What does Web 2.0 mean to me?

I was asked this question for a podcast at the recent Under the Radar conference where Zvents presented. You can test my memory by hunting up the actual podcast, but I am pretty sure this is the same answer I gave:

It means two things -- one technological, and one social.

Socially, it's the return of hope and enthusiasm to Silicon Valley. People may mock "bubble 2.0" and naysayers can always point to some particular point of excess, but the reason we entrepreneurs are here is to change the world, and a lot of dreams lay dormant from 2001 to 2005. Those dreams are being knit into reality today, and many of us can see that we'll be able to make the world a very different, and hopefully better place, soon.

Technologically, it's about data as a platform (just like Tim O'Reilly said) and more importantly, it's about fast and simple integration of that data. Mashups may occasionally be dorky, but they demonstrate a level of interoperability that is simply astonishing when compared to 1999. We've all seen network effects accelerate change and growth to warp speed -- what we're seeing now is kind of Metcalfe's Law of web functionality, where the value of every interoperable web service is the square of the number of other services to which it can be connected.

Hmmm. I know I didn't say that one in the podcast. It may actually be worth its own post.
But, back to work. Big customer meeting tomorrow...

...Web 2.0 means the return of customers. Yee Hah!

Aggregate Knowlege launches at ETech

I may be busting the press embargo by 90 minutes or so, but I'm really excited about this one. e, Tomorrow at ETech, Paul Martino and Chris Law are taking the wraps off of Aggregate Knowledge, their fascinating new play on a recommendations web service.

Paul and Chris were formerly founders of Tribe Networks, and Paul (several lives ago) was a graph theory PhD student at Princeton. They've cracked the problem of providing user-specific recommendations across multiple data types in real time, thanks to some seriously fancy math under the hood. We've been using AgKnow at Zvents to power some of the "related events" content on our site (Disclosure: I am also an investor), and look forward to more customers joining their service so we can begin to benefit from further network-effect driven recommended content.

Most importantly in this mash-up world, it takes from minutes to a few hours to fully implement their service on your site. EAI is soooo dead.

I expect them to do very well in both the content recommendation and non-search navigation business. Rock the house, guys!

P.S. I previously mentioned these guys in November.

Technorati Tag: ETech

The limitations of dynamic content creation

To confirm the spelling on the Latin phrase "casus belli," I typed it in to Google. eBay provided some serious unintended humor.

Ether *is* Keen 2.0: Old Wine, New Bottles

Over at TechCrunch, Mike just posted on Ether, a new company driven out of the pay-per-call innovators Ingenio. My immediate thought was, "is Mayfield funding this company?" because Mayfield is (in)famously trolling through old bubble business plans for ideas, and this sounds an awful lot like Keen.com.

Keen was funded by Benchmark around 1999. I first saw gigantic billboards on the Underground advertising Keen in 2000 when I was living in London, and I remember thinking, "Damn, that's a great idea," as I stared at them from the platform across the tracks. It may still be a great idea, but Keen was relegated to a fairly painful fate, morphing into a psychic hotline and not much else. And certainly nothing that could make back the bubble-zillions that got poured into it.

In poking around to check out the carcass of Keen, I discovered a most curious fact:

Ingenio (Ether) *is* Keen! Changed their name sometime in the last seven years. Look right down at the bottom: "Keen is a trademark of Ingenio, Inc."

What was old is new again...!

Feed reader creators: There is so much left to do

I have a confession to make. Here I am smack in the middle of Web 2.0, a founder of a site that pumps out more RSS than you can shake a stick at, and I don't like feed readers. In fact, until about two weeks ago, I had never really used one, save a single desultory experiment back in 2005.

(Gasp!)

Yes, I have been quite embarassed about this affliction. I must admit, I have hidden it from my peers.

"Hi, I'm Ethan, and I type in URLs by hand."

I felt so bad that I finally caved in a few weeks ago and submitted to Bloglines. At least I could get an OPML file out of it, I thought... since Dave Winer assures me that will be useful soon, and Kevin Burton swears it will help me find all sorts of cool stuff on the web. I heard rumors at the last TechCrunch BBQ that it even attracts girls, but I've already found one of them.

But I couldn't stand it. Sure, it's all my reading in one place, and the atom feeds look sort of like their source blogs, but it's all kind of... attenuated. Like sucking Coca-Cola through a long straw, so the fizz is gone. All the formatting is replaced with grey-on-white arial. The fascinating sidebar tidbits and blogrolls and, yes, ads all disappear. And the urgent boldface of posts as yet unread, marching down the left sidebar like dutiful ants...

I thought I was alone.

And then... I found another! There in the endless grey arial sat a wizened little scrap of text, from AVC, blog home of none other than Fred Wilson, who, if he isn't the patron saint of Web 2.0, is, at a minimum, merry Mercury in its Pantheon. And what sayeth Fred?

"I Prefer Browsing To Reading Feeds"

Hallelujah!

Me too, Fred! In fact, this may be the most important post you've ever written. It's supportive of an inclusive and exploratory, rather than exclusive and reductionist, view of the web. While it calls out feed readers explicitly, it also criticizes by implication all the other exclusionary, reductivist drivers in this fascinating new media landscape -- our tendency to read the same old blogs; our algorithmic focus on the same old hubs and authorities; our analytical adherence to the same old scales and dimensions, and most particularly, our (and MY) fear that somehow, by being human, I was wrong.

A quote from Stephen Pinker's book (yes, an actual paper book!) The Blank Slate:

"The belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to write off people's enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale, and forced millions of people to live in drab cement boxes."

I love blogs. I love the conversation, and the chase, and the delight of discovery. I love the humanity of user-created content, and I don't want to aggregate and attenuate that away in some misguided attempt at rational efficiency.

Is BuzzMachine the same without seeing that giant press picture at the top of the site before reading it every day? It reminds you, the reader, of the massive machine that is MSM. Like the three tones of NBC News at dinnertime; like Pavlov's dog; I salivate before dining daily with Jeff Jarvis.

Give me that ornament, and human scale, that connection with the writer and their carefully tweaked site, and at the same time make my life easier - and you'll have a dedicated customer. But until then...

...this new/old human-based web needs to remember us humans.

Feed reader creators: There is so much left to do.

Great new maps from Ask.com

Ask announced that they're going to fight for search, and launched some cool new maps functionality. Much of what you see here is a quality re-implementation of Google Maps, but there are some cool new features - for instance, Tyler pointed out that after you enter a route, you can click a "play" button and Ask will walk you through the steps onscreen.

Yawn, you say. Google did most of the useful bits a year ago, and Yahoo more or less matched this last fall.

True.

What I find fascinating is that the leading edge of search is all happening at startups, and that the offerings of the big boys are increasingly undifferentiated.

Why isn't Google building Plazes on top of Maps? Why isn't Google building Zillow on top of Maps? Heck, why isn't Google building Zvents on top of Maps?

It's a very interesting time to be a search startup. It feels like the calm before the storm -- with an absolute explosion of functionality coming very soon.

Classifieds are Transactional, Groups are Relational

Mike recently wrote a second review of the forthcoming Microsoft Expo (aka Fremont) on TechCrunch.

He said, "Expo is centered on the idea that people will trust others within a group, and so is allowing classifieds networks within groups."

I left a comment on the article, which I'll expand upon here.

The original concept of Tribe Networks was that classified advertising would work better within the trust circles of existing groups, or "Tribes". This focus - which wasn't something they publicly discussed - is why their investors included the Washington Post and Knight Ridder. While Tribe is still going, it's fair to say that this concept didn't work for them. Maybe Microsoft can do better, but I am not convinced.

There are two simple reasons why.

First, classifieds are inherently transactional, and long term relationships of trust simply aren't necessary. Each of us has a sphere of activities, interests, friends, and so forth -- and when a buyer and a seller get together to transact a piece of merchandise, none of that is relevant. I have both bought and sold cars via classified ads, and what mattered to me wasn't that the other guy was nice, or trustworthy, or that we had anything larger in common; what mattered was that his cash or his car was as represented, and I came to the exchange with one, and walked away with the other.

There are very rare exceptions to this dictum - just yesterday, my friend Niranjan regaled me with the story of his purchasing an absolutely mint 1964 Volvo P1800 as driven by "The Saint." He still visits the previous (and original) owners of the car once a year to show it to them, and they sold it to him at a below-market price on the basis of his winning personality and love for the car. But exceptions like these prove the rule. Ask yourself - how many goods have I purchased or sold through classified ads; how much did I really care to know about those sellers/buyers, and how much would I be willing to change the mechanics of the transaction - e.g. paying higher or taking a lower price, waiting longer for an item to turn up within my limited network, etc., just to take advantage of that fuzzy feel-good surround?

The second problem with this concept is that people are wildly inconsistent. The certified CPA is cheating on his wife. The marriage counselor that they are seeing is an asshole in business dealings. The ultra-reliable mechanic who fixes their car with fantastic attention to detail can't keep his personal finances in order. Within different contexts, people's behavior can be so different as to be contradictory, and therefore, all the social things you think you know about someone from a groups-like exercise such as this, may disinform as much as they inform.

I'll be very curious to watch this develop, but I don't see any magical secret sauce yet.

Google Maps ego-surf: Everything is higher resolution at the Googleplex!!

Google Maps updated their satellite imagery, offering higher resolution in many places. Of course I had to check out my house - an increasingly less obscure form of ego-surfing. Since I live only a mile or two from Google, I scrolled over there to check out the uniquely weird/cool architecture of the Googleplex. Surprise! The world suddenly gets sharper, more crisp, and clearly resolved, right where the landfill ends and Google begins, even if the roads don't quite match up.

It's kind of cute -- sort of like those airbrushed graduation pictures we all had at age 18. If I were organizing the world's information, I'd probably do the same thing.

Q: Guys, when are you going to stop being coy and make 'Googleplex' resolve in the same way that 'Buckingham Palace' does?

User-Created Content: Market Goods, Cavemen, Schadenfreude

Ethan Prater at Jigsaw dropped me a note after my last post on user-created content and encouraged me to push my thinking a bit further. Specifically, he asked how I'd think of the content that users place into Jigsaw's contacts marketplace. As I understand Jigsaw's business, there are two different categories of information and value that they're getting from their users:

1) Contact information

2) Metadata & feedback about contact information

The first case is a classic "selfish self-entry" good. Either I am entering my contacts into Jigsaw in order to make cash money ('Buy, Sell, and Trade Business Contacts" is their tagline) or I am entering my contacts into Jigsaw in order to better manage them, and to derive some business development value ("trade your contacts") from them.

Metadata about contact information is a bit trickier, and forgive me, Ethan P., if I divert from your actual business model a bit to expound upon it. One of the other taglines on the Jigsaw front page is, "Accurate Data: Because Members Build and Clean the Database." That 'cleaning' bit is what I would refer to as metadata -- meaning, feedback that this is a bogus contact, an outdated contact, or a useless contact - I imagine someone writing in, "this guy may be the VP of Spending Money on Large Humming Boxes, but he takes 18 months to make a decision."

This is exactly the same kind of user-created content that steers the ship at Craigslist -- users can flag any post as miscategorized, spam, etc. -- and that eBay relies upon, with their famous buyer- and seller-rating system. It's the same kind of content that Amazon Reviews runs upon - the guy on the street giving good directions, which he has no particular reason to give.

It's difficult to identify why, exactly, users do this - I'd say that it falls at the delightful juncture of psyche where human beings depart from the rational choice models and start acting like, well, humans. Depending on what you belive, it might be called schadenfreude content, or perhaps caveman content.

The person who discovers that a Jigsaw contact is bogus (or, on Craigslist, that the posting is inappropriate in some way) is very unlikely to be fooled into wasting their own time on that content / contact again -- they've discovered that it's bad, and they'll move on. From a selfish perspective, throwing even another mouse click after that bad content in the form of punching a simple bogosity button only increases their sunk cost. So why do it? Is it because we instinctively recognize that on the other side of the oft-referenced "tragedy of the commons" lies a triumph of the commons, where lots of feedback snippets from lots of people can actually create broadly beneficial value? Or are we simply mad enough at having been misled -- whether it's an abstract anger at a bum steer in a piece of anonymous information, or a very directed annoyance at some scammer who's trying to take our money -- that we strike back through negative review?

I don't know.

In any case, we act; we vote; we warn the other grubby apes that here lay sour berries, here lurk leopards, and we suggest that the tribe move on.

Here is what I would posit: That the urge toward fairness and truth is so strong that it overpowers economic gain - and economic gain can actually get in the way of this impulse, by making people question their own instincts. So without knowing exactly how Jigsaw is managing their user-driven data-cleaning feedback system, I'd strongly recommend that they pay their users for this act in status and righteousness, not money. Compensating them for their contacts is an entirely separate transaction; monitoring the data quality is a moral crusade that I think we all are deeply primed to engage in, regardless of what the dystopian economists tell us about our amoral motivations.

Next post: data exhaust, perhaps the only category of user-created content that *might* qualify for the soulless rubric 'user generated.'

User-Created Content: Selfish, Social, Selfless

I continue to be fascinated by everyone's determination to wrap user-created content into their new web services, despite their flamboyant display of ignorance as to *why* users actually create content. Here are three distinct models that can help you think about why users create:

1) Selfish UCC. Delicious bookmarks and Flickr photos. I primarily bookmark and take pictures for myself -- because I want to remember, or because I like something. I use these web-based apps instead of client-side equivalents because I personally get more value out of them. While the social benefit is apparent, I view that social benefit strictly through a selfish lens -- instead of emailing pictures to my Mom, I can just point her at Flickr. I encourage other people to use these sites for selfish reasons as well -- it makes it easier for me to keep track of their UCC. Another great example of selfish UCC is every auction on eBay. Those sellers are not putting those auctions up there to help anyone but themselves - any general benefit is strictly a secondary effect. It's not necessary for any individual item of UCC to relate to any other item - a picture or a bookmark has its own stand-alone value.

2) Social UCC. Blogs, Slashdot comments, and Yahoo Groups are great examples. People create content in order to express a point of view within a larger conversational context. There is usually an implied audience and an implied reference in most of this type of content. Why do people create conversations? It's somewhere between selfish and selfless - call it social. We want to take part in something larger than just ourselves, but we expect to benefit as well. In this case, personal and general benefit are deeply intertwined, and each item of UCC relates to other items of UCC.

3) Selfless UCC. This is the one that leads most everyone astray. The single great example of selfless UCC is Wikipedia. If I am an expert in subject X, I already know all about it. I do not benefit personally from writing down that information and sharing it with the world -- I am primarily doing it so that you, the reader, can benefit; or out of some sense of "greater good" and contribution to something shared and larger than just myself. It's a very noble aspiration that drives this kind of UCC, and it's not particuarly surprising that this makes it the most rare. Implied for this sort of content is a weak sense of authorship -- if I am personally attached to the content, it begins to look much more like a conversation.

The obvious non-UCC example of this strong authorship point is newspaper reporters vs. columnists - a column is a conversation, whereas a byline is subsumed (largely) by the headline and content of the article.

There are particular issues inherent to each different type of UCC:

1) For selfish UCC, the issue is relevance and commensurability. If I take notes on something for my own purposes, there's no reason for me to care whether it accords with anyone else's notation in any sort of commensurable way. Delicious tries to address this problem by suggesting tags that other people used on an item; this drives convergence on certain terms, making their programmatic understanding of what that item is more robust.

2) For social UCC, the issue is personal opinion over-riding fact. Every conversation implies ego and point of view, and in reading a conversational thread, one has to constantly be asking "what was their motivation in saying that". Bias is inherent to the medium.

3) For selfless UCC, the issue is quality. As people are endlessly pointing out, there is a lot of crap in Wikipedia. You may not agree with someone's opinion on Slashdot, and you may not find my bookmarks in Delicious useful, but there are strong incentives in both contexts for me to at least try to make my content accurate. In the selfless context, well, the incentives aren't just as strong.

This suggests obvious remedies in product design:

1) For selfish UCC, take note of Delicious' example and try to drive general relevance without interrupting the selfishness of your users. Delicious prompts me with terms others have used, making my selfish life easier while making relevance of my actions more general.

2) For social UCC, create programmatic mechanisms (like polls or votes or star ratings) that allow people to quantify their point of view on some abstract scale. This will benefit the user (by allowing them to say simply, "I am *very* Republican," for instance) and benefit everyone else -- who can then say, "He's *very* Republican, and I can easily assess where he's coming from."

3) For Selfless UCC, use human editors to manage quality, and try as much as possible to create "superuser" editors to do this for you. The cost-benefit ratio is outstanding, so get over the stone-ageness of it and go make money.

If you apply this model to a lot of the "Web 2.0" websites out there, it readily explains why there are such issues with the user-created content on most of them. UCC is a two-edged sword, and must be used well to avoid injury.

Note on terminology: I deeply dislike the term "User-Generated Content" (UGC). People don't generate (a mechanistic or animalistic term), they create. Creation is a deeply human act, and we should celebrate it.

Update: Find more at the follow-up post "Market Goods, Cavemen, Schadenfreude"

Ruby on Rails at SDForum Tonight

Tom Hill, one of our senior engineers at Zvents, will be speaking about Ruby on Rails tonight at the SDForum Emerging Tech SIG at the Cubbery Community Center in Palo Alto. Details here:

Zvents is developed primarily in Ruby on Rails, and I can't say enough good things about it. Come find out more about the next wave in Web programming!

SDForum runs all sorts of interesting technical and business events related to software development- you can see their full schedule here.

Squidoo and TechCrunch: Experts Rise Again

When I heard about Seth Godin's new startup Squidoo, I thought, "Aha! That fits perfectly into Nivi's Trillion Dollar Matrix in the 'experts' category." I did a quick Technorati search on the status of the conversation, and discovered that Adam Marsh at EconoMeta has taken the matrix farther in interesting ways -- but pulled the experts column! Not so fast, Adam! In addition to clever programmatic methods like Squidoo for managing and measuring expertise, there are plenty of other expert systems out there. Like Google Answers, or Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which I predict will bifurcate into two main areas of practice; one, the mass processing of tasks where non-expert humans beat computers, and two, the focused processing of tasks where human experts beat computers.

But by focusing on point examples like the Turk or Squidoo, we're missing the hundred-billion dollar present reality that should be smacking us in the face:

Media is about expertise.

I regularly hear about new startups like Squidoo from TechCrunch, which is one of my key personal filters for what matters on the cutting edge of the web. Is Mike an expert? Of course he is, and the fact that TechCrunch has more traffic and better adoption curves than a lot of supposedly hot search startups speaks volumes about the world recognizing the value of expertise.

Talent will out.

The computer era has made clear that talent is much more unevenly distributed than anyone would have thought. In 1975 or 1985, were all the best managers in the world Harvard and Stanford MBAs? No. No. In 1995 or 2005, were all the top engineers in the world at blue-chip corporations and top-tier universities? No. No.

Expertise requires talent.

Let me re-assert Barry Diller's claim that there's only so much talent in the world. Diller's rule of talent (you can probably find the Web 2.0 podcast somewhere, but it parses to "there are few undiscovered geniuses in closets anywhere") means that the best user-created content is a transitory phenomenon. A lot of what Jeff Jarvis refers to as "user created content" is, I would assert, a snapshot of the emergence of talent in new and unexpected places, like blogs. But these people usually don't stay "users." Talented folks who were unevenly distributed vs. the expected structures of recognition, wealth, and power, have a tendency to rapidly move into expected positions, or start reorganizing the structures to reflect new realities.

So we end up with new media, containing new experts, who continue to act as an incredibly valuable relevance mechanism for data.

Hats off to Seth. And hats off to Mike, whose user blog --> expert media site should in no way be thought of as any less complex, cool, or important than startup entities in a different, algorithimic column of the trillion-dollar matrix.

My next post will hopefully not be so long in coming: Thoughts on how it's easy to get stuck between media and practice, drawn from a couple conversations I've had with two guys who are doing both.

Mike: media & practice
Andy: media & practice

My media is here at Onotech; Zvents is my practice.

Tribe Founders Launch Startup Aggregate Knowledge

Paul Martino and Chris Law, both founders of Tribe Networks, have been hanging out at the NSV offices and working really hard on their new startup, Aggregate Knowledge. They have a recommendations web service, WSRelater, live now on the web. I've played with it, and it's awesome. There is some impressive math behind the engine, and the number of cool things I can think of to do with it is rather long. Keep them on your radar screen.

Update: Google Responds, Urchin Works

I sent out an email to the team last night:

Hallelujah! We've got data!
After 49 empty hours, we've got data through 1pm today. Urchin works again!

Google customer service both called and emailed us yesterday as well, apologized for our troubles, and offered to refund money to us. I told them that a refund was nice, but what's really important is that Urchin works. To me, that means our website data consistently available with no more than 2-3 hours' delay.

The big issue is not one startup's angst about its temporary lack of web stats. The big issue is whether it's possible to reliably deliver complex software over the Internet at all. Google is the biggest player in this space, with vast resources of engineering, bandwidth, and servers, but everyone from Salesforce.com to Zvents is attempting to deliver significant software functionality remotely over the Internet.

We are asking our customers to bet their businesses on our ability to deliver. "Flaky but free" simply does not cut it any more. How many of you out there rely on Yahoo or Google email for business-critical communications? What if it went down tomorrow, for 48 hours? What if Salesforce.com stopped working for 48 hours? What if Ebay or Adwords stopped working? Marketing campaigns, communications, and commerce grind to a halt, and real damage is done to real people and real businesses.

Can this really work? The whole premise of the next generation of Web startups is that it can. Zvents is planning on embedding its calendars and serving events into a lot of other people's websites, such as early adopter LinkSV. If we go down, they have no events calendar on their site. As we grow, that customer reliance on us will grow to tens of thousands of similar sites, and if they have no data for 48 hours, there will be anguished screams that will sound very similar to my own post.

I think it can work, but it's going to require not only a business model, but a lot of grownup enterprise kind of thinking, with SLAs and obligations and recompense for failure clearly laid out in contracts. Otherwise, the level of trust simply won't exist to create the very cool future that we're imagining and building right now.

Google: Start acting like a real business or you're doomed

Zvents is an Urchin hosted customer. Yes, customer, as in we pay Google $200 per month to provide our web stats to us. We have been very happy with the quality of the tools that Urchin provides, but intermittently unhappy with the time lag it takes or our web data to appear, and the occasional gaps in our data (we are still missing two hours from last Monday). Google has been kind of OK on the customer service front.

Until today.

I don't know how many other people like us there are - people who paid for hosted Urchin before today's announcement. But I bet that all of them are pissed.

Here's what happened:

I tried to log in to Urchin. Surprise! Urchin now resolves to Google analytics. I typed in our login and password, and I was informed that this account "has to be validated". As it happens, this is a special account just for Urchin and I don't havedirect access to the email address - a not uncommon problem in any organization larger than, say, one. After a few hours of fumbling around and swapping phone calls and emails, I get one of the other guys to send me the validation information.

Next surprise: Because Google is switching to some damn unified login system, whenever I use the login for this account, it messes up any other Google logins I have. Apparently there's a way to pipe this login over to my Gmail account, but it's another hassle-filled step that I didn't have to take yesterday when Urchin JUST WORKED.

Eventually I get in to Urchin. Urchin is getting slammed with traffic. We hear all this hoorah about Google's hundreds of thousands of servers and their ability to host applications, and all I can say is, if casual interest in a service you aren't even accepting new registrations for grinds you to a halt like this, you are nothing like ready for prime time.

Here is a screen shot of what Urchin looks like to me after 10 minutes of waiting and a couple attempts at reloading:



Not very useful.

When I finally do get in to Urchin, I have no data since 3pm yesterday. That's 24 hours without data. Zero. Zip. None. I'm trying to run my business here, folks! Hello?

It's nice that it's now free. But I was willing to pay $200 per month for a service that Just Worked. Google may be all excited about advertising business models, but there are billion dollars businesses built on charging other businesses $200 per month.

Right now, I feel like Google doesn't care about me enough as a customer to tell me that they're changing a product I pay for. They don't care enough about me as a customer to make sure that my login doesn't change, or that they at least ask or warn me before changing my login. They don't care enough about me as a customer to make sure that the re-launch of their product doesn't dramatically impact the people who are already paying them lots of money.

Google isn't acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren't they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up.

Hand-waving hippie dreams of new media

Uncharacteristically, Jeff Jarvis posted some complete nonsense on Buzz Machine yesterday. He wrote:

Robin Good puts together a few PowerPointable lines on the future of media:

Consumers become producers of content, and niche content surpasses by orders of magnitude the value of traditionally labelled commercial television and film.

The value is not anymore in the best seller or in the blockbuster.

The value is in infinite choice of content and in the opportunity for the consumer to see content when she wants it: prime time is anytime, and anytime is prime time.

Meanwhile, allow me to quote from a recent Slate review of the new Comcast NHL coverage, a piece entitled "The latest desperate attempt to top ESPN":

...if OLN's occasionally amateurish-looking production affirms for viewers that only ESPN can do sports right, then Comcast's national ambitions could find an early, icy grave...

...The network's buffoonish studio show doesn't do much to enhance OLN's credibility....

...The telecasts also gain instant credibility because of play-by-play announcer Mike "Doc" Emrick, who leaves the cliché-ridden competition in the dust—skaters don't merely pass the puck, they "feather it along,"...

...It's easy to sympathize with OLN's early struggles. The channel won the rights to broadcast NHL games...not two months before the opening face-off. At this point in its nascent coverage, OLN's basic charge is to transmit a crisp picture; at least the network's production values compare in quality to local cable broadcasts...

Unless you're so bought in to the new memes of free content from all (dude) you'll note a trend in the Slate review (and yes, they are part of the horrible MSM, in a new-media kind of way)

1) Talent
2) Production values

- "Doc" Emrick is talented and a plus
- The studio team are buffoons and a minus
- Production values are not yet up to ESPN's standard since the OLN only had two months to put the broadcast together, and viewers will notice.

Media is valuable, because our time and attention is valuable. We all choose to consume media from preferred providers, and the two mechanisms by which we choose those providers are the talent on display, and the production values around that talent. I loosely define production values as "capital investments which make the consumption of the core content more pleasant, informative, or easier". For writing, production values include good web design, non-intrusive ads, reasonable colors and fonts (get busy, Andrew!) and so forth. For audible media, production values are things like the recording quality, background noise, the level of editing to remove slow or redundant sections, and so forth. For anything visual, the list of production values begins to be very long, and even more important.

It's a cliche that no one watches home video, despite its existence for decades. The two areas where I can think of home video having real general media value are a) occasional "man on the spot" news clips (Rodney King) and "America's Funniest Home Videos". What links these two together thematically is that they're essentially random -- something either funny or important happened in front of a turned-on video camera, and the value of the content outweighed its lack of production quality.

Here's a graphic that I put together in 2001 for a strategy I was doing for a mobile phone company. Any similarity to Web 2.0 standards is strictly coincidental - I've been thinking in power curves for a very long time. As you can see, based on the empirical data of a search I did on Amazon, there's a nice inverse relationship between cost of production and number of content items.



Why is this? There are two dynamics at play. First, in any gathering of people to create something, some people are more talented than others. I participate in some small-scale local theater and performance, and when there are six people in a room, usually everyone knows that one or two of them are better than the rest. These talented people tend to like working with other talented people, and over a small amount of time, quite a sorting effect occurs. Pretty soon the talented gang invents a name, throws out a shingle, starts charging, and voila! the naescent MSM is born.

When you add money into the equation, the effect is to enhance the differentiation. Perhaps a financier made money once, sometime, in a far distant past, by *not* seeking out the best directorial, writing, performing, and technical talent for his production - but I doubt it. When real dollars are at stake, people seek out the best, and then fund them. Those who aren't the best don't get funding. From movies to music to television to video games, this is an obvious trend even in relatively "new" media like video games.

Example of the "talent self-clusters" point here, here, and here.
Example of the "financier seeking the best talent" point here and here.

Oh, ze world, she turns but she stays ze same...

I do believe that temporarily, at least, some barriers have fallen in our new world. Here I am, writing this blog. But my choice with this blog is very clear: I can either a) invest a lot of time in it to create quality content on a regular enough basis to develop a readership or b) I can get on with my real life, which is running a cool new startup called Zvents, and only post here occasionally because I feel like it, and not worry about becoming a media property. I am never going to out-do BuzzMachine in popularity or readership unless I put some serious work into the effort, which I'm simply not going to do. Therefore I will 98% remain on the "Consumer" side of the blog equation, despite my reasonable levels of inclination, ability, and empowerment to become a producer. Meanwhile, Jeff will sit on the opposite side of the equation, and take each successive step up the production values and monetization ladder which develops over the next few years, and in 36 months, it won't be possible to compare my blog to his with a straight face - if it even is now.

Jeff will have, by dint of wildly disproportonate readership, a "blockbuster" on his hands, giving lie to the baloney in his recent post.

Whenever anyone starts talking about new democracy in media, just remember that for the past 100 years, any normal person with about $50 to their name has been able to buy a typewriter and a sheaf of paper, sit down, and create a novel. For the past 100 years, being a successful novelist has been a well-paying, respected position. The fact that so few have managed to do this, despite the legions who have tried out of the near-totality of all who could have tried, indicates that there's something slightly more fundamental going on than big mean corporations holding back the little guy.

That something is the rarity of talent, the social network clustering effects of production values, and the reality that all of our time is limited, and brands are a great way to short-circuit searching costs.

The wonderment of the current age of the internet is not that the new winners will look any different than the old winners, but simply that a window of opportunity exists to make new winners at all.

The Real Microsoft Memos

Everyone is talking about the transparently leaked Microsoft memos. The version presented here (courtesy of the unchained snark that is The Register) is much more entertaining than the ones you've read elsewhere:

Gates stirs Microsoft with dramatic 'more meetings' plea

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Published Thursday 10th November 2005 00:04 GMT

Analysis Ever the master of public relations, Microsoft has always been able to figure its way out of a tight spot with the use of a judiciously leaked memo.

...in the spirit of the excellent 500-word "digested reads" offered by some of our better newspapers, we give you the précis of the latest Gates and Ozzie memos. Then we'll put the whole affair in some historical perspective.

From: Bill Gates

Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 9:56 PM

To: Executive Staff and Direct Reports; Distinguished Engineers; All TV, print, radio and internet news outlets; All bloggers [delete last five before release]

Subject: Internet Software Services

Microsoft has always had to respond to innovators in the software business and seize the PR initiative.

Ten years ago this December, I wrote a memo entitled The Internet Tidal Puddle in which I attempted to undo the damage caused by my book, The Road Ahead, published just three months previously.

In The Road Ahead I failed to mention the internet at all. The same month, Netscape had floated on NASDAQ, creating the largest ever first day gain. Clearly, there was a puddle in the road ahead. So in my memo I warned that we could either step round the puddle, or step right into it, and risk being drowned.

In 1995 none of our products made use of TCP/IP. Now, a decade later, I can safely say that many of them do.

In 1995 I warned that we risked losing the mindshare of a new generation of internet software developers who chose to shun Microsoft APIs completely. Now, a decade later, I can say that close to 100 per cent of Internet-born viruses, Trojans, rootkits and worms use Microsoft APIs exclusively.

However, to lead we need to do far more.

In order to execute on this opportunity we must look as if we're acting quickly and decisively. Recently competitors [Steve, chair down. DOWN.] have gained massive public attention by rolling out products that remain in beta for many years. This is unacceptable. Products that remain in beta for many years should be first and foremost, in the public's mind, Microsoft products.

For three months Ray Ozzie has been sitting in his orgone accumulator devising a strategy to ensure we can execute. I've attached a memo written by him that I think strikes the right balance between pre-announcement and non-delivery. I'm happy to share it with you.

Bill

Go read the rest here.

NumSum, Nivi, and a Trillion Dollars

Nivi just posted a response to some of my stuff on social web. We also had a really interesting conversation over at Bessemer with James Cham on this subject the other day. Nivi's matrix is empty and hard to play with, so I put in in NumSum, which is Steve Yen's latest project:



Play away.

SDForum Search SIG @ Microsoft Thursday

John Battelle and an interesting panel. I will be here:

Scoble asks what you call 'em? Raw Potatoes!

Scoble asks what you call things like Flickr, Microsoft Gadgets, Google Maps, Amazon Affiliate parts.

Quote:

I’ve been struggling to communicate with others what the new Internet ecosystem is made up of and it hit me a few minutes ago.

They are Internet Connected Components.

Hear me out.

When you go to Kayak Buzz or Zvents, what do you see? Two ICCs. One is a Google Map. Another is a AdSense bar...

...I think we need a non-branded name to generically refer to these things. What do you think?

Here's my proposal: raw potatoes. Why? Because they're what you mash up.

If you call 'em rawpotatoes (no space) you can create a nice searchable tag/phrase that doesn't currently mean anything else. When's the last time you saw a search result this empty?

Hats off to Chris Law for reserving the URL already. I'm sure he'll be happy to build it as an open community resource for Web 2.0 just like he's done with WSFinder.