KernelPop

Beacon

2010-01-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

For some random reason, I remembered I used to post stuff to this blog. I couldn't even remember what it was called...

Google helped me find it, and firefox remembered my password. So here I am again.

Its a fascinating archive of my frame of mind in early 2006... it seems like such a long time ago and really highlights a huge gap since. I guess I've been buried by work. But I know I've had tons of ideas. It would be nice to retrace them right now, but I guess I got lazy and they evaporated as fast as they came.

Maybe I'll start to put it back out there again.

NBA Widget

2007-05-17T07:53:00.001-07:00

Fractal Value Pattern

2006-11-03T20:10:00.000-08:00

Blizzl0r
Originally uploaded by Math Jazz.

Simple exponential would have been convenient, but its not quite so one-directional, is it?

Picking Winners

2006-10-22T19:44:00.000-07:00

There is a debate in the policy world that has been going on for a long time: Whether or not a central entity should decide focus and investment, or if the frontiers should find their own way. There is no concensus on this issue...

We also practice both without really noticing, and work hard to play sides against the other in the name of something else. At the end of the day (and from either side) it seems to be the winners who wind up picking the Winners.

Yada

2006-10-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

Get Version 1 Out

2006-10-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across Paul Graham's startup essay again today and found this part resonated a little too much:

... get a version 1 out as soon as you can ... The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
The other approach is what I call the "Hail Mary" strategy. You make elaborate plans for a product, hire a team of engineers to develop it (people who do this tend to use the term "engineer" for hackers), and then find after a year that you've spent two million dollars to develop something no one wants. This was not uncommon during the Bubble, especially in companies run by business types, who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be carefully
planned.

My world has become some odd hybrid of these two approaches. I'll say this: They don't go that well together. Gotta pick one. Or at least, crown one king.

Macrostructures

2006-10-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

Macrostructures, Inc

Some Fruit

2006-10-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

I've been quiet for a while, but I've been starting to see some fruit from the 2.0 fad -- and it has very little to do with Youtube.

The whole thing went overboard. More hype than it deserved, and the hype seem to spoil the promise.

But I stumbled across finetune today. I started to realize the power of consumer distribution and how consumer interaction is shaping business models. Sign up and take it for a spin. This is the first service that I think might kill online radio as we know it...

Regardless, this puppy is about interactive programming. Its beyond Launchcasts invisible hand. Its at your fingertips, and directly under your control. Playlists are active and moldable, but not required. You can listen to other people's stuff, or stuff it picks based on a single artist.

The thing that caught my attention is that it forces you to extend your network of artists or songs. Only 3 songs per artist on any playlist, and you can't play a playlist until you have about 60 songs. But there is a Lazy button. Push it and you get a rotation. finetune picks the rest for you.

THESE ARE AD PLACEMENTS. People are lazy. They will accept the engine's choices because it takes too damn long to pick 60 songs (I did at least). That's available inventory. Its almost like product placements, but you get the product itself. Skip the ad, don't need a tag line. Qualified people get your content and get exposed to your business. And the consumer gets relevent 'marketing.'

The idea extends well beyond music. That's just one form of content. Its another form of the ad game. But its a different content game that favors serial publication. You have to be refreshing your offering frequently to build the business.

Learning to Fly

2006-07-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

Its a big wide open world out there. You have to master the ground, manage the surf and learn how to fly.

Churn, Attention, and Shackles

2006-05-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

Very interesting chatter on bubblegen around valuations and churn. The churn discussion gets interesting in the comments, where people explore the nature of networks and highlight how the qualities of social networks may be distinguished from other networks.

Basically, social networks may be expected to behave in many respects like a night club. Change and migration is inevitable because people change. Economically-founded social networks, like eBay, have more a solid basis as a maket of sorts. People establish reputations based on transaction history: switching costs are too high to establish new networks (re-establishing these reputations).

The web2.0 rantings crop up around who should really own the value of these established reputations. In web1.0, companies like eBay use this value to trap people into (aka add value to) its network. In web2.0, the people own their own value.... or at least that's the rallying cry.

I don't believe that this actually the case. If these social networks could find a way to raise switching costs they would. And I think they already try. You can share photos, but can you make a bulk transfer? doubt it. Try moving an entire blog from one system to another... or even your links.

Freedom to publish, and republish, and chunk and mash and all that hype is great. Its also truely unique and innovation inspiring. But it has its limits. Each of these networks needs its nodes. It is nothing without them. The economics drive each service to limit its scope to reinforce the values of service retention among its users.

... but this does raise an interesting potential opportunity. If this is truely the mentality among the building mass of peer-consumers, then the central service of value will be reputation portability. Its a natural extension of preference portability ("my" portal pages), opinion distribution (blogs), link portability (delicious) and photo poprtability (flickr)... There probably is a market for qualified reputation tagging and service migration facilitation.

Tipping YouTube

2006-05-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

So why did Youtube take off when other more established video hosting services stagnate? Amr Awadallah posed this question earlier this week, and I've been trying to figure it out.

I started with a web2.0 hypothesis and a vast pool of comScore Media Metrix data, and found some compelling evidence almost right away. Social networks thrust youtube past its competitors, and acted as a springboard for broader public adoption.

The idea is that social networks built by peer publishers would accelerate distribution and stimulate broader adoption as it reaches the edges. To test this theory, I evaluated the penetration and composition of peer publisher targets among the video hosting services that Amr evaluated over the past 18 months. I used myspace, blogger, and other peer publishing sites to build these segments, and also reviewed across age and gender groups to see if there was central point from which growth fanned out.

Let me review a concrete case that demostrates the findings -- looking at Youtube and Stupidvideos (who had comparable traffic in October 2005), using Myspace users as a proxy for social networkers.

In the early months of Youtube (oct & nov), 70-80% of its visitors also visited Myspace. Stupidvideos composition was around 30%, where it had been all year. Youtube growth is built on this segment. When it breaks from the pack starting in December, its core usage base is still myspace users (@80% comp).

But ultimately, youtube tips. Growth starts to extend beyond this core network, into the more mainstream usage base (as evidenced by the declining myspace comp). Stupidvideos, meanwhile, stagnates aside from a modest tailwind as people adopt these services. But it has clearly lost, despite being first.

Youtube clearly penetrated the social networking crowd early (and not by accident), and derived a large chunk of its visitors from people who at least touch these networks.

So what? Everyone has to get their traffic somewhere, right? True, but I believe we're seeing the first demonstration of the power of social networks. The core of these networks are peer publishers -- people who routinely communicate in a one-to-many fashion about, well, whatever they feel like.

The key here is the one-to-many form of communication. Peer publishers are broadcasting -- to a limitted network, but broadcasting nonetheless. They are not telling a freind who tells a friend. They are broadcasting to a larger group (who happen to be inclined to do the same).

The power of these social networks is plain as day, but I still can't figure out how it can be monetized. Should myspace be asking for a cut of Youtube's success? Could they even manage such an arrangement?

It seems the power balance is so firmly in the hands of the users, that any blanket marketing or distribution model would be doomed. Either way, it will be interesting to watch this unfold.

Numbskull

2006-04-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

I may be nothing but a numbskull who pounds a few little ragged ideas out every once and a while. I'm well out on the long tail, and for most puposes I am simply talking to myself. Thankfully, this is not something that I have a problem with.

Umair Haque has nailed it again. A straightforward breakdown of cliche, reality and preference as a demonstration of the constructive and destructive economies of peer content production. The freedom to agglomerate (I love economists), and the peril of dial-up talk radio morons spouting bullshit on all of my niche interests.

In the end, he points out that the whole situation is self-correcting. The people who deliver the most value within any network benefit, and those who don't don't. There is very little incentive for someone who does not care about makeup to keep spouting off on make up sites.

But this leaves me in an odd spot. Maybe I should just take the hint... My posts add no value to any network (thought feedburner tells me I have 6 subscribers). Or maybe I just redefine the network. I love my own bullshit, and have always been content with a lively internal debate. If its not enough to please a network of 1, then it'll never fly far beyond that.

... still think there is a market in facilitating cohesion and network extension. The noise is exteme and growing. There are many thoughtful and meaningful voices out on the tail (in addition to the numbskulls). They may find their niche, or their network of 1, but its getting harder -- not easier -- to find them.

Enterprise Peer Solutions

2006-04-14T05:33:00.000-07:00

It seems that the peer pundits are finally starting to talk about the potential for peer solutions in the corporate environment. Fred Wilson has a post on the Union Square blog that discusses the potential (and the discussion).

I've been thinking about this for a while, both as a web2.0 spectator and as a manager. I've posted a few thoughts on what I've been able to find in the space, and the initial kernel on the obvious opportunity in this space, inspired by a MSFT anouncement to integrate RSS with Outlook.

This is the real thing. Someone will make a big business out of this. Building effective many-to-many communication platforms is central to any organization, and today we have a better way.

It will be very interesting to watch how this plays out (or to throw on a jersey and get into the fray).

Keep sharp

2006-04-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty quiet on the posts lately... way too many nights and weekends going towards the day job. That's time I would spend followign my nose through postings.

I've been skimming, and it seems like the honeymoon with peer-based publishing is winding down. I'm not saying its not dead -- just some of the raw sex appeal seems to be wearing off.

I hope to have something more thoguhtful to say shortly... which is also that I hope to give myself enough time to keep sharp. Burnout is no good.

NBC Video Posts

2006-03-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

There is a fairly heated argument going on on A VC. Fred is supportive of NBC's move in an early post yesterday. They are showing signs of 'getting it'. Own the content, but leverage emerging social media to realize additional benefits... chunk it, free it.

But in a subsequent post on the topic, Fred stirs the pot a little bit with an atta-boy to a guy who hacked the NBC source so the video would play on his site instead of NBCs. That set off some sparks -- at least with one person.

Its a good point/coutner on the topic. You should check it out if you didn't see it. And check back in if you did...

My opinion: This is an open-minded move on NBCs part. They still have to dig a little deeper to make this strategic and tactical. I tend to agree with Fred that it would actually be encouraging to see an ad associated with the clips. It would signal that its more than defensive branding.

Uncertainty

2006-02-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

.. a follow up to that leadership stuff in my last post.

A key component of leadership is handling uncertainty. You can never know what will happen and there is risk associated with just about everything.

There is a certain amount of blind faith involved, and a certain amount of brut force required to pound through doubt.

The preacher analogy comes back again -- Unwavering faith; conviction. The best leaders will achieve these traits not just in themselves but also the people around them.

On Leadership

2006-02-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

A lot of chatter on leadership in my personal life recently, so I thought I'd put down my thoughts on the matter -- more as a sort of personal bookmark than any attempt at spouting wisdom.

I've reached a point in my own career where leadership has become central to just about everything. As my staff has swelled to approach 40, and my charge extended to three or four functional areas, I can't rely on individual relationships, clubhouse attitude, and strategic 'atta-boys' to get from here to there.

This is the personal side. I've found that while I don't take to it naturally, I do get it. I can even be good at it at times.

As a member of senior management, I'm also seeing the bigger picture challenges with leadership. To be honest, I now understand that most personal challenges with leadership originate at this level. Achieving clarity of purpose of the whole can make the rest of it very easy. Without it, gears grind, and it becomes very hard for people to fulfill the intermediate leadership roles.

But its very hard to achieve clarity of purpose that translates to all levels in the ranks, as well as the full range of major internal and external stakeholders.

The other day, a friend mentioned that Leadership is figuring out where everybody wants to go, then jumping out front and saying 'Follow me!'

There are a few great nuggets in this very simple statement. First, you need to talk to everybody -- employees, investors, partners, independent smart people. You need to listen. This is not to say everyone will agree... some will be flat wrong, others crazy. But this is where you find the answer.

Second, once you've figured it out -- achieved clarity of purpose -- you have to throw all of your weight behind it. Once you've figured it out, stop figuring and take responsibility for pulling everyone along with you.

Third, you have to say 'Follow me!' You have to communicate, in as many different ways as possible, where you are going and why you are going there. You have to preach. The message must be a part of the answer to every question.

If the core organizing principle, the defining element that yields clarity of purpose is simple, you are home free. But odds are that most of 'everybody' that you intend to lead will not have your perspective. You have to speak to them; you have to make them believe. Otherwise you are just a loudmouth, not a leader (or maybe just content to be the boss).

Complexity makes it even tougher to be disciplined about leadership. It becomes harder to motivate individual employees or even entire divisions with the same message that motivates investors. It all has to fit together, or it’s going to fall apart.

What gets us the financial results, the market share, the product capabilities, and the buzz that makes people want to continue to push towards those ends? Its leadership.

Contextual Video -- the gap

2006-02-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting discussion of Exploding TV on A VC today. There is a response in the comments by Dave that claims that relevency in video advertising is the answer to free micro chunked copywrited video distribution

Who cares how long the ad is, as long as it is interesting and relevant? I've pretty much stopped watching live TV, and only watch pre-recorded shows via DVR. Well over 99% of the ads are skipped because I know that they are either not interesting or not relevant

I don't know if I agree with this or not, but it does present an interesting case for the convergence of a couple of peer-based concepts. Clearly, the answer is contextual advertising, which is not a new concept. Implementation in a video context is the tricky part.

Proper targetting requires that you understand the content of the video, at the very least. It could also require knowledge of the individual. Video content classification is much harder than text. You can't scan the content and dig out a relevency heierarchy.

The answer is in the tag. Social tagging can play both sides of this equation. Yourtube and the other social video services already build on the tagging concept. Tag clouds can provide the user component of targetting. The combination of content and user could provide advertisers, publishers, copywrite holders and distributers (social networks) an innovative and effective way to monitze micro-chunked video, if not full video.

Its almost a perfect web2.0 storm... and might actually stimulate this new distribution channel.

Signal in the noise

2006-02-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

I ran across a R/W web post about temporary RSS engagements this morning. I think RSS overload and the burdens of pull-based distribution are starting to generate some applications. Still nothing simple, but I guess its a start.

Some diversionary posts

2006-01-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

I've run across some old digital scribblings, some of which are hauntingly familiar. I didn't really know I had these and don't really remember putting them down. I guess this was an early digital log of mine. I'm going to post a few of them. So much of this stuff is on paper, but I guess I have some digital stuff, too.

At some point, this stuff turned from bleary-eyed pulls at the poetry bong to something that attempted to be lyrics (I learned the guitar in the early 90s). This puppy from October 1999 is somewhere in between:

Create & compete

Analyze & evaluate
Decide and act.
There’s nothing but politics in the way…and you will win.
See all, feel pressure and let go
No solution lacks simplicity
No error lacks intention
No agreement lack misunderstanding.

It’s found without.
Strength conviction and genius through Quality
Comes only in completion:
Scope perspective actors and aggravations
See me, me, and me see you, him, her and them (the motherfuckers)
Doubt question pick and pry.
Without for within…and you will win.

GapingVoid - VC - Jan 08 2006

2006-01-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

GapingVoid - VC - Jan 08 2006
Originally uploaded by spierzchala.

I love these gapingvoid cartoons.

Catchup

2006-01-29T20:22:00.000-08:00

If you are new to this thread (as anyone would be because I'm the only reader -- I like to rehash my notes, ya know), there is a great post on Publishing 2.0 that will serve as a quick catch-up on where all of this RSS, blog, edge, peer, feed discussion stands today.

This piece seems to join a quietly growing chorus of folks starting to focus on the everyday user. Paramount to this trend is the observation that most of the people in the discussion are hyper-users of this technology. Its starting to crystilize that what works for them may not work at all for the everyday email & trade photos public out there.

The implication: The easy-geek that is web2.0 today has scale limits. The economics of web2.0 are about to excert some force on the technology. Either is will adapt to a form more fit for broad scale adoption, or it will settle in a a niche technology.

Mainstreet will never know RSS

2006-01-27T19:37:00.000-08:00

There was a post yesterday on Feld Thoughts about phasing out My.Yahoo. He's basically ditching his longtime personalized homepage for a FeedReader-based start up. He's doing this in part as a way to filter out the distracting noise of the news -- mainly stock market chatter after a read of Fooled By Randomness.

I find this funny because the book had the same effect on me, but to different effect. I actually got reengaged with my yahoo for the first time in ages, using RSS to steadily purge the noise in favor of thought provoking feeds.

Today, A VC discussed the topic, and came out on my end of the experience (I think). Though he's clearly a bigger feedhead than I am and requires software for some purposes.

The most interesting part was in the comments, where I seem to find all of the best material. Mike Orren's reply lays it out clearly:

Friends, in the rest of the country, in the heart of middle America, in major metropolitan markets, there are people: smart people, even VC's and merchant bankers who have NEVER HEARD of RSS. Even worse are those who pretend to grok it but have never used it, even in the context of My Yahoo.

And consumer adoption is almost as bad.

If there is one bit of Media 2.0 hubris (and I'm guilty of many others) that needs to die, it's the notion that RSS feeds are the mass-market editors of 2006.
Don't get me wrong-- I believe a media of ultimate customization is nigh. But most people are lazy. And even lazy people buy stuff. Yahoo! and others who cater to them are going to rake it in.

..Cheers Mike, whoever you are.

Ya Who?

2006-01-26T19:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a little baffled by all of this noise around Yahoo's statement about not being focused on being #1 in search.

Peer-pundits take everything to extremes. Extremes start good conversations, specially in this kind of environment. Its kind of funny to watch everyone punch the topic from one side to the other.

But its also kind of sad -- a kind of Napolian Dynomite solo teather match -- A studied excersize in exploiting momentum for its own sake, with it or against it.

What people seem to forget is that Yahoo is much bigger than search, even if the grass roots go there. Digital media is also bigger than search. To say that there are other relevent score cards, and that these score cards present a better opportunity for lasting advantage is business.

Business is always uncertain, opportunities are never obvious -- certainly not to outsiders, cheerleaders, or enthusiasts. Was Yahoo a genius when they bought Overture? Sponsored search was a novelty at the time. Good move, it turns out. I'm sure there were bad ones, too.

My point is that opportunities do not make themselves, and capitalization requires some level-headed risk taking. In sponsored search MSFT didn't do it, AOL didn't do it. They waited to see if it was real and missed the search advertising game (yeah, yeah, they both make money off of their search-base, but they share it with Y or G today).

Yahoo has said that it thinks they see the next opportunities elsewhere. Can anyone tell me that this is wrong? What is Google doing? Maps, email, video, feed readers, earth. The search tidal wave is receeding and Google knows this as well as Yahoo does. This market will grow slighly faster than the overall online advertising market, and become more an more crowded and commoditized.

Sure, there are all sorts of applications that can and will hang off the side of the gigantic search vessel, and many of these may become very important strategically. Search will be an important aspect of digital media, but not necessarily in a 'who's #1' kind of way.

Audience matters. Search is not the only place to get it. If Y percieves an advantage they can press on other fronts, and is not going to burn all of their fuel chasing yesterday's game, then good for them. They seem wide awake to me.

Recommendation RSS

2006-01-23T04:40:00.000-08:00

Very interesting article on recommendation engines in the NYT this monring. I think these developments are very much on par with the kind of subscription-less preference-based RSS feed platform.

I'd love for my delicios cloud to be the only input to a fully personalized feed...

I'm getting a little frustrated about all of this. It can't be very hard to do.

Some fresh air -- finally

2006-01-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

There has been a lack of interesting things out there over the past few weeks. I havn't felt like there was anything to say. The CES seemed to soak up too much attention. The only thing I can really take from all of that noise was that Google is pretty much 2nd rate beyond their core business. Great at search, and gained heaps of first mover advantages in contextual advertising. But they seem lost in the media space...

Whatever.

I came across a fantastic read today (thru r/w web) -- Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig review of how peer publishing is pushing legal boundaries on FT.com. Read it.

RSS for business

2006-01-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

I finally found a thread discussing RSS applications in the workplace. About F-in time.

RSS Applied has a aggregator section devoted to corporate applications of RSS.

Now, granted, this is basically a PR avenue for these guys. They are trying to sell the same kinds of services that I was getting at a couple of weeks ago.

But I think they've got it a little wrong. It isn't about marketing channels. It isn't about external operations. This is the 'build a better home page' approach.

The opportunity is in using appropriate technology for certain types of vital communications. Most of corporate operational communications are many-to-many engagements. Meetings are the core of this system. Phone calls, faxes, emails, have all augmented these systems.

The social platforms serving blogging are a much better fit for many-to-many communications than any of these transformative technologies.

Anyway... its good to see that I'm not the only one recognizing this fact (though I already think MSFT is on the scent). Its also good to see that the idea has not advanced very far. The pricing info is also useful.

TiVO & Lazy Reader

2006-01-01T18:13:00.000-08:00

I want to elaborate a little bit on my last post, "People are Lazy".

There is deep-seeded power behind this observation. It the engine behind the rise of Tivo, search, and just about any other innovation you can think of. Tivo is my favorite example. People have been recording shows since VCRs came along when I was a kid.

It was known as 'recording shows' until Tivo came along and it became 'time shifting'. As far as I know nobody raised much of a stink about it. It wasn't until it became really easy that it gained traction and mainstream adoption.

There are all sorts of pertinent observations here. Recording was possible with existing technology (VCR), but it was a pain in the ass. Try recording 12 shows using a VCR and 240 minute tapes for an extended period of time.

Throwing a hard drive and basic processing at the situation was also relatively easy to do, but you had to be a very patient hardware engineer with fairly advanced software expertise as well. All the skills were learnable, and all the materials were available at Radio Shack, but who has time.

The guys who built the TiVo business said to themselves 'People are Lazy' (I am guessing here really. They could have been saying 'I'm a geek god, look how cool my shit is!!!', but I don't think so). Along the way, they stumbled into benefits, like pausing live TV.

The same thing applies to peer-based publishing, RSS, Tagging, and all of this stuff. Its all there. Anyone can dive in and play around. But no one will -- not enough to build a real bustling, profitable market. Not until the 'cool shit!!!' mentality gives way to the 'people are lazy' approach to building services.

And by 'People', I mean non-blogger, non-developer, non-techie, non-VC, non-geek people. They are not stupid, they are just busy with the rest of their lives. Services that make all of this networked value easier to access are the ones that will matter.

"People are Lazy"

2005-12-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

I can't keep from comming back to this Kedrosky post on the flawed thinking behind structured blogging: Structured Blogging Will Flop:

Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging — the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they’re posting — is going to be a flop. It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:

* People are lazy
* People are lazy
* People are lazy

The same goes for all of this feed/tag/reader stuff. I don't want to have to tag all of this stuff. I want other people to do it for me. I don't want to even have to subscribe to anything.

I want the blogger/reader tagging, trackback, technorati diaspora to figure all of this crap out for me and present me with relevence. Simple. That's it. I don't want to ever have to look for anything again.

Only need two main nav links in the interface: More Mainstream & More Obscure. Add a management console that allows you to tune your tastes, build cluster groups and I'm done.

I'll never have to read javascript or HTML, or jack around with RSS, XML, Feedburner. I'll have the fringe pushed to me, to whatever extent and direction is comfortable for me, and the ability to optimize my own experience without having to become a software developer.

Rubel Sees Comments Search in His Crystal Ball

2005-12-25T14:49:00.000-08:00

The effervescent Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion today kicks off his blog series, 2006 Trends, with a promise of a new trend discussed every day for the rest of the year.

He claims that's 10 trends for 10 days left in the year. His first trend is one of those stupid simple yet brilliant ideas that makes you wonder why it doesn't exist already. If 2005 was the year of blog search, then 2006 will be the year of blog comments search.

Steve makes an excellent point that comments often contain very good information that sometimes clarify a point a blogger made or reveals it to be false. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find any comments in search engine results today. Sure, many comments are often of the personal-attack sort or proclamations of"frist!", but I'm sure smart programmers can find a way to strip thoseout.

As the big players try to find new sources of information to mine, comments do seem like a probable target. This effort will likely prove more difficult than it seems on the surface, however.

Systems like Haloscan don't seem to be easily indexable, but you better bet that comments providerswill have a strong incentive to find a way to make their systems play well with Google and the others.

MSFT Strikes Again?

2005-12-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

I am curious about this RSS integration into Outlook. There's not a whole lot of chatter about his one, but there are a few doom-saying posts out there.

The most relevent point I saw was in a response to a comment on a post by Nic Cubrilovic

...but RSS is more than just ‘reading blogs’. The company I mentioned in the post is using RSSPopper to subscribe to an internal blog, bug tracking system, a wiki that is used for project specs and many other sources all relevant to the company. I am also currently advising a large UK firm on using blogs and RSS, and they will probably use RSSPopper as well until this new version of Outlook is released. This move is huge as it will introduce RSS and feeds to more businesses who will look at ways to use it effectively with internal knowledge management...

The point is: There are vast areas where social networking practices, tools and techniques have yet to catch on -- the workplace is the biggest and most lucrative one. The tools and techinues that optimize social information exchange will be different in the workplace. The balance between push and pull may be different. At the very least there will be a notion of 'obligation' --an employee must subscribe to X division update feed, and will be held responsible for mastery of its contents.

Think push Intranet that can actually be tailored to each job. You subscribe to what you need to know, you publish what you have to communicate.

The tools associated with blogging, which are so affectionately promoted, reviewed and defended by the web2.0 crowd are still niche offerings. They are still tech offerings and their value (as expressed in the chatter at least) is proportional to the cleaverness of the latest spin on the latest new new thing.

The promise of Outlook is in its breadth. Lots of people have general knowledge of how it works and open it every day anyway. And it comes at the social network from the other direction -- the pure push medium of email. Its a way to improve on email distribution lists as the primary mode of mass communication in the workplace.

I've always been surprised when these lists are treated as solutions -- 'we'll just create a new list and these communication problems won't happen again'.

The opportunity is huge for integrating social networking functions into the fabric of workplace information management. I don't know if this Outlook thing is really about this or not, but it probably is. And this could change the game for social networking applications.

Its VERY easy to see buisiness models around corporate social networking integration. Software, technical integration, business practice integration, consulting. Have to remember that most people don't have a clue about any of this stuff, and the value will be very easy to deliver.

POP!

Blogging Explained

2005-12-22T19:11:00.000-08:00

bloggingexplained
Originally uploaded by cmbert.

Simple answer. Slightly more complicated to execute. If people blog to make money, then there is a business in facilitating distribution in networked ways. http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002084.html

Full Circle...

2005-12-21T20:14:00.000-08:00

Wow, Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW and one of the Time 100) has started a blog as of this past Monday. He always said the reason for the web was to provide the general population the ability to share (self-publish). I was always interested in why he had not been a big Blog guy and why he was not pushing this technology and the associated technologies (i.e. RSS).

From his first post on his blog:

'In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.'

Talk about full circle, this is it. Now Tim actually is a part of the revolution and is an active part of it. This is important because he is one of the first people to really see this potential. Now, don't get me wrong, he has been publishing technical notes and ideas online for 20 year, just in the more traditional form of online publication.

Anyway, this is an interesting day. It shows that we are coming full circle, and we are going to start to see some of the original theories and ideas come back. We are going to start to see more grassroots efforts that pay off. We are going to see technology and companies reinvent themselves. The technology is more advanced, the developers are more advanced, the business environment is more advanced, but most importantly, the everyday consumer is much more advanced!

Welcome to Web 2.0 Tim!

Volume vs. Trust...

2005-12-15T17:46:00.000-08:00

Why is the everyday larger publisher scared? I was thinking about this the other day when talking to one of the largest publishers in Chicago. Common sense says they should not be scared because they have volume. The readership for the Chicago Tribune in any give day is around 2MM consumers. The Tribune website gets around 1.2MM visitors every month. Why would a large company such as the Tribune Company be nervous? The reason is trust

Cameron does a great job of addressing this issue in his post on the root of media value. The issue is the consumer is burned out, or maybe just burned on traditional media. There is a reason the Drudge Report has an average of 1.5MM unique visitors per month (more than the tribune). The average consumer is looking for something new and fresh. This does not only apply to publishers and media sites, but also corporate information and research. Consumers are becoming more likely to visit a consumer opinion site over a site from Apple computer. This phenomenon has been embraced well by some companies, such as Apple, and has been a problem for others, i.e. Ford motors.

The viral nature of the internet has allowed for some rapid success stories that may not have been possible in the traditional media (your welcome Paris Hilton). The issue with self publishing and the growth of RSS, Podcasting, Blogging and social networking online could be a disruptive event in the life of corporations as we know them.

Blogs are darn scary for the big newspapers, and even more scary for consumer oriented companies. The negative side of this technology is, anyone can post anything they want online. The positive side of this technology is: anyone can post anything they want online. Of course there are going to be the fringe and conspiracy theorists of the world, but the world of self publishing and social networking is not fringe any longer. This is mainstream, and it is moving faster than anyone (including Rupert Murdoch) can control it.

The companies out there need to embrace this technology and environment, not fight it. There are many companies forming that are offering services to large Fortune 500 companies to combat the Blog world and save their image. This is the wrong approach. Companies need to use this rich environment of consumer data to learn. Self-publishing should be one of the biggest areas of learning from large companies and those that set-up their service and business around this technology will succeed. Look at it this way, where else will a company like Comcast ever have access to unadulterated comments, opinions, ideas, and insights on themselves and their competitors.

PushWrite

2005-12-14T06:22:00.000-08:00

Couple of Kernels have popped. It seems that most of the focus on read/write development are still focused on building better 'pull' technology to navigate the sprawl of peer-based publication. To date, I have found nothing that places value on 'push' technologies that deliver optimized, customized content from this same sprawl.

I see a real opportunity on this front. Part of this is personal bias. I value 'push' media as a way to reveal items of interest that I might not have found on my own, or might not have time to look for.

In the context of Umir Haque's take on emerging Micromedia Economics (massive PPT on the topic, my basic/simple discussion), the relative scarcity of Attention increases (vs Production) as the Media value chain shifts towards peer-based production. This creates opportunities to add value in distribution by building tools that economize Attention. This is widely observed, but remains focused on 'pull' methods (as far as I can tell). I don't know if this is because search is in vougue, or if hyper-efficient pull approaches will completely replace push methods of distribution in a micromedia environment. I think its Google hype.

In fact, I think that personalized push distribution would represent greater distribution efficiency than any pull approach. The 'find me quality' techniques and mechanics would actually be almost the same as search, only everything is preprocessed and presented to the user without any user action (though a feedback mechanism is the keystone).

Some of this already exists in various forms. Google news alerts are a good example of the functionality at its most basic form. In a micromedia environment the key will be to leverage the information expressed in peer networks -- feed subscriptions, user posts & tags, and expressed preference -- to optimize relevency & merit. The good news is that most of this information already exists in all of these web2.0 services.

Examples of Value in Push Media

Exhibit A: Yahoo! LaunchCast. I love the personalized radio station. It is not perfect --some things it chooses to play I hate -- but I have also found music that I love that I may have never found in a retail situation, and certainly never heard on commercial radio. This is all driven by user expressed taste, and network preference clustering (or something along these lines) that personalized value based on media attributes (like genre in the case of music) and aggregations of peer taste expressions.

Exhibit B: Satellite Radio. I love the heavily niched push in this environment for many of the same reasons I love . I actually use Satellite & Y! LaunchCast together -- listen, learn, seed, listen, repeat -- to deliver myself a very fresh, current and high-quality music environment (though my wife would disagree).

I've had debates with people about how best to spend $12 per month on music -- 99c a song and an iPod, or Satellite+Y!LaunchCast. It usually comes down to how much you travel, and how you get to work. iPod fanatics will talk about the vast array of tools that they have at their disposal, which includes user playlists and other bundles of people with similar tastes. They value a certain degree of push also to help them keep fresh. The value of push is in the time savings to idenitify high quality content.

Exhibit C: Feed subscriptions. Once you've found a source that you like, you add the feed to a collection of things that you want 'pushed' to you -- through some RSS Reader or a web-based service like My Yahoo! I've been juggling my feeds around to make sure that I don't miss anything that might be relevent across a number of sources. I want this stuff pushed at me.

But I have hit a limit. After adding more and more feeds, I am hesitant to add new things. Its just too much. A personalize push engine built from expressed taste, would be a great way to maintain bredth without all the noise.

Where 'push' becomes so important -- queue the web2.0 background music -- is at the edges.

Tag Value

2005-12-11T04:26:00.000-08:00

I started rambling in my last post about the value of Tags and their relative status in the social network pecking order and realized that it probably deserved its own post if I was ever going to find these thought again in the future.

From my success publishing my delicious links though this blog, I feel like I might actually 'get' the Y! / Delicious news. There are several levels to these social networks that all center around open information and how its handled.

Blogging is actually a fairly high-touch activity -- you've got to sit, write, link, and maybe even review spelling, logic and rhetoric.

Link tracking is about the least you can do to express preference, relevence, classification. But in aggregate its still a fantastic way to establish preference networks, and relative network quality valuation.

I am aware that things that I tag are way down the pecking order compared with things that I actually digest and discuss. But its good to have the list handy (which delicious was doing for me), and to extend this to anyone who happens to read this post (which I think is just me -- but you never know).

I'm also a metric head, and it is pretty obvious that there is enourmous value in the information behind these simple little tags. The value is not in the individual tag, but in how various tags are clustered for different types of people; how tags proliferate and penetrate various segments.

There is enough information here to build a nice recursive analytic environment where both content and attention gain qualitative attributes from one another -- and this value grows exponentially with the size of the network.

I've talked a little bit about the challenges in scaling peer-based media beyond blogger niches... and the most complelling example of how to tie media together into useful packages for individual tastes is still Y! LaunchCast, which builds individual playlist based on user classifications.

LaunchCast works. It works in large part because of scale. Digesting individual input on a finite information base can generate decent aggregations for individuals. This can extend an individual's network to include high-value elements of virtual peer networks.

When I step back, its pretty clear that the value that could be generated by scaling link-pooling as much as possible. Establishing these networks will be critical to delivering relevent content in a micromedia market.

It works in radio, is needed in peer-publishing, will be necessary for micro-video to ever get off the ground.

I think that Y! is way ahead on this. It will be interesting to see if these dynamics ever take over the media marketplace. If they do, Y! will be king.

So I'll ask the question that everyone seems to be asking indirectly... What will Y! want to buy next? and can I build it in 9-12 months?

Required Reeding

2005-12-11T04:16:00.000-08:00

I've been messing around with delicious over the past week or so, which has been timely with all the hype around the Y! purchase of the service.

I figured out how to push my delicious links through feedburner, like you would a blog. Its pretty cool. With this distribution channel set up, I can pull my delicious links through onto this blog -- the "Required Reading" section in the right sidebar -- and have them up to date and current -- always reflecting what I've been tagging recently.

This is a great way to reference the interesting posts without having to actually blog about what I've been reading. All I have to do is tag it, and it will show up here. Nice.

Mass Media & Micromedia Economies

2005-12-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

I followed my nose through A VC to Bubblegeneration run by a guy Umair Haque (who I can't seem to find out much about).

On the site he has posted a presentation reviewing the changing economies of Media. Interesting observations, and at least a little economic logic to support some of the web 2.0 Hype. Nothing like a little analytic rigor to get me bought in.

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt

There a couple of specific concepts (nothing new) that are particularly helpful to my quest to figure out the opportunities in this shift. First is a break out of the basic Media market (sorry about the crap graphics)

And the value chain that delivers the goods:

In the mass media world, Haque goes on to describe how the economics favor investment in Attention at the expense of Production due to relative scarcity along the value chain. Basically, while Attention is scarce, it is not nearly as scarce as infrastructure, production, and all of the other things in the value chain.

The Mass Media space is essentially driven by these economies.

The Haque posits his view of how the Micromedia economy forms around these same concepts, and how the relative scarcity of Production vs. Attention changes everything. Worth a read (or maybe two or three)

Wharton Posts

2005-12-04T06:14:00.000-08:00

A few Wharton links I ran across dealing with how the big web portals are responding to all of this web2 stuff. Generally, nothing new in here, but a useful consolidation.

Yahoo!
MSFT & Google
AOL
...

On the long tail

Aggregation is the opportunity

2005-12-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

rssecosystem
Originally uploaded by cmbert.

There is a lot of noise in this new r/w space. I think the real business opportunity is in the aggregation

Its Google's Fault

2005-12-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

Reading that last post about being overwhelmed got me thinking about a different thread. There is a great discussion on Fred's thread about the worm turning moment and anxiety that is surfacing around google's power.
I found the comment by David Gibbons most interesting in highlighting that Google is not a Web 2.0 company.

I think google is sticking to their knitting of "owning the internet's rawest material" but they're applying what worked for Web1.0 to the read/write web, and if they do, they will become the tirants that Mark describes.
Google own Web1.0 because they own its rawest commodity, the URL. The URL, is the "crude oil" of Web1.0 and indexing it is the refinery process that provides the gas for our internet experience, namely search. Google has the biggest, most efficient URL refinery on earth, so they take home the spoils (of web 1).
The raw material of Web2.0 is you and me, the user. Web 2's commodity is our time, expertise, attention, productivity, assets and our wallets. I'm increasingly feeling that Google wants to "own" me, and that's partly what I take from your Google posts, Fred. Problem is, this strategy of owning the web's raw material isn't going to work when applied to humans ... we aren't URL's and we wont stand for it :-)
I think Google's going this route because;a) They realize that the URL refinery will loose internet market share and,b) They think they can use URL ownership to lock in "people ownership" ... hence the google box and the "cube" (frightening) ... c) ... but they're also in a corner over the fact that the new internet could increasingly choose to workaround the URL ... thanks to increasingly intelligent clients (VoIP etc.) and increasingly "dumb" central servers.
I'm personally torn over google; gmail rocks but they are lame in that they so poorly support Mac users and revenue model's a bit of a on-trick pony. When the whole world is your client, how do you dominat a new market without competing with them?

Now, I will point out that Google is a big facilitator of web 2.0 -- and they make a ton of scratch on it.

AdSense is about you and me, not just the URL. But they have built the network; they are not necessarily a part of it (like eBay).

Of course, the point is that they are in a position to exploit the environment that has emerged around their platform (like MSFT), and there ain't nothin Peer-based about that.

10 Rules

2005-12-02T03:56:00.000-08:00

I ran across this sort of elementrary post on 10 Rules for internet start ups through A VC a few days ago and found it worthy of keeping in the file.

I have to say that I am (of course) skeptical about the importance of qualifying things like this with the term 'Internet'. People seem to use it because it gives them license to say old tried and true things as if they were new, or to make some sage pronouncement without evidence. It doesn't matter, really. Bullshit will gather no links.

Internet is just a medium... and while the medium IS the message, business still runs on money.

My name is Jim and I am an Internet Junkie.

2005-12-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

I am a master of the internet and am drawn by new technology and new ideas daily. Luckily I work at comScore Networks, which gives me the opportunity to surf the web 20 hours a day and get paid for it. Realize, this is like an alcoholic working as a bartender or an addicted gambler working at the racetrack.

I must tell you though, I am Perplexed; I am Over Stimulated; I am Overloaded;

The Internet is Overloaded - Actually, the Internet User is Overloaded…

How do I know? Because I have been surfing the web for 20 years and I am a part of a rapid moving jet… That is not going to slow down. One metric of the rapid expansion of creativity on the web can be seen through the number of buzz words that were introduced into our mass media vocabulary just in the past 18 months…

Some examples of these include:

Blogosphere
Podcast
Wiki
RSS Feed
Social Networking
Micro-Chunking
Firefox
Roker
Skype
Alcara
Linkroll
AdSense
VOIP
Bubble Generation
Flickr
Riffs Roll
Razr
Icerocket
Feedster
Typepad
Trackback

There are over 1,000 of these terms floating around, and they are all new and unique. Consumers are being blasted every time they go online with every type of stimulation possible. There are 100’s of companies out there trying to find the next killer app.

Consumers are exposed daily to…

Ad Banners
Ad Pops
Pop-ups
Pop-unders
iPops
iFrame
Flash Frame
Flash Ads
Flash Roll
Roll over
Roll under
StreamRoll
Streaming Media
Rich Media
Media Mail
eMail Spam
Spam
Spam Spam Spam

There was a new study done that estimated if the recent growth of SPAM over the past 18 months were to continue at a straight line, the average consumer in 2009, for every one actual legitimate email, would receive 248 SPAM emails. Think about the repercussions of that situation.

Now there are many companies out there who are working on solutions for SPAM and every other virus of the web. Most are still very broad stroke solutions.

We actually found that within a given year, almost 30% of all households will reformat their hard-drives on their home PC’s to deal with the many issues with the machine.

Help - I am under water...

Audio Pool for Posting

2005-12-01T04:58:00.000-08:00

Why can't I place a call to a voice log when I'm in my car to dump my ideas down to a location that I can easily post from?

It couldn't be very hard convert to text from their either.

How hard could this be? Might be an attractive service for the telcos.

oLog

2005-12-01T04:41:00.000-08:00

I was reading some notes on Jim's blog about how he hoped he would be creating a living history on his blog that he could return to many years later to relive the happy (and sad) moments that moved him to post entries -- even if they are raving rants about soft drinks.

I'm in the process of moving and I've run across all of my old Journals, letters, pictures and all sorts of stuff that I have saved and carried from city to city. Crazy. I love this stuff, but it is so inaccessable. And I only seem to run across it when I move.

Jim is right. There is unique value in digital journals ...

Why can't I digitize my offline "Log" and access it like I would my Blog?

That would be infinately more interesting to me, personally, than digitizing the stacks in the Library of Congress.

R/W Media Hits your TV

2005-12-01T04:28:00.000-08:00

Blogs have changed my approach to reading content online, completely pushing "traditional media" our of my line of site... Will the same thing happen to how I consume Video?

Will the networks keep content dominance due to their production infrastructure? or will indy production catch up as technology proliferates? Probably a little of both. But it doesn't really matter. Its the distribution network that matters (the Media is the Message).

In a R/W video environ -- just as in the text or podcast eviron -- the challenge will be content consolidation. How do you deliver, or suggest, content that people would like?

There are a couple of good examples here (and this is really nothing new):

'Push' based on Market Research: Mass Media
Get specific info from the user: Search
Get user input on tastes: Y! LaunchCast
Let users self-select: Social networks

There are draw backs to each approach... I'll cover these and the implications in later posts.

The point here is that people consume video differently than text, and there any dislocation will be different. It is much more of a push media that will require a certain degree of bundling to accomidate the more passive nature of video entertainment.

The social network model will be weak as a model for how this dislocation will happen, and where the opportunities will be.

Root of R/W Media Value

2005-11-30T18:24:00.000-08:00

As a born skeptic, I have resisted the latest wave of peer-based hype surrounding blogs for some time. I've run web sites from the ground up, and through dummy services like geocities and the like. So what. People are posting stuff on the internet. It isn't that hard.

But now I get it. I get it because I've been sucked in. Once I got past using RSS to give me locally published football news (to get the real scoop), I quickly found that I was pushing traditionally published content down further on my My Y! page. Today I dumped them altogether.

The truth is that I get very little beyond basic updates on the 'news' from these sources. The value is in their timliness, not their content, and I get this from many different sources. There is never anything that gets you thinking. Never anything that makes you mad, or engages you in the discourse. It just is. And it only is once it 'has been determined' to be fact (passive voice intentional).

The hype is the problem. The Hype around this whole community, viral, peer-based, social Web 2.0 noise tuend me off, and caused me to dismiss the whole thing as a well orchestrated PR excersise (I've been there myself).

What's ironic is that I saw the whole thing as someone using the media infrastructure to some end, and that I was being presented with 'fact' that was spin. But this was just traditional media coverage. Once I engaged inside these networks, I found fluid conversations. No fact, no posturing, no false sense of authority. Egos to be sure, but it is all open for debate (whatever it is). And it is good.

The value is undeniable, but I am still struggling to work out the implications. And the entreprenuer in me is curious about the opportunities that emerge in this kind of dislocation.

So I want to get back to basics and figure out what it all means. I get that Google Ad Sense can support one witty schmo's beer nut budget for his regular midnight rantings -- and that this scales. But the fundamentals behind why this works are more interesting. I firmly believe that core qualities are being exposed through these networks that will transform all informational enterprises -- from technical R&D to corporate strategic and market research.

Its not just newspapers, catalogues and libraries... as Goliath might lead you to believe.

Join this conversation. I don't know the exact path, but I know we can figure it out together.