I spent a few years of my life working on eMarkets. It was a business that created a ton of hype, most of which came to naught as the protagonists were exceedingly ahead of their time, and even (gasp!) poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. I've always admired eBay for building a phenomenal market out of of exactly the kinds of customers that your MBA marketing classes would tell you never to go after -- the flea-market, short-a-dollar, nickel-squeezing types that make up the collectors, traders, antique dealers, and general sharp bargainin' eye-for-a-deal secondary market of the world.
eBay has done this so well, says the UK Guardian (new bastion of cutting edge tech analysis?) that the average wealth of a UK household has increased by 3000 pounds (about $5000 at current dismal exchange rates).
I suspect that increase in value is almost entirely attributable to two factors; a) the ability to monetize previously unsellable "long tail" items and b) the ability to maximize one's selling price for many "big tail" items that previously might have been sold at a discount for want of multiple competing buyers. Both of these are different aspects of a decrease in transaction costs, most particuarly the costs of locating a willing buyer, or (the flip side of the same deal) the buyer's costs of locating an appropriate item to buy.
This is probably a good time to go sideways into policy and plug Hernado de Soto's fantastic book The Mystery of Capital, which analyzes how a lack of clear, efficient system for allocating property rights in many countries prevents people from borrowing against the value of their homes, and causes cradle death for capitalism.
It's kind of startling to stop and think that the ability to borrow against one's home is a fundamental basis for making our capitalistic world go 'round - and that liquidity is reflected in reasonably efficient mechanisms for turning a house into cash, or vice versa. eBay has taken a whole second tier of capital goods -- mostly what government statistics bureaus are fond of calling "durable goods" but plenty of other stuff, too -- and creating a market of sufficient liquidity that rather than being a straight purchase, the acquisition of many items can now be thought of more as a financial transaction where you go "long" the item in question against an expected curve of depreciation vs. usefulness, with an exit at some future date for a signficant fraction of the item's current value.
It's these kind of tertiary unexpected effects of the Internet that make world-changing techno-social systems so cool.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
More Thoughts on Events, Media, People
I've made the claim before that events are news, and I've implied that Zvents is going after the media angle of the whole landscape. Peter Caputa is blogging about when, and how, Zvents and WhizSpark will collide; I'll lay out a few components and he can draw his own conclusions.
First, check out this above-the-fold Sunday Merc from a few weeks ago:
I should just say "Events = News" and let the image do the talking. More or less the entire selling point of this Sunday paper is four key events: The Grand Prix in San Jose (55,000 attendees expected) The Gilroy Garlic Festival (122,000 attendees last year) a jobs fair (paid placement advertising, no doubt really profitable for the Merc) and some kid-friendly events. The Merc is one of the more important papers in America - 268,000 circulation - and all the most important things that they can think of to splash across the front of their Sunday paper are events.
Is it any wonder that we're interested in this space? The web provides the opportunity for phenomenal search tools, personal managment tools, near-effortless communication with your friends about items of mutual interest, an unlimited volume of content, and incredibly cheap distribution to the end-user. Once the nitty-gritty process of "what to do" starts getting reinvented - the first task on our list - it's a few hard but short steps to a drastic rethink of local media, with implications numbering in the billions of dollars of ad spend.
So here's my map of the events space - I could have done this a number of different ways, but this is today's way of thinking about it + 10 minutes in PowerPoint.
Zvents is going to try to make the media connection to people about public events. Peter is trying to help event promoters/venues connect to people. His revenue model is primarily direct, with some indirect; mine is primarily indirect (ads) with some direct. And since the media side is so huge, where we will likely first collide is somewhere right around Evite, which is the management of personal events. I don't find that space interesting in and of itself, but when someone starts adding a public event to their personal calendar and forwarding it to their friends; or creating a "Joe's 49ers game party" on the back of the public event of a 49ers game, I'm solidly into that territory. And when Joe starts blogging about both the 49ers game and his party, it starts to smell an awful lot like WhizSpark's "local bloggers promote events" model.
Fascinating times.
Closing question: Where's Nick Denton in all of this?
First, check out this above-the-fold Sunday Merc from a few weeks ago:
I should just say "Events = News" and let the image do the talking. More or less the entire selling point of this Sunday paper is four key events: The Grand Prix in San Jose (55,000 attendees expected) The Gilroy Garlic Festival (122,000 attendees last year) a jobs fair (paid placement advertising, no doubt really profitable for the Merc) and some kid-friendly events. The Merc is one of the more important papers in America - 268,000 circulation - and all the most important things that they can think of to splash across the front of their Sunday paper are events.
Is it any wonder that we're interested in this space? The web provides the opportunity for phenomenal search tools, personal managment tools, near-effortless communication with your friends about items of mutual interest, an unlimited volume of content, and incredibly cheap distribution to the end-user. Once the nitty-gritty process of "what to do" starts getting reinvented - the first task on our list - it's a few hard but short steps to a drastic rethink of local media, with implications numbering in the billions of dollars of ad spend.
So here's my map of the events space - I could have done this a number of different ways, but this is today's way of thinking about it + 10 minutes in PowerPoint.
Zvents is going to try to make the media connection to people about public events. Peter is trying to help event promoters/venues connect to people. His revenue model is primarily direct, with some indirect; mine is primarily indirect (ads) with some direct. And since the media side is so huge, where we will likely first collide is somewhere right around Evite, which is the management of personal events. I don't find that space interesting in and of itself, but when someone starts adding a public event to their personal calendar and forwarding it to their friends; or creating a "Joe's 49ers game party" on the back of the public event of a 49ers game, I'm solidly into that territory. And when Joe starts blogging about both the 49ers game and his party, it starts to smell an awful lot like WhizSpark's "local bloggers promote events" model.
Fascinating times.
Closing question: Where's Nick Denton in all of this?
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Events: Long Tail + Big Tail
Most readers of this blog are familiar with Chris Anderson's seminal "Long Tail" article in Wired. In the year or so since that article was published, we've seen an explosion in both real business and baloney rhetoric built on the long tail concept. Lost in the shuffle-play, perhaps, has been a point that Anderson makes on the final page of the article: That MP3.com was a classic long tail business, which had no "big tail" to draw people in:
Events are in many ways a classic long-tail business. I have a bunch of spreadsheets where I try to calculate how many public events there are in a given metro area (the Bay Area, being home, is most often subject to such numerical indignities) and at some point, the hapless Excel hacker has to throw up his hands. Rolling Stones concerts and 49ers football games are easy to count. Bands at local bars are easy to count.
But what about implicit events, like the opening hours of the local go-kart race track? Is that an event? What about the daily classes at 6pm at Hot Yoga 101 or Fred's Karate Studio? They are scheduled for a certain time, or available any time; they are activities "to do" - the public can walk in and pay a fee - are they events? And then let's look at that 49ers game. Maybe 50,000 people get tickets. Maybe a million watch it on one of several local Bay Area TV stations. So one physical event generates multiple virtual events. 150 local bars have "49ers game Sunday" special events. Add 150 more. 15,000 fans throw "49ers game at my house" parties. Add those as well, though we begin to cross the threshold from public to private events.
When one adds all of these up -- and throws in the Meetups, the radio-controlled airplane club meetings, the church services, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the extension courses at local universities, the City Council of Sunnyvale public forum for comment on the new library... I consistently get numbers like 50,000 events a week in the Bay Area. Can you say Long Tail?
But Long Tail isn't enough -- there's the Big Tail, too. The reason that Rolling Stones concerts and 49ers games and movie listings make it into the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, with their limited print space and their expensive distribution model, is that they are wide-swathe high-popularity events that many paying customers care deeply about. And when folks are trying to figure out what to do on a Wednesday night, dinner and a movie is very often their first and best choice.
Figuring out the right mix of Long Tail + Big Tail is a huge business opportunity in events, as it is in many other fields of commerce. I'm pretty excited about what we're doing at Zvents, and I look forward to showing the world and getting your feedback in (gulp!) less than a month.
The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn't have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin.Here's a modded graphic from the article:
Events are in many ways a classic long-tail business. I have a bunch of spreadsheets where I try to calculate how many public events there are in a given metro area (the Bay Area, being home, is most often subject to such numerical indignities) and at some point, the hapless Excel hacker has to throw up his hands. Rolling Stones concerts and 49ers football games are easy to count. Bands at local bars are easy to count.
But what about implicit events, like the opening hours of the local go-kart race track? Is that an event? What about the daily classes at 6pm at Hot Yoga 101 or Fred's Karate Studio? They are scheduled for a certain time, or available any time; they are activities "to do" - the public can walk in and pay a fee - are they events? And then let's look at that 49ers game. Maybe 50,000 people get tickets. Maybe a million watch it on one of several local Bay Area TV stations. So one physical event generates multiple virtual events. 150 local bars have "49ers game Sunday" special events. Add 150 more. 15,000 fans throw "49ers game at my house" parties. Add those as well, though we begin to cross the threshold from public to private events.
When one adds all of these up -- and throws in the Meetups, the radio-controlled airplane club meetings, the church services, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the extension courses at local universities, the City Council of Sunnyvale public forum for comment on the new library... I consistently get numbers like 50,000 events a week in the Bay Area. Can you say Long Tail?
But Long Tail isn't enough -- there's the Big Tail, too. The reason that Rolling Stones concerts and 49ers games and movie listings make it into the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, with their limited print space and their expensive distribution model, is that they are wide-swathe high-popularity events that many paying customers care deeply about. And when folks are trying to figure out what to do on a Wednesday night, dinner and a movie is very often their first and best choice.
Figuring out the right mix of Long Tail + Big Tail is a huge business opportunity in events, as it is in many other fields of commerce. I'm pretty excited about what we're doing at Zvents, and I look forward to showing the world and getting your feedback in (gulp!) less than a month.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Cringely on Skype: Wrong, wrong, wrong
It's not very often that Robert Cringely gets *everything* wrong in a column, because he's a really smart guy. But his recent piece on Skype comes close to being a strikeout.
Let's take these one by one :
"So what's most interesting about News Corp. and Skype isn't that the deal fell through, but that News Corp. even knew Skype was available."
In case no one has noticed, communications and media are merging. In particular, Barry Diller over at IAC sees this happening. Is Match a media property, or a structured medium of communication between single people? Ummm, both. The last peer-to-peer client (Kazaa) that the Skype founders did was for distributing paid content (music), whereas Skype distributes free user-created content (voice calls and text messages). Is one of those a media company and one of thos a communications company, with a big bright line between the two? Kind of blurry, huh? If I were Rupert Murdoch, I'd not only know this convergence by heart, I'd be watching Diller like a hawk, which means I'd be all over this space.
"Since Skype service requires broadband, and broadband so far is inherently fixed, Skype threatens only incumbent FIXED phone service, not mobile service..."
Skype is based on the Global IP Sound (GIPS) codec. GIPS is the magic inside Skype that gives it its incredible ability to overcome latency, packet loss, jitter, and all the other crappy data delivery realities of the Internet. If you go to the GIPS website, you can hear a very nice demo of their sound quality over "telephony bandwidth" which is plenty narrow enough (8Kbps if I recall correctly) to fit within a GPRS channel. GPRS usually has waaay to much latency to work well for packet voice, but EV-DO? Absolutely.
And if that's not convincing enough, I have it on pretty good authority that a major CE manufacturer might be selling some Skype-enabled mobile devices in the not-far-distant future. Which they aren't doing because "Skype requires fixed broadband."
"Expect Skype to be sold, another viral marketing success sucked up by big business. Expect it to go to either a major broadband provider or, more likely, to a big mobile carrier with no fixed telephone assets."
I don't have any inside information on this point, but I can see that Skype is most attractive to Yahoo and Google and Microsoft and IAC and... NewsCorp, I guess, given that they're now buying web properties. All these guys get that communications+media = the future, because media is professional content and communications is user-created content and their combination is the "architecture of participation" which is Web 2.0. Why doesn't Cringely get this? He's got all the pieces in front of him.
"Of course, the rest of the VoIP industry loves this. If Skype is worth $3 billion, then so is Vonage and maybe Packet8."
Oh, puh-leez.
Firstly, let's look at cost base. Since Vonage doesn't use a decent codec like GIPS, they have been required to build out POPs across their targeted territories in order to get their calls off the public internet and onto their private low-latency high-quality backbone as soon as possible. This is an *enormously* expensive process similar to building a traditional telco network. Vonage also offers a physical box (CPE) that you plug your phone into, which means it is in the business of procuring, mailing, and managing hardware that has a BOM in the range of $60 to acquire every new customer. So both in capex and opex, Vonage has huge costs that Skype simply does not have. I don't know about Packet8's backbone, but their CPE situation is identical. So either should have a massively deflated value when compared to Skype, which requires only a software download (very low cost) and no network buildout for its "core product" of Skype to Skype calls. Incidentally, this is why Skype has 120 million people who've downloaded its client and Vonage and Packet 8 are in the single-digit millions at best. Skype does need POPs to do In/Out to the phone network, but that is a very different cost dynamic than what Vonage has to do simply to be in business.
Secondly, let's look at user experience. I have tried both Vonage and Packet8, and I have cancelled both because neither worked well enough to use, on Sand Hill Road right in the middle of Silicon Valley. This was due to some problems with my DSL line (thanks, SBC), but ultimately both solutions failed. Skype, on the other hand, works almost magically well. Recently I was in Chamonix in the French Alps, sitting on a plaza in front of the tourist office, using their free WiFi, and talking to (in succession) several foreign countries including the U.S., 6500 miles away.
Skype is unique in the VoIP, and while they may be bought by a smart network provider such as Comcast, my prediction is that they'll be snapped up by one of the usual-suspect next-generation communications+media companies, or as I should start calling them, "Extended Conversation" companies. I heard a rumor yesterday that Skype wanted $1 billion from Yahoo, and Yahoo offered $100 million. I don't know if any of that is true, but it sounds a lot more reasonable than anything Cringely is saying on this subject.
And someone really smart should buy Global IP Sound.
Let's take these one by one :
"So what's most interesting about News Corp. and Skype isn't that the deal fell through, but that News Corp. even knew Skype was available."
In case no one has noticed, communications and media are merging. In particular, Barry Diller over at IAC sees this happening. Is Match a media property, or a structured medium of communication between single people? Ummm, both. The last peer-to-peer client (Kazaa) that the Skype founders did was for distributing paid content (music), whereas Skype distributes free user-created content (voice calls and text messages). Is one of those a media company and one of thos a communications company, with a big bright line between the two? Kind of blurry, huh? If I were Rupert Murdoch, I'd not only know this convergence by heart, I'd be watching Diller like a hawk, which means I'd be all over this space.
"Since Skype service requires broadband, and broadband so far is inherently fixed, Skype threatens only incumbent FIXED phone service, not mobile service..."
Skype is based on the Global IP Sound (GIPS) codec. GIPS is the magic inside Skype that gives it its incredible ability to overcome latency, packet loss, jitter, and all the other crappy data delivery realities of the Internet. If you go to the GIPS website, you can hear a very nice demo of their sound quality over "telephony bandwidth" which is plenty narrow enough (8Kbps if I recall correctly) to fit within a GPRS channel. GPRS usually has waaay to much latency to work well for packet voice, but EV-DO? Absolutely.
And if that's not convincing enough, I have it on pretty good authority that a major CE manufacturer might be selling some Skype-enabled mobile devices in the not-far-distant future. Which they aren't doing because "Skype requires fixed broadband."
"Expect Skype to be sold, another viral marketing success sucked up by big business. Expect it to go to either a major broadband provider or, more likely, to a big mobile carrier with no fixed telephone assets."
I don't have any inside information on this point, but I can see that Skype is most attractive to Yahoo and Google and Microsoft and IAC and... NewsCorp, I guess, given that they're now buying web properties. All these guys get that communications+media = the future, because media is professional content and communications is user-created content and their combination is the "architecture of participation" which is Web 2.0. Why doesn't Cringely get this? He's got all the pieces in front of him.
"Of course, the rest of the VoIP industry loves this. If Skype is worth $3 billion, then so is Vonage and maybe Packet8."
Oh, puh-leez.
Firstly, let's look at cost base. Since Vonage doesn't use a decent codec like GIPS, they have been required to build out POPs across their targeted territories in order to get their calls off the public internet and onto their private low-latency high-quality backbone as soon as possible. This is an *enormously* expensive process similar to building a traditional telco network. Vonage also offers a physical box (CPE) that you plug your phone into, which means it is in the business of procuring, mailing, and managing hardware that has a BOM in the range of $60 to acquire every new customer. So both in capex and opex, Vonage has huge costs that Skype simply does not have. I don't know about Packet8's backbone, but their CPE situation is identical. So either should have a massively deflated value when compared to Skype, which requires only a software download (very low cost) and no network buildout for its "core product" of Skype to Skype calls. Incidentally, this is why Skype has 120 million people who've downloaded its client and Vonage and Packet 8 are in the single-digit millions at best. Skype does need POPs to do In/Out to the phone network, but that is a very different cost dynamic than what Vonage has to do simply to be in business.
Secondly, let's look at user experience. I have tried both Vonage and Packet8, and I have cancelled both because neither worked well enough to use, on Sand Hill Road right in the middle of Silicon Valley. This was due to some problems with my DSL line (thanks, SBC), but ultimately both solutions failed. Skype, on the other hand, works almost magically well. Recently I was in Chamonix in the French Alps, sitting on a plaza in front of the tourist office, using their free WiFi, and talking to (in succession) several foreign countries including the U.S., 6500 miles away.
Skype is unique in the VoIP, and while they may be bought by a smart network provider such as Comcast, my prediction is that they'll be snapped up by one of the usual-suspect next-generation communications+media companies, or as I should start calling them, "Extended Conversation" companies. I heard a rumor yesterday that Skype wanted $1 billion from Yahoo, and Yahoo offered $100 million. I don't know if any of that is true, but it sounds a lot more reasonable than anything Cringely is saying on this subject.
And someone really smart should buy Global IP Sound.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
On Vacation, 2005 style
In case you can't tell from the decline of blogging volume, I've been on vacation these past two weeks. I've been climbing mountains, among other things: These shots are from Andrea and my summit of Mt. Blanc (with Alex and Jono, rock on guys!) last week in Chamonix.
I'm now in Prague with some great folks, and will be "back at work" soon. Which is good, because things are hoppin' back at the Galactic HQ, which I know because vacation, 2005, is not vacation, 2001, or even vacation, 2003.
This time, my cell phone works in Europe. No more lugging the old London Motorola Timeport, and no more buying Orange SIM cards and calling all my friends so they have the number. Want to talk? Call me.
This time, WiFi is everywhere. It was free in Chamonix. It was free from my friends in London. It is so cheap as to practically be free here in Prague.
And oh my god, Skype has arrived. I can't even count how many calls I have done on Skype. It's really is so cheap it's effectively free -- I can't remember when I put my 10 Euros for Skype Out in, and it's just worked and worked and worked.
Since I have been in Europe I have electronically talked to people in:
Japan
India
Greece
Serbia
England
The Czech Republic
and of course the USA. I have worked at least an hour every day (except when we summited Mt. Blanc) and a lot more on some days. The ability to be in touch is incredible -- I have successfully juggled two or three different major threads of activity, and still taken time to relax and actually *be* on vacation.
The world is gonna change a lot more real soon now, but it's worth stopping to recognize just how much it has changed in the past 24 months.
I'm now in Prague with some great folks, and will be "back at work" soon. Which is good, because things are hoppin' back at the Galactic HQ, which I know because vacation, 2005, is not vacation, 2001, or even vacation, 2003.
This time, my cell phone works in Europe. No more lugging the old London Motorola Timeport, and no more buying Orange SIM cards and calling all my friends so they have the number. Want to talk? Call me.
This time, WiFi is everywhere. It was free in Chamonix. It was free from my friends in London. It is so cheap as to practically be free here in Prague.
And oh my god, Skype has arrived. I can't even count how many calls I have done on Skype. It's really is so cheap it's effectively free -- I can't remember when I put my 10 Euros for Skype Out in, and it's just worked and worked and worked.
Since I have been in Europe I have electronically talked to people in:
Japan
India
Greece
Serbia
England
The Czech Republic
and of course the USA. I have worked at least an hour every day (except when we summited Mt. Blanc) and a lot more on some days. The ability to be in touch is incredible -- I have successfully juggled two or three different major threads of activity, and still taken time to relax and actually *be* on vacation.
The world is gonna change a lot more real soon now, but it's worth stopping to recognize just how much it has changed in the past 24 months.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Citizen Media 2: The future is concentrated in... Worcester, Mass.?!!
I'll restate the William Gibson paraphrase (not exact quote) from the last post: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
I've posted about Peter Caputa and his excellent blog a couple times -- after swapping a few emails with him, and poking around his extended network over there in Worcester, Mass., I started to see some strange attractor kind of activity.
Firstly, there's the Wormtown Nightlife, a small e-zine sort of publication that has a very Web 2.0 mashup sort of feel to it -- with apartment listings from Craigslist, and events from Whizspark, and all sortsa nice features.
Then Peter started blogging about local bloggers getting print syndication -- which is a seriously hot topic in our own offices, except we tend to think more about print guys building blog audiences on the side -- kinda like Dan Gillmor, The Man Hisself, did.
Then I found this cool little dealie called blogfortickets which, surprise surprise, is a way of getting local bloggers (in Worcester, natch) to publicize an event in exchange for free tickets to that event -- pretty much the unspoken quid pro quo model of the entire access-for-exposure cultural media business, all the way from Vanity Fair magazine and their Oscar party down to your local alternative paper beat reporter plugging his friend's band and scoring a free drink token at their next gig.
And needless to say, when you dig into a "case study" on the blogfortickets site, you are greeted by the cosmic confluence of all things New Media Worcester:
So a quick question to the Worcester crew, since it's pretty clear you all know each other:
How do you deal with the old media of Worcester? Besides saying that their site sucks, I mean. The Worcester Telegram and Gazette is owned by the New York Times, has a circulation in excess of 100,000, and has lots of events nicely organized on its site. It's one of the top 100 papers in America. The Worcester magazine may have site issues, but they've got lots of great content, too.
So how does new media interact with old? Trumping it? Joining it? Circumventing it? You guys seem to have boiled the future into a nice tasty concentrated concoction over there -- what's it taste like?
I've posted about Peter Caputa and his excellent blog a couple times -- after swapping a few emails with him, and poking around his extended network over there in Worcester, Mass., I started to see some strange attractor kind of activity.
Firstly, there's the Wormtown Nightlife, a small e-zine sort of publication that has a very Web 2.0 mashup sort of feel to it -- with apartment listings from Craigslist, and events from Whizspark, and all sortsa nice features.
Then Peter started blogging about local bloggers getting print syndication -- which is a seriously hot topic in our own offices, except we tend to think more about print guys building blog audiences on the side -- kinda like Dan Gillmor, The Man Hisself, did.
Then I found this cool little dealie called blogfortickets which, surprise surprise, is a way of getting local bloggers (in Worcester, natch) to publicize an event in exchange for free tickets to that event -- pretty much the unspoken quid pro quo model of the entire access-for-exposure cultural media business, all the way from Vanity Fair magazine and their Oscar party down to your local alternative paper beat reporter plugging his friend's band and scoring a free drink token at their next gig.
And needless to say, when you dig into a "case study" on the blogfortickets site, you are greeted by the cosmic confluence of all things New Media Worcester:
There's gold in them thar hills, I think...The Event: South End Style
The Task: To help generate online buzz for South End Style by co-ordinating local bloggers to talk up and talk about the event on their blogs. In exchange for their time, bloggers would be given free passes to the event (normally $75)
The Players: Buck Paxton, Duncan Arsenault, Peter Caputa, Volcano Boy, LinneaDates, Andrew Teman, Amy Linny, WormtownNightlife
The Results: Blog for tickets mobilized quickly to take the buzz to the blogs. A WhizSpark event site was created for South End Style to act as the central landing spot for all outgoing blog links. This event website, unlike the main event sponsored site, included special instructions to those who reached the site via blogs…mention the code weblog and receive a free drink ticket with event ticket purchase.
To aid in the process, participating bloggers were given a variety of banners and images, as well as a snippet of information to use in their posts to help them get started. They were each asked to create a post talking up the event in their own way, and linking to the WhizSpark event site. The effect was swift and firm, as word of South End Style permeated the web, creating the buzz that the client was looking for. Last minute ticket sales spiked from word of mouth and online buzz created by the BlogForTickets crew and the event was a success.
So a quick question to the Worcester crew, since it's pretty clear you all know each other:
How do you deal with the old media of Worcester? Besides saying that their site sucks, I mean. The Worcester Telegram and Gazette is owned by the New York Times, has a circulation in excess of 100,000, and has lots of events nicely organized on its site. It's one of the top 100 papers in America. The Worcester magazine may have site issues, but they've got lots of great content, too.
So how does new media interact with old? Trumping it? Joining it? Circumventing it? You guys seem to have boiled the future into a nice tasty concentrated concoction over there -- what's it taste like?
Citizen Media 1: Bombs in London
I live in London, Al Qaeda bombs America. I live in America, Al Qaeda bombs London. So far, I seem to be living life by Ted Williams' maxim, "Hit 'em where they ain't."
Speaking of where they ain't, traditional media can't be everywhere -- but ordinary people can, and are, and increasingly can record and report on what happened. The Washington Post was so surprised that people would actually use cameraphones to take pictures that they wrote two more or less identical pieces on the same subject, and then threw in a gallery of cameraphone images for good measure. Some decent analysis in the second piece -- Robert Macmillan nails the point that this is simultaneously no different from the Zapruder film, and entirely different from anything that has gone before.
Interestingly, history has always had the jump on the news media for citizen participation -- while in the past two centuries it's been hard for individuals to compete with the speed and long-distance capabilities of news, the humble letter or personal account is often the core document from which history is constructed in all its textured glory and narrative magnificence.
Dan Gillmor is right -- we are on the cusp of being able to report the news ourselves as it happens, across all media (audio, visual, textual) and this is going to change the existing channels of information tremendously.
However, we still have a long way to go -- hats off to Technorati for trying, but this falls short of the precise conveyance of information that I get from the New York Times; but Flickr did a great job of highlighting recent tags like londonbombblasts.
To quote William Gibson, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Speaking of where they ain't, traditional media can't be everywhere -- but ordinary people can, and are, and increasingly can record and report on what happened. The Washington Post was so surprised that people would actually use cameraphones to take pictures that they wrote two more or less identical pieces on the same subject, and then threw in a gallery of cameraphone images for good measure. Some decent analysis in the second piece -- Robert Macmillan nails the point that this is simultaneously no different from the Zapruder film, and entirely different from anything that has gone before.
Interestingly, history has always had the jump on the news media for citizen participation -- while in the past two centuries it's been hard for individuals to compete with the speed and long-distance capabilities of news, the humble letter or personal account is often the core document from which history is constructed in all its textured glory and narrative magnificence.
Dan Gillmor is right -- we are on the cusp of being able to report the news ourselves as it happens, across all media (audio, visual, textual) and this is going to change the existing channels of information tremendously.
However, we still have a long way to go -- hats off to Technorati for trying, but this falls short of the precise conveyance of information that I get from the New York Times; but Flickr did a great job of highlighting recent tags like londonbombblasts.
To quote William Gibson, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Citizen Journalist: Chris Allbritton in Iraq
People interested in "citizen journalism" and user-created content should check out the blog:
http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ where Chris Allbritton has been traipsing around Iraq supported by readers:
I had believed that regardless of the blog-driven forthcoming split between editorial and reporting at the major news organizations, it would be these organizations that would continue to have the near-monopoly ability to fund and maintain an extensive news-gathering presence around the world. Chris' work suggests that this belief may already be out of date.
Bonus food for thought: We all can see that our current news-gathering system is getting manipulable and corrupted beyond belief, and increasingly its authority and credibility are shot. Wouldn't it be interesting if a new form of reporting, based on a new form of trust and credibility -- socially established, not oligopoly-brand-based -- emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old?
http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ where Chris Allbritton has been traipsing around Iraq supported by readers:
In March 2003, I made it back in time for the war, becoming the Web's first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger. With the support of thousands of readers, we raised almost $15,000. You can read my dispatches here. It was one of the moments in journalism when everything worked. It was a grand -- and successful -- experiment in independent journalism.Here's a sample of his writing:
“Bumps in the road”? Just earlier today, presumably before the Iraqi journalist was killed, an Iraqi member of parliament was killed in a car bomb attack. I can't even begin to tell you how many Iraqis have been killed in the weeks I was away. And how many more Iraqis, journalists or otherwise, will die because the Americans can't tell who's friend or foe? Those aren't “bumps in the road.” Those are signs that you went off the road without a map a long time ago...
News flash: Iraq is a disaster. I've been back one day, and the airport road was the worst I've ever seen it. We had to go around a fire-fight between mujahideen and Americans while Iraqi forces sat in the shade of date palms on the side of the road, their rifles resting across their laps. My driver pointed to a group of men in a white pickup next to me. “They are mujahideen,” he said. “They are watching the Americans.” Indeed, they were, and so intently that they paid no attention to me in the car next to them. We detoured around two possible car bombs that had been cordoned off while Iraqis cautiously approached.
Rumsfeld's assessment of “good progress” on the constitution is not accurate... [Morale] wasn't rock-bottom among the Marines of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, but it wasn't great. Most of the ones I talked to weren't confident they were doing anything worthwhile, and were instead focused on getting home alive. If a few Iraqis had to die to make that happen, well, war is hell.
I'm not sure who's winning this war, the Americans or the insurgents. But I know who is losing it: the Iraqi people. Those bumps in the road are their graves.
Highly recommended.I had believed that regardless of the blog-driven forthcoming split between editorial and reporting at the major news organizations, it would be these organizations that would continue to have the near-monopoly ability to fund and maintain an extensive news-gathering presence around the world. Chris' work suggests that this belief may already be out of date.
Bonus food for thought: We all can see that our current news-gathering system is getting manipulable and corrupted beyond belief, and increasingly its authority and credibility are shot. Wouldn't it be interesting if a new form of reporting, based on a new form of trust and credibility -- socially established, not oligopoly-brand-based -- emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old?
Events, News, Local Media
Tyler drops me an email, saying "Caputa has been drinking from our coffee pot."
As an aside, Tyler will be starting his own blog soon. I am fearful that many posts will be of the approximate form, "Ethan and I had this great conversation, he went off to blog about it, and now my task list is two days longer."
This is a fantastically good post by Peter. In addition to the best graphical design and the best blog figurehead in the (granted, small) dudes-starting-an-events-company space, his thinking is really first-rate. And yes, we'd like to help build "that" -- and a heck of a lot more besides!
So let me address a few points:
"We're not talking micro-formats. We're not talking who can get the biggest pile of events. We're talking about leveraging events to build community."
Absolutely agree. As much as I admire Dave and the Technorati crew, they at present seem to have a "one big pile" theory of the Web that is decidedly un-community. In a previous post I suggested that while their Live8 page implies that they may be getting media (and their recent hiring of the exceedingly bright Peter Hirshberg is another big clue) but I am still not sure that they get local media in the slightest. Local media is not one big pile -- it is a lot of little piles, right down to the happy little sandboxes of communities and individual people. Microformats are designed to enable the "one big pile" method of media, and Google News shows how well that works. Not.
However, *someone* (or someones) needs to put together a big pile of events, because that is the grist for the mill that will make this new media go. There are only three (OK, 3 1/2) ways this can be done:
1) People enter the events themselves. As a .5 addendum, individual users like clubs, museums, and the marketing secretary of the San Francisco Symphony enter the events themselves. The shopping sites (Shopzilla, Pricegrabber) have evolved their models to high levels of participation by their data sources/merchants.
2) Some reportorial/editorial/data staff at some "publication" in this new world enters the events themselves.
3) Some magically delicious techno-spider crawls the web and devours reams of prose, spitting out all the gruel and swallowing the crunchy event bits, which are polished to DBMS perfection by its extraordinary digestive tract.
If we look at "old media" like, say, the Pink Pages in the SF Chronicle, (handily reproduced in data form at SFGate) they are getting their events through a combination of 1) and 2). Technorati, with its microformats push, hopes to get events purely through 3). I think that all of us in this space should, right now, face up to the fact that probably it will be some combination of all three.
And I think that we should further promise that if we are ever sitting at some future panel at some future conference we should not, not, not, snipe back and forth about "editorial is better" or "techno-spiders rule" like the mind-numbing WiFi vs. CDMA panel I sat through at CES last February. It's a combination of these, OK? Pax.
Hey, look, I even have a slide on this -- and even better, it includes a long tail! No Rip van Winkel blogging here, nosiree.
"We can create a template for a Sunday football game and let 50 sports bar owners use it to organize Sunday night 2 dollar draft parties at their bar."
Yeah! Right on! Forget 50 -- how about 5000? Heck, there are reportedly 10,000 bars in Wisconsin alone. (I can't find the link 'cause I heard it on NPR). All those guys need is a template, and their local venue information... and some cardinal event representation of "the Super Bowl" to point to.
Now that "cardinal representation" is where things get dicey, but I'll have to leave that for another post. Because we have all learned from Google that there are several kinds of truth, namely statistical, absolute, network-social, and "Sergey said so." Is this the cardinal site for the Superbowl? Or is it someone else's potentially far better site? Is an autobiography the most authoritative source on a politician's life? Hmm. Again, 'nother post for more on that.
"Now think of all of the events that are happening. And then realize that events are ALWAYS happening. There are always events. New ones."
Peter, you are so on the money! But let's take this one teeny weensy step further. What are all these new things that are happening? Well, there are expected things (events) and there are unexpected things (which, I suppose, can also be called events, but only after they happen). When you take all the expected things that are gonna happen, and you take all the unexpected things that just happenened, and you talk about these things in some vaguely structured format supported by a revenue stream, what do you got?
Ye gods.
Again, previous post:
"The three legs of local media are 1) reporting 2) editorial and 3) advertising."
Reporting about what? Events (future) and unexpected things (recent past).
Editorializing about what? Events (future) and unexpected things (recent past).
Advertising? Oh yeah, billions of dollars of it.
Events are so where it's at.
Final point from Peter:
"Create a site for the Olympics and aggregate what everyone is saying around it, pictures people are taking, etc. Create the unofficial (or official) site for the event, and benefit from its buzz."
I'm guessing that Peter means "a virtual site like Technorati did for Live8." Because in the present web reality, creating a site is already an exercise in virtualization, currently phrased as "mashup." And in the emerging 2.0 future, we won't even be able to do that -- all our readers/writiers/participators/eyeballs/hands/heads/hearts/"fellow inhabitants of What's Next" are going to be RSSing and ATOMing and creating their own virtualization of us... which means that we'll have to do things ever so slightly differently.
More on that in a month or two. And tomorrow, I'll expand on Peter's final point about "revenue stream from site-building" and discuss my theory of MySpace as a music-blogging site a bit more. If Tyler doesn't hit me with the coffeepot.
As an aside, Tyler will be starting his own blog soon. I am fearful that many posts will be of the approximate form, "Ethan and I had this great conversation, he went off to blog about it, and now my task list is two days longer."
This is a fantastically good post by Peter. In addition to the best graphical design and the best blog figurehead in the (granted, small) dudes-starting-an-events-company space, his thinking is really first-rate. And yes, we'd like to help build "that" -- and a heck of a lot more besides!
So let me address a few points:
"We're not talking micro-formats. We're not talking who can get the biggest pile of events. We're talking about leveraging events to build community."
Absolutely agree. As much as I admire Dave and the Technorati crew, they at present seem to have a "one big pile" theory of the Web that is decidedly un-community. In a previous post I suggested that while their Live8 page implies that they may be getting media (and their recent hiring of the exceedingly bright Peter Hirshberg is another big clue) but I am still not sure that they get local media in the slightest. Local media is not one big pile -- it is a lot of little piles, right down to the happy little sandboxes of communities and individual people. Microformats are designed to enable the "one big pile" method of media, and Google News shows how well that works. Not.
However, *someone* (or someones) needs to put together a big pile of events, because that is the grist for the mill that will make this new media go. There are only three (OK, 3 1/2) ways this can be done:
1) People enter the events themselves. As a .5 addendum, individual users like clubs, museums, and the marketing secretary of the San Francisco Symphony enter the events themselves. The shopping sites (Shopzilla, Pricegrabber) have evolved their models to high levels of participation by their data sources/merchants.
2) Some reportorial/editorial/data staff at some "publication" in this new world enters the events themselves.
3) Some magically delicious techno-spider crawls the web and devours reams of prose, spitting out all the gruel and swallowing the crunchy event bits, which are polished to DBMS perfection by its extraordinary digestive tract.
If we look at "old media" like, say, the Pink Pages in the SF Chronicle, (handily reproduced in data form at SFGate) they are getting their events through a combination of 1) and 2). Technorati, with its microformats push, hopes to get events purely through 3). I think that all of us in this space should, right now, face up to the fact that probably it will be some combination of all three.
And I think that we should further promise that if we are ever sitting at some future panel at some future conference we should not, not, not, snipe back and forth about "editorial is better" or "techno-spiders rule" like the mind-numbing WiFi vs. CDMA panel I sat through at CES last February. It's a combination of these, OK? Pax.
Hey, look, I even have a slide on this -- and even better, it includes a long tail! No Rip van Winkel blogging here, nosiree.
"We can create a template for a Sunday football game and let 50 sports bar owners use it to organize Sunday night 2 dollar draft parties at their bar."
Yeah! Right on! Forget 50 -- how about 5000? Heck, there are reportedly 10,000 bars in Wisconsin alone. (I can't find the link 'cause I heard it on NPR). All those guys need is a template, and their local venue information... and some cardinal event representation of "the Super Bowl" to point to.
Now that "cardinal representation" is where things get dicey, but I'll have to leave that for another post. Because we have all learned from Google that there are several kinds of truth, namely statistical, absolute, network-social, and "Sergey said so." Is this the cardinal site for the Superbowl? Or is it someone else's potentially far better site? Is an autobiography the most authoritative source on a politician's life? Hmm. Again, 'nother post for more on that.
"Now think of all of the events that are happening. And then realize that events are ALWAYS happening. There are always events. New ones."
Peter, you are so on the money! But let's take this one teeny weensy step further. What are all these new things that are happening? Well, there are expected things (events) and there are unexpected things (which, I suppose, can also be called events, but only after they happen). When you take all the expected things that are gonna happen, and you take all the unexpected things that just happenened, and you talk about these things in some vaguely structured format supported by a revenue stream, what do you got?
NEWS.
Ye gods.
Again, previous post:
"The three legs of local media are 1) reporting 2) editorial and 3) advertising."
Reporting about what? Events (future) and unexpected things (recent past).
Editorializing about what? Events (future) and unexpected things (recent past).
Advertising? Oh yeah, billions of dollars of it.
Events are so where it's at.
Final point from Peter:
"Create a site for the Olympics and aggregate what everyone is saying around it, pictures people are taking, etc. Create the unofficial (or official) site for the event, and benefit from its buzz."
I'm guessing that Peter means "a virtual site like Technorati did for Live8." Because in the present web reality, creating a site is already an exercise in virtualization, currently phrased as "mashup." And in the emerging 2.0 future, we won't even be able to do that -- all our readers/writiers/participators/eyeballs/hands/heads/hearts/"fellow inhabitants of What's Next" are going to be RSSing and ATOMing and creating their own virtualization of us... which means that we'll have to do things ever so slightly differently.
More on that in a month or two. And tomorrow, I'll expand on Peter's final point about "revenue stream from site-building" and discuss my theory of MySpace as a music-blogging site a bit more. If Tyler doesn't hit me with the coffeepot.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Open Letter: Del.icio.us major UI issue
I love Del.icio.us. I wish Joshua Schachter all the best, and as I understand it, "the best" means everyone using his wonderful creation.
Joshua, can you please, please fix one UI problem that is (I suspect) costing you thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of uses every day?
How life should work:
When I go to Google, and I want to find something, I find a box that has a blinking cursor in it, and a grey button titled "Google Search". Unless I am waaaaaay behind the curve, it dawns on me (me being the zero-sigma Internet user) that perhaps I should type what I want, and click "Google Search" or even (gasp!) press (Enter).
How Del.icio.us works:
When I go to Del.iciou.us, what do I see?
1) A big list of tagged items that I may care nothing about
2) A list on the right side of "most popular" that I probably care at least slightly about
3) A few mysterious text links in the top-right: "bookmarks index post settings about"
How do I find something?
I dunno.
Oh, it turns out, I go up to the URL entry field on my *browser* and type /tag/something to get what I want. And if I want "interesting blog" then I tyle /tag/interesting+blog.
Gee, that was obvious!
What if I want to see someone's bookmarks? Again I go to the browser's URL entry field, and add /onohoku/ or /fred/ or whatever (there seems to be no fred or john on del.icio.us... but of course there's an /ethan/...miller... we Ethans are early adopters!
Now this being Web 2.0, of course I could hack together my own bad-ass interface for del.icious and release it to the world. But that would not solve the core problem, which is that right now, some frustrated del.icio.us newbie is going to the main site, laden with glorious potential, and clicking away frustrated because he damn well can't figure out how to *get what he wants*.
Can we please, please, have a text entry box or two? Or even (gasp) a single line of text explanation of how to get what we want?
It will make the tagging universe grow *ever* so much faster...
Thanks.
Joshua, can you please, please fix one UI problem that is (I suspect) costing you thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of uses every day?
How life should work:
When I go to Google, and I want to find something, I find a box that has a blinking cursor in it, and a grey button titled "Google Search". Unless I am waaaaaay behind the curve, it dawns on me (me being the zero-sigma Internet user) that perhaps I should type what I want, and click "Google Search" or even (gasp!) press (Enter).
How Del.icio.us works:
When I go to Del.iciou.us, what do I see?
1) A big list of tagged items that I may care nothing about
2) A list on the right side of "most popular" that I probably care at least slightly about
3) A few mysterious text links in the top-right: "bookmarks index post settings about"
How do I find something?
I dunno.
Oh, it turns out, I go up to the URL entry field on my *browser* and type /tag/something to get what I want. And if I want "interesting blog" then I tyle /tag/interesting+blog.
Gee, that was obvious!
What if I want to see someone's bookmarks? Again I go to the browser's URL entry field, and add /onohoku/ or /fred/ or whatever (there seems to be no fred or john on del.icio.us... but of course there's an /ethan/...miller... we Ethans are early adopters!
Now this being Web 2.0, of course I could hack together my own bad-ass interface for del.icious and release it to the world. But that would not solve the core problem, which is that right now, some frustrated del.icio.us newbie is going to the main site, laden with glorious potential, and clicking away frustrated because he damn well can't figure out how to *get what he wants*.
Can we please, please, have a text entry box or two? Or even (gasp) a single line of text explanation of how to get what we want?
It will make the tagging universe grow *ever* so much faster...
Thanks.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Google Maps API is launched
Read about it here. In my last post I talked about Google and Yahoo trading punches - well, I think that Google is landing fewer but bigger shots. Google Maps is a roundhouse, and until Microsoft launches their TerraServer product as Virtual Earth on MSN (supposedly launching any moment at Where 2.0) Google Maps is the standard. There are already all sorts of cool mashups out there, and now that the API is out, this will explode. Um, where is Yahoo on this?
Flickr takes Yahoo Social: My Web 2.0
Well, along with everyone else on the small planet known as Silicon Valley, I've been wondering what Stewart, Caterina, and the Flickr folks have been up to since Yahoo bought them... since they certainly haven't been updating the Flickr interface ;-)
Today Tyler drops me an email saying "Check out Yahoo's new My Web 2.0, it's social search and it's cool." And lo and behold, who's writing the Y! Searchblog section for MyWeb but Caterina...
Damn, it is cool. It's delicious Yahoo search.
So what does this mean? Well, there are four fundamental ways to ways to determine relevance in search results. These are:
1) Market/collective/algorithmic - Call it the law of large numbers, the wisdom of crowds, or statistical truth, but PageRank and similar "hubs and authorities" algorithms figure out, on average, what everybody thinks of a given site.
2) Expert/editorial - Roger Ebert on movies. Julia Child on cooking. Henry Kissinger on diplomacy. They've spent a lifetime figuring out what is the best, and the'll tell you so. Yahoo's roots are in this sort of directory/taxonomy/recommendation based organization.
3) Personal - Based on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, give them results that most closely match their tendencies. Amazon's A9 is the best current example.
4) Social - Based not only on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, but on those of all the people they know. This is a fascinating middle ground (possible sweet spot?) in between personal and collective/algorithmic -- you've got enough critical mass of opinions on key topics to hopefully eliminate outliers, but you've got a close enough connection to the user that you can bend your results to match their point of view.
A note on tagging: Tagging doesn't change any of the above four categories. The voting mechanism -- bookmarking, visiting, linking, tagging, reviewing, whatever -- which is being rolled up in any of the above methods is entirely (OK, largely) independent of the method used. Flickr is all about tagging, but don't forget that they started out as a social network -- and that social sensibility is what they've brought to My Web 2.0.
Google and Yahoo are introducing products like two boxers standing toe to toe and punching. Google is throwing stunning roundhouse technologies like Foreman, shaking everyone's perception of what's possible whenever they land a punch. Yahoo is jabbing and dodging like Ali, clever sneaky punches that do a lot of damage but don't cause the crowd to Oooh in quite the same way.
Ali beat Foreman the second time they fought.
Update: John Markoff in the NYTimes is all over this. He gets the fact that we're talking about the re-creation of local media, too. The curtains just lifted on the future, folks, and the play is about to begin...
Update Update: Battelle, as usual, is all over this first. If you want any more proof that all of media is changing, the fact that his book *still* isn't published (all of, what, three months later?) drives him to asterisked profanity. And to answer John's implicit question, yes, communities of experts will emerge who will tag and organize for a living. They'll be the modern-day equivalents of Ebert, Child, and Kissinger - but they'll express their expertise not in books, columns, and Wall Street Journal op-eds, but tags, blogs, social networks, and other forms of relevance votes, connections, and organizations of information. tb
Today Tyler drops me an email saying "Check out Yahoo's new My Web 2.0, it's social search and it's cool." And lo and behold, who's writing the Y! Searchblog section for MyWeb but Caterina...
Damn, it is cool. It's delicious Yahoo search.
So what does this mean? Well, there are four fundamental ways to ways to determine relevance in search results. These are:
1) Market/collective/algorithmic - Call it the law of large numbers, the wisdom of crowds, or statistical truth, but PageRank and similar "hubs and authorities" algorithms figure out, on average, what everybody thinks of a given site.
2) Expert/editorial - Roger Ebert on movies. Julia Child on cooking. Henry Kissinger on diplomacy. They've spent a lifetime figuring out what is the best, and the'll tell you so. Yahoo's roots are in this sort of directory/taxonomy/recommendation based organization.
3) Personal - Based on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, give them results that most closely match their tendencies. Amazon's A9 is the best current example.
4) Social - Based not only on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, but on those of all the people they know. This is a fascinating middle ground (possible sweet spot?) in between personal and collective/algorithmic -- you've got enough critical mass of opinions on key topics to hopefully eliminate outliers, but you've got a close enough connection to the user that you can bend your results to match their point of view.
A note on tagging: Tagging doesn't change any of the above four categories. The voting mechanism -- bookmarking, visiting, linking, tagging, reviewing, whatever -- which is being rolled up in any of the above methods is entirely (OK, largely) independent of the method used. Flickr is all about tagging, but don't forget that they started out as a social network -- and that social sensibility is what they've brought to My Web 2.0.
Google and Yahoo are introducing products like two boxers standing toe to toe and punching. Google is throwing stunning roundhouse technologies like Foreman, shaking everyone's perception of what's possible whenever they land a punch. Yahoo is jabbing and dodging like Ali, clever sneaky punches that do a lot of damage but don't cause the crowd to Oooh in quite the same way.
Ali beat Foreman the second time they fought.
Update: John Markoff in the NYTimes is all over this. He gets the fact that we're talking about the re-creation of local media, too. The curtains just lifted on the future, folks, and the play is about to begin...
Update Update: Battelle, as usual, is all over this first. If you want any more proof that all of media is changing, the fact that his book *still* isn't published (all of, what, three months later?) drives him to asterisked profanity. And to answer John's implicit question, yes, communities of experts will emerge who will tag and organize for a living. They'll be the modern-day equivalents of Ebert, Child, and Kissinger - but they'll express their expertise not in books, columns, and Wall Street Journal op-eds, but tags, blogs, social networks, and other forms of relevance votes, connections, and organizations of information. tb
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
"Inbound" vs. "Outbound" definitions: Vertical search is horizontal!
One of the questions today at the SDForum Vertical LEAP conference has been "what is vertical search?
There are two simple answers to this. Firstly, there's what I'd call "Inbound" vertical search. This means that anyone in the world, at some given point in time, wants to do a certain thing:
Shop
Travel
Get a job
etc.
So the "Inbound" is people (temporarily) participating in a certain type of activity.
Visual:
Second, there's the "Outbound" concept of vertical. This is the sort of vertical that business-to-business publishers like Primedia and CMP and Reed Elsevier have been working on forever. Oh, and there was this cool "bricks and clicks" company called eBusinessMedia...
Here, the vertical is based on "who I am" rather than "what I do". The music business is a vertical. Agriculture is a vertical. Medicine, with several sub-verticals, is a vertical. Music, agriculture, and medicine all need employment/jobs services -- all need secondary markets for used capital equipment -- all need dedicated industry news sources -- but the "vertical" here is the fact that medical jobs, markets, and news are entirely different from agriculture jobs, markets, and news.
Visual:
Oddly enough, from the standpoint of this traditional view of "vertical," the distinctions that are driving this conference are actually horizontal.
Visual:
Hmmm. Leave it a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley to mix up their X and Y axes ;-)
There are two simple answers to this. Firstly, there's what I'd call "Inbound" vertical search. This means that anyone in the world, at some given point in time, wants to do a certain thing:
Shop
Travel
Get a job
etc.
So the "Inbound" is people (temporarily) participating in a certain type of activity.
Visual:
Second, there's the "Outbound" concept of vertical. This is the sort of vertical that business-to-business publishers like Primedia and CMP and Reed Elsevier have been working on forever. Oh, and there was this cool "bricks and clicks" company called eBusinessMedia...
Here, the vertical is based on "who I am" rather than "what I do". The music business is a vertical. Agriculture is a vertical. Medicine, with several sub-verticals, is a vertical. Music, agriculture, and medicine all need employment/jobs services -- all need secondary markets for used capital equipment -- all need dedicated industry news sources -- but the "vertical" here is the fact that medical jobs, markets, and news are entirely different from agriculture jobs, markets, and news.
Visual:
Oddly enough, from the standpoint of this traditional view of "vertical," the distinctions that are driving this conference are actually horizontal.
Visual:
Hmmm. Leave it a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley to mix up their X and Y axes ;-)
Local Media, Technorati, and Vertical Search
I am sitting here at SDForum's "Vertical LEAP" vertical search conference, where I've sat through a local search presentation from Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and MSN which pretty much missed the point entirely. I asked a question about a) events and b) local search as local media, since neither (enormous, gigantic, huge) topic had been mentioned by any of the assembled gigantic players. Credit to Brady Forrest, PM at MSN for their local search, for at least mentioning mobile -- yet another (enormous, gigantic, huge) topic they'd entirely slid past for a whole hour. If these guys get it, then they're holding their cards very close to their chests.
I'm working on an events search company called Zvents, which heretofore is unannounced. So there. I announced it. Secret closed demos on the web in a month, live beta by September, or faster if Tyler starts adding Red Bull to his coffee.
So I am spending a lot of time thinking about local media. And none of these local guys get it at all, and at the same time, Technorati (hats off to Dave Sifry!) gets it in a (enormous, gigantic, huge) way. I'll be the Nth guy to link to the Live8 page, and the second or third guy to link to Peter Caputa's discussion of that page (right on Peter, and we should talk about events) and I'll even throw in a bonus link to Chew Shop on Caputa on Technorati.
So what do I think?
Well here are a few relevant facts.
1) Local media is enormously fragmented. There are 70 newspapers in the Bay Area, plus tens of TV and radio stations, and they are *all* supported by ad dollars.
2) Classified ads were a nice chunk taken out of local media, but those dollars are largely gone; high-value categories like jobs, housing, and for-sale went to Monster, eBay, and the like long ago.
3) The three legs of local media are 1) reporting 2) editorial and 3) advertising. Let's take these in order.
Reporting: When we look at a project like Dan Gillmor's open media / bayosphere / We the People, you see the foundations of local reporting. Remember that this is not just going to be people doing this in their spare time -- we are going to get latter-day Ben Franklins running around researching stuff and writing it up (or podcasting or vblogging it) and publishing it online. Reportage = conceptually sorted, 20 years of implementation to go.
Editorial: I have a whole separate riff about how political blogging and tech blogging represent the explosion of the vertically integrated media model -- guys like Kevin Drum or Joshua Marshall provide me with more editorial insights than does the New York Times; but for the moment, they are reliant on the "MSM" mainstream media to provide the basic grist for their editorial mills. Most interesting to me is the extension of editorial blog voices beyond the narrow reaches of politics and emerging technology. I firmly believe that the reason these "went first" is that the foundation of bloggable news was firmly in place in textual form, and the blogging tools that sprang up made manipulation of that text very simple for bloggers. Myspace is actually an example of music blogging, I think -- 18 million people go there because, fundamentally, they gave indie bands the (different) tools they needed to post MP3s, talk about their shows, and post their band/brand image online. I think that with the emergence of "structured blogging" standards for other categories -- shopping, events, finance, and so forth -- we will see and explosion of new blogging editorial categories as, for instance, a financial blogger can quickly and easily point to financial data and charting information to make his (her) points.
Advertising: This is the part of local that has gone the furthest, and the least; local classified (in certain categories) went 10 years ago, but local newspaper display, local TV and radio, and lots of classified -- plus flyers, posters, billboards, etc. -- has yet to go. And we are talking tens of billions of dollars. It will follow the eyeballs, which will follow the tools, editorial voices, and reportage that is already moving to new media.
Technorati gets the media thing, as demonstrated by the Live8 page -- but it's not clear that they get the local media thing, which fundamentally has shaken out to be an oligopoloy the first time around between Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Tribune, Gannet, etc. with very little local competition. Will it happen that way again? I'm not sure - and this Technorati thing may be the emergence of a new NBC or a new USA Today, not a new Knight-Ridder -- but what I'm sure of is that none of the local papers get this, none of the big portals get this, and there is money laying all over the table to be scooped up.
Game on.
P.S. How much has the world changed? This places is full of VCs and entrepreneurs and the nicest thing that's happened to me today is that Marc Canter linked to me in his blog. Thanks, Marc!
I'm working on an events search company called Zvents, which heretofore is unannounced. So there. I announced it. Secret closed demos on the web in a month, live beta by September, or faster if Tyler starts adding Red Bull to his coffee.
So I am spending a lot of time thinking about local media. And none of these local guys get it at all, and at the same time, Technorati (hats off to Dave Sifry!) gets it in a (enormous, gigantic, huge) way. I'll be the Nth guy to link to the Live8 page, and the second or third guy to link to Peter Caputa's discussion of that page (right on Peter, and we should talk about events) and I'll even throw in a bonus link to Chew Shop on Caputa on Technorati.
So what do I think?
Well here are a few relevant facts.
1) Local media is enormously fragmented. There are 70 newspapers in the Bay Area, plus tens of TV and radio stations, and they are *all* supported by ad dollars.
2) Classified ads were a nice chunk taken out of local media, but those dollars are largely gone; high-value categories like jobs, housing, and for-sale went to Monster, eBay, and the like long ago.
3) The three legs of local media are 1) reporting 2) editorial and 3) advertising. Let's take these in order.
Reporting: When we look at a project like Dan Gillmor's open media / bayosphere / We the People, you see the foundations of local reporting. Remember that this is not just going to be people doing this in their spare time -- we are going to get latter-day Ben Franklins running around researching stuff and writing it up (or podcasting or vblogging it) and publishing it online. Reportage = conceptually sorted, 20 years of implementation to go.
Editorial: I have a whole separate riff about how political blogging and tech blogging represent the explosion of the vertically integrated media model -- guys like Kevin Drum or Joshua Marshall provide me with more editorial insights than does the New York Times; but for the moment, they are reliant on the "MSM" mainstream media to provide the basic grist for their editorial mills. Most interesting to me is the extension of editorial blog voices beyond the narrow reaches of politics and emerging technology. I firmly believe that the reason these "went first" is that the foundation of bloggable news was firmly in place in textual form, and the blogging tools that sprang up made manipulation of that text very simple for bloggers. Myspace is actually an example of music blogging, I think -- 18 million people go there because, fundamentally, they gave indie bands the (different) tools they needed to post MP3s, talk about their shows, and post their band/brand image online. I think that with the emergence of "structured blogging" standards for other categories -- shopping, events, finance, and so forth -- we will see and explosion of new blogging editorial categories as, for instance, a financial blogger can quickly and easily point to financial data and charting information to make his (her) points.
Advertising: This is the part of local that has gone the furthest, and the least; local classified (in certain categories) went 10 years ago, but local newspaper display, local TV and radio, and lots of classified -- plus flyers, posters, billboards, etc. -- has yet to go. And we are talking tens of billions of dollars. It will follow the eyeballs, which will follow the tools, editorial voices, and reportage that is already moving to new media.
Technorati gets the media thing, as demonstrated by the Live8 page -- but it's not clear that they get the local media thing, which fundamentally has shaken out to be an oligopoloy the first time around between Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Tribune, Gannet, etc. with very little local competition. Will it happen that way again? I'm not sure - and this Technorati thing may be the emergence of a new NBC or a new USA Today, not a new Knight-Ridder -- but what I'm sure of is that none of the local papers get this, none of the big portals get this, and there is money laying all over the table to be scooped up.
Game on.
P.S. How much has the world changed? This places is full of VCs and entrepreneurs and the nicest thing that's happened to me today is that Marc Canter linked to me in his blog. Thanks, Marc!
Monday, June 27, 2005
Response to Kevin Drum - Three Thoughts on Future Media
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision on file-sharing, political blogger Kevin Drum asks:
"The year is 2015 and Columbia has just released Spiderman 7. The next day, 10 million people with no technical savvy at all go to their computers, stick a Blu-ray disc into their DVD drive, log on to Movies4Free... Three minutes later they have a 100% perfect DVD...As bandwidth increases, DVD technology improves, and software becomes as easy to use as a toaster, every piece of digital content on the planet will be available within minutes...Is this OK? Or do you have a different vision for the future? If profit-based movie/music distribution becomes essentially impossible, do you think the content industry will somehow adapt and get its revenue elsewhere? Or will content creators continue creating but just make a lot less money at it?"
Three thoughts:
1) Right now, radio broadcasters make more money from music than music labels do. U.S. CD sales are $17 billion, radio advertising is $20 billion. Broadcasters' ability to take the labels to the cleaners for the past, oh, ninety years is due to a court decision in the early days of the 20th century that set the recompense rate exceedingly low. The NAB has had enough political clout to keep it there ever since. Cool, huh? Note that they make all this moolah by... giving songs away for free.
2) Before Caruso (correct me if I'm wrong on this) there were no recorded-media stars, and instead there were many more local peformers of moderate skill who played directly to the people (y'know, live) and made a decent living doing so. If the hyper-promotion of mediocrity machine that is the labels goes away, perhaps we can move somewhat back in the direction of this former model. Quality will still rise to the top; with free distribution of songs, it would do so as a matter of course. But if the primary payment mechanism for musicians was for *playing music* instead of recorded album sales, then, it would be terrible! No one would get more rich than Jerry Garcia. Have you ever seen Jerry Garcia's house? That sounds OK to me.
3) Movies are a very social medium with extremely high costs of production. Right now, they emphasize cost-of-production over, say, quality. I get better acting at my local theatre than I do in watching a Jerry Bruckheimer $200m extravaganza -- but the "production values" of the local theatre are a bit lower. If production technologies get cheaper (and they will!) then the local theatre can start to compete -- meaning that we'll get a much wider base of content producers, similar to today's documentary situation. Unlike music, it's not unreasonable to hyper-encrypt movies during their initial "theatrical" phase and only show them there -- people seem to like watching movies together, and after you've made back your (much smaller) costs of production plus some profit, you throw the thing into the maw of the collective and start working on your next piece. Again, surprisingingly similar to the local-theater model, which seems to work just fine.
Trackback
"The year is 2015 and Columbia has just released Spiderman 7. The next day, 10 million people with no technical savvy at all go to their computers, stick a Blu-ray disc into their DVD drive, log on to Movies4Free... Three minutes later they have a 100% perfect DVD...As bandwidth increases, DVD technology improves, and software becomes as easy to use as a toaster, every piece of digital content on the planet will be available within minutes...Is this OK? Or do you have a different vision for the future? If profit-based movie/music distribution becomes essentially impossible, do you think the content industry will somehow adapt and get its revenue elsewhere? Or will content creators continue creating but just make a lot less money at it?"
Three thoughts:
1) Right now, radio broadcasters make more money from music than music labels do. U.S. CD sales are $17 billion, radio advertising is $20 billion. Broadcasters' ability to take the labels to the cleaners for the past, oh, ninety years is due to a court decision in the early days of the 20th century that set the recompense rate exceedingly low. The NAB has had enough political clout to keep it there ever since. Cool, huh? Note that they make all this moolah by... giving songs away for free.
2) Before Caruso (correct me if I'm wrong on this) there were no recorded-media stars, and instead there were many more local peformers of moderate skill who played directly to the people (y'know, live) and made a decent living doing so. If the hyper-promotion of mediocrity machine that is the labels goes away, perhaps we can move somewhat back in the direction of this former model. Quality will still rise to the top; with free distribution of songs, it would do so as a matter of course. But if the primary payment mechanism for musicians was for *playing music* instead of recorded album sales, then, it would be terrible! No one would get more rich than Jerry Garcia. Have you ever seen Jerry Garcia's house? That sounds OK to me.
3) Movies are a very social medium with extremely high costs of production. Right now, they emphasize cost-of-production over, say, quality. I get better acting at my local theatre than I do in watching a Jerry Bruckheimer $200m extravaganza -- but the "production values" of the local theatre are a bit lower. If production technologies get cheaper (and they will!) then the local theatre can start to compete -- meaning that we'll get a much wider base of content producers, similar to today's documentary situation. Unlike music, it's not unreasonable to hyper-encrypt movies during their initial "theatrical" phase and only show them there -- people seem to like watching movies together, and after you've made back your (much smaller) costs of production plus some profit, you throw the thing into the maw of the collective and start working on your next piece. Again, surprisingingly similar to the local-theater model, which seems to work just fine.
Trackback
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
So what about tag spam?
Tyler asks me another question:
"I'm a little concerned about tag spam. Is this a problem on Flickr and other sites that allow communal tagging?"
So I went and did a search.
I haven't found any discussion of it as an issue. Comment spam on blogs and comment trolls, on the other hand are well-known and much-discussed problems; none of the solutions are perfect, but include:
- Registration (know who posts something)
- Moderation (increase or decrease visibility by editorial intervention)
- Deletion (the ultimate in editorial intervention)
- Complication (making spam hard to do quickly and automatically)
Tag spam might be different than blog comments, because:
a) You can't include a URL (which spam needs to do in most cases to be effective)
b) You can't express yourself to others in a personalized way (which most trolls seem to want to do).
So it may be anodyne enough to not really be useful to vandal communities. Just a guess.
Some related links:
A loooong but fairly interesting post about tags. No mention of spam. John Dvorak pans tagging in PC Magazine. Some brief thoughts on vandalism in reply to Dvorak -- apparently del.icio.us has had some spam Another reply to Dvorak. A flat-out awesome post on the meaning of RSS
"I'm a little concerned about tag spam. Is this a problem on Flickr and other sites that allow communal tagging?"
So I went and did a search.
I haven't found any discussion of it as an issue. Comment spam on blogs and comment trolls, on the other hand are well-known and much-discussed problems; none of the solutions are perfect, but include:
- Registration (know who posts something)
- Moderation (increase or decrease visibility by editorial intervention)
- Deletion (the ultimate in editorial intervention)
- Complication (making spam hard to do quickly and automatically)
Tag spam might be different than blog comments, because:
a) You can't include a URL (which spam needs to do in most cases to be effective)
b) You can't express yourself to others in a personalized way (which most trolls seem to want to do).
So it may be anodyne enough to not really be useful to vandal communities. Just a guess.
Some related links:
A loooong but fairly interesting post about tags. No mention of spam. John Dvorak pans tagging in PC Magazine. Some brief thoughts on vandalism in reply to Dvorak -- apparently del.icio.us has had some spam Another reply to Dvorak. A flat-out awesome post on the meaning of RSS
Are Tag Clouds Useful? And how to make them more so
Tyler asked:
"Is there a better way to display tag utilization than the tag cloud?"
I would say yes. The "tag cloud" was a cool concept but I find it of limited usefulness. Its axes of meaning include:
1) inclusion (vs. exclusion - the cloud is finite)
2) font size
3) order
I have seen clouds ranked both alphabetically (another one) and ranked by use; when listed alphabetically that means that there is only one axis of meaning (aside from the set limitation of inclusion) which is font size.
It would be possible to include font color as another axis, and even bold vs. italic, but what does that tell the user? It will not be clear.
Absolute popularity is a moderately interesting feature of tagclouds that, frankly, is best represented by a list; I assume that the reason that tagclouds were first done is that the resultant visual mass fits more neatly on to a web page than a 100-item vertical or horizontal list.
Here is an idea that might make tag clouds more useful: Create an actual honest-to-god 2D map representation of them. Sort of like a network diagram, but all node and no connection between node. User types in a tag -- "chocolate" and you create a custom 2D map based on "events that include tag chocolate also include these tags" and then let the user scroll around on that map or click on that map, in Google Maps fashion (can you tell that I have been profoundly influenced by Google Maps? ;-) and get to "food" "wine" "laborador" "ghirardelli" "roses" or whatever, and gradually scroll away to the outer bounds of the related-tags-surface.
Now what you have is a tagcloud that shows not overall popularity (a "who cares" feature -- when was the last time you checked out Google Zeitgeist, much less derived some useful information from it?) but relatedness to something the user cares about, presented in a navigable visual form.
Might be interesting.
"Is there a better way to display tag utilization than the tag cloud?"
I would say yes. The "tag cloud" was a cool concept but I find it of limited usefulness. Its axes of meaning include:
1) inclusion (vs. exclusion - the cloud is finite)
2) font size
3) order
I have seen clouds ranked both alphabetically (another one) and ranked by use; when listed alphabetically that means that there is only one axis of meaning (aside from the set limitation of inclusion) which is font size.
It would be possible to include font color as another axis, and even bold vs. italic, but what does that tell the user? It will not be clear.
Absolute popularity is a moderately interesting feature of tagclouds that, frankly, is best represented by a list; I assume that the reason that tagclouds were first done is that the resultant visual mass fits more neatly on to a web page than a 100-item vertical or horizontal list.
Here is an idea that might make tag clouds more useful: Create an actual honest-to-god 2D map representation of them. Sort of like a network diagram, but all node and no connection between node. User types in a tag -- "chocolate" and you create a custom 2D map based on "events that include tag chocolate also include these tags" and then let the user scroll around on that map or click on that map, in Google Maps fashion (can you tell that I have been profoundly influenced by Google Maps? ;-) and get to "food" "wine" "laborador" "ghirardelli" "roses" or whatever, and gradually scroll away to the outer bounds of the related-tags-surface.
Now what you have is a tagcloud that shows not overall popularity (a "who cares" feature -- when was the last time you checked out Google Zeitgeist, much less derived some useful information from it?) but relatedness to something the user cares about, presented in a navigable visual form.
Might be interesting.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
How Google, A9, and Flickr create those awesome new web interfaces - "Ajax"
I recently wrote a short post about the fast and fabulous new web interfaces we're starting to see, which are changing how web apps work, and making them ever so much more rich and interactive -- for the first time, a real threat and alternative to the desktop.
Now we are getting some great insight and writing about how this is done.
Quoting Jesse James Garrett:
Preoccupations: "Ajax, who he?"
Now we are getting some great insight and writing about how this is done.
Quoting Jesse James Garrett:
Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload. Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax.Again, all credit to the link which led me there:
The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a
fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web. Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.
Preoccupations: "Ajax, who he?"
Marc Canter is a genius -- the "Digital Lifestyle Aggregator"
This is one of those off-the-top-of-the-head posts that would be oh so much better if I polished it and edited it and moderated the tone a bit. But I am really, really geeked out at finding Marc Canter's 10-month-old post on "Digital Lifestyle Aggregators" which is near enough to a spittin' image of what I have been working on for the last year, knowing nothing of this essay. We call our version the Extended Conversation, and since we're coming in from a telco tack, we are spending a lot of time thinking about voice and phones as a crucial component of this -- something that I think the largely web-based thinking of the U.S. folks may have missed. Or, I could just be a prisoner of the installed base of my client -- as Marc says, "...Based upon what assets, IP, market position, resources and existing technology base – each DLA customer will have their own unique set of requirements and implementation details..."
So true.
Marc says he works for Tribe.net, though he also says he hopes they fire him. Is this what Tribe is doing? Not that I was aware of... will find out.
Updated: Mark runs Broadband Mechanics, which is a technology provider to Tribe.net among [apparently] many other firms.
All credit due to the links that led me there:
"Thoughts on the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator"
"From blog to DLA" (tb)
So true.
Marc says he works for Tribe.net, though he also says he hopes they fire him. Is this what Tribe is doing? Not that I was aware of... will find out.
Updated: Mark runs Broadband Mechanics, which is a technology provider to Tribe.net among [apparently] many other firms.
All credit due to the links that led me there:
"Thoughts on the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator"
"From blog to DLA" (tb)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Three quick links - Web2 calendaring and mapping
Want to capture these though I don't have time to comment right now.
1) JWZ aka Jamie Zawinski of Netscape (past) and DNA Lounge (present) on "Groupware, Bad!" and the perils of not getting your customers laid... I found this via the peripatetic Tim Bray.
2) A guy I never heard of before, JGWebber (Joel), who I found via JWZ's site. He has a very detailed analysis of the nutz n boltz driving Google Maps, which incidentally was created by a friend of a friend. Under the radar, Google is doing a lot of hiring-by-acquiring in the Bay Area. About a year ago, I told this guy that he was totally wrong to be working on this project. So much for my omnipotent authority (re: another forthcoming post on that subject...)
3) A company I never heard of before, SandCodex, which has some interesting interface and mapping technology. Well, the demo is cool, anyway. I got this from JGWebber's site.
That is an example of the extended conversation... Maybe I should revisit del.icio.us for this kind of thing.
1) JWZ aka Jamie Zawinski of Netscape (past) and DNA Lounge (present) on "Groupware, Bad!" and the perils of not getting your customers laid... I found this via the peripatetic Tim Bray.
2) A guy I never heard of before, JGWebber (Joel), who I found via JWZ's site. He has a very detailed analysis of the nutz n boltz driving Google Maps, which incidentally was created by a friend of a friend. Under the radar, Google is doing a lot of hiring-by-acquiring in the Bay Area. About a year ago, I told this guy that he was totally wrong to be working on this project. So much for my omnipotent authority (re: another forthcoming post on that subject...)
3) A company I never heard of before, SandCodex, which has some interesting interface and mapping technology. Well, the demo is cool, anyway. I got this from JGWebber's site.
That is an example of the extended conversation... Maybe I should revisit del.icio.us for this kind of thing.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
So what does A9 Yellow Pages Mean?
I try to avoid me-too "look what just happened" blog posts, and despite a ream of content on that last amazon post, a lot of said content fell into the "wow how cool" hand-waving bucket.
Before I natter on a bit more, John Battelle (as usual) has nailed it in pithy form in his Business 2.0 story:
Update: And finally, before I natter, check out this very funny note from John Aboud, via Seth Godin.
Commence my nattering. Here's what this announcement actually means:
1) Amazon used to sell stuff. Call that the "database model" where they shipped first information, and then goods, from a centralized location.
2) Amazon created the marketplace. Call that the "network model" where they acted as an info-mediary who brought together buyers and sellers, with goods shipped around the periphery of the infospace, peer-to-peer, without Amazon actually ever touching them.
Note that quarter to quarter, Amazon derives either a majority, or all, of its profits from the marketplace.
3) Now Amazon has created what I would call the "embedded network model" which extends the network model into the fabric of everday life. Contrast to the marketplace -- you don't care who the seller is, or where the seller is, you just want the goods you found on this mystical Amazon site to show up at your doorstep. In the "embedded network model" Amazon is enabling you -- with your real location, real needs, and real-world context-- to seek out merchants who are also local, physical, and with whom you may interact directly. Today, it's not really embedded -- it's just a first-step extension of the marketplace model. But look where it can go:
1) Amazon links to the catalogs and inventory of the merchants, and you can search that. Amazon provides "merchant tools" (which eBay and PayPal are also working on) to help merchants do this.
2) Amazon offers its Visa card/shopping cart as a pre-payment system for its users. Want a pizza? Find it online, order it online, pay online, and go pick it up.
3) Amazon, working with a delivery partner, enables local delivery from local merchants for same-day, or perishable, goods. Speciality grocery + Amazon = WebVan 2.0??
And these are just the commerce implications. The non-commercial (social) implications are even more interesting -- see my previous comment on the Viper Room. Very, very interesting.
Before I natter on a bit more, John Battelle (as usual) has nailed it in pithy form in his Business 2.0 story:
It's pushing Amazon's virtual-commerce business model -- where you can buy
anything you want online -- into the bricks-and-mortar local retail space.
Amazon wants to be part of any kind of commerce.
Update: And finally, before I natter, check out this very funny note from John Aboud, via Seth Godin.
Commence my nattering. Here's what this announcement actually means:
1) Amazon used to sell stuff. Call that the "database model" where they shipped first information, and then goods, from a centralized location.
2) Amazon created the marketplace. Call that the "network model" where they acted as an info-mediary who brought together buyers and sellers, with goods shipped around the periphery of the infospace, peer-to-peer, without Amazon actually ever touching them.
Note that quarter to quarter, Amazon derives either a majority, or all, of its profits from the marketplace.
3) Now Amazon has created what I would call the "embedded network model" which extends the network model into the fabric of everday life. Contrast to the marketplace -- you don't care who the seller is, or where the seller is, you just want the goods you found on this mystical Amazon site to show up at your doorstep. In the "embedded network model" Amazon is enabling you -- with your real location, real needs, and real-world context-- to seek out merchants who are also local, physical, and with whom you may interact directly. Today, it's not really embedded -- it's just a first-step extension of the marketplace model. But look where it can go:
1) Amazon links to the catalogs and inventory of the merchants, and you can search that. Amazon provides "merchant tools" (which eBay and PayPal are also working on) to help merchants do this.
2) Amazon offers its Visa card/shopping cart as a pre-payment system for its users. Want a pizza? Find it online, order it online, pay online, and go pick it up.
3) Amazon, working with a delivery partner, enables local delivery from local merchants for same-day, or perishable, goods. Speciality grocery + Amazon = WebVan 2.0??
And these are just the commerce implications. The non-commercial (social) implications are even more interesting -- see my previous comment on the Viper Room. Very, very interesting.
Google Voice - The Extended Conversation
The problem with the extended conversation it that it happens in so many places that sometimes, it's hard to consolidate, even in your own mind.
January 17:
First, there were rumors of Google getting into the voice business.
Then, John Battelle posted a piece on the rumor.
Where I wrote a comment.
For a week, it was all quiet on the Western Front.
January 24:
And then the whole world went absolutely apeshit.
And, incidentally (or not?) some guy from Bulgaria named Dimitar Vesselinov posted a comment on Battelle, nailing the issue:
Throughout this all, I somehow had an image in my mind that I'd written a pithy post about all this and put it up here, but somehow, I never did so. This is now that (non-pithy) post.
Ahem. Let me discuss the Extended Conversation.
Oh, hell, let me just demonstrate it by linking to a photo on Flickr of a slide that I've made which introduces the "why" for both the Extended Conversation, justifies Google's move, and agrees with Dimitar, all in one go.
See? Wasn't that cool? It comprised multiple forms of media, hyperlinking, tagging, user-created content, diary --> conversation --> publication fuzziness, and about twelve other principles of What's Going On here in this new new world.
We used to have "conversations" on the telephone. Some of us had "correspondence" via letters, but not since the days of Voltaire could letters be considered "conversations". (Incidentally, did you know that in London, the Post Office delivered mail four times a day before the advent of telephony?) Then we added email, and IM, and suddenly the web went broadband and storage got cheap, and somewhere in there search engines actually started to work, and then a bunch of crazies went and invented the whole blogging paradigm, and there were digital cameras everywhere, and social networks had their moment of glory but left a lasting impression, and then (finally, in the US!) cellphones started getting smart instead of dumb (if only mobile operators would follow, the dummies!) and we are starting to see the emergence of this big gnarly thing called the extended conversation that is going to encompass everything in exactly the same way that the phone system used to touch on everything, except this time we aren't just stuck in voice, and we can tie it all together in a pretty package with a bright red ribbon.
Some people call this Web 2.0. I call it the Extended Conversation.
So let's look at Google. I think they get all, or most of this, already. Firstly, they recognize that search changes how you use information, most especially when you've got a lot of info to manage. Do you even look at the call record on your phone bill? Probably too much information. Do you search back through your email inbox to find stuff you wrote a month ago? Of course you do, because you can, especially with Lookout or Google Desktop or one of the really useful personal search engines.
They get user-created content, too. They have blogger, they have Picasa, they have GMail. They just launched Desktop. They get that user-created content equals communication... I think. When you look at the SIMS study, it's clear that the vast majority of "the world's information" which Google is determined to search is user-created content (see the Hal Varian "How Much Information" SIMS Berkeley study) or read the fantastic article "What's Next for Google" that Charles Ferguson wrote for MIT's Technology Review a few months ago, you can't help but think (if you are a Googler) OK, what are we gonna search/own/monetize next? And the big flaming answer is voice, voice, voice.
So yeah, they're gonna do Google Voice. But maybe not yet.
Why are they gonna do it?
Because all the content in the world comes from people, and most of it is voice.
How are they gonna do it?
Well, if I were a Googler told to do this tommow, I'd turn some of those 250K Linux servers they have into POTS NAPs around the United States and Canada, and I'd run Asterix on them (or a highly robust Googlized version of Asterix) and I'd throw the UI to it in with GMail (or keep it separate, but hold hands with GMail behind the scenes) and make a great inbox and outbox and CDR function, and record every call (allowing the user to delete, etc., just like email) and allow calls to be annotated and hyperlinked and blogged and so forth... and maybe even think about real-time linking of points within the call and what I am doing in the browser, for instance while I am talking (via Google Voice) I do a Google search, and that search is tagged and linked to that moment of the conversation. Whammo, you have a really compelling application-level extension to voice, and another knee in the groin of the dumb transport companies.
Oh, my. This is gonna be a fun decade.
January 17:
First, there were rumors of Google getting into the voice business.
Then, John Battelle posted a piece on the rumor.
Where I wrote a comment.
For a week, it was all quiet on the Western Front.
January 24:
And then the whole world went absolutely apeshit.
And, incidentally (or not?) some guy from Bulgaria named Dimitar Vesselinov posted a comment on Battelle, nailing the issue:
It makes sense. Why? Do you want to search for your voice data? What about
transcripts? People want this kind of information and I suppose they will get
it. It’s about the data, stupid!
Throughout this all, I somehow had an image in my mind that I'd written a pithy post about all this and put it up here, but somehow, I never did so. This is now that (non-pithy) post.
Ahem. Let me discuss the Extended Conversation.
Oh, hell, let me just demonstrate it by linking to a photo on Flickr of a slide that I've made which introduces the "why" for both the Extended Conversation, justifies Google's move, and agrees with Dimitar, all in one go.
See? Wasn't that cool? It comprised multiple forms of media, hyperlinking, tagging, user-created content, diary --> conversation --> publication fuzziness, and about twelve other principles of What's Going On here in this new new world.
We used to have "conversations" on the telephone. Some of us had "correspondence" via letters, but not since the days of Voltaire could letters be considered "conversations". (Incidentally, did you know that in London, the Post Office delivered mail four times a day before the advent of telephony?) Then we added email, and IM, and suddenly the web went broadband and storage got cheap, and somewhere in there search engines actually started to work, and then a bunch of crazies went and invented the whole blogging paradigm, and there were digital cameras everywhere, and social networks had their moment of glory but left a lasting impression, and then (finally, in the US!) cellphones started getting smart instead of dumb (if only mobile operators would follow, the dummies!) and we are starting to see the emergence of this big gnarly thing called the extended conversation that is going to encompass everything in exactly the same way that the phone system used to touch on everything, except this time we aren't just stuck in voice, and we can tie it all together in a pretty package with a bright red ribbon.
Some people call this Web 2.0. I call it the Extended Conversation.
So let's look at Google. I think they get all, or most of this, already. Firstly, they recognize that search changes how you use information, most especially when you've got a lot of info to manage. Do you even look at the call record on your phone bill? Probably too much information. Do you search back through your email inbox to find stuff you wrote a month ago? Of course you do, because you can, especially with Lookout or Google Desktop or one of the really useful personal search engines.
They get user-created content, too. They have blogger, they have Picasa, they have GMail. They just launched Desktop. They get that user-created content equals communication... I think. When you look at the SIMS study, it's clear that the vast majority of "the world's information" which Google is determined to search is user-created content (see the Hal Varian "How Much Information" SIMS Berkeley study) or read the fantastic article "What's Next for Google" that Charles Ferguson wrote for MIT's Technology Review a few months ago, you can't help but think (if you are a Googler) OK, what are we gonna search/own/monetize next? And the big flaming answer is voice, voice, voice.
So yeah, they're gonna do Google Voice. But maybe not yet.
Why are they gonna do it?
Because all the content in the world comes from people, and most of it is voice.
How are they gonna do it?
Well, if I were a Googler told to do this tommow, I'd turn some of those 250K Linux servers they have into POTS NAPs around the United States and Canada, and I'd run Asterix on them (or a highly robust Googlized version of Asterix) and I'd throw the UI to it in with GMail (or keep it separate, but hold hands with GMail behind the scenes) and make a great inbox and outbox and CDR function, and record every call (allowing the user to delete, etc., just like email) and allow calls to be annotated and hyperlinked and blogged and so forth... and maybe even think about real-time linking of points within the call and what I am doing in the browser, for instance while I am talking (via Google Voice) I do a Google search, and that search is tagged and linked to that moment of the conversation. Whammo, you have a really compelling application-level extension to voice, and another knee in the groin of the dumb transport companies.
Oh, my. This is gonna be a fun decade.
Amazon takes a whack at telcos -- application trumping transport
A9 just annouced a way-cool extension to the Yellow Pages concept. From the Washington Post:
Here is an example search result from Boston.
There are two important points here. The first point is that geography is really, really important. The fact that all these businesses have a location matters to their customers; the fact that Amazon has GPS-tagged all the information around the pictures and listings is what makes this service work.
The second, even more important point, is that communications is becoming an extended conversation, and applications are trumping transport. When the world was about plain vanilla POTS, being a transport company (hello, AT&T) was a very valuable thing to be. But on the day it is announced that SBC might buy an AT&T that is a shadow of its former self, Amazon announces a feature that -- almost incidentally -- offers a free phone call between the user of its website and the merchant they are trying to reach. Given that the original intent of the yellow pages was to stimulate phone calls to businesses (and charge for the phone calls) that's an incredible turnabout.
Coupled with the potential for Google to get into the VoIP market -- again, as an extension to its current application-centric business of enabling conversations, not communications -- this now qualifies as a trend.
Incidentally, this also demonstrates that Time Warner was exactly right to buy AOL. They just bought at the wrong time, and may have bought the wrong company.
Also incidentally, the ability of users to add their own photos is really important. If Amazon is smart, they will allow a lot of clustering and linking to happen that has *nothing* to do with the core commerce focus of their yellow pages -- for instance, people linking their party photos from the Viper Room in LA to the geo/location of the Viper Room. There are all sorts of eVite possibilities here, too... it just goes on and on. Welcome to the future.
Finally, last incidental point -- Flickr had better get all the way to platform status soon, or sell themselves to the highest bidder, or they are going to be overwhelmed by the rollout of smart photo-inclusive features like this one.
Voice will be taken over by application providers if the telcos don't do something smart, or something sneaky (AKA regulatory relief). Get hot, boys...
For the past several months, a fleet of nondescript vans equipped with digital
cameras and proprietary computer software has been traversing the streets of
several major U.S. cities, continuously photographing businesses on every block.
Operating secretly under the code name "Project Mercury," the vans have
transmitted more than 20 million images to a database compiled by A9.com Inc., a
wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. A9 set up shop last fall in Silicon
Valley, far from the Internet retailer's Seattle headquarters, with the goal of
creating new search technology for computer users to hunt for information and
products on the Internet.Today, millions of the photos, coupled with their corresponding electronic yellow page listings, are scheduled to become available on the A9.com Web site. Only businesses that have paid to be in the A9 yellow pages will be featured. A9 will invite those retailers to take digital photos of their own that can be added to the Web site, potentially taking computer users inside stores to view merchandise.
A9's offering includes a way for computer users to take notes in an online "diary," and save and search the comments. It also offers a feature that automatically connects users to businesses by phone. Users input a phone number on the Web page, and, with a click of the mouse, can effectively be connected to any of the businesses listed free of charge. Special software connects the call by ringing a user's phone and the line at the business.
Here is an example search result from Boston.
There are two important points here. The first point is that geography is really, really important. The fact that all these businesses have a location matters to their customers; the fact that Amazon has GPS-tagged all the information around the pictures and listings is what makes this service work.
The second, even more important point, is that communications is becoming an extended conversation, and applications are trumping transport. When the world was about plain vanilla POTS, being a transport company (hello, AT&T) was a very valuable thing to be. But on the day it is announced that SBC might buy an AT&T that is a shadow of its former self, Amazon announces a feature that -- almost incidentally -- offers a free phone call between the user of its website and the merchant they are trying to reach. Given that the original intent of the yellow pages was to stimulate phone calls to businesses (and charge for the phone calls) that's an incredible turnabout.
Coupled with the potential for Google to get into the VoIP market -- again, as an extension to its current application-centric business of enabling conversations, not communications -- this now qualifies as a trend.
Incidentally, this also demonstrates that Time Warner was exactly right to buy AOL. They just bought at the wrong time, and may have bought the wrong company.
Also incidentally, the ability of users to add their own photos is really important. If Amazon is smart, they will allow a lot of clustering and linking to happen that has *nothing* to do with the core commerce focus of their yellow pages -- for instance, people linking their party photos from the Viper Room in LA to the geo/location of the Viper Room. There are all sorts of eVite possibilities here, too... it just goes on and on. Welcome to the future.
Finally, last incidental point -- Flickr had better get all the way to platform status soon, or sell themselves to the highest bidder, or they are going to be overwhelmed by the rollout of smart photo-inclusive features like this one.
Voice will be taken over by application providers if the telcos don't do something smart, or something sneaky (AKA regulatory relief). Get hot, boys...
Monday, January 24, 2005
Bellster, Technorati, Slashdot?
When I do a search on Technorati (5:40pm PST, 1/24/2005) for "Bellster" Slashdot is not any of the 41 results, even though Slashdot has a 128-comment post/article on Bellster that was created at 1/24/2005 at 5:08pm EST (3.5 hours ago). Why is that? Too recent? Slashdot hasn't implemented Dave Sifry's server-side code? Will try again tomorrow.
Update: It showed up on 1/25 at about noon.
Update: It showed up on 1/25 at about noon.
Jeff Pulver at play again: Bellster launches
As noted by Kevin Werbach and others, Jeff Pulver, the originator of FreeWorldDialup, the Pulver Innovations WiSIP phone, and a host of other telco-tweaking apps, is at it again. He's launched Bellster, which allows its participants more-or-less no-extra-charge phone calls worldwide. "No extra charge" is significant because it's not free -- in order for the service to work, each participant has to have some sort of reasonably bulk usage plan in their local calling area/country.
My take? RIght now, the short answer is, it's a stunt. A cool stunt that is interesting and will cause big telcos more worries than actual revenue problems. Like BitTorrent, its gnarly technical requirements will keep it from touching more than 1% of the userbase. Basically, you have to set up a dedicated Linux Asterix PBX server in your house to share your phone line with others. Not something that the average user is going to do.
Now... when someone rewrites Asterix into a PC application that runs on Windows, with a slick user interface a la Skype, and adds Bellster functionality, and says to every dummy (cough) user in the world, "Plug your phone line into your PC, download our app, and you get free phone calls worldwide" ... then, the telcos have a problem.
My take? RIght now, the short answer is, it's a stunt. A cool stunt that is interesting and will cause big telcos more worries than actual revenue problems. Like BitTorrent, its gnarly technical requirements will keep it from touching more than 1% of the userbase. Basically, you have to set up a dedicated Linux Asterix PBX server in your house to share your phone line with others. Not something that the average user is going to do.
Now... when someone rewrites Asterix into a PC application that runs on Windows, with a slick user interface a la Skype, and adds Bellster functionality, and says to every dummy (cough) user in the world, "Plug your phone line into your PC, download our app, and you get free phone calls worldwide" ... then, the telcos have a problem.
Friday, December 17, 2004
The three-axis auto-match and Match.com
I met my girlfriend, Andrea, through Match.com, and thus I view the capabilities of such matching services in a fairly positive light. However, onece one sets out on the quest of finding across distance that "perfect someone" via multilple search categories, one must commit to the notion that an ever-more-perfect search mechanism will yield ever-more-perfect results.
The previous post on Matt Jones' bookshelf and my forthcoming post on location-based blogging beg the question -- what are fast and easy ways to identify whether someone is likely your type? I would argue that you can analyze three axes and get very good results on the interesting-conversation front, and probably the I-want-to-date-you front as well:
1) Personal: Height/weight/gender/gender preference/availability. Just the basics.
2) Bookshelf: What do you have on yours?
3) Geo-log -- where have you been, and how much time have you spent there?
Voila. A whole new way of doing dating.
The previous post on Matt Jones' bookshelf and my forthcoming post on location-based blogging beg the question -- what are fast and easy ways to identify whether someone is likely your type? I would argue that you can analyze three axes and get very good results on the interesting-conversation front, and probably the I-want-to-date-you front as well:
1) Personal: Height/weight/gender/gender preference/availability. Just the basics.
2) Bookshelf: What do you have on yours?
3) Geo-log -- where have you been, and how much time have you spent there?
Voila. A whole new way of doing dating.
More on Amazon - "My Work Bookshelf"
Someone with the screen-name 'blackbeltjones' has uploaded his work bookshelf onto Flickr and annotated the jpg with the actual titles of the books. Can I just say that a) Flickr rocks b) this is a cool idea and c) this is an obvious extension of the content of my previous post on this subject. Prabal, are you taking note?
Click through on this photo to the right, and the full coolness will be revealed.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Real search engines and great search engine humor (no, really!)
If you think that Google is the end-all and be-all, read John Battelle on IBM's WebFountain. Wow. That is how a search engine is supposed to work, but the reason you can't access it is that it costs too much per query to give to you for free, and you're too cheap to pay for it.
I can't remember where it was that someone pointed out to me that the true genius of Google wasn't that they created such a great search result, but that they created a pretty decent search result on a less-computational-cost-per-search than could be repaid by advertising. Per might remember, I need to ask him. (task placeholder)
I am going to cross-post on WebFountain over at Onohoku (link placeholder) because this is the scary shit that is destroying the middle class as we know it, in both corporate and governmental applications. Technology can make you free, and it can also make you a robot (which means 'slave labor' in the original Czech)...
The Battelle piece also led me to a truly wonderful self-parody hidden within the Google corporate site. I won't spoil it other than to say fly over there now and check it out!
I can't remember where it was that someone pointed out to me that the true genius of Google wasn't that they created such a great search result, but that they created a pretty decent search result on a less-computational-cost-per-search than could be repaid by advertising. Per might remember, I need to ask him. (task placeholder)
I am going to cross-post on WebFountain over at Onohoku (link placeholder) because this is the scary shit that is destroying the middle class as we know it, in both corporate and governmental applications. Technology can make you free, and it can also make you a robot (which means 'slave labor' in the original Czech)...
The Battelle piece also led me to a truly wonderful self-parody hidden within the Google corporate site. I won't spoil it other than to say fly over there now and check it out!
Monday, December 13, 2004
More on Amazon and the extended conversation
On a day when Google announces that they're digitizing a number of major libraries, Prabal and I happened to be having a conversation about Amazon and where all this virtual/physical stuff is going.
Here are a couple of datapoints.
Firstly, Amazon has this handy "search inside the book" feature which allows full-text searching of books.
Secondly, Amazon now does this very handy "this book references... this book is referenced by..." relational search for references to and from the book.
Now. Most people's libraries are made up of books published in the last 20 years. The vast majority of these books have bar codes on them, which either contain or link directly to the ISBN number of the book in some database online somewhere. Here's a scenario:
January 1, 2005: Amazon places a special offer on its website. By clicking in a special box on their order form, for just $5.99, Amazon will include in your order a USB bar-code reader and a CD with special book-organizing software -- kind of like iTunes for your books. When you receive the software and plug in the reader, you can scan the bar code on every book you own; and for the ones that don't have bar codes, you can type in the ISBN or Library of Congress catalog number. That combination will allow your average book owner to get 90% of their library online at a rate of about five books a minute, or a few hours for a reasonable library of 1000 books. Press a button, and your entire library is uploaded to Amazon.
Some trust and fair-use issues would need to be resolved; Amazon might negotiate with the holders of the copyrights that anyone who physically scanned a bar code would get unrestricted search and access to the text of the books online. Perhaps this would be limited to books you'd bought through Amazon, and they would effectively get into the DRM business. Books that you'd typed in the LC or ISBN number would need to be managed a bit more closely; perhaps such books would drive a query from the site to look up and enter a quotation from a chapter in the book, or some such method of ensuring that the customer actually held a physical copy.
This would also lead to issues with people walking into bookstores and scanning books. However, this battle will be fought soon over cell phones with good cameras in them. Already in Japan, it is reported as a serious issue that kids will enter bookstores and snap photos of pages in magazines that are of particular interest to them.
What would the result of such an upload be? Suddenly, one could manage and search one's personal library online. Search from a text perspective, anyway. Soon I'm going to get around to writing about the "fruit theory" which causes me to believe that books on bookshelves -- even lots of them, such as my library of about 3000 books -- are a highly efficient mental model by which to keep track of information. What's a great example of this? Prabal takes pictures of his bookshelves. He has shelves and shelves of books in Ohio, whereas he is in California -- and he knows where on the shelf a certain book is (efficient mental model). With the picture, he can a) remind/search to a greater degree of precision and b) tell his wife Wendy using a coordinate system that he might not remember, but can now communicate, e.g. "it's a little to the left of the big red book on the 2nd shelf from the bottom," and FedEx does the rest.
For manifold reasons, people are always? or at least for a very long time, going to want real physical books. This combined system would be a beautiful way to combine the benefits of the virtual and physical, and Amazon would be dumb or nuts (and they are neither) not to pursue it.
And then... Steve Wozniak is doing virtual/physical integration via his "Wheels of Zeus" startup -- which is aimed at the "where's my stuff" personal RFID market. For a deluxe package of $59.95, Amazon could mail out a combined RFID/bar code scanner and a big sticker sheet of WoZ tags... and not only you, but your entire family , could suddenly find and access all those great books on your shelves.
The combination of web-based management, personal possessions which come from a limited dataset, and scanning/tagging technologies is going to be flat-out amazing. Imagine managing your wine collection this way. Your tools. Your shoes. Anything (unlike CDs) where the virtual must remain no matter how far digitization goes.
This is gonna be cool.
And the best thing is, besides this great conversation, we had a billion-dollar idea tonight! Now we just need a billion-dollar implementation... ;-)
Here are a couple of datapoints.
Firstly, Amazon has this handy "search inside the book" feature which allows full-text searching of books.
Secondly, Amazon now does this very handy "this book references... this book is referenced by..." relational search for references to and from the book.
Now. Most people's libraries are made up of books published in the last 20 years. The vast majority of these books have bar codes on them, which either contain or link directly to the ISBN number of the book in some database online somewhere. Here's a scenario:
January 1, 2005: Amazon places a special offer on its website. By clicking in a special box on their order form, for just $5.99, Amazon will include in your order a USB bar-code reader and a CD with special book-organizing software -- kind of like iTunes for your books. When you receive the software and plug in the reader, you can scan the bar code on every book you own; and for the ones that don't have bar codes, you can type in the ISBN or Library of Congress catalog number. That combination will allow your average book owner to get 90% of their library online at a rate of about five books a minute, or a few hours for a reasonable library of 1000 books. Press a button, and your entire library is uploaded to Amazon.
Some trust and fair-use issues would need to be resolved; Amazon might negotiate with the holders of the copyrights that anyone who physically scanned a bar code would get unrestricted search and access to the text of the books online. Perhaps this would be limited to books you'd bought through Amazon, and they would effectively get into the DRM business. Books that you'd typed in the LC or ISBN number would need to be managed a bit more closely; perhaps such books would drive a query from the site to look up and enter a quotation from a chapter in the book, or some such method of ensuring that the customer actually held a physical copy.
This would also lead to issues with people walking into bookstores and scanning books. However, this battle will be fought soon over cell phones with good cameras in them. Already in Japan, it is reported as a serious issue that kids will enter bookstores and snap photos of pages in magazines that are of particular interest to them.
What would the result of such an upload be? Suddenly, one could manage and search one's personal library online. Search from a text perspective, anyway. Soon I'm going to get around to writing about the "fruit theory" which causes me to believe that books on bookshelves -- even lots of them, such as my library of about 3000 books -- are a highly efficient mental model by which to keep track of information. What's a great example of this? Prabal takes pictures of his bookshelves. He has shelves and shelves of books in Ohio, whereas he is in California -- and he knows where on the shelf a certain book is (efficient mental model). With the picture, he can a) remind/search to a greater degree of precision and b) tell his wife Wendy using a coordinate system that he might not remember, but can now communicate, e.g. "it's a little to the left of the big red book on the 2nd shelf from the bottom," and FedEx does the rest.
For manifold reasons, people are always? or at least for a very long time, going to want real physical books. This combined system would be a beautiful way to combine the benefits of the virtual and physical, and Amazon would be dumb or nuts (and they are neither) not to pursue it.
And then... Steve Wozniak is doing virtual/physical integration via his "Wheels of Zeus" startup -- which is aimed at the "where's my stuff" personal RFID market. For a deluxe package of $59.95, Amazon could mail out a combined RFID/bar code scanner and a big sticker sheet of WoZ tags... and not only you, but your entire family , could suddenly find and access all those great books on your shelves.
The combination of web-based management, personal possessions which come from a limited dataset, and scanning/tagging technologies is going to be flat-out amazing. Imagine managing your wine collection this way. Your tools. Your shoes. Anything (unlike CDs) where the virtual must remain no matter how far digitization goes.
This is gonna be cool.
And the best thing is, besides this great conversation, we had a billion-dollar idea tonight! Now we just need a billion-dollar implementation... ;-)
Friday, December 03, 2004
The Extended Conversation
I stole this citation from John Battelle's Searchblog. But it's cool enough that I want to write about it myself.
"Rageboy" has discovered, and briefly discussed, that Amazon is now providing hypertextual citation in both directions -- showing both the books that are cited in Book A, and all the books that cite Book A. This means that you can now not only find out all about Book A, you can quickly ascertain where Book A sits in the entire pantheon of scholarship in its topical field. The similarity of this to Google's PageRank algorithm will not be lost on any of the search cognoscenti, and the potential of that alone is enormous -- in addition to reading review, finding out "people who bought also bought," and looking at best-seller lists, I can now choose my books on the basis of how often they are cited, or how broadly they cite -- powerful applications of the "hubs and authorities" model which underlies PageRank. When this is suitably combined with a nice visualization and discovery tool like TouchGraph, we might really be on to something. Three cheers for social networks of data!!
"Rageboy" has discovered, and briefly discussed, that Amazon is now providing hypertextual citation in both directions -- showing both the books that are cited in Book A, and all the books that cite Book A. This means that you can now not only find out all about Book A, you can quickly ascertain where Book A sits in the entire pantheon of scholarship in its topical field. The similarity of this to Google's PageRank algorithm will not be lost on any of the search cognoscenti, and the potential of that alone is enormous -- in addition to reading review, finding out "people who bought also bought," and looking at best-seller lists, I can now choose my books on the basis of how often they are cited, or how broadly they cite -- powerful applications of the "hubs and authorities" model which underlies PageRank. When this is suitably combined with a nice visualization and discovery tool like TouchGraph, we might really be on to something. Three cheers for social networks of data!!
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Final Results: Givers for Kerry, Takers for Bush
A few weeks ago, I posted a comparison between the Presidential polls and the Tax Foundation's tax tables on state-by-state net federal tax receipts (taxes collected vs. federal spending). Now that the people have spoken, I have updated this table to reflect the final results. It's still a very strong correlation:
Givers for Kerry, Takers for Bush.
No wonder we have an enormous deficit...
tax to vote final 2004
Originally uploaded by onohoku.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Types of Social Gatherings
Brainstorming with Andy about different types of social gatherings and their purposes.
This is neither complete nor fully sorted. (DRAFT)
Sports --> Teams get together to compete, fans get together to be entertained and vicariously compete.
House party --> people get together to socially network, which is fun.
Conference --> Information exchange and social networking
Bazaar --> Buying and selling; commerce.
"Activities" --> pleasurable activity -- like dinner (tasty) skiing (fun) hiking (fun and exercise)
"Activities" (b) --> Practice - increase skill for performance or competition
Performance (e.g. symphony) --> expertise/skill (of players) pleasure (of audience)
Cause --> result (fundraiser, politics, etc.)
Collaboration --> work/task
Education --> information exchange only (vs. +social NW of conference)
Interfaces (Waltzbot/DDR; karate-bot; musical instruments that are net-enabled and data-capture-laden)
Types of outputs of work/collaboration:
--> document
--> object a car, a chair, a house)
--> idea (this brainstorm... if we didn't write it down - docs are frozen ideas)
--> other action (e.g. Karl Rove gets you to vote Republican; his action begets your action)
--> performance? How does practicing for a play fit in? What is created there?
Brainstorming with Andy about different types of social gatherings and their purposes.
This is neither complete nor fully sorted. (DRAFT)
Sports --> Teams get together to compete, fans get together to be entertained and vicariously compete.
House party --> people get together to socially network, which is fun.
Conference --> Information exchange and social networking
Bazaar --> Buying and selling; commerce.
"Activities" --> pleasurable activity -- like dinner (tasty) skiing (fun) hiking (fun and exercise)
"Activities" (b) --> Practice - increase skill for performance or competition
Performance (e.g. symphony) --> expertise/skill (of players) pleasure (of audience)
Cause --> result (fundraiser, politics, etc.)
Collaboration --> work/task
Education --> information exchange only (vs. +social NW of conference)
Interfaces (Waltzbot/DDR; karate-bot; musical instruments that are net-enabled and data-capture-laden)
Types of outputs of work/collaboration:
--> document
--> object a car, a chair, a house)
--> idea (this brainstorm... if we didn't write it down - docs are frozen ideas)
--> other action (e.g. Karl Rove gets you to vote Republican; his action begets your action)
--> performance? How does practicing for a play fit in? What is created there?
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Divded States: Givers for Kerry, takers for Bush?
Timothy Noah wrote an interesting piece on Slate today, which defends Massachusetts against the implicit attacks which George W. Bush levelled against it last night. The core of Noah's argument is that the much-maligned liberal hotbed of "Taxachussets" pays a heck of a lot more into federal coffers than it takes out -- in other words, it is a net giver to the country as a whole.
He links to Tax Foundation table of federal expenditures and receipts state-by-state.
I found this table absolutely fascinating.
I dropped this data into Excel, re-ordered the states by their FY2002 rank, and created a new column which represents the current (as of today) state poll standings for Kerry vs. Bush, taken from electoral-vote.com. Using Excel's handy conditional formatting, I colored this column blue if Kerry is +4 or greater, red if Bush is +4 or greater, and grey if the state is from -3 to +3.
The results are quite interesting, to say the least.
I am happy to send this original Excel document to anyone who wants it, but I have attached, for easy viewing purposes, a .jpg of the table. The main impact is visual, and the message it conveys is simple:
States which are net givers to the federal pie predominantly vote for Kerry, while states that are net takers from the federal pie predominantly vote for Bush.
This Bush hegemony of the dependent includes a large number of Western and Great Plains states where the "culture of self-sufficiency" and derision of poor urban welfare freeloaders are wildly predominant points of view.
A couple other observations jump out:
1) Just 16 states (about 1/3) are net givers, while 32 (about 2/3) are net takers. Two (FL, OR) are even at 1.00. This means that, grossly speaking, the givers have large economies, while the takers have small economies. Since the leading 16 are dramatically more liberal than the trailing 32, we can also conclude that as one's economy grows and one's state becomes more prosperous, it also becomes more liberal.
2) This is most aptly demonstrated by the case of Colorado, which has leaped 17 places on the list between 1992 and 2002, from significant net taker (1.06) to significant net giver (.79). In the same 10 years, the modern economy of Colorado has exploded; its population has vastly increased; and the state has become significantly more liberal, to the point where it remains very much in play for the Presidental election, despite its as-of-today +6 for Bush poll standing.
I could go off in any number of directions with this data set, but I'll leave that to the members of the list. If I have the time, I intend to drop in some state GNP data, and also electoral-vote data and possibly population data, so we can see the typical profile of liberal vs. conservative states.
Two points that I will add are:
a) I am just now finishing Neal Stephenson's 3-volume, 3000 page novel on the Baroque era, when both the Scientific Revolution and the commercial revolution transformed first England, and then the world. Stephenson has done a superb job of laying out that the competing factions of Whigs & Tories in England fought, quite explicitly, over whether the wealth of England would be based on commerce (the Whigs) or on land (the Tories, allies of the aristocracy). Fortunately for all of us, the Whigs won - I'm much happier as I am that I would have been as a gentleman's man-servant, I suspect. This recent exposure to these ideas, when added to the visual impact of this attached data, causes me to wonder if similar arguments can be made -- on the basis of this hard data -- about the different political parties of the United States.
b) I am going to go way out on a limb, and say that not only will Kerry win the election, but that he will win the election by capturing swing states Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, and New Jersey. A glance at the list will demonstrate why I chose these.
He links to Tax Foundation table of federal expenditures and receipts state-by-state.
I found this table absolutely fascinating.
I dropped this data into Excel, re-ordered the states by their FY2002 rank, and created a new column which represents the current (as of today) state poll standings for Kerry vs. Bush, taken from electoral-vote.com. Using Excel's handy conditional formatting, I colored this column blue if Kerry is +4 or greater, red if Bush is +4 or greater, and grey if the state is from -3 to +3.
The results are quite interesting, to say the least.
I am happy to send this original Excel document to anyone who wants it, but I have attached, for easy viewing purposes, a .jpg of the table. The main impact is visual, and the message it conveys is simple:
States which are net givers to the federal pie predominantly vote for Kerry, while states that are net takers from the federal pie predominantly vote for Bush.
This Bush hegemony of the dependent includes a large number of Western and Great Plains states where the "culture of self-sufficiency" and derision of poor urban welfare freeloaders are wildly predominant points of view.
A couple other observations jump out:
1) Just 16 states (about 1/3) are net givers, while 32 (about 2/3) are net takers. Two (FL, OR) are even at 1.00. This means that, grossly speaking, the givers have large economies, while the takers have small economies. Since the leading 16 are dramatically more liberal than the trailing 32, we can also conclude that as one's economy grows and one's state becomes more prosperous, it also becomes more liberal.
2) This is most aptly demonstrated by the case of Colorado, which has leaped 17 places on the list between 1992 and 2002, from significant net taker (1.06) to significant net giver (.79). In the same 10 years, the modern economy of Colorado has exploded; its population has vastly increased; and the state has become significantly more liberal, to the point where it remains very much in play for the Presidental election, despite its as-of-today +6 for Bush poll standing.
I could go off in any number of directions with this data set, but I'll leave that to the members of the list. If I have the time, I intend to drop in some state GNP data, and also electoral-vote data and possibly population data, so we can see the typical profile of liberal vs. conservative states.
Two points that I will add are:
a) I am just now finishing Neal Stephenson's 3-volume, 3000 page novel on the Baroque era, when both the Scientific Revolution and the commercial revolution transformed first England, and then the world. Stephenson has done a superb job of laying out that the competing factions of Whigs & Tories in England fought, quite explicitly, over whether the wealth of England would be based on commerce (the Whigs) or on land (the Tories, allies of the aristocracy). Fortunately for all of us, the Whigs won - I'm much happier as I am that I would have been as a gentleman's man-servant, I suspect. This recent exposure to these ideas, when added to the visual impact of this attached data, causes me to wonder if similar arguments can be made -- on the basis of this hard data -- about the different political parties of the United States.
b) I am going to go way out on a limb, and say that not only will Kerry win the election, but that he will win the election by capturing swing states Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, and New Jersey. A glance at the list will demonstrate why I chose these.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Watch the election unfold... poll by poll
The sort of information aggregation that Electoral Vote is doing is really quite impressive. With a little bit of elbow grease and a good web implementation, they are presenting a very interesting and valuable piece of present knowlege out of a flurry of confusing numbers and statistics. This sort of interest-driven site is a classic example of user-created content, and in the same way that the PTA makes your kid's school run better, these people are subtly but definitely improving the workings of our world. Well done.
The sort of information aggregation that Electoral Vote is doing is really quite impressive. With a little bit of elbow grease and a good web implementation, they are presenting a very interesting and valuable piece of present knowlege out of a flurry of confusing numbers and statistics. This sort of interest-driven site is a classic example of user-created content, and in the same way that the PTA makes your kid's school run better, these people are subtly but definitely improving the workings of our world. Well done.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Social Network Theory applied to Political Books
I continue to find social networks of information more interesting and informative than social networks of people. Perhaps this is because the richness of data available for mining on the Web of social information is so much greater. In five years, I can imagine that the existence of long data exhausts from Match.com, Friendster, political donation lists, Yahoo groups, etc., will create equally viable information sources for human social networks.
In the meantime, what we have to play with are social networks of information. Google, of course, is the exemplar of this field, with its PageRank algorithm based heavily on "what other sites think" of a given website. Amazon's 'people who bought X, also bought Y' is another fertile field; and we have a fascinating new analysis of political bestsellers from Valdis Krebs.
Here is the network map of the top 100 political books on Amazon, arranged according to their degree of relatedness. It demonstrates what Krebs rightly calls 'echo chambers' of thought on both the left and the right, with "debate replaced by hate" at the extreme margins, where partisans of both the left and right consistenly buy a tightly grouped set of books that most strongly reinforce each other.
This is a demonstration of the increasing segmentation of America, where sophisticated marketing, geographic mobility, and the twin philosophies of voter and consumer choice have enabled seemingly similar American citizens to exist in completely separate realities.
As an aside, I highly, highly recommend Charlie Wilson's War, which is one of the few books in this diagram read by both left and right. It's a superb story about rea-world people, and real-world politics, accomplishing literally unbelievable feats during the the closing years of the Cold War.
I continue to find social networks of information more interesting and informative than social networks of people. Perhaps this is because the richness of data available for mining on the Web of social information is so much greater. In five years, I can imagine that the existence of long data exhausts from Match.com, Friendster, political donation lists, Yahoo groups, etc., will create equally viable information sources for human social networks.
In the meantime, what we have to play with are social networks of information. Google, of course, is the exemplar of this field, with its PageRank algorithm based heavily on "what other sites think" of a given website. Amazon's 'people who bought X, also bought Y' is another fertile field; and we have a fascinating new analysis of political bestsellers from Valdis Krebs.
Here is the network map of the top 100 political books on Amazon, arranged according to their degree of relatedness. It demonstrates what Krebs rightly calls 'echo chambers' of thought on both the left and the right, with "debate replaced by hate" at the extreme margins, where partisans of both the left and right consistenly buy a tightly grouped set of books that most strongly reinforce each other.
This is a demonstration of the increasing segmentation of America, where sophisticated marketing, geographic mobility, and the twin philosophies of voter and consumer choice have enabled seemingly similar American citizens to exist in completely separate realities.
As an aside, I highly, highly recommend Charlie Wilson's War, which is one of the few books in this diagram read by both left and right. It's a superb story about rea-world people, and real-world politics, accomplishing literally unbelievable feats during the the closing years of the Cold War.
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