | Purse Lip Square Jaw -- On community, trust and social software]
I've also been re-reading Alphonso Lingis' The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. I'm most interested in the idea that real value is found not in what we have in common, but in what makes us different. I like his discussions around being bound to someone - or something - that offers us no truth.
Anne's thinking has been formed by such different processes that it seems exotic, but a welcome shift of emphasis and purpose.
In Lingis' book Trust, he argues that the trust inherent in travel can show us how its value is found in experiences such as bravery, lust and joy. Contrary to the familiar trust between friends and family, on which most social software is modelled, Lingis passionately evokes this notion:
"Trust laughs at danger and leaps into the unknown."
Again, what makes this interesting is how much it differs from the idea that we form community along lines of similar or shared efforts. Instead, these kinds of community and trust revel in the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unknown, the irreconcilable. Their value is in what they teach us about things falling apart, about encountering and negotiating difference, about existence as difference and repetition, where repetition implies multiplication rather than preservation, about change. In these communities the sensual life prevails--and it is gloriously risky and difficult to control.
By defining community as something that requires we already know each other (by either one or six degrees of separation) and that we share interests, efforts or goals in common, and by committing these assumptions to architecture and code, we effectively deny people using these applications the ability to find community and trust in 'others,' and ultimately discourage people from changing, or becoming 'other' themselves. In this scenario, the radical promise of connection and cooperation between different people is undermined by conservative notions of connecting and cooperating only with people like us or, in some twisted expression of personal freedom, only with the people we choose.
Many have argued that this very tendency Anne is positioning against -- people's seemingly natural drift toward socializing with those they know, or those they have very strong affiliation already -- imbues the Internet with a profoundly conservative character. But the entropy of social stability and conservatism is countered by the wellsprings of spirit, that lead to almost irrational, impulsive interactions with those who are different, who are not the known, who are other than us. Anne suggests that any truly powerful social platform will have to allow us chance connections, random interactions, if it is to have any hope of matching the pulse and power of the larger, richer world. The alternative is to be blocked in by the dangerous simplicity of our tools.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Emily Chang let me know that she and Max Kiesler are doing something interesting to usher in the 'unofficial' Web 2.0 week:
[from eHub Interviews to Launch the Week of Web 2.0]
eHub Interviews, a series of email interviews with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services, will launch this week (October 3-8, 2005) as part of the unofficial Web 2.0 week here in San Francisco.1 With over 150 web applications and services in eHub (and growing every day), we felt it was time to hear about Web 2.0 from the people making it.
I guess that is intended to stand in distinction to the Web 2.0 conference, which is the official Web 2.0 event that Emily is niddling about. I managed to snag one of the almost-impossible-to-get press passes, and will be one of the myriad non-implementers trying to make sense of this phenomenon -- which seems to be coming together so fast! -- so track me down if you are going to be there. I hope to hook up with Emily, too.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
October 02, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
September 30, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Steve tells me that I am not the only one who got a big "promotion" based on the Technorati algoritm tweaks: he went from #220 to #100. Congratulations!
Comments (14)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Robert weighs in on the controversy sparked from a recent Wall Street Journal article about the messy development processes in Microsoft, and the impacts on Longhorn.
But his clarification -- that it's just the process that's broken, not the product -- doesn't engender a lot of warm fuzzy feelings, especially for those who have lived through Windows hell. It is good -- for those who plan to use their software in the future -- that they are throwing out the bad code that was created by bad processes, but there is no certainty that what comes out of the process in the future will be better.
I am personally working to keep track of what is happening in web apps, not the gargantuan integrated Office-type application suites that Microsoft is interested in. The open source stack -- that is the real challenge to Windows -- is another demonstration that swarm logic works better than centralized, top-down development approaches, in software and everywhere else.
Comments (12)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I recently suggested that Technorati must have introduced a tweak, at the very least, in their ranking algorithm. Adam Hertz responded to an email, saying that they had, and they were about to announce it. Yesterday, he posted the following:
[from Technorati Weblog: Site Performance and Improvement Update]
For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.
This is a big change, since formerly technorati based blog rank on those links pulled from the "front page" of the 18.5M blogs they are tracking. Obviously, different blogs vary enormously in the halflife of front page posts. At Get Real, we keep only the last 17 days of posts on the front page. Somewhere else, they might keep 10 days of posts, or the last 20 posts, or whatever. Switching to the past six months, from my viewpoint, will lead to a real improvement, where those authors with the greatest long-term impact will have higher rankings, and those who have a brief spike in readership will not immmediately shoot up in the Technorati rankings.
So, this explains why Get Real's rank shot from 3,400 to 1,559. When you dig into the additional 5+ months of posts of 18M+ bloggers that Technorati was formerly ignoring, you will find an additional 1000+ posts linking to Get Real.
What is still missing? User selection of the period of time used, and a way to select specific areas of authority. The typical query would be -- if Technorati would support this -- "show me the top 100 bloggers on the topic of "social media" based on their posts in the past 12 months". We need to open the model so that user preferences drive the searches, not some canned algorithm. And since Technorati has gone so far with tags, why not use those to determine topic?
Comments (36)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 28, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Gregory Lamb writes in today's Christian Science Monitor that we are seeing a huge explosion in the range and depth of media we are exposed to daily: We swim in an ocean of media. Many are immersed in media all the time. I have a friend who has one or more TVs on on every floor of his three floor home all the waking hours that he is there.
Using more than one medium at once
"The extent that we saw that was quite remarkable," says Michael Bloxham, a Ball State researcher who helped prepare the report, which was released Monday at a media convention in New York.
What's more, of the time spent using media, nearly one-third was spent consuming two or more forms at once, such as watching TV and surfing the Internet, or listening to music while playing a video game.
One theory the study lays to rest, Mr. Bloxham says, is that this media multitasking, which the researchers call Concurrent Media Exposure, "is the province of only the young or the tech savvy." All age groups multitask, he says, though the pairings may differ. Those over 50, for example, were more likely to combine TV viewing with newspaper reading. Younger people might listen to music while sending instant messages.
This is just another example of continuous partial attention, which I have written about a lot in the past few years. This media partial attention is often a very social activity, where people will play video games while listening to music, or with a football game on in the background. In business, we subscribe to RSS feeds, and switch back and forth between reading a report, some blog posts, and IM with a colleague.
Comments (30)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ken Yarmosh pinged me about an interesting format for a discussion around Web 2.0: a blogoposium. This newly minted term attempts to leverage tags (Technorati, again) as a means of concentrating a bunch of talk on a particular subject in a concentrated period of time. I think "tagposium" would be a better term, but so much for that.
I plan to tag this post, and a later offering, with the "blogoposium1" tag that Ken recommends.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So I was visiting Technorati to induce the system to spider my recent posts -- some tags were not showing up there for stories written in the past few days -- and I saw this...
... which is interesting, since that last time I looked, like last week, Get Real's rank was around 3,400. That's quite a jump, which makes me think that Technorati had been so backed up that Get Real's rank might not have been recalculated in some time. My goal, now, for 2005 is to see Get Real in the top 1000 at Technorati.
I wish Technorati would provide the actual date of the last update. The implication is that it is ten seconds old, computed at the time of the query, which is obviously not true. And while they're at it, I would like then to exploit their own tagging system better. For example, I would like to find all links to Get Real that point to pieces that are tagged "social+architecture" or the like.
Comments (14)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 27, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Seth Godin has announced his new company, Squidoo, where he is apparently taking on the title of "Original Squid." He says it's the biggest thing he's ever done, so it must be pretty big.
Apparently building a product using Ajax, which he is demoing next month at eComXpo.
Comments (5)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
September 26, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Phil Wolf of Skype Journal posted
a picture of the Skype Product Roadmap that was shown to him and various independent software developers. The thing is interesting in a way, but the flap that followed -- where various Skype folks are howling about NDAs, broken trust, and so on -- is much more interesting.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Mena Trott writes about the unveiling of a next generation blogging solution that builds on the legacy of Typepad and LiveJournal, called Comet. Her mom helped in the demo at DEMO, and was awarded the coveted DEMOGod status. The demo was structured around answering the concerns that a person like her mom might have with regard to posting in a public blog:
[from Six Apart - Mena's Corner: Mena Trott's Mom]
We went through all her concerns and showed how “Comet” addresses them. First, she does have things to say — she emails me and calls me constantly. If she was just to write about the family, she’d have more than enough content. But if she was to write about the family, she’d feel uncomfortable about anyone being able to read it. Therefore, we’ve provided privacy options that let only certain groups read your content. Not only that, but we provide views from the groups she has set up in dynamically driven pages that can be organized by keywords and topics. And finally, we’ve built in aggregation in both the application and the “published” pages.
We’ve taken the stuff we’ve learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with the publishing features of Movable Type and TypePad. And we’ve made it extremely media-rich. Adding photos, audio, books and music reviews, etc... is as easy as dragging and dropping files into your posting screen.
Sounds like Comet is an attempt to answer the 'pulling together the threads' issue I have been writing about; but I think the reality is that no one vendor will really manage the creation of all the threads. Folks like Typepad will have to deal with an explosion of media types, and new, specialized forms of bloggish expression: music reviews here, movies reviews there, food posts, over yonder, vlogs somewhere else. It will be interesting to see how a horizontal blog technology, like SixApart's, fares in the fragmented and federated world that is coming.
I foresee increasing interest in specialized bloggish tools -- like Last.fm's Journal for music reviews, and Flickr for photos -- and some sort of personalized aggregation tool -- a la Netvibes -- to render a complete picture of people's many streams. Will there be a place for general purpose blogging tools, at all?
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 23, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Microsoft is reorganizing seven divisions into three, which is being widely considered as the company preparing itself for the next war, since the battle for the desktop (as in operating system) is long over, and the next battle is looming.. Erick Schonfeld argues that is may be Ozzie Time:
Perhaps the biggest shift, though, comes with the announced retirement of Windows chief Jim Allchin (who will continue as co-president, with Johnson, of Platform Products and Services until Windows Vista ships later next year), and the rise of Ray Ozzie as chief technical officer for all three divisions. Allchin was always the biggest champion of Windows and, thus, PC-centric software. Ozzie is tasked with helping Microsoft shift to more of a Web-based software-as-a-service strategy.
Waiting five years between major revisions of Windows threatens to put Microsoft at a competitive disadvantage when Web-based software companies like Google and Salesforce.com can upgrade their software and add new features on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. If Ozzie can figure out a way to combine the power of Microsoft's PC-based applications (Windows and Office) with the flexibility and network effects of its Web-based applications (MSN), he can help Microsoft maintain its industry status as biggest dog on the porch.
Well, good luck to him. Groove never became anything more than a niche application, but it was out there *way* in advance of the new explosion in web applications. He may be the right guy at the right time, but I think he will have his hands full with the wave of innovation going on out there in the weeds, and the entrenched competitors on every front: yes, Microsoft is fighting big competitors on everyfront. In search, online music, business collaboration products, handheld devices, and their cornerstone, PC operating systems and office apps.
A pointer from Om Malik led me to a piece from James Stoup on Micrososft's challenges:
Many years from now analysts will look back, draw a mark on a timeline and say, “Here it is, the beginning of the fall of Microsoft.” But don’t think for a second that MS is going to collapse in a week or two. Oh no, we couldn’t be so lucky, it’s going to take some time. You see, much like the Roman empire, MS is going to take a while to completely crumble. And even if they do fall there is no guarantee that they won’t pick themselves of up start over. Or, more likely, something different will arise from their ashes and a new company with an old name will start to compete in the market place.
But where will that mark be? When will historians peg the start of their fall? Personally, I feel it to be in about a year and a half into the future. When Longhorn comes out, and fails to be everything MS hoped it would be, that is where you can draw your line. That is where Microsoft had the chance to reassert their domination and instead they pissed their chances away. Longhorn is going to be a big disappointment to a lot of people. And when all of those people realize it’s time to upgrade, they might just look somewhere else.
I think the turning point goes back to Microsoft's inability to get people to upgrade to XP when it was first released. That was the first nail in the coffin.
But the coming Battle-Of-The-Stacks is really the war for everything: the entire application and communication stack. Microsoft has bet that they will win, everywhere, and invested strategic levels of their capital into that prospect. Can they survive is they lose any of the battlegrounds? Yes, Microsoft can survice if MSN loses to Google in search, and loses to Yahoo in online mail and instant messaging, and loses to Apple in music. But it can't survice if it loses some critical collection of these areas. If web-based app development based on open source (Linux + Java + MySQL + Apache) becomes the dominant base for future apps, and business collaboration and communication shifts to that platform instead of Microsoft's .Net and Office servers and applications, Microsoft is in deep yogurt. If Microsoft loses the battle for the living room -- the blackbox that connects PCs, game machines, and teleivisions together -- to Apple, or Sony, or any combination of other players, Microsoft would be gravely wounded. If iPod PDAs and phones become ubiquitous, then Microsoft's enormous investments in that sector implode. And so on. There are so many battlefields I don't know why the pundits think Microsoft can do it all.
The most likely scenario to me is that Microsoft will lose one, two, or more of these battles, and will then be a much diminished player: perhaps dominant in games, but not in cell phones; perhaps strong behind the firewall for large business (like IBM of old), but nearly non-existant in small and medium business (their initial beachhead in business, once upon a time); maybe strong on desktops, but not on servers.
Its possible that one central battlefield will become clear, and Microsoft may be able to concentrate all their energies to winning it. But such a Waterloo could play against the Napoleon that Microsoft seems to have become. Aggressive and schooled in the competitive tactics that have brought justice departments the world over after them, they may look like the smart bet. But I see them fighting against dozens of strong and highly motivated competitors -- Cisco, Apple, Sony, IBM, and so on -- so I am betting against Microsoft. Or at least I am betting that Microsoft can't win everywhere, and unless they take drastic actions -- basically ceding the battle in some of these areas before losing strategic rescources along the way -- they may lose in areas that could be won, if they concentrated their resources and investments. But I am betting on hubris, momentum, and short-sightedness, so that Microsoft will have a few big losses, and the hope to conquer the world will lead to them losing most everything.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 22, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
At Emily Chang's eHub, I saw a link pointing to Writely. The basic concept of Writely is simple, and well-realized: a web-based repository of documents, each of which can be shared with other collaborators.
The documents themselves support various rich text elements, like styled text, tables, images, and so on. Every edit session is saved as a separate timestamped version, and you can open earlier versions, see what changes have been made by collaborators, and even revert to earlier versions. You can export the docs as RTF and Word formats. You can publish docs to make them accessible to specific users or to the public. Docs can be tagged, and each tag can then be used to select the corresponding subset of documents.
I encountered a small number of annoyances in the user interface -- the folks behind Writely didn't test on a Mac with Firefox, apparently -- so various elements that were highlighted wound up being impossible to see. They say they are working on a fix. Doesn't work at all on Safari. A "note" capability -- more or less a post-it that gets placed on the doc -- is in alpha, and really needs to be rejiggered to be more like a Word comment. I also can't get the RSS feed from my account to be accepted by NetVibes as valid. But otherwise the features form a great starting point for what is likely to become an instant success.
What I like about Writely is the web-centric model: the docs reside in the system, and (aside from the occasional exported doc) everything is off the desktop. The endless problems of passing docs around as email attachments are completely avoided. And the ability to push docs from a private, collaborative development to a published version for a larger group, and the then fully public. This is the usual lifecycle of many documents, like press releases, for example.
What is missing? I would like to be able to save comments with doc versions, so that collaborators could summarize changes. Other, more sophisticated capabilities -- like document templates, page headers and footers, and other page layout -- would really round out the document capabilities.
But I have switched over. I intend to use Writely aggressively -- partially to get away from the document clutter on my desktop, and partially to make all the Corante corporate docs I manage accessible to my partners.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have actively started using a bunch of specialized web apps that provide the means to publish writing or other information. For example, I wrote recently about the reasons why Last.fm's journal is a cool place to write about music: the integration with Last.fm's music database is really great. Likewise, the integation of 43Places' geographic database with posts there is equally cool. I anticipate that dozens more of these domain-specific solutions will be rolled out, similarly integrated with specialized domain-specific databases.
So, my online life has recently fragmented. For the past few years, I have divided my writing between Get Real and my personal blog, A Working Model, where I have been writing on topics like politics, karate, travel, and music. My rapid migration to these other services has led to me trying to duct tape things together in some way, using RSS feeds. Today, my A Working Model blog includes feeds rendered in the right margin from Get Real, 43Places, Last.fm, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and a travel schedule. But the contraption that I have created to make this work is rickety. I have been using Feeddigest to manage these feeds, for example, and for no reason that I can understand, sometimes javascript calls to the Feeddigest service time out.
Just as I was getting fed up with this mess, someone introduced me to Netvibes, which is a new Ajax web app, that attempts to provide a perhaps better MyWeb. The idea is a way to pull together your favorite RSS feeds -- like an RSS reader -- but a format more like a portal.
What I would like, though, is something different: to be able to define a Netvibes portal, pulling together all these threads of my online life, and publish it so that it is accessible to others. They don't support that yet, but I intend to start the begging and whining.
Comments (10)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 17, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I noticed that David Weinberger had Many-to-Many: reviewed RawSugar, which is prompting me to add a few comments.
I spoke recently with the founder, Ofer Ben-Schachar, who suggests that we are going to drown in the flat tagspace that we are creating, and that one obvious solution is to create hierarchical aggregations of tags. He points out that we have grown used to this idea in e-commerce sites, where the class of "cameras" is broken into various makes, price ranges, or types.
I argued with him, suggesting that these domain schemas -- like the way discussions about wine naturally fall into vintage, region, country of origin, and grape -- are a general case, but that there is no way that a system like RawSugar, or a group of people, can develop such schemas for all sorts of things. Or to agree, in many cases, how these classifications work. Consider the difficulties in classifying music: what the hell do you say Broken Social Scene is? And most of the things that people fiddle around with on the web are not clearly about just one thing, or only linked to one schema.
He showed me an example of how RawSugar could provide a means to decomplexify a universe of discourse for one reasonably well-defined group: those interested in bicycling in the San Francisco area. He worked with several groups and developed a taxonomy for this universe of discourse, including tags and a hierarchical ordering of them, so that information about trails would be tagged consistently with "rides for kids," "gentle rides," "difficult rides," and so on.
My argument remains the same: I believe that that the approximation and fuzziness of tags is their true value: we don't have to be dead on, but over time, order emerges. I don't buy the idea that we need to have order imposed.
At the same time, there are hundreds, if not thousands of realms where clear-cut natural domain schemas exist: restaurants, wine, and many other examples come to mind. Even music -- leaving aside the fuzziness of music genres -- naturally has artists, labels, albums, tracks, and so on. So there may be a way that RawSugar can worm its way into the tagosphere, and provide value.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I'm not in the beta program (ahem!) yet but I would love to see what the Flockers are up to. Roland Tanglao is was raving about it back in August. An open source browser that lives and breathes social architecture.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 16, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Mapstats is one of a bunch of Ajax web apps I found through Emily Chang's eHub (and I have more of them to talk about, coming soon, like Writely). Mapstats provides a website stats capability, and displays the last 25 visitors on a Googlemap.
Very lightweight, easy to use, provides basic capabilities -- unique visitor count, page hits -- and plots that data on a graph. I love the map (go here to zoom in on where Get Real's visitors are from and what they are looking at).
I am truly amazed at the innovation that seems to be spinning out of the Ajax movement. Dozens of web apps are being conceived and spun out: people are having parties where the purpose is to dream up and then implement (in real-time) an app as a group activity. Wild stuff. There are a number of these apps that fall short (like NumSum, which I really wanted to use as a replacement for Excel, but it is too limited at the moment), but a larger and growing number of truly useful apps that have been spawned recently that are truly revolutionary, like Basecamp, and the new Last.fm release.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 15, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I saw that Om Malik mentioned a new web based (Ajax) instant messaging client called meebo. Pretty neat, if you need to login on some locked down machine or one that isn't yours. But I have the same heartburn with this as I do with the other multi-headed clients -- they only support the lowest common denominator -- 1:1 text messaging -- and so you have to throw away all the better stuff to use them.
And it doesn't support Jabber, so I can't use it for the whole world.
What I hope is that these guys read the Nerdvana series I wrote, and try implementing that.
Comments (21)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 14, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So it wasn't just me.
[from Google Talk: Help Center]
Please note:
There are currently connection issues with the iChat client. We are aware of the problem and are working on it. Please expect a fix in the next few days. Thanks for your patience during our beta period.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a story with few real surprises, Steve Ballmer is alledged to have thrown a chair across a room and shouted about wanting to "f***ing bury" Eric Schmidt, of Google, after yet another senior engineer quit the company to work at Google, according toBusiness Telegrapgh:
The issue of its [Microsoft's] competitive tactics is a hot one because only a week ago Ballmer was the subject of some embarrassing publicity that speaks of the depth of rivalry between Microsoft and Google, the internet search engine giant.
According to a sworn statement, Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room when a former Microsoft engineer met him in November to discuss his intention to defect to Google.
Small wonder there were a few giggles in conference when Ballmer welcoming the competitive environment created by the open-source movement which gave birth to Linux, the free alternative operating system that nibbles at the edge of Microsoft's empires. So did he really throw a chair? He's clearly powerful enough. Ballmer insists: "I've never thrown a chair in my life."
So what about the colourful language? The engineer's affidavit alleges that Ballmer shouted: "F***ing Eric Schmidt [Google's chief executive] is a f***ing p****. I'm going to f***ing bury that guy. I have done it before, I will do it again. I'm going to f****ing kill Google."
Suddenly the body language is that of a chastened schoolboy. In the morning session, Ballmer was making points about Microsoft's persistence and tenacity at maximum decibels ("If we didn't get it right we'd keep working it and working it and working it") while punching the air.
That animation has gone now: "Did I want to keep that fellow at the company? Yes. Did I say I wanted to compete with Google? I don't know what words . . . Did he write down the exact words? I don't know. By and large I made a commitment nine years ago that I was not going to curse. I know I've had one or two transgressions in nine years, but I made that commitment to myself. Is that one of them? I don't recall."
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 09, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Felix Miller of Audioscrobbler and Last.fm emailed me today, letting me know about the beta availability of web services accessing various things, such as the RSS feed from Last.fm Journals.
If your user name at Last.fm is "stoweboyd" (and mine is, your Journal's RSS feed is http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/stoweboyd/journals.rss, although it doesn't appear anywhere on the Journal pages, or the user profile info, yet.
Other information, like recently played tracks are also accessible, in various formats. Here's my recent journal entries (formatted by Feeddigest):
Comments (17)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 07, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Mercora announced a swarm approach to getting an artist or group sent to the LA Music Awards. They will aggregate the choice of listeners... (Windows users only at the moment)... using the Mercora IM Radio application.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
"It's not what you know, it's who you know." That maxim is probably at work in the recent investment of Minnesota's "largest public radio network" in Gather.com, a social networking service targeting public radio listeners. The service, to be launched in December, is meant to be a clone of the socially architected hit, MySpace:
Deborah Caulfield Rybak, Star Tribune [from MPR parent invests in networking website]
However, Gather may be different. MySpace caters to teens and young adults and has been described as having the personality of a teenager's poster-papered, music-filled bedroom. Gather, designed for public radio's older, more sober audience, might more resemble the parents' book-lined study.
Well, we'll see. Do you really want to network with people because they listen to the same radio shows as you?
MySpace benefitted from stumbling across a real-world community with unmet needs: indie musicians and their fans. While I am an advocate for social architecture -- in fact, I believe that all ecommerce will be socialized in the future -- that doesn't mean that every marketer's segment, like public radio listeners -- are in fact a community. It's just as likely that they are a collection of unintegrated groups. My hunch is that this is a hammer looking for a nail, but I am willing to be surprised.
[pointer from PaidContent]
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 06, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The folks at Technorati have introduced a new service into their mix, the Technorati Blog Finder, which is intended to help people find authoritative blogs on various topics.
Hold on a minute... isn't that what Technorati was already doing? Well, sort of. But existing services from Technorati aren't based on a persistent profile of blogs. Search just finds recent posts that include a given search term, and the Tags service finds recent posts that are tagged with the search term. The point of the Blogs service is to find blogs that are tagged -- using a different tag syntax -- as matching the search term. This is intended to be a tag-based declaration of the topics that the blog touches upon.
The Blogs service using the same algorithm for authority used to order results in Search and Tags services. In the graphic above, I searched for blogs tagged with "social media". Note the ad real estate all around.
First of all, I feel that this is a much more useful tool -- right off the bat -- than the monolithic Technorati 100 list, the Feedster 500 list, or any other all encompassing list. Finding the top 10 blogs on "social media" -- if that's what you are researching -- is much more helpful than looping through the top 100 blogs and hoping that the two lists overlap somewhere.
What I don't understand is why Technorati can't distill these lists out of Search and Tags -- why do we have to have yet another form of tag, and yet another sort of declaration?
In this case, I had to create a series of tags, like this --
<a href="technorati.com/blogs/social+media" rel="tag">social+media</a>
-- and place it somewhere on the blog that is accessible to Technorati: in my case, on the bottom of the right margin.
Still, a useful service, so long as the Technorati servers can keep up with demand -- which apparently they cannot. When I clicked this morning on Mary Hodder's Napsterization "412 links from 295 sites" to see who had been linking to her recently, I got the now-usual Technorati runaround: "Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation."
I like the fact that the authority ranking emerges from the social gestures of many other people, but I would like to concoct a way for that to reside locally -- at each blog -- the way that comments and trackbacks do, now. It's great to be able to assert "this blog is about X, Y, and Z" in some way that allows people to find what they are looking for, but I remain concerned that all the raw data is contained within databases owned and operated by aggregators, such as Technorati. On the whole, though, I like the idea of being able to declare these assertions, and this service (if Technorati can ever solve its server load issues) looks very useful for the blogosphere.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology | Telecommunications
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have been using the ClustrMaps application for just over a month, and I find that the distribution of readership for Get Real (see here) fascinating. I guess I expect to see North America and Europe -- because I personally know readers there -- but seeing the traces of people from Africa, Asia, and South America always surprises me, and reminds me what a global village we are part of. I am also amazed at what I think must be a local spike -- 60K+ readers since 24 August.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got the chance to see what the Feedburner pro account yeilds in the way of stats. I am happy to see that Get Real's RSS subscriptions are growing, slowly, now about 612. But perhaps more interesting is finding out exactly what people are reading, and clicking through to.
It is no surprise that recent posts on Google Talk take top honors, but the level of interest around the Podcast Hotel mess was surprising. I would have imagined that longer, in depth posts -- like the one on Jeteye -- would be more widely read, but I don't know exactly what the thinking process is. Over time, I am looking to gaining a better understanding of reader behavior from monitoring the Feedburner stats.
I also learned about the beta of Mint -- a new blog stat tool -- that is ongoing. Sounds like a very interesting project:
Mike Davidson Repeat referrers — the single most useful web stat
As a previous user of both Shortstat and Refer 2.0, I get great value from perusing my list of referring URLs. For the uninitiated, this is a list of all the URLs on the web which people are clicking on to get to your site. Did MSNBC just link to a blog post of yours? Bam, it’s in the referrer list. Is Metafilter sending over morons to your latest iPod contest only to have them suggest “Google.com” as a potential “greatest site you’ve never seen”? It’s in the referrer list. Or is some 16 year old kid spouting off about something he knows nothing about and then referencing you as an example? Again, it’s in the referrer list.
Anyone who can hook me up with access to the beta? Anyone know Mint's developer, Shaun Inman?
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 31, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
 Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org has a great post describing how the BBC are "reinventing" radio. In a nutshell, the idea is to let people "bookmark" (timestamp, in fact) music using SMS on their cell phones as they hear it on the radio, perhaps adding tags to the bookmark, and subsequently login to a website to rate it.
The best way to describe it is to start off with some Principles for Effective Social Software that we developed as a result of working on the project. I'm not going to pretend that they cover everything, but they've proven very useful for us. We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:
- Every individual should derive value from their contributions
- Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
- The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals
So this is how it works. Phonetags is about bookmarking songs you hear on the radio using your mobile phone. The way you use it is very simple. If you're listening to a radio network (initially BBC 6 Music) and you hear a song you'd like to make a note of, you pull out your mobile phone, type an 'X' into an SMS (remember: X marks the song) and send the text to a BBC short-code. Later when you come to the site, you type in your mobile number into the search box to see a list of all the songs that you've bookmarked...
Tom provides great screenshots, and discusses operational tags, which he calls "magic tags" (a term that I hope does not catch on), which *do something* as opposed to being just an assertion. For example, "*four" represents assigning the value of four stars to the tagged song in your personal profile, not just associating it with other songs tagged "*four."
Note: this is much like the example I outlined in Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World, where I denote a restaurant as being "4 out of 5". Because I was making an argument for an open tagging system -- one in which the author does not know what hypothetical or real taggregator services might be taking advantage of the tags at some point in the future, the "4 out of 5" model of rating is better, since it does not presume what the the rating scale is:
I believe, in the long run, the services will have to become smart enough to look at the tags and decide whether an entry is relevant. A restaurant review service like the idealized Dinnerbuzz could simply look for the "restaurant" tag, and rely on elements from the restaurant review domain -- cities, states, cuisines, "4 out of 5", and the like -- as markers. It might be smart enough to ignore the other tags -- "Cohiba Churchill" and "Gruet" for example -- that other services might pick up on.
In the case where a service has a 10 point ot 100 point scale, the "4 out of 5" can be normalized, where "*four" is hanging in space. The BBC system is yet another fascinating example of a closed tagging model for music -- like Last.fm -- and so "*four" is only meaningful there, where you know its a five star scale.
In the long run, the BBC project is a glimpse into the future of a socialized model of radio participation, leveraging cell phone mobility (don't tag music while driving, folks!). But, although Tom offers Priciples of Effective Social Software, he and the BBC are not dealing with the issue of who owns the metadata.
Tom Coates We're getting in incredible metadata on music that we simply didn't have before - metadata and descriptive (emotive!) keywords that we can analyse and chop up and use as the basis for all kinds of other navigational systems. This is metadata that is often sorely lacking and could help us enormously in the future.
Yeah, well... except the metadata should be understood to be the property of the listeners, perhaps made open to the BBC, but actually should be held in trust. There is going to be a tug-of-war between media companies at their "audiences" which increasingly are going to become active participants in the crafting of media experience. As user's attention and social gestures increasingly form the social architecture that forms media experience users will want to control -- to own -- the elements of their social profiles that contribute to the greater good.
Tom makes the case as to why BBC and other media firms will want to tap into the social aquifer, the wellsprings of this future experience, but they don't really make the case for us handing over all that information to the BBC. I agree that radio needs to be reinvented, to be socialized (a la the personal radio station at Last.fm), but this is not that.
As the first comment states at Tom's post:
What do i get again? :) Sorry to be obtuse, but as a user what's the benefit to me? [posted by Stewart at August 30, 2005 01:05 AM]
In the final analysis, I agree that radio will need to be socialized, but I am not sure that a broadcast medium like conventional radio can make that jump. Certainly, the BBC or other broadcast media would like us to provide all those tags and ratings, but why would we hand over all that metadata to them, since it may not actually change our personal experience of the radio a bit? They can't fracture the broadcast into a gazillion streams, with those tagged "downtempo" finding their way to me. It just provides a "tagalicious" means for the BBC to profile their market, as opposed to a way to have a many-to-many communication setup.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have upgraded my Last.fm account (last discussed here), so that various extended options are available for me, and you, to play with.
The baseline account includes the new journal -- blog -- posting capability, that I discussed last week. But now I have enabled the personal radio station capability, so you can tune into an Internet radio station playing what I listen to: lastfm://user/stoweboyd/personal. Note that this requires downloading the Last.fm player.
By the way, the folks at Last.fm tell me that RSS feeds are only a few weeks away. That means I will be able to pull my last.fm musings and other info and use them to paper the walls at other blogs. Nice!
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 28, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I finally had a chance to dig deeply into the new, dramatically enhanced Last.fm over the weekend. Jumping past the superficial -- the much improved user interface, and various software glitches of the past -- this version of Last.fm is almost a perfect example of what I have been preaching about social architecture:
- People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe -- the social elements of social applications are central, and the domain elements (in this case music) come second.
- Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us -- the social "gestures" that we leave behind in our online searching -- comments, ratings, tags, and so on -- weaves the fabric that binds us together, and through which we make sense of the world.
- Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else -- successful social applications -- like Last.fm -- work because their orientation is bottom-up throughout. People's fuzzy tags, group formation, and music preferences drive the overall experience, not a single, centralized taxonomy and unified top ten hit parade model. (Big aside: exactly what is lacking in all the current top 100 or 500 blog lists, by the way.)
- Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff -- it is our collective perceptions of and enjoyment of music that animates the endless catalog of artists, albums, and tracks that form the natural domain model of recorded music. It is through social interaction that we can learn something about a new artist, or new music by an old favorite. We are not on our own, wandering through the stacks: our view of the world of music, in this case, is shaped and informed by others.
The New Last.fm
The core coolness of Last.fm -- the automatic creation of a personal, virtual neighborhood of people with shared musical tastes, whose musical libraries you can browse, all based on a plug-in that pulls the sequence of tracks played from your iTunes -- is still central in the new Last.fm. But this has been extended in some very important ways:
Tagging -- Last.fm now includes a generalized tagging capability, so as you roam through the library of music -- your own and others -- you can attach arbitrary tags to artists, albums, and tracks. Given a tag, like jazzy, you can find music that others consider jazzy.
Many Flavors of Radio -- Last.fm formerly supported a variety of radio selections -- you could listen to a Stowe Boyd radio station, based on my favorites -- but now this has been extended in a variety of ways. One option, is to listen to music sharing a given tag: tag radio.
Blogging -- Last.fm now includes a well-integrated blogging capability, which provides basic blogging, but really tight integration with the natural schema of recorded music. When you want to make a post that references a specific artist, album, or track, the blog tool supports a/ checking that the thing referred to actually exists, or that you spelled it correctly, and b/ automatically creates the cross references in the social artifacts database.
Here, I have created a blog entry talking about the band Lali Puna, and specific tracks and albums they've made.
Later on, after this is posted, someone looking at the core artist information about Lali Puna will see that I have written about them.
In this way, Last.fm will support a rich, socialized experience for its users, with personal observations, listening behavior, tags, and implicit and explicit relationships with friends and those with similar musical tastes. These social elements are clearly the foreground for any serious user, after a short period of involvement. Those who wish to search through the natural, domain information can certainly do so, but that will rapidly lead the searcher to the social information: what people are writing about and thinking about the bands, music, and tracks that make up the shared space that defines Last.fm discourse.
Close
There is no doubt in my mind that Last.fm has all the lineaments of success as an advanced example of social architecture. Whether they will be a business success is a function of other factors. Clearly, the company has shifted its business model: it is trying to make money. They have partitioned a number of features -- like broadcasting a personalized radio station -- into an "upgraded" account, which costs $3/month.
And they have adopted the key mechanism of making money on social applications: integrated ecommerce. Anyone interested in Lali Puna, after reading my review, is offered the option to buy the album. However, this is only loosely coupled at the moment: you leave the context of Last.fm for the actual transaction. I feel that this will be replaced in the future by a much more integrated buying experience.
Also, aside from the status of being "upgraded", Last.fm hasn't pushed ahead into the notion of digital reputation. I can only imagine that, as soon as people start creating tags, blog posts, and comments, reputation will soon follow. Then we will see a closure in the authority and authenticity aspects of social relations.
There are some other niddling details, that I trust they will remedy quickly, like lack of RSS feed from the Last.fm blogs, and other content aggregation areas. I would like to know whenever my pal Gary Turner posts on his Last.fm blog, or when anyone posts something about Lali Puna, or whenever someone posts on the "downtempo" tag. I bet that will be coming soon.
All in all, this is a textbook example of the idea I had in mind when I posted the Starting From Scratch: Social Design Is Hard piece. Once they have built those missing bits, I have the in-depth case study I need for a comprehensive seminar on social architecture: coming soon, I hope!
Comments (9)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A Flickr user, "friendly_chic407", posted a cell pic of a guy exposing himself on a NY subway car (see pervert081805 on Flickr - Photo Sharing! -- beware: shows his penis), and the story was picked up by Boing Boing, and then hit the papers.
The story could be just another day in the life, since life in the metropolis is full of annoying bullshit like this, but find the outpouring of emotions in the comments at the Flickr post amazing: ranging from outright skeptisicm of the validity of the picture, to those actively promoting this sort of odd (if not sick) sexual behavior, to feminist-tinged support for friendly_chic, to those clamoring for mob violence if and when the prep is ever found.
One of the real social impacts of sousveillance -- when we, as individuals, are actively monitoring what is going on around us -- is pushback: those who stand up will be smacked down. I am not taking a side on this specific case -- I don't have the chops to determine if the photo is real or not, or whether friendly_girl is just another victim of the insane crap going on or some sort of attention-starved phoney -- but I know that even if she is just a plain vanilla victim, all of these cultural archetypes will be dragged out of mothballs immediately. All the litany will be mustered -- "she must have sent the wrong signals", "she's a lesbian", "how do we know that it's not faked", and so on -- attempting to discredit the person making the claim.
[Update: In a New York Daily News story, friendly_chick reveals herself to be Thao Nguyen, a 22 year-old New Yorker, who said "I saw him massaging himself and then he unzipped and pulled it out. I thought, 'I can't believe he's doing this in the middle of the day!' " -- but it really wouldn't make a difference if it was after midnight, would it?]
[Update: The perp may have been found.]
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 24, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got the chance to demo a new take on search two weeks ago. Jeteye has released a solution that actually makes search results persistent shared spaces, called Jetpaks. Jetpaks are hosted by the company, and can be shared with the world or with a specific group of people.
When you enter a search term into Jeteye, it uses any of various search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and so on), but also searches against Jetpaks that you have access to. You can also create new Jetpaks based on these searches.
New links, tags, and commentary can be added over time by people with access to the Jetpak. So we can imagine -- given a bit more sophistication in the sorts of elements that can be added -- that a Jetpak can be a shared space, one element in distributed collaboration.
People can be 'invited' to the Jetpak via an integrated email invitation approach. Public access seems to also be implemented via simple URLs, as well as searching across public Jetpaks. Try searching for "stoweboyd" and you'll find several Jetpaks that Jeteye folks and I have created while fiddling with the technology.
Jeteye represents the fusion of search and bookmarking, providing a single toolset for adding links to existing Jetpaks (a browser plugin) as well as a search capability (albeit piggybacked on the other search engines) to find new stuff. This fusion is inevitable -- which is why Technorati, del.icio.us, and other search-related applications will be sucked up by search engine companies. Likely end game for Jeteye, too, I expect.
In practice, I have encountered the usual beta glitches, and barriers to practical use. For example, I created a jetpak just for sharing with a small group of colleagues, and I wanted to include a link to a Basecamp project. Basecamp encodes URLs with 'https' -- secure HTTP -- and Jeteye barfed on the link. But even if it hadn't, Jeteye would need to then store the login and password for the Basecamp instance, for this to work. A likely scenario for effective sharing, but a snag at the moment. Also, I have trouble updating existing Jetpaks -- little things like editing tags -- and while it may be operator editor ("read the manual, dummy") the user interface is not all that intuitive at times.
Interesting to bump into technology that is directly implementing metaphors I have been using, like "tags define a shared space". Here, the metaphor is search as a shared space. In practice, we very commonly tell people to look something up on Google, then to do something once found. Now, we can collate a single web location with commentary, or collate a number of unintegrated bits of information together into a portfolio or dossier.
Once some more capabilities are added and the rough edges are smoothed off, Jeteye could potentially represent a radical alternative to conventional notions of collaboration. I could use a collection of very specialized tools for various things -- calendars here, spreadsheets here, project blog there -- and collate these along with web links, comments, and the like. Jeteye could become a meta-collaborative tool, sitting above more specialized systems, pulling the bits and pieces together, and creating a context for sharing those bits. Very cool stuff.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have played with Google Talk a bit more, since first getting onto it yesterday, including downloading the PC native client on Virtual PC. Given my laptop set-up today -- no head mike, not even my iSight -- on the road, working out of hotel room, it's hard to judge sound quality on the push-to-talk feature, but it is clear that this is meant to be a direct competitor of Skype, the upstart that has roiled the instant messaging world with its meteoric growth in the past year.
I was also surprised that Talk is not integrated into Google Desktop, at least not on the current released version. This is the future, however. The plug-in architecture they've developed should make that a snap. A little more ambitious to tightly integrate instant messsaging -- presence, for example -- into other apps, like gmail. And that would make the gmail solution competitive on the enterprise front with Microsoft and IBM offerings, although they do need to create a small client for offline email. management.
What about Talk capabilities integrated into Orkut, and Blogger? Many, many integration opportunities. Nerdvana is on the way?
Obviously, I expect to see video in Talk before you can catch a breath.
I am unhappy that Google has opted to not roll out a Google Desktop app for Mac , but at least with the iChat Jabber integration, I can ride the Google Talk wave a little. I hope the Apple and Google folks figure out how to make the cross-talk work... hey, wait. It might be working already, and I just don't know. more to follow.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology | Telecommunications
August 23, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Since others are buzzing about the new Google instant messaging service ahead of tomorrow's planned release (like Om Malik and Niall Kennedy (who has created a how to)), I thought I would state that, yes, it is running the XMPP protocol (that is to say the Jabber protocol). I have tested it with iChat's Jabber capability. Anyone want to test, I am stowe.boyd@gmail.com on the talk.google.com server.
I have been predicting (begging?) for years that Google would come out with an instant messaging system -- although I had presumed it would be based on the Picasa Hello client they already own -- but jumping to Jabber is a really smart move. It sticks a thumb in the eye of AIM, MSN, and Yahoo -- the three market leaders with various closed networks. And it could represent exactly the sort of market destabilization necessary to end the stupid and painful fragmented world that those three have bequeathed us. I am going to get all my contacts to switch to Google Talk as soon as I can.
I have to presume they have embedded Talk functionality for the new Google Desktop tomorrow. I wonder how Nerdvana-like it is?
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by David Coleman
Although they are slugging it out in the "search" arena right now, the fight is spilling over into collaboration! Tomorrow Google will be announcing the Beta of Google Desktop 2, which takes search a bit further by recording what your interests are and having an intelligent agent that presents you with web pages, blogs, news stories, etc. that it thinks you might be interested in. This new version will have a sidebar for: e-mail, RSS, Atom news, weather, stocks, etc., a scratchpad, quick find, and integration into the Outlook toolbar. It will also extend the number of file types it can search so in can look in MSN Messenger Chats as well as networked file drives
I have always said where you have content you have interaction (collaboration).
Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Micorosoft are now set to duke it out in the IM arena. This new Google Talk application should be using both text and voice and will put Google directly in competition with Skype (as well as Microsoft and others who are going after Skypes 40 million users).
Other bloggers (Om Malik, http://gigaom.com) believe that Google is using the Jabber open-source IM engine, which would allow Google users to connect to other IM systems that currently work with Jabber (including: AOL, iChat, ICQ). At the same time Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are all upgrading their IM systems to add VoIP features.
Google is rumored to be thinking about another $4B stock offering to help fuel this fight. It is my contention that Google should just use some of that money to buy Skype and put them in a much better place in the race against Microsoft and would add many millions of users to the cause!
What do you think about all of this?
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 22, 2005
Posted by David Coleman
It had to happen sooner or later… although Microsoft Project has 70+% of the market, someone had to make a Java-based version of MS Project. Well Marc O’Brien, who has had about 20 years in the project management space, and is now the CEO of Projity (Foster City) has not only done a completley new Project Management (PM) tool in Java, but has taken it a step further.
If you are familiar with the offerings from MS Project, the Standard version has fewer features and it is generally the MS Project Professional that is used a lot. Called “Project-On-Demand (POD)” this new tool will initially be offered in October as a service with a starting price tentatively set at only $39.99/month/user. Wisley, O’Brien is focused on SMBs and not the Fortune 1000, which is a better market for hosted tools anyway.
Underneath the covers POD uses Postgres, but is DB independent, as well as browser independent (just have to have a JVM running), and the demo we had was in Firefox.
Marc has known me for a long time, since back in the days when he was CEO of WebProject (which got sold about 5 years ago), and know’s of my interest in how teams can use this type of PM tool (what we call DPM – distributed project management) tools. He has promised that there will be additional collaborative functionality added to this tool by year end, so stay tuned!
In the mean time POD had very impressive PM functionality and could even do WBS (work breakdown structures) and RBS (resource breakdown structures), which MS Project can’t do directly at this point (you have to go into Visio to do this). POD can even do sophisticated earned value analysis (Cost Performance Index, and Schedule performance Index) as well as the basic functions of importing and exporting MS Project files without inserting additional errors.
In the spirit of “he who has the most connections wins!” POD, with its open architecture, is integrating with a number of On-Demand solutions, and through XML are integrating with a number or ERP vendors like Intacct. But the overall philosophy and goals for development were: to make a replacement for MS Project that ran in Java; was Hosted (monthly subscription model); was available on every OS/browser; decreased some of the complexity inherent in MS Project; and was inexpensive enough so that it was a “no brainer” to try and quickly buy such an application.
Marc and his company have been in stealth mode for the last 2.5 years with teams in France and India helping to develop the prodigious functionality of the product, which should be familiar enough to anyone who has used MS Project. So familiar in fact, that no cross training is needed. Marc claims that it just takes an hour to get it up and running and most of that time is a project manager or administrator creating groups and permissions. It is worth checking out if your company is not already indentured to Microsoft at: www.projity.com, although the web site does not say all that much, more will be revealed in the next few weeks.
What do you think about a Java-based alternative to MS Project?
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 19, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Niall Kennedy broke the news this morning of a new Technorati feature: multiple tag search.
You can now search Technorati for multiple tags! Just separate each tag with the word "OR" to add an posts tagged with your specified tag to your search results.
Multiple tags are a great way to follow your favorite topics while accounting for the variety of methods people tag their posts. A tag search for college OR university displays the latest posts indexed by Technorati tagged with either "college" or "university." You could also mix tags in an area of interest such as tracking the mobile gaming industry through a tag search for PSP OR GameBoy.
Well, this is a good step forward. However, if we're talking boolean searches here, how about "and" - that's where the power is. Specificity. Have you ever tackled a very broad word such as "coffee" or "blogging" - watch out. Others echo this statement.
What we need is that way to dig into the results easily and quickly. Using a boolean search with "and" is one way - using a tag cloud refining technique is another. Each page can have its cloud of words often used in pairing with that tag - and then you dig down, each time to a narrower topic since the tags are all considered together, not separately.
Via Social Software Weblog Tags: technorati, tags, tagging
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Review on Macworld is less than glowing for InterComm 1.3 by Five Across. Touted as collaboration tool replete with IM, file sharing and integrated RSS reading, very few of the features performed well or correctly. Read the review here. Technorati Tags: InterComm, IM, Five Acrosscollaboration
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 18, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
You may have noticed that I have a new map over in the upper left corner, a ClustrMap, that displays where Get Real readers are located (go here for the larger version). This is an evolution of the earlier HitMaps service that I had tried last year. I really don't understand the way that ClustrMaps determines the update frequency for various levels of users, so perhaps I can get Marc to clarify that when he returns from summer vacation.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 17, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a long-overdue move, EMC Documentum has announced integration of existing instant messaging solutions into eRoom 7.3. The firm is moving to counter the instant messaging lead that its competitors -- IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle -- have in the enterprise collaboration space. I'm interested in seeing how the integration is managed.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 12, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Scott Richter, a man accused of being one of the world's top spammers has agreed to pay $7 million to Microsoft. After paying legal bills and dedicating $1 million to computer access for the poor in NY, Microsoft aims to reinvest the other $5 million in combatting further spam and to help address computer-related crimes with worldwide governments. Interesting to see that spammers are actually paying the price for what they do. Via Messaging Pipeline
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 10, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Google news has opened the door to syndicate results. Each news page and news category contains a link for feeds in RSS or Atom. Keyword results are also now syndicated. With some restrictions, the feeds can also be incorporated into personal websites.
Google has chosen to use the generic term "feed" in their materials. I think this is a good move - although RSS has some strong roots, it really is not the only feed option. It's also, perhaps, a more mainstream-friendly term. The typical "orange" subscription button is not present, but perhaps we'll see it added in future.
I am especially happy about the keyword syndication and have been waiting for it. I subscribe to a whole ton of keywords/key phrases for the many blogs I write on. However, some topics are tricky, and searches of PubSub, Technorati and others often yields spam blogs (arg) or irrelevant content.
For example, a search for "coffee" on Technorati (search/tag) is something I'm very interested in for my coffee blog. On the search side, I get every comment made about having coffee in the morning or jumping off to a cafe. On the tag side, I get all the blogs I already subscribe to. So, nothing new. Nothing relevant. However, if we jump over to Google News now, the search yields some good stuff - some studies, news, press releases and market changes - all of which yield new fodder for my blog.
The downside: the feeds look like crap and there is no way to change it. Small summary only, including links to all "related" items. I agree the latter is great, so I don't get the same story a million times, but I really do like my full text. By restricting the format of the item as is done here, I don't think Google is realizing the true benefit to be had by disseminating the news in RSS/Atom format.
Here is what a single feed item looks like:
Via Steve Rubel and Blog Herald
Technorati Tags: Google, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Syndication, News
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 09, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Where do you stand on the MSN Filter debate? Pro or con? Here are some thoughts on what people think of MSN Filter.
For those who don't know, MSN Filter is a new network of blogs MSN has released to be the "inside scoop" of various topics - basically filtering "the best" of what other people have blogged about and, by the sheer size of MSN, giving those original bloggers their "15 minutes of Internet fame."
Pro:
Jason Calacanis - "Now, I’m thrilled MSN is in the game because at some point soon I’m sure they will make these Filter sites and/or Start.com the default homepage for tens of millions of MSN/IE users. Tens of millions of folks will reach our blogs via Microsoft’s RSS reader and meta-blogs. The alternative—which we are living with right now—is our blogs are no where to be found on the MSN, Yahoo, Google or AOL home pages. Having these big players move blogs to the top level will be huge for blogging."
Mike Sigers thinks that the speed and volume of the filter process will force some into writing original content, rather than being filters themselves - [note, I see this as perhaps being good for blogging]. "One more reason you need to set yourself up as the expert in your niche, with original, thought provoking, expert, educational comments."
Adam Sheppard (MSN) - The model is essentially Nanopublishing as originally championed by Nick Denton at Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. Both great blog networks with their own audiences that they'll continue to be successful with... The people at MSN care about making a difference... With MSN Filter I hope to increase awareness of Blogs and give users a voice and forum to submit interesting content to our hired bloggers. This is something we want to learn from and evolve over time."
Steve Rubel - "It’s good content, it’s short, it has a lot of links and it is updated often. It is also very news driven and that’s a good idea to keep it current and interesting."
Con:
John Walkenbach - "So you read an article, and you want to make a comment. You see this: You must sign in using a Microsoft .NET Passport to publish a comment to this website. Get a clue, Microsoft."
Paul Scrivens (9Rules) talks about the lack of community in these new blogs. "It’s simply more of the same and how can the same be any exciting? ... I’m not saying that this isn’t a good business model, but I don’t think it’s a good social model. [bolding mine]
Darren Rowse - "My initial reaction to MSN Filter is that i’s pretty bland and boring - without too much personality. I think not naming the bloggers is a bad move... I guess MSN are wanting to concentrate more upon the content than the profile of their bloggers - the name ‘Filters’ I guess gives some indication of this."
Richard MacManus thinks that this move by MSN to invite in nameless bloggers to filter unoriginal content will spur on Yahoo or AOL to perhaps do it right and "inviting truly independent content creators into their fold."
----
I am probably more on this Con side of the fold. Although competitive pressure is a great plus coming from the big guns, past movements will show us that the big guys need to get it wrong for a bit before they figure it out. I think this is happening now. MSN has decided to "embrace blogging" for one reason or another, but instead hired a whole bunch of junior writers or editors to capture and spit out a high volume of information rather than taking the time to build meaningful relationships with bloggers, to hire good writers and community people to share knowledge and truly add value to the content.
There is nothing wrong with being a filter, so long as what is being aggregated and digested comes out with more value than when it goes in.
I am also equally concerned about the lack of open blogging guidelines. How do they filter? What is the selection process? How much Microsoft stuff will get slipped in? Why are they filtering comments? Why do you need a .NET password to post a comment? What's to the rumors of charging bloggers to submit content?
Funny aside - I did early on consider applying for the blogger jobs at Microsoft, but decided against it in the end. I had an inkling that 10 posts a day were not "quality posts" and that I would not enjoy it. Looking at what's been produced and the complete lack of profile being given the bloggers, I am quite glad I passed up the "opportunity."
What are your opinions of MSN Filter?
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a recent post, Jason Calacanis on The Blog 500, I suggested that Jason Calacanis was off base when he said that the Technorati 100 are selected -- unlike the rest of the index -- "based on the number of links for all time." Jason also asserts that the T 100 don't change over time.
I asked the nice folks over at Technorati to demystify all this:
[from Adam Hertz email]
Stowe,
We use the same authority calculation for Top 100 as we do elsewhere in our service: it is based on the the number of unique sources that are currently linking to the blog.
Let me know if you have more questions on this.
Best,
-A-
So it seems that the Technorati 100 is just the first one hundred of the total index, all of which are be recalculated on the same basis, and those 100 really do in fact have large numbers of inbound links from a large number of sources, and those links are "current" which in Technorati-speak means that those inbound links are on the front pages of the source blogs.
As I said, this makes most of what Jason is asking for in his Blog 500 post irrelevant, since Technorati is actually implementing pretty much what he says he wants. And I don't blame Jason for being confused about how this works: Technorati's innner workings seem to be a mystery to us all, no matter how critical Technorati has become.
I still maintain that this "hit parade" approach is less interesting than some long-term reputation model (as I outlined here and here). Bob Wyman at PubSub offers a bunch of useful insights on the pros and cons of using ageless links (like blogrolls, that change very slowly), here:
A "for-all-time" ranking system rewards people simply for having been blogging longer than others. It gives weight to seniority not quality. In a "for-all-time" system, a blog that accumulates 1,000 InLinks over the last five years is given the same rank as one that has generated 1,000 InLinks since it was first created 10 days ago. This just doesn't make sense. Imagine a blog that carried links to pictures of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe event" at the Superbowl and as a result gained 10's of thousands of InLinks in a matter of hours. Imagine also that that blogger hasn't had much to say since that event that anyone has found to be worthy of an InLink. Does it make sense that years later all those stale links should be lifting the rank of the now boring or even dormant blog over that of people blogging interesting content today? I don't think so. One important question that a ranking system should answer is: "What have you done for me lately?"...
Although the Technorati 100 is not based on a "for-all-time" system of weighting links, it is based on "ageless" links. I'm sure there are some uses for such ranking systems, but I must say that this attribute of the Technorati 100 is the one that contributes most to my failing to find it to be useful. Apparently, the Technorati system only considers links that are still visible on the blog when they scrape it. (Unlike PubSub, which is feed oriented, Technorati scapes blog pages...) However, they give to all such links an equal weighting in their ranking -- no matter how old they might be. What this means is that you can give your blog more say in the Technorati system simply by showing more history on your blog! Also, it means that if you abandon your blog, your links will continue indefinitely to have weight in the Technorati system. Given that a massive number of blogs are abandoned, any ranking system based on ageless link weights will have a persistent bias towards bloggers that used to be popular whether or not they are still popular.
PubSub does not provide a "for-all-time" ranking system nor do we base our LinkRanks on "ageless" links. As mentioned before, the Daily PubSub LinkRanks are computed using a window of only a couple weeks of LinkCounts data. Thus, very old InLinks have no impact on current Daily LinkRank. If a blog is abandoned, its influence on our rankings will rapidly disappear. We decay the value of more recent InLinks according to their age in somewhat the same way that we decay the value of multiple InLinks from a single site (see discussion above). What we do is give more value to an InLink created today than to one created yesterday and we give less value to a two day-old InLink, etc. until an InLink created a couple of weeks ago has no value to contribute to a blogs rank. The result is a much more accurate and current measure of a blog's current popularity, importance, impact, whatever...
As I suggested in a post yesterday, based on Mary Hodder's notion of taking control of the algorithms being used by services like Google, Technorati, and PubSub, I don't really want services like PubSub or Technorati just to grind away with their internalized algorithms, how ever well-motivated and rational: I want them to export the raw data in a structured format (to be determined what that is), so that we can determine what our own top 100 or 500 or 1000 blogs ought to be, based on the weighting that we place on the various factors. Since I believe that longtail reputation is more important than current number of links, I could put a higher weighting on that, and based on a candidate set of 100 or 1000 blogs, come up with an ordering based on my own recipe.
Even better, I could combine metrics derived from different services -- Technorati, PubSub, and the fictional Blognetter I outlined yesterday, for example -- in a spreadsheet, or even better, in a new meta-ranking service I envisioned called RankOut.
As these sorts of metrics become increasingly relevant, we need an open model to emerge. Jason's call for a different list of 500 A-listers is not the answer, and neither is the carefully tweaked algorithms buried within Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, or other services.
I am fine with Technorati and the others having their own closed algorithms, and offering the results up as one element of their value add. But I believe that this information -- the raw data they are amassing -- is not theirs: it is our data, it is the accumulation of our "gestures" -- our links, our trackbacks, our blogrolls, our tags, and so on -- and we have a right to ask these services to give us back the data that they have spidered from the Blogosphere, so that we can fiddle with it however we want to.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 08, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Mary Hodder's much awaited write-up of what we called The Paris Index while talking about it in Paris a few months ago is up at Napsterization.
Mary's thesis is that the mechanism that underlies the perception of value in the Blogosphere -- links -- is too limiting, on many levels:
[from Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts]
Currently, blogs are measured in systems like Technorati or ranked in PubSub by links or by number of subscribers to a feed in Feedster. In particular, these are the not very interesting, subtle or telling measures used to make indexes like the Technorati Top 100 or the PubSub 100 or the Feedster 100. In Particular, the Technorati Top 100 is based purely on inbound links. All of these lists tend to favor those who blog in more general, popular topic areas, and not those who are specialists in an area.
For many bloggers the relevant sphere of influence is not overall popularity, as those indexes express. It's influence and connection within a community. And the relevant measure of connection isn't the number of connections -- it's the depth and impact of those connections. This is about celebrating the niche, and measuring engagement over time.
Mary then suggests that we need an open source algorithm that establishes the weighting of a whole suite of alternative metrics: inbound links, numbers of comments, indirect mentions, 2nd generation links, and so on.
I was a participant in the discussions in Paris (after dinner, with Mary scribbling on a napkin that she has photographed in her post), but I have started to take a different tack to the same problem, perhaps because I have been madly fiddling with a collection of web services based applications as a means of managing the operations of Corante. That pastiche of tools has given me a different idea.
Instead of developing a single, open source, mega algorithm for determining blog value, how about developing a simple standard for publishing blog metrics so that individuals or groups could easily collate various sorts of interesting metrics about blogs into meta-indices?
For example, imagine that I were to create an online solution, let's call it Blognetter, that would discover the centrality of any given blog in the implicit social network that the blog is part of (this would be a very useful tool, by the way). Pointing Blognetter at Get Real would discover links from Get Real to Mary's, Doc's, and Ross' blogs, and vice versa. Using various parameters, it would rapidly determine a network that defines a community, of some number of hops via links away from Get Real. Blognetter would calculate that Get Real is connected to and from a specific number of those other blogs. That service could then provide that data in an agreed upon XML format.
Ok, so imagine other services exist, that likewise provide other data -- like the number of indirect mentions (without links), or number of RSS hits, or number of unique visitors, for example -- and would provide it in a similar fashion. The last metric is something that bloggers themselves would have to provide, by the way, and suggests all sorts of issues about gaming the system, but let's leave that aside for the moment.
Lastly, a collating service, let's call it RankOut, could aggregate these various feeds related to Get Real, and any RankOut user could override the default weighting built into RankOut. RankOut may "know" what the feeds "mean" in a sense -- the builders of RankOut may be aware of the point of Blognetter, for example. Or maybe not. Any blog metric could be self-describing: the XML feed would include a description feild, and suggested uses, and so on. Then, based on the user's needs, wants, desires, they could create an array that would compare a set of blogs. If you think comments are a better indicator of value, skew that measure. If you think links are more important, go for it. If you consider mentions in the mainstream media more relevant for your analysis, bingo. The twiddling would be up to the user, and the rankings would shift accordingly.
And lastly, specific rating services -- the Robert Parkers of the blogosphere, if you will -- could then publish their ratings, based on what they deem to be most important. Wondering who the 100 most important contributors are to the whole swirling discussion around Social Architecture are? Or who are the most influential voices in the Carl Rove mess? There might be a dozen such lists on these and other topics created and maintained by various individuals or groups at the RankOut site, where such rankings could be published just like Del.icio.us bookmarks are, and tagged so that people can find them in a tagalicious way. This could lead to a wide and diverse ecology of metrics -- and critics-- coming into being, and over time we would slowly converge on more or less standardized ways of using them, as we begin to better understand how these individual metrics, and their combination, reflect the true value of blogs and the authors behind them.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Technorati ranks all the blogs that it tracks, so it shouldn't be possible that two blogs have the same rank, right? Can someone explain this to me:
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 07, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
You can see the gleaming new seal in the right margin that signifies that I have been accepted (the 147th member) into the AttentionTrust. However, I had to wander far afield of the domain www.attentiontrust.org to find a clear manifesto for its existence, but I did find it, in a great post by Seth Goldstein at Transparent Bundles, called AttentionTrust.org: a Declaration of Gestural Independence. Seth digs into the philosophical underpinnings of the now au courante notion that we are operating in an attention economy, and therefore, Others may want to exploit attention, and its evidence, for Their ends, rather than ours.
Along the way, he provides a operational definition of attention -- "Attention is the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. " -- and cuts to the chase, pointing out "The reason attention is becoming more important now is that the Internet has enabled the recording and sharing of these choices in real-time."
So, we are denizens of a digital ecology, and every move we make there could be recorded, and monetized.
Seth reproduces Michael Goldhaber's 11 Principles of the New Economy, which dissects the issue at hand adroitly:
- Cyberspace is where the new kind of economy comes into its own. Like any economy the new one is based on what is both most desirable and ultimately most scarce, and now this is the attention that comes from other people.
- Attention is scarce because each of us has only so much of it to give, and it can come only from us -- not machines, computers or anywhere else.
- An economy has to be based on something that is fungible, that is that can be passed along, and one thing about cyberspace -- e.g., the web -- is how conveniently you can pass on attention through hyperlinks.
- Not everyone can attract the same amount of attention. Some of us are stars, but most just fans.
- The more you pay attention to someone, the more that person is etched in your memory, and the easier it feels to pay still more to her.
- So, roughly, your attention wealth = size x attentiveness of your past and present audiences.
- Unlike the old matter-based wealth, the new wealth is nothing you can hope to put under lock and key. You get it by reaching out into the world.
- Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. The best guarantee you have for attention going to you for what you do is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible (hence it makes sense to put out drafts, early versions, so there are witnesses for everything you do.)
- Also you accumulate attention through the full extent of your personality --everything that makes you distinctly you and not someone else...
- So the new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don't normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now...
- What people do demand as privacy now is freedom from having to pay attention, not from being seen but seeing what they don't want to.
Seth then offers the core rationale of the AttentionTrust:
The first move in establishing an open market for Attention was to declare a set of basic rights:
Property: I own my attention and I can store it securely in private.
Mobility: I can move my attention wherever I want whenever I want to.
Economy: I can pay attention to whomever I wish and be paid for it.
Transparency: I can see how my attention is being used
These represent our rights as attention owners. Our attention data is ours, each of us individually. In the wake of the behavior of credit card companies, credit unions and data brokers, it is vital that we recognize our right, and our responsibility, to govern ourselves relative to the use of our private information.
So, I am asserting that I hold these truths to be self-evident, and that here, at Get Real, we will try to figure our what it means. For example, we will not create any attention capture schemes that pop endless browser windows at you if you try to shift your attention by moving off-blog. But more important, we will not amass personal profiles of reading habits, for example -- although we will look at generalized data to determine which posts are most popular and so on.
But I guess I diverge from Goldstein's darkly dystopic view of our digitally connected age, although I do concur that we should regain control of our attention, and the proofs of intention that our digital acts represent: moving from one URL to another, creating a link or a tag, or the time spent scrolling through someone's recent post. His concerns about Google's "post-competition" monopolizing of all the information associated with our use of that company's search engine are well founded. But his linkage of such macroeconomic corporate incursions on our personal freedoms with living a connected life, and his apparent need to reject the continuous partial attention that being connected seems to engender, well, it just doesn't connect. The two are not two parts of one thing. He writes...
I am not sure exactly what attributing full status to a human being looks like on the Internet, but it likely relates to making the value of private gestures public, rather than having them live as secret elements in a black-box algorithm. A few weeks ago I mothballed my Sidekick and decided to live without wireless email for the first time since I got my RIM pager in 1998. The decision was related to my desire to control my attention which had gotten splintered beyond repair in a continuous wireless communication environment.
The two parts of this paragraph -- split at "A few weeks ago" -- are in a sequence, but they don't appear to be related, to me.
I reject the notion that being concerned about Others manipulating the metainformational breadcrumbs we leave behind by traipsing around the Internet also means that we have to adopt a neo-Luddite mindset, and toss our instant messaging clients into the trashcan.
Nonetheless, I think that every thing else that Seth asserts is right on, and that there is a battle to be fought, or else we will potentially lose something critical for the future: control of attention.
The choruses of attention, data, privacy and identity are all converging in one giant conceptual mashup, which stretches from Web 2.0 pundits to members of Congress grappling with identity theft regulation. Lost at times are the basic rights we are fighting for, which I understand to be:
* You have the right to yourself.
* You have the right to your gestures.
* You have the right to your words.
* You have the right to your interests.
* You have the right to your attention.
* You have the right to your intentions.
Join the cause.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 05, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
David Coleman, a guest contributor here at Get Real, recently posted a piece entitled Too Much Collaboration. In it he sides with those who are viewing what is going on in the Internet from the information technology or communications theory perspective: bits or information are flying through the pipes, and we have all these messages or bits or information splatting against our eyeballs, demanding our attention. He quotes a long list of those in favor of decreasing our connectedness for the sake of personal productivity. For example, Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," who, as he summarizes, states that "digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished."
Personally, I reject the notion that what we are doing today on the Internet was supposed to increase personal productivity or even getting critical tasks accomplished, no matter what may have been the motivations of those who are building the software or paying our salaries. What people are doing is building richer social connections, which directly and indirectly contribute to them having a richer life. That may translate into more wisdom, better insights, and at times, faster response to critical events, but it doesn't in general mean more personal productivity. In fact, I made this argument recently, in a piece called Linda Stone at Supernova: Continuous Partial Attention...
People are overwhelmed with information, if they operate on an information basis: too many RSS feeds, too many channels, too many choices. That leads to anxiety, yes. But there is never too much meaning, too much insight, too much understanding. So shifting over to a socialized means of filtering the world instead of the information model decreases anxiety: I trust those that I am connected to to help me make sense of the world. And for that to work, I must adopt a communitarian attitude: my time is truly not my own. It is a shared space, a commons in which I interact with my buddies, where we live.
This does not require a return to full attention, one-thing-at-a-time processing of the world. Yes, you rely on trust -- trusted contacts -- but Linda seems to suggest that we will be able to leave the filtering to others: to trust concierges, protectors, leaders. Personally, I don't want to yeild sense making to leaders any more.
David seems to misread this argument. In his piece, he characterizes my viewpoint as leaving the filtering of the world to others, to diminish information flow in some way:
Basically, he believes that your social networks are your filter for information overload. If A likes it and I like and trust A, then I should like it. I agree with Stowe to a point, in that social networks only deal with part of the problem. I do not believe that you will be able to filter enough through these networks to stop the overwhelm of your bandwidth for both information and attention.
I never said that, nor intended it. (It's weird to be misinterpreted at your own blog.) I didn't mean that my network filters information for me, but that my network leads me to a wide variety of activities, issues, and perspectives. It's not like a giant news digest service. I guess if you still believe that the authoritative voice on topics of importance to you is the mass media, then it sounds like a new digest service. But I meant something quite different: my network is where the authorative voices are on the things that matter to me. They are the ones making the "news" with regard to what I care about. And that can be the case for everyone, I believe.
David has bought in on the personal productivity mantra -- that the value of something is solely measured by its increasing the speed at which we do our own tasks, independent of the world we are enmeshed in. I maintain that personal productivity is not generally interesting to us, personally, as individuals, but is used by others, employers and so on, to evaluate us -- erroneously -- against some impersonalized metric.
But the social perspective is different: I am interested in the progress that others in my network are making, too. I am happy to accept an interrupt from a buddy, asking my opinion on how to podcast, or responding to a questions, or brainstorming a proposal I may have nothing to do with. Because I know that I will require that same willingness to help, at a later date.
This is the price -- and value -- of accepting the social side of connectedness. We are not information processing units plugged into a network of machines: we are people, interacting through online social networks. If you want to pretend we are machines, and that throughput is the only way to measure the value of connectedness, you are missing the entire point.
I am not concerned with the 'overwhelm' of information and attention like David and the Sunday supplement pundits he names seem to be. I have adopted continuous partial attention as a meaningful strategy for remaining connected in a much larger social scene that would be suggested by my tiny, tiny office. I switch from task to task, from IM to telephone, from this interrupt to that, and slowly get back to the list of things I am plugging away on. Yes, things slip from today to tomorrow, but an equal number of things slip from tomorrow, or never, into today. And that slippage is not waste, it is not loss of productivity, it is exactly the interaction with others that makes all this worth doing in the first place.
Gandhi said "we have to be the change we want in the world." It you want the world to be filled with hyper-efficient robots, obsessively focused on getting their own tasks done at the expense of others' progress, never veering off to look at a friend's new project, or to answer a colleague's question, then by all means, please be that sort of person. I promise I won't add you to my buddy list. However, if you'd like the world to be a warm, engaging place, where you are surrounded and connected to hundreds of people who believe that your presence matters, and who actively seek your advice and input on issues that are important, then you can switch over to living a connected life. Forget the information overload hyperbole, or the new terror tactic: attention overload.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Labnotes at Opsop riffs on my recent post on Open Tags, and suggests using UML "anchors" or "fragments" to denote tags:
[from More on Microformats]
I've also been thinking about using the fragment identifier, e.g. <a href="#thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>. It's semantically correct (I know what this tag means to me), and persistent (back reference), but I'm not sure how it plays along with syndication.
None of that would matter if I didn't have to link to anything. When I write my post, I simply add a line of text that looks like:
tags: microformats reltag semantics xri
That's enough content for people who read the post, it's also enough content for the WP plugin to figure out the tags and create the microformat. I only need to add the links so Technorati can spot the tags. Understood. That's what the "rel" attribute does. But then why does relTag have to say anything about the URL?
Why, indeed?
I think there is some merit in the simplicity of the use of an anchor ("#thai") but it poses other small problems: don't hey have to be unique in the HTML file? Or maybe on the the first instance would be found? But of course, the way that we use tags now -- a pointer from a taggregator like Technorati points to a post, not a specific location in a post -- doesn't gibe with how anchors work.
Even more simple is the convention of a keyword "tag:" but that brings up a host of problems, because that sequence of characters is not encoded in any way, and people could use it for other purposes, like "I went to look at the tag: it was red" does not really introduce three tags: "it" "was" "red". Also, there is no obvious way to end the sequence.
No, I really think we do need something like the XMI approach that Drummond proposes (see earlier post), but I am not certain yet of the exact form it should take.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Drummond Reed picks up the thread I have been raveling (or unraveling?) about open tagging, and demonstrates a solution to the use of absolute and relative URLs that I outlined in Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World, based on the XRI proposed standard (which I confess, I was blithely unaware of until this moment):
[from Open Tagging]
So what's the XRI solution? Switch from an HTTP URI to an identifier syntax specifically developed for abstract identifiers (including generic concepts like "+Thai" that don't exist as definitive HTTP URI resources). For example, the XRI-based open tag would look like this:
<a href="xri:// thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
What's the "+" stand for? It's the XRI global context symbol for generic identifiers - identifiers that represent generic subjects, topics, or concepts for which there is no central authority, any more than there is any one authoritative dictionary for the meaning of the word "Thai" in the English language.
So how would an XRI-aware browser (or search engine) deal with this tag? Exactly the way Stowe intends. Because the author of the tag did not put "+Thai" in the context of any specific dictionary service, the instruction to all service providers is: "interpret this tag as the generic meaning of the concept 'Thai'." Each service provider can then consult their own dictionary service to provide further understanding/mapping/linking of this term. Or they can use a shared community dictionary service from organizations like Wikipedia or XDI.ORG.
Better still, XRI syntax allows an author to declare a explicit dictionary authority for a word if they choose to. For example...
<a href="xri://technorati.com/( thai)" rel="tag">Thai</a>
...would tell interpreters of this tag that the author is referring to the generic concept of "Thai" in the specific context of the dictionary provided by the authority "technorati.com". The author can cite any authority they want, including themselves. For example, the following two examples would be two different ways of citing myself as the dictionary authority (the first using a DNS domain name address and the second an XRI i-name address):
<a href="xri://equalsdrummond.name/( thai)" rel="tag">Thai</a>
<a href="xri://=drummond/( thai)" rel="tag">Thai</a>
Finally, to provide backwards-compatability with existing HTTP URI infrastructure (i.e., until the XRI scheme is understood natively by browsers), any XRI can be transformed into an HTTP URI using an XRI proxy resolver such as the one publicly available at XDI.ORG. For example, the second XRI above could be turned into a "clickable" link today using this proxy resolver by expressing it as:
<a href="http://public.xdi.org/=drummond/( thai)" rel="tag">Thai</a>
There are even more features that XRI brings to the complex problems of tags, ontologies, and shared meaning (especially the concept of synonyms, for establishing equivalence of concepts across communities and even across human languages), but that's enough for one post. The best part is that XRI syntax is quite mature. The OASIS XRI TC is preparing the second Committee Draft of the XRI 2.0 specs right now for a full OASIS vote this fall. Identity Commons has already started to i-name enable WordPress. Since no registration authority is required for the XRI space, open tagging with XRIs could start happening organically as fast as taggers decide to start using it.
I haven't started to dig into the XRI spec, but I intend to. However, the assertion that we can start merrily open tagging (tra la) with XRIs fails one critical test: I would like to have taggregators like Technorati accept these tags as equivalent to the closed URL-based tags currently in use. Without that major shift in the tag ecology, XRIs have a long road before migrating into general use.
[PS I glanced at Drummond's first post, and discovered that it was Doc Searls that convinced him to start blogging as part of the whole XRI standard push. Why am I not surprised?]
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I love instant messaging, but even I agree that you need to block strangers from interrupting you. Steve Bass at PC World sketches out how to be invisible on IM. Personally, I don't have a boss, and I like to let my contacts know when I am idle -- usually means I am on the phone or otherwise busy.
Cloak of Invisibility
The Hassle: I love instant messaging, but I hate it when strangers interrupt me. Plus, my boss can tell when I'm away from the PC. Even the alerts when buddies come and go are getting annoying.
The Fix: Become invisible. In AOL's full version of AIM, click Setup at the bottom of the window, choose Preferences, Privacy, and select Allow only users in my Buddy List. Don't want anyone to know you're goofing off? Uncheck how long I've been idle. To squelch the alerts, choose Notifications in the Category list, uncheck Show pop-up notifications, and click OK.
In MSN Messenger, choose Tools, Options, Privacy, highlight All others in the 'Allow list' pane, and click Block. Next, return to the options list, pick Personal, and under My Status, uncheck Show me as "Away". Then go back to options; and for Alerts and Sounds, uncheck all the boxes.
In Yahoo Messenger, choose Messenger, Privacy Options, Ignore List and then select Ignore anyone who is not on my Messenger List. Next, select Privacy and check Do not show anyone how long I've been idle. Finally, choose Alerts & Sounds, uncheck Enable alert sounds, and click OK. To cloak yourself from specific buddies: Right-click one of them, choose Stealth settings, and then select Permanently Offline.
I don't recommend going all the way fully cloaked in darkness, as outlined. But I certainly buy into ignoring those not on your buddylist. Even though time is a shared space, you need to share it with the world of those known to you, not some schlub in Turkey who wants to practice his english (it has happened, believe me) or yet another guy who wants to argue with me about the incredible value of LinkedIn membership.
Comments (4)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
August 02, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Because I was unable to go to Blogher, I didn't get a chance to hear Mary Hodder speak there (although she and I did have dinner in Paris a few months ago). I am eagerly awaiting the post that Mary mentioned today:
[from Napsterization]
After 45 minutes of intense anger and frustration from many audience speakers in the room toward Technorati link counts and top 100, I suggested we create a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. It's something I've been working on for few months, trying to frame, about what this problem is and how we might solve it. But it's a complex issue and I'm also busy. So it's taken a while. However, my blog post is almost done, and I do plan to put it up in the next day or so.
That's one of the themes I hope that we will dig in on at the upcoming Symposium on Social Architecture.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 28, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Looks like Ben Carcio and Chris Pape are working on a "visual social search" tool at The NodeTime Project. Let's keep our eye on that.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 27, 2005
Posted by David Coleman
A recent CNET article noted that the typical office worker is interupted every three minutes by an e-mail, IM, phone call, etc. If you are working on something creative, it takes about 8 minutes for our brains to get into that state. With all these distractions how is anyone able to get anything done?
The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.
"People are ultraconnected. And you know what? Now they are starting to realize, 'Wow, I want to actually stop getting interrupted.'" Notes Chris Caposella a VP in the Microsoft Information Worker Business Unit.
Dan Russell, a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center, turns off the instant notification of e-mail and only looks at e-mail 2X a day and has cut the time he spends with e-mail in half. Other organizations, like Veritas Software have implemented "no e-mail Fridays." Employees can't e-mail one another on Friday, but they are allowed to e-mail customers or other parts of the storage company if they have to. The result? Workers spend more time connecting face to face.
A study by Hewlett-Packard earlier this year found that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail--checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation. Half of workers felt a need to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being "happy" to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.
Even airlines are starting to offer broadband Internet access. So how will we be able to deal with this tidal wave of communications?
"With Office 12, we will do things to make it a lot easier for people to be more effective in the way they manage all of these communication mechanisms," Capossela said. IBM also is looking at solutions to manage scheduling for the next version of Lotus Workplace, part of IBM's collection of software that rivals Office.
But technology may not be the solution. Like many issues in collaboration it is the "people and process issues" that are the crux of the problem.
"The problem, Russell said, is that there are only certain types of tasks that humans are good at doing simultaneously. Cooking and talking on the phone go together fine, as does walking and chewing gum (for most people). But try and do three math problems at once, and you are sure to end up in frustration."
I have written a lot about what I call "attention management" and what everyone else calls "Continuous Partial Attention" (term coined by Linda Stone). Stowe has been blogging about this for months, and he and I have had a few discussions on the subject.
Basically, he believes that your social networks are your filter for information overload. If A likes it and I like and trust A, then I should like it. I agree with Stowe to a point, in that social networks only deal with part of the problem. I do not believe that you will be able to filter enough through these networks to stop the overwhelm of your bandwidth for both information and attention.
I believe that the problem needs to be attached also from the other direction. That is to augment a person's ability to "attend" to content and events. In my view of the future there are a variety of technology solutions that might help. But I don't think the scheduling tools that Microsoft and Lotus are building are it. I believe that you will need to multiply your bandwith and attention by multiplying your self.
Some type of virtual agent that not only knows where you are, what you are doing and what collaboration programs or devices you have, but it also has a subset of your personality and is assigned to deal with specific types of tasks demanding your attention. For example, this virtual agent or avatar can deal with lower-level requests for attentiona and decisions around what to pick up at the grocery store. It knows your likes and dislikes, what is in the refrigerator and what is not, and you have empowered it to make those shopping decisions, and have the groceries delivered to your house at 6:00 pm (it knows your schedule and that you are due to have dinner with your family by 7:00 pm).
This leaves you free to deal with critical requests for your attention from your family, your boss, negotiating with a client, dealing with a crisis, etc. Since many fewer items fall into these "critical" categories your bandwith and attention are on overwhelmed, and yet all of these other demands on your attention are also being satisfied.
In a recent article by Dr. Doree Seligmann from Avaya Research Labs, she describes a virtual communications agent that is system agnostic and facilitates communication (or not) based on rules you give the system and what it knows about you and your devices. It is my belief that Avaya is building such a system as an abstracted layer that can be used by both developers and end-users. It is the closest to the Avatar or virtual agent that I described above that I have heard about.
However, I can't pay attention to everything, so if any of you out there know of other projects or services that will serve to augment my attention abilities I would love to hear about them!
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
My favorite geolocation hack, Plazes, has been updated to include an integration with Google Maps, along with a bunch of other stuff. Checkout the Where is Stowe Boyd page. Here's a zoom in on the 90 days history, showing just the wifi spots in New York City that I used in the past 90 days:
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Leave it to Google to start their own RSS reader. Steve Rubel has the news. So does John Battelle. I am sure there are others. Many others. The Google blog has a tiny little post on it too.
Basically, when you sign in to your Google Personalized Homepage, go to the "Add Content" link in the upper left corner, a customization area comes out. You can of course fiddle with placement of stuff and add more news, some bookmarks , the weather or whatever.
But, the big news is that you can add in any blog to your Google homepage. In essence, your homepage now can act as your RSS aggregator, albeit on a small scale. Nobody in their right mind would ever think of managing 300 feeds on a homepage like this. At least, not with the current layout. Additionally, it only shows titles, not full text, so you have to link out.
The above is a screenshot of the new homepage with 2 blogs inserted. You can see them on the left - Blogaholics and Get Real. You have the option to change the number of posts shown but not how they are shown.
It may challenge My Yahoo, but I don't think it has anything to compare with Bloglines, Lektora, or any of the other RSS aggregators out there.
Technorati Tags: Google, RSS, aggregator, personalization, search,
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 26, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I followed a pointer from Randy Charles Morin at RSS Blog to the new BlogPulse Profiles Beta. See the entry Get Real profile. I was hoping that they were taking the opposite tack to Technorati ranking, but it looks much the same:
796 ( 81 citations from 59 source(s) in past 30 days )
Post Frequency 17 per week
They both use the same approach, which is what I am calling the "Hit Parade" approach, as opposed to a longtail, cumulative approach. The latter, I think, is a better indicator of authority.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by David Coleman
I recently saw a press release about LiveWire's www.livewire.com, the new beta service that enables users to create rich-content websites and blogs with ease, as well as build community and instant-message one other and it got me to thinking what the components of trust are. Both the behavioral components and the new technologies that support trust and community. The new LiveWire service allows users to build websites and share files simply by dragging and dropping their content files onto the Five Across-powered Livewire application. The web pages can contain blogs, digital photographs, movies, spreadsheets, audio files or other multimedia assets.
My partner in podcasting (Bill Ryan) and I actually tried Five Across Bubbler www.fiveacross.com product to load our last Collaborate! pod cast on "Project and Program Management" and make it available for download at: http://bubbler.net/william_ryan/Collaborate!/. It takes a few minutes to figure out how to use Bubbler but then you can just drag the MP3 file over to make it available.
Tribe www.tribe.net also has recently added "open profiles", allowing users to aggregate data from other online destinations -- basically, from any site that publishes an RSS feed. For example, a Tribe user can set his profile to automatically include the latest posts on his blog (via, for example, Live Journal), the latest photos from his camera phone (via Flickr), his Amazon wish list, and even bookmarks from del.icio.us. Once established, the user's profile automatically updates whenever changes happen at any of those other sites. Users will also be able to obtain a unique Tribe URL to enable them to send people directly to their open profile. The Open Profiles allow you to do blogging on your profile, but they are also used as a way to let people get to know you, and help to build trust and community.
Other communities like "Live Journal" and even AOL have added the ability to Blog and support rich media and a variety of types of interactions. Although LiveWire is mostly about downloading music, the addition of Five Across's Bubbler tool for rapid development of web sites, along with an IM tool that supports presence detection as well as chat, file and schedule sharing makes LiveWare more than a P2P music sharing site, but one more dedicated to creating communities around your interests in music. We have been seeing a number of these sites (content-oriented communities) popping up recently, like Connect Via Books www.ConnectViaBooks.com from the UK which allows you to filter others in the system not by your music playlist, but by your reading list.
However, getting back to the topic of TRUST, in my experience, trust is built in part by what you say and what you do. A small part of trust is built by what you say, and a much larger part by what you do. Blogging allows you to have a more dynamic presence so that people can keep up with what you do and think (if they subscribe to your blog). But it is still your talking about what you did, not someone else experiencing it. It is that personal experience that tends to build trust.
A good example of communities that come together in a short time, have a great level of trust, and do amazing things in a very hostile environment are some of the camps that are created for Burning Man (a 40,000 person event that occurs at the end of August on the BlackRock Playa (desert) see http://www.burningman.com/. One of the groups I am familiar with is called "Opulent Temple," and they are a sound camp with all the DJs and high tech equipment that go along with such ventures. They have created a tribe of the same name (www.opttem.tribe.net) to help coordinate this camp/commuity at Burning Man in much the same way that LiveWire and other sites are brining together a variety of social software tools to help create community virtually.
Although the coordination of the camp occurs using a social tool like Tribe, the 80-100 people that are part of the Opulent Temple camp get a sense of the camp goals or themes, the roles people play at camp, and more detail about who you are. All this is great, yet it is through the pre-camp fund raising events, parties, art shows, etc. that many of the people in this camp get to know and trust each other. After all, unlike virtual communities these people will be camping together in a hot, dusty, chaotic environment for a week and doing amazing things. That takes real trust and coordination to do this!
As Blogging becomes more visual (vblog) and you have the ability to post a video of your daily experiences like Amanda Congdon at www.rocketboom.com maybe your ability to virtually be part of the experience and build trust will be greater? However, until then, I have to rely on referrals from friends and my own experience to determine who I will trust and what I will share!
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Kevin Marks wades in on the discussion about open tags at Many-to-Many:
Jeff Jarvis called for decentralised tags and restaurant reviews, and Stowe Boyd posted some ideas about how to achieve this.
Unfortunately, Stowe misunderstood how the existing open, decentralised tagging model works, and went off into a design dead-end because of this.
Hmmm. I'm not sure that it is a dead end, although it's clear that what I am proposing as an open tag model is currently not what has been implemented by Technorati and other tag services.
Kevin goes on:
Stowe confuses the tagspace linked to (which provides the context for the meaning of the tag), with the services that can index the tag. These are completely independent. You can link to Technorati, your own site, Wikipedia or anyone who provides a tagspace with a URL that ends in the tag you want - for example:
<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal" rel="tag">Get real</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/decentralisation" rel="tag" >decentralisation</a>,
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Stowe Boyd" rel="tag" >Stowe Boyd</a>
Actually, I never said that wasn't how today's tag URLs work, I just never explored all the flavors that Kevin identifies, because generally I don't think they are what people want to do.
Mostly, people have been using tag URLs that point to a term in the Technorati or other tag services, like so:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
or alternatively, they might collapse categories and tags at their blogs:
<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
This other sort of declarative tags, one that points to some other place on the web while allowing a service like Technorati to discover the relation being asserted -- like the "Decentralization" tag being associated with a decentralization entry in Wikipedia -- is potentially helpful, but like the more usual forms of tag declaration, they suffer from the same problems:
- The use of a URL to define the tag means that it has to point to somewhere, and that somewhere is defined at the time of writing. What I am striving for is a means to assert the relationship between the posting and the tag, not a place for a URL to point to. Using a URL as the denotation for a tag has boxed us into the need for it to point somewhere. Telling me that I can have it point anywhere doesn't help, because I don't really want to point anywhere.
- The overwhelming volume of tags that have been created in blog posts are of the 'points to Technorati tagspace' form. This basically cedes control of the tags to Technorati and other services.
- The second most common form of tag declaration is within bookmarking services, like Del.icio.us, where the user asserts a tag relationship between a tag, like "Thai", and some location on the web, or a similar sort of association between a tag and a picture, at a photo service like Flickr. But there is no manual creation of the tag in the URL: the bookmarking service handles the links, behind the scenes. [Note: I looked at the page source for a Del.icio.us tag, and there are no 'rel="tag"' elements there, so presumably they aren't using the microformat style for tagging.] This likewise puts the tag in the control of the bookmarking or photo service. Note that there is no way that I could adopt this Del.icio.us model for tagging my own posts, because then there would be no reference in my post to the tag.
Kevin also suggests I am approaching the problem in a wrongheaded way:
Stowe then spends a lot of space worrying about the problem of where he links to, as if this is set in stone at the time of posting. This is not just premature optimisation, it's optimising for a nonexistent problem. Because you control your own data on your own blog, if you later decide to link to a different tagspace, you can change your own links; you don't need an elaborate and fragile RSS hybrid with mandated behaviour to do so.
I think Kevin is too close to the problem that he doesn't see what it is. He is set on telling me that I don't understand how tags work, and how bloggers can use them. I am trying to explain a model of how services like Technorati should -- no, must -- work in the future for tagging to scale up to what we need it to be.
He states that since I control the text at my blog where I am making the tag declarations, then I have control of the 'data', and later, I can decide to link to a different tagspace. The problem is simply that I don't want to have to change the text that declare tags later to have them work for other tagspaces: I want the other tagspaces to point at my blog entry without me editing anything.
And, yes, I grant that the tag services of today and tomorrow can read and make sense of explicit tag declarations that point to Technorati or other services, to my own collapsed tags/categories tagspace at Corante, or even to random locations on the web like the Wikipedia example, but given that I am really trying to create a link to the tag, hanging in a universal tagspace, not a physical location on the web per se, why are we using hyperlinks in the first place? (Although I have built this entire argument based on the premise that we have already come too far with tags to rethink that questionable notion.)
And Kevin -- and various others (see Ryan King's comment on Jeff's post, for example) -- seem to ignore the second part of the proposed open tags model: the operational model of the tag services is backward. I don't want to encode a link from my blog to a tag entry at Technorati, or an entry at a Dinnerbuzz restaurant review page: I want those services to a/ create the links from those entries to my blog (which Technorati and others do, so long as I ping them), and then b/ create the trackbacks at my blog that point to those Technorati or Dinnerbuzz entries (which they do not do, today).
Let me dig into that last point more deeply, because I think it is a core element of the transition that I am advocating. In the open tag approach I am advocating a tag I create in my blog entry is the declaration of a relationship between that entry and that universal tag: a link between my blog post and "Thai", now and forever, independent of the services that may or may not acknowledge that link. Later on, immediately after I write the post or perhaps years from now, sevices may discover the declared link, and take action on it: creating a Dinnerbuzz entry in the list of entries associated with that specific Thai restaurant I wrote about, for example. The second half of the convenant between the service and the writers that declare the tags should be this: the tag service should create both an explicit link to the blog post being referenced, and a trackback ping should be sent to the corresponding blog entry.
That trackback will automate the second part of the tag link: and it is a one to many relationship. I create a tag declaration in a post and that can lead to an unlimited number of pointers to other, who-knows-what-they-are tag service entries, lists, or whatevers. (Yes, I know that many blog technologies don't implement trackback. Well, it is another immensely useful standard, and they should, and they all will in time, I suspect.)
Today's services expect us to either do all the work of linking from our posts to their tagspaces explicitly and manually if we want the references to exist in the post. I have to point to the "http://technorati.com/tags/thai" if I want readers of my writing to know that Technorati is pointing back at my entry.
The restaurant review also sheds light on another complexity that today's tag model handles badly. I can safely assert the Technorati tag "http://technorati.com/tags/thai" in a post, because I know that Technorati will create a tag list once it spiders my blog entry, and the URL will resolve appropriately. But when I write a review with what are intended to resolve to a unique identifier for a "Thai" "restaurant" called "Thai Luang" in "Reston" "Virginia" and say it was a "4 out of 5", there is no possible way I can guess what the actual, physical location on some hypothetical, or many hypothetical, tag-based restaurant review services will be. But when the idealized Dinnerbuzz finally begins to collate reviews of my favorite Thai restaurant, it will have a physical location: perhaps a dynamic one like "http://www.dinnerbuzz.com/query?reston+virginia+thai+thailuang" or a static one like "http://www.dinnerbuzz.com/US/virginia/reston/thai/thailuang". But I don't know what that location is at the time of writing, nor should I have to. And I don't want to manually go back and add it to the post years from now. The idealized Dinnerbuzz, or a future Technorati, should acknowledge the creation of the link pointing to my entry by sending the appropriate trackblack ping, and that will put the URL in my blog post automatically.
I also think that the current model of registering the tags -- pinging Technorati, and waiting for the service to spider the site -- is silly. We should use a simple RSS registration model, and provide the tags in the feed, explicitly marked. This would make things simply and faster. (As an interesting sidebar, the implication is that authors can limit the exploitation of their tags only to services to which they have explicitly registered. I'll leave that for another post, though.)
Instead of grappling with the big picture dynamics of the model I propose -- the problems in static and closed tag declarations, and the need for a trackback-based tag acknowledgement, in particular -- Kevin seems to be suggesting that everything is fine, just leave it to him and the other experts who have concocted the current mechanism that they have implemented in services like Technorati.
Marc Canter comes to my defense:
[from Hey Kevin]
[...] if smart people like Jeff Jarvis and Stowe are calling for it - then there must be something to their complaints. By defintion is somebody bitches about something - there has to be SOMETHING there - right?
Your retort implies (as I happen to know) that Technorati has figured out that having the Technorati domain in the tag URL is not the ONLY way to do it - so you're speaking the right line - now.
But that's NOT how it was launched and so subsequently - everyone still uses the original code you guys distributed which DID use the Tehcnorati domain in it. No amount of backpeddling will change that.
So now you have the problem of the mis-conceptions that Jeff and Stowe have harped on. Sorry - it's not my fault, I'm just pointing out - what's up. (This is where I say "Don't shoot the messenger" - I love Technorati - and I'm just trying to make sure you realize what it's like - for us.)
Thirdly - though I totally understand you and grok you and have been through this with Tantek, Matt, Rohit and others - I STILL wanna point out that the technique you refer to - is just ONE way to use, store and access micro-content.
I sure hope you guys and gals are open minded to OTHER techniques for sharing, tagging, aggregating and in general - pushing RSS beyond it's current limits. I call it micro-content. Others do too.
Somewhere in there - your cult decided to call it microformats. Kevin - you and I have been around too long to care about what it's called - 'cause we ARE talking about the same thing! Right?
Briefly stated - we need microcontent feeds.
We need shared servers.
Life isn't ONLY about search engines spidering and indexing microformats. That's an approach a SEARCH ENGINE company would take - DUH! But to me - I want MORE than just search engines storing micro-content and that means they have to access, store and index this m-c via feeds, pages and legacy systems - as well.
Well, I haven't swallowed the microcontent kool-aid, either, but I concur with Mark on the thrust of his comments: this stuff is too important to leave it in the hands of the engineers and entrepreneurs. This has to be a solution that works for us, does what we need it to: the bloggers, the individuals, the hypothetical beneficiaries of this social architecture we are busy creating one tag at a time. If we leave it to others, however benvolent they may be individually, collectively their interests are not ours, their motives and needs are not ours, and we will get something other than what we want, especially when we aren't sure of what we want. And perhaps what is implemented will serve our needs, but perhaps it won't. And then, they may not turn out to be benevolent, and we may wind up with something that serves their needs, and ours not at all.
So we need to have a truly open tag model, which I define as one that meets the implicit convenant with the tag creator: a covenant that we will need to make much more explicit. But it will not be condensed, as one critic to my earlier post stated, into "RTFM" (read the fucking manual). We need to create the operating manual of what we need, and hand that to the engineers, not the engineers telling us what they have implemented and how good for us it is.
This discussion is a big step forward toward that, but we have a long way to go, judging by the positions that are being taken in this and the related posts and comments in the thread.
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
July 25, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Yahoo makes yet another acquisition, this time buying up Pixoria, the company responsible for the widget app Konfabulator. The first move - Konfabular (Yahoo! Widgets) is now free.
Pixoria widgets were previously Mac based, but they now serve both Windows XP and Mac OS X.
Pixoria has over 1000 third party widgets plus a great platform for people to build Yahoo-enabled mini apps using our APIs and they are a great new desktop distribution channel for Yahoo. Yahoo will keep the app as a free product, and apparently Yahoo will refunding people who purchased it in the last couple of months. Pixoria was just 3 guys - Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke and Ed Voas. This will clearly be a way for Yahoo to spread its API (OpenYahoo) into various desktop applications. Via Om Malik
So, Yahoo has openly made this move as a way to share content in a usable format - XML feeds. Konfabulator fits into the picture by, in their words [decaying link], "provid[ing] real-world examples how how to use this stuff." Current Konfabulator developers will be folded into the new Yahoo Developer community, where they're likely to receive a bit more support.
Good move on the part of Yahoo. Very much in line with what we've seen from them this year.
Previous posts:
Yahoo buys dialpad - June 14, 2005
Yahoo buys blo.gs - June 14, 2005
MyWeb 2.0 - June 30, 2005
MyWeb Beta - April 30, 2005
Yahoo acquires Flickr - March 20, 2005
Technorati Tags: yahoo, konfabulator
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Adam demonstrates that Technorati actually has access to historical link counts for the blogs it tracks:
Stowe,
We ran the calculations on your historical counts -- that is, the total number of links to your blog that we have in our databases.
The results: A total of 2817 links from 757 unique inbound sources.
-A-
As I said the other day, I believe that this information -- the long-tail, cumulative link count -- is much more important than the current link count that Technorati provides, which is more of a hit parade, short term approach. In general, if I go to Technorati I would like to see a measure of authority tied to the blogs -- which is a long tail phenomenon -- as opposed to recent popularity.
[tags: Technorati, Social Architecture]
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Mary Hodder at Napsterization digs into the same issues I have been bumping against regarding Technorati's model of link counts:
Technorati also only counts links and sites from blogs that have a link on the front page. Therefore, if a bloggers blogs, which bloggers tend to do, their old posts scroll off the front pages and therefore the links in those old posts go off the Technorati count at the same time. Blogroll links stay in the counts because they are permanently on the front pages of blogs, but if a blogger's post links to another blog, that link only gets counted so long as it's on the linking blog's top home page.
Bloglines on the other hand, gives a total link count, for all Blogline's history. If a blogger is linked to 10 times, in the history of Bloglines aggregation of links, those links count as ten, towards Dave's Bloglines total. Bloglines doesn't give a base count of sources doing the linking. Also, Bloglines shows you everything since they started tracking blogs, so Dave's first link goes back to a post on August 22 2002. Technorati would age that post off their link counts, since that blog no longer shows the post on the front page (it long ago scrolled off the page). However, I wasn't able to look at Dave's first link on Technorati, because the service kept returning error messages about high search volumes, so I can't compare their first result to Blogline's first result.
Mary intends a multipart series on this and related issues: this one is on link counts, later ones are key word search, subscription (watchlist) search, spam, and special services.
Personally, I think a number of us are being poked into asking these questions becuase the growth of the blogosphere is leading to a breakdown in services -- like Technorati -- that we have come to rely on and, simultaneously, increasing the importance and value of these results.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 24, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I waved my hand at what I am calling Open Tags in a recent post, inspired in part by a Jeff Jarvis' post, Made For A Distributed World.
I made the case that the current model for html-based tagging is flawed from the distributed world perspective, because it is based on specifying at the time of writing exactly what services are going to manage the tag information. For example, consider this Technorati-based tag:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
That tag denotes that Technorati -- at some time in the not too distant future, once Technorati crawls my post -- will create a new entry in its database associated with the tag "Thai" that points to the posting I placed the tag in. Which seems to be fine, except for a few key problems:
- I don't necessarilly know in advance all the services that I would like to have point to the post. For example, I might like to have a bunch of services -- a restaurant review service, Technorati, a cigar-oriented service, and a wine review service -- all point to the posting.
- And I don't want top have to clutter up the posting with an expanding list of tags, each associated with a different service, which is an alternative, but a pain in the ass. Note that this is the direction that closed tags will take us!
- One alternative to Technorati-style tagging is to use a bookmarking service like Del.icio.us, and to manually tag all entries there. However, this does not lead to tags being present in the post, so I find that inadequate.
What I really want is a way to define the tags that should be associated with the post -- such as "Thai", "Cohiba Churchill", "Restaurant", "Gruet Blanc de Noirs", and "Reston" -- but to defer the identity of the service or services that are supposed to support the tags. (Note for programmers: this is a classic 'late-binding' issue as dealt with in many programming languages approaches to type-binding.)
My vision of open tags are designed to avoid the identity of Technorati-style services I might want to index my posts. For example, the Technorati tag "http://technorati.com/tags/thai" denotes Technorati as the service to handle the tag, as well as pointing to a specific page on the Internet generated by the Technorati system either on demand or in advance of an attempt to access it. Instead, my idea of an open tag relies on a relative address, like "/tags/thai".
<a href="/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
A reader of my earlier piece, Randy Charles Morrin, pointed out that this relative address leads to a problem:
The problem with this clean approach, is that if you click on the link, then you are most likely looking at a 404. Get Real!
Randy is right: the browser resolves the relative address in the URL to be a hypothetical address at the Corante server -- "http://www.corante.com/getreal/tags/thai" -- which doesn't exist. Hence, a 404 message: file not found.
Note that even with the Technorati-style static tags, you get a similar sort of message from Technorati in the case that the tag has not been created yet: although Technorati provides you, instead, the HTML to stick into your post to create the appropriate tag.
What is lacking for the open tag to work is some retooling at the blogging level: open tagging requires a tool -- either independent or integrated into the blogging technology -- to create pages corresponding to the open tags, and to manage the information there in a distributed fashion in way that is analogous to what Technorati does in a centralized way.
One option is to rewrite all my MovableType templates to make a direct connection between blog categories and tags. I would then simply map the MovableType category feature to generate the open tags This would work, since I could change my MovableType category archive settings to generate the correct directories: "http://www.corante.com/getreal/tags/thai", for example.
Note, however, that this doesn't lead to an integration with Technorati or other tag-based solutions. It simply collapses blog categories and tags. If I want to get today's Technorati to work, I still need to create URLs that are Technorati specific. But I don't want to create them at the time of writing the post, either by hand or automatically, because there are going to be many Technorati-ish services in the future and I don't necessarily know who they are at the time of writing.
This is much like the idea of people writing about your posts: at the time of my writing this there is no way I could possibly know who is going to make a comment about these thoughts on open tags. That's why we use trackbacks: so that in the future people can comment on what I have written, and the blog technology handles the trackbacks. So tomorrow, or next week, someone reading this piece will scroll to the bottom and be able to see a list of the folks that have riffed on this open tags post. I believe the same mechanism should be used by services like Technorati, instead of the explicit, in-advance tag specification we use today.
Today, MovableType and other blog solutions use pings to inform solutions like Technorati when it's time to read posts and scavenge their tags, or else we can manually browse Technorati and tell them to do so by providing the URL of our blogs. But that is a dumb model given that we have RSS.
For the open tag model I propose that Technorati-like services request an RSS feed from users that they, in effect, would subscribe to. For example, I could make my MovableType implementation generate "http://www.corante.com/getreal/tags/tagspace.xml". The services could poll the RSS feed at their preferred cycles, and generate any appropriate entries. Note that these RSS feeds would have to be configured to provide the tags in an easily accessed fashion. And, as I suggested, these services could trackback to the appropriate blog entries, and sent a link to the corresponding entries that they have assimilated into their own tag spaces.
If we shift to open tags, the Technoratis of the tag world will have to either get smarter about what sorts of tags are relevant -- perhaps a wine service would only link to posts that include tags that 'make sense', like "Gruet Blanc de Noirs" -- or else we could give them direction.
Jarvis suggested specifically denoting the identity of the service that should pay attention to the tags, using the "for:dinnerbuzz" type tags. A service, like the Dinnerbuzz restaurant review service, would see that tag in the RSS feed, and would then add the post to its database, using the other tags to identify it as a Reston Virginia Thai restaurant. A trackback ping could be used to send the URL to the various corresponing tag pages at Dinnerbuzz, such as "http://dinnerbuzz/tags/thai' for example, and these would be associated the entry at my local tag pages.
But this leads us back to hard-coding the identity of the service or services we wish to have tracking our tags, although it would let us use a single set of tags for many services. I believe, in the long run, the services will have to become smart enough to look at the tags and decide whether an entry is relevant. A restaurant review service like the idealized Dinnerbuzz could simply look for the "restaurant" tag, and rely on elements from the restaurant review domain -- cities, states, cuisines, "4 out of 5", and the like -- as markers. It might be smart enough to ignore the other tags -- "Cohiba Churchill" and "Gruet" for example -- that other services might pick up on.
The open tags approach has great value, I believe, but there is a lot working against it. First of all, we have a huge proliferation of closed tagspaces out there in use, such as Technorati, and they don't work this way. But it's early days yet, and an enterprising competitor to Technorati could decide to launch a new service based on the open model, to some extent taking advantage of the performance problems that seem to be plaguing Technorati over the past few months.
(Note that Technorati's performance problems are significantly influenced by the closed model they have adopted: they are forced to read the source of our blog pages, looking for tags buried in URLs. In the open tag model, the tags would be encoded in XML-based RSS feeds, so performance of the tags parsing part might be significantly faster. Other aspects of the implementation would not be faster, but it seems that the backlog is at the blog reading phase.)
In the long run, open tag style services will emerge anyway, since others will see the treasure trove of information buried in Technorati-style tags and will decide to mine it. Realizing that the closed model has all the problems I have sketched out, someone or some group will propose a service that works in the open fashion, at least with regard to sending trackbacks to posts that are deemed relevant since this will lead to traffic at their service. The real problem will be bloggers considering this to be blog trackback spam. A transition to a consistent format for open tags' RSS is likely to be a later development.
So we should start thinking about the long-tail value of our tags: they are not just for the service we are explicitly using today. Technorati may be long gone five years from now (I hope not!), but some service will be mining years of archived but still relevant opinions about Coldplay's X & Y, restaurants in Reston, and what's the best champagne to stand up to a Cohiba cigar.
One interim solution is to collapse categories and tags, as I outlined above, and to redesign your blog templates to generate both open and closed tags. For example, I could have each tag/category listed at the foot of my entries in the following style:
Thai [t] Cohiba Churchill [t] Restaurant [t] Gruet Blanc de Noirs [t] Reston [t]
and each tag would resolve to the local tag/category archive page when clicked, and the associated "[t]" would be the explicitly generated technorati tag. At some time in the future, if and when Technorati either ceases to exist or decides to support the open tags model, I could simply tweak my template to drop the "[t]" element. I plan to adopt this approach, at Get Real and perhaps across Corante as a whole.
[I don't address it in this piece, but I also believe the various bookmarketing services should adopt the trackback elements of the open tag model. That is to say that when someone reads this post tomorrow, and enters it into his Del.icio.us bookmarks with some commentary and tags, Deli.cio.us should ping my blog to create a trackback to that bookmark.]
The world is distributed, and our approach to making sense of it through tags should be as well. We need to anticipate that closed models are inherently at odds with what we are trying to do when we tag our entries. Obviously, if Technorati or some other competitor became super-dominant, and occupied the role of a de facto tagspace monopoly, this would be moot. But that is unlikely, for a wide variety of reasons. We will likely see an explosion of tag-based services, as the value of the blogosphere's resources expands, and all that frenzy will inevitably lead to an open and distributed model for tags, something like this open tags model I have outlined.
Comments (11)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 22, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So, I got a response back from Adam Hertz at Technorati regarding my recent query about the service appearing to be stuck. Yes, it was. (I should start charging for finding these bugs. How many is that, now?)
Stowe,
I want to thank you for reporting this. It turns out that you turned up a glitch we'd introduced: We recently upgraded the hardware where we store blog metadata (such as link counts), and our link counter wasn't populating the new database. So we were displaying stale data. We fixed this, and now we're displaying current data.
As you mentioned in your other email, your counts went down. Technorati bases its authority calculations on the number of current incoming links and sources, rather than the cumulative counts throughout history. So for example, if someone linked to you in the past, but the post containing that link has scrolled off the bottom of that person's blog, we don't count that link in the calculation of your authority.
We still maintain "non-current" links in our database, and they are accessible in cosmos search results. We just don't use them in our authority calculation.
I hope this helps you understand how our service works. I'm sorry your link counts were stuck. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.
Best,
-A-
Well, a/ that bugs sucks, but I'm glad they found it (don't they QA these new features?), and b/ that feature sucks, and I always assumed that the link counts were cumulative. Shouldn't they be? Or at least, shouldn't there be both kinds: these transient, hit parade sorts of link counts that I guess they were always implementing and I was too stupid to notice, and the on-going, long-tail, cumulative link count. After all, these links persist forever, so shouldn't the link count?
I'm interested to see what others think about this. Did you know it worked that way? Was I the only one who didn't get that memo? More importantly, do you think it should? I maintain that the link count should be cumulative links, not some transient 30 day running number or whatever the algorithm is.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So I have been trying to cut the folks at Technorati some slack, since they have gone over to a new beta recently. But the fact is that the site is becoming impossibly backlogged. This is the message I got several times today:
I also sent email complaining that the info about Get Real hadn't been updated in weeks: stuck at "404 links from 260 source". I came back from lunch -- I didn't get email from Technorati support, note, and noticed that I had been updated: "377 links from 248 sources" -- going backward in links even though I have had 16 new links in the last 3 days... again, according to Technorati.
I am starting to wonder if the backlog and performance is making Technorati not only difficult to use, but maybe the data is becoming incomplete or erroneous?
I guess I am going to have to give Jeremy Wright's recommendations about Technorati alternatives -- particularly IceRocket -- a look-see. Also note that yesterday's post about Open Tags is immensely relevant: we can't depend on any single service to manage the critical glue that holds the social architecture together, and the dumb way we are managing tags -- based on a specific service's tag namespace -- must be jettisoned, or exptended, and soon.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 21, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Even though he was completely wrong about how the Dinnerbuzz solution works, Jeff Jarvis is dead-on in his Made For A Distributed World. Jeff thought that Dinnerbuzz would aggregate blog posts tagged with various sort of restaurant information -- "Thai" "Reston" "Virginia" -- and then provide a search mechanism so that people could find posts using the domain schema for restaurants: "find all Thai restaurant reviews for Reston Virginia". Alas, it turns out to be not constructed that way.
Jeff's point is that in a distributed world people want to post all their observations at their own blo, not over hundreds of thematic blogs. I would like to post about wine, restaurants, music, and gizmos at my A Working Model blog, and simply ping (via trackback, perhaps) other aggregators (like the idealized Dinnerbuzz site Jeff was dreaming of), and they could sort out what's what based on the tags.
Jeff suggests that either Technorati or Delicious style tags would work, but an expanding world of services mining meaning from tags mean that we would start to have dozens of tagspaces. Currently, a technorati tag for "Thai" looks like this:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
Which means that the tag is managed by technorati at that URL. I would like to shift over to distributed tags, based on a relative path in the href:
<a href="/tags/thai" rel="tag">Thai</a>
This would mean that the dozens of sites I might be distributing my reviews to could all inspect my tags, and detemrine if they were relevant for thier use. As Jeff points out, we could include specific tags as guidance, like this:
<a href="/tags/for:dinnerbuzz" rel="tag">for:dinnerbuzz</a>
This would mean we could reuse the same bunch of tags in a single post for wine, cigar, and restaurant reviews, for example. More importantly, we could write posts and tag it independently of the service or services that will ultimately reuse the information. We wouldn't be locked into a specific service (like Technorati or Delicious) and we could begin to operate in an open tagging model, which we are going to need.
[Note: I tried to dig around in this topic a few weeks ago, in a discussion with Dave Sifry of Technorati in which I was referring to "remote tags". But this idea of Open Tags is a much cleaner treatment.]
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Stumbled onto Tagsurf today, while reading several weighty papers (Clay Shirky and Pietro Speroni) about the different ways people are trying to use tags, the value of tagclouds, and the way that tags associated with a post change (normalize, mature?) over time.
About Tagsurf
Tagsurf is a new type of online message board which uses tags to help organize subjects instead of threads or channels. Like Del.icio.us used the concept of tags to organize shared links, and Flickr used tags to organize and share photos, Tagsurf uses tags to help organize posts and messages between users. You can sign up for various alerts based on tags, so you can be notified of new messages instantly across a variety of mediums: IM, Chat and Email. Tagsurf is a hyper-forum: It allows you to communicate on a variety of levels, yet pulling only the messages that you feel are important.
Tagsurf is currently in development and we consider it in Alpha state. It's usable but it could break at any time. You've been warned.
The notification of tag-based forums via IM intrigues me. I have therefore started a thread there, called "Tags: Folders or Annotations", to pursue some of the points that Clay and P.S are touching upon. I tagged the thread with these tags, by the way: tagalicious tags tagsurf folksonomy fauxsonomy. So login, and let's see what a tag-based thread feels like.
What I started the thread with:
So the question is: are tags more of a mechanism for organization -- putting things into piles or folders -- or a way to annotate artifacts? Or is this distinction unhelpful?
I find myself creating tags on blog posts so that I can denote a thread of discussion over time -- like the 'hot memes' widget in the right margin at Get Real. And I seldom find myself tagging things in a way that would seem like a comment: like "nice post!".
I created an AIM notifier to ping me when something happens with the thread. Let's give it a go!
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 20, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I now run a bunch of instant messaging clients on my desktop, for a variety of boneheaded reasons:
- iChat - I am on the Mac, and iChat is really a cool way to interact with other Mac users, so long as they are likewise using iChat, that is. iChat also gateways to AIM and Jabber, so I use iChat as my client to talk to those worlds, but that can be less than optimal, since a number of the AIM and Jabber features don't work in iChat, or the other services don't support iChat style addresses. My handle is stoweboyd@mac.com, which various AIM services don't recognize as an AIM address, for example.
- I recently downloaded the Yahoo Messenger client, because I wanted some means to IM with Yahoo folks. I discovered that a/ the user interface is ugly, and b/ all the neato-cool features of the new Yahoo beta are not supported on Mac: that same old Windows-first approach of dissing all the Mac minority.
- I just have given up on Microsoft instant messaging solutions, primarily because of their antipathy for Mac. If they had ported Outlook to Mac, I probably would have stayed with it, since so many applications and services integrate with it (like Plaxo, for example), but I have made the jump over to Mail and iCal.
- I had tried to run various multiheaded instant messaging clients on the Mac, like Fire and Proteus, but they were maddening, so I have dropped them, at least until the time that someone comes up with a way to support more than just text interoperability. I really need audio and video.
- And then there is Skype. That has become the number two instant messaging solution for me, and often an IM chat in iChat becomes an audio call in Skype. I am considering swithching to Skype as my primary conduit, and most likely will do so when the video capability is debuted, later this year. There are several third party solutions, like vSkype and dialcom's spontania4IM, that support video, but they do not support Mac (Grrrr).
My pal, Stuary Henshall, who is perhaps the world's leading Skype head, sent me this message:
So I went to look at the Jyve Tools, and, yes, you guessed it, they only run on Windows. So I can't post the neato-cool chiclet on Get Real showing my Skype presence, as shown here.
The Apple folks ought to get with the big switch that is going on here, and make iChat integrate completely with Skype, or pay someone to build all these cool Skype related widgets for Mac. Because I think that Skype is building the kind of momentum and user base that could lead to a wholesale defection from the other services, and I for one am ready to quit.
Since Apple decided not to build a closed network of their own, nor to rely on the federated model of Jabber, they should licence Skype and build it into the next generation of iChat. Skype is already squarely in competition with Yahoo and Microsoft, given the strong push those companies are making toward VoIP in their instant messenging products, but Apple has seemingly let that battle go, choosing to not add VoIP into iChat.
So a tighter link with Apple is likely to be a good move for Skype, based on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Especially when Mac comes out with iPod Phone (including video!) and squares off with Microsoft in the looming monster battle for the living room: the little black box that will control the family's internet-based entertainment. It's going to be Apple, with the killer iPod brand and partnered with Intel, versus Microsoft's Xbox and Windows solutions. Apple lacks various key pieces of the puzzle -- like a viable game platform, instant messaging plus VoIP, and a tivo solution -- but Jobs is likely lining those pieces up.
And, just as a side effect, one outcome of that battle is likely to be consolidation of the fragmented instant messaging world. If and when someone wins that battle I believe it will be like Betamax/VHS, and the standard will become ubiquitous. Its early to call a winner, but Microsoft's flabby innovation these days when contrasted with iPod's market dominance in digital music makes me nod toward Apple. And if Skype wins big as a result, thats cool with me. I just want one buddylist, and if the government isn't going to force interoperability, llike they should, then I am rooting for an instant messaging monopoly. And please, God, don't let it be Microsoft.
[tags: Skype, Jyve, vSkype, Spontania4IM, Stuart Henshall, iChat, iPod Phone, Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft, Proteus, Fire, Battle For The Livingroom, social+tools]
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology | Telecommunications
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got a Goolge alert about a new social networking solution, called look4mac.com, which seems to be motivated by the premise that people who use macs would like to have a social network excluding non-Mac users. Hmmm. I don't think so.
Using the now conventional (yawn) friend of a friend network model (see above), look4mac seems only suited for people in the Mac business world -- like technicians, mac software developers and support staff, and perhaps graphic artists -- who want to buy and sell goods and services to each other. The site does not use the social media approach (blogs) but relies on the older collaboration model of forums and interest groups (yawn).
No new ground is plowed here, and although I am trying hard to suspend my disbelief and imagine that for a very specific constituency this could be useful... but, nah, I really can't buy it. And I don't really understand the social network feature, given that it appears to not be very integrated with other features, like classified and forums. And look4mac offers a photo gallery and sharing capability, but does not include the key social architecture widget of tags, for photos or other artifacts. I pass, and I am a very ardent Mac head, although I don't make my living servicing them, which may be the whole point of the service.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 19, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
InfoWorld is reporting some stats from NetApplications.com stating that Firefox is gaining ground in the browser market.
Market share for Firefox was 8.71% in June, up from 8% in May. Each month the Firefox market share has been rising by a half or whole percentage point, with the majority of growth matched with a loss in IE share.
Analysts are expecting that once Firefox grabs 10% of the market its growth will accelerate significantly, obviously benefiting from mass market recognition. Some analysts, using slightly different models, have already pegged Firefox as having reached and surpassed this 10% marker.
Anyway, it's not been an entirely up week for Firefox. As reported on CNet (thanks to Scoble for the link), the latest 1.0.5 update, which had many security matches, had some code changes that caused some extensions to stop working. A new release is scheduled to fix this. Meanwhile, all non-English versions of 1.0.5 have been halted - to some angst from the public. PR nightmare.
When Asa Dotzler was at Gnomedex, we had a brief chat about the issue of Firefox extensions. In order to build a core product that simplifies the web experience, they have decided to leave many features to other developers in the form of extensions. They are thereby not responsible for those extensions and people are free to add them on or not, customizing their web experience.
However, we can see here that Mozilla is not completely free from managing the extensions. Rather than leaving the fixes to the developers - in essence, asking them to release new versions - Firefox will now be updated to manage this. I think this is a good PR move on their part, as the developer community is important to Mozilla, but their desire to correct the code to work with the extensions has caused flare ups from those countries who never received the 1.0.5 release, and are now forced to wait. It's an interesting trade-off.
It seems this has been the week for reflection on Firefox. ZDNet has four-page interview with Asa Dotzler all about grassroots marketing and the reflection of this in the mainstream press. Though the Firefox movement began as a grassroots campaign, it has grown to gain more than significant mainstream coverage - hundreds of references on most mainstream press websites.
One interesting thing to note is that with the release of IE 7, about 50% of businesses will not be able to upgrade - since IE 7 will not be released for Windows 2000. Asa expects significant corporate growth for Firefox will come from this opportunity.
We're excited about Microsoft launching IE 7 — it will remind a lot of people that if they want better features they have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading. Even if we stopped supporting Windows 98, a company can support [Firefox on Windows 98] themselves as it is open source. This is one of the advantages of open source — you can avoid the forced update cycle.
As we improve our tools for corporate deployments and people feel they're being left behind on Windows 2000, hopefully we'll see a real domino effect.
The article gives a tidy little overview of recent movements in the Firefox sphere, as well as going over some of the features to appear in 1.1 (including auto install of patches and drag and drop tabs!) - and, I'm sure, a feature or two will drop without our even noticing.
I love watching the progression of the Firefox movement - it says volumes about what people want in their online experience. So, little PR hiccups will not, in the end, stop what has begun.
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, IE, SpreadFirefox
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got a PR email the other day from AIM, asking
EVER WONDER HOW POPULAR YOU REALLY ARE? THE AOL INSTANT MESSENGER (AIM®) SERVICE HAS THE ANSWER
New AIMFIGHT.com Site Lets AOL® Members and AIM® Users
Gauge Their Online Popularity, Compare Buddy List Ranking With Friends, Colleagues and AIM Users Everywhere
Dulles, VA July 18, 2005 Are you the social center of the online universe? Do you covet the pinging sound of popularity and importance? Today, American Online, Inc. and the AOL® Instant Messenger(TM) (AIM®) service unveiled a new Buddy List ranking feature and Web site that let users once and for all answer the burning question: "How Popular Am I?"
Live today, AIMFIGHT.com (www.AIMFIGHT.com) lets AOL® members and AIM® users see how connected they are to the online community at any given moment. By entering their AOL or AIM Screen Name, as well as that of a friend, users can square off against their buddies to see just how popular they really are, and compare Buddy List rank.
We have seen a lot of this sort of gaming in the early days of the social networking explosion, when people would attempt to become the 'most connected' at orkut or LinkedIn.
In an accompanying description of what social networks are, the AIMFIGHT site is pretty good, and pretty funny.
I checked who was more connected, Greg Narain or me, using the 'boydstowe' and 'madmonknyc' handles. I dominated!
Of course, it would be a lot more easy to just put the numbers on the buddy list, like other attributes. In my ongoing Nerdvana rant, I'd like all these sorts of social attributes to be on the buddy list entries, but in a case like this it's even more obvious that it should be displayed there, instead of this silly AIMFIGHT screen.
What I would like to do with this underlying circles of friends and friends of friends information is to be able to make my own attributes public: where I am geographically, recent blog posts, my availability, or whatever. The implicit social network latent in the instant messaging network is just crying out to be tapped, and not for silly games like this: it's the future center of the online universe if someone at AOL, Google, MSN, or Yahoo wises up to it.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Cousin danah suggests that it is the market trend data over at MySpace that is leading News Corp to buy the social networking company:
Unlike the other YASNS, the value of MySpace comes from the data on media trends that is the core of what people share on that service. You have millions of American youth identifying with media and expressing their cultural values on the site. Marketers who want to understand the constantly shifting youth trends are often looking for a perch from which to be the ideal voyeur. And with MySpace, they found it. Here, youth are sharing media left right and center and forgetting that they are doing so under the watchful eye of Big Media who are certain to use this to manipulate them. Because youth believe that MySpace is a social tool for them, they are not conscious of how much data they're giving to marketers about their habits.
Hmmm. I don't know that Murdoch is really interested in the market trends so much as the growth curves at MySpace, and the 'several million' in profits it posted. My bet is that the social architecture for MySpace combined with people's passion for music represents a turning point for the music industry, and Murdoch and Co. decided to buy it before it cost billions. Moreover, the same social architecture, combined with other domains -- movies, TV, books, wine, TV, games -- could turn MySpace into the socialized replacement for Amazon, since Amazon has frittered away their lead in the space and yeilded the Web 2.0 era to others.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
July 16, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Dana Blankenhorn thinks that Technorati should be for sale.
A lot of people out there have been noticing Technorati falling behind in tracking links - while Bloglines pulls ahead.
Dana thinks now is the time for an infusion of major cash. The mass market is knocking at the door, ready to use the tool. It needs to keep up, and for that needs cash.
Dana's advice: Self-fund, fast. Sell. Or lose out.
Technorati Tags:
|
