Stanford VLab rumor roundup

This post is a bullpen for all the rumors and tidbits that flew by at the Stanford MIT VLab search event and don't get their own special post.



- Delight.com is launching a search service in a couple of weeks that, basically, will be search for women. I don't know what that looks like, but a good guess would be the search equivalent of delight.com. Lynda Keeler, who also launched LA.com, is apparently expanding her media-savvy ways toward more search functionality. Stay tuned.

- Barney Pell, currently an EIR at Mayfield, told a great story about Snap.com, which he is advising. When they first launched Snap, they discovered that their users skewed much older than average web demographics. They got ahold of some of these people and asked them, "why are you using the site?" The response was, "Because your fonts are big. All those other sites use tiny fonts and I can't read them." So Snap is launching big.com whose value proposition is simple: "The Most Readable Results on the Web."

- Near the beginning of the session, Barney asked, "Who here is starting or working at a vertical search company?" About 25% of the ~150 people there raised their hands. Of those ~40 people, 100% were in the front half of the room's seats, and none were in the back half, whereas people were pretty randomly scattered all through the room's seats. So do people who sit in the front start companies, or do people who start companies sit in the front?

- Feeva, which launched at Demo today, is going to be providing geolocation and personal targeting information to GoogleFi or GoogleNet or whatever the heck the big Google WiFi play is going to be called.

- Quote from Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and now Odeo (via Scott Rafer): "Never mistake a clear vision for a short distance." This re: Scott's first attempt to start an RSS feed search company... in 1998.

- Looksmart is apparently about to launch "hundreds" of vertical search sites for various B2B verticals - shades of VerticalNet, circa 1999?! What was old is new again...

- Barney Pell's comments on the panel can be found here.

- Paul Flaherty: "Vertical search is a trusted intermediary between a set of authors and a set of readers. 'Vertical' means either a narrow set of authors or a narrow set of readers. We tend to focus on narrow authors (travel = airlines, jobs = firms who are hiring) and forget about segments of readers. Don't."

- Since the definition remains unclear, a reminder that I blogged about "what is vertical search" the last time I went to one of these panels.

Vertical Search Firms: Google Commoditizes Google

I just attended a fantastic event on vertical search at the Stanford - MIT Venture Lab (VLAB). This is the first of several posts driven out of my mad scribbling during the session, the highlight of which was Scott Rafer, recently of Feedster and now of Wireless Ink, among other things. I had heard Scott speak before (most notably at Sylvia Paull's CyberSalon with David Sifry and Doug Cutting) and somehow it had escaped my notice that in addition to being really goddamn smart, he has a fantastic sense of humor.

Anyway, one of the tidbits of insight that I am blogging from his talk is that you, as a vertical search entrepreneur, should know that Google-like search is a commodity, and that you should layer more goodness on top of it. If you are unclear that Google-like search is a commodity, and the existence of Lucene and Nutch does not persuade you, and further the existence of GigaBlast! on the backs of two grad students in friggin' New Mexico does not convince you, then perhaps this will:





Yes, the Google Search Appliance. The GoogleBox. Scott made the stunningly obvious observation (obvious only after he said it, of course) that you, as a vertical search startup, can almost certainly afford $30K for one of these, and should almost certainly point it against a targeted set of URLs for your vertical effort, as kind of a cheap base case get-to-parity move before you start stirring that secret sauce.

So get out your credit card, and it's off to the races!

It's in Wikipedia, it must be true

Ivan Pope from Web API Tracker just emailed me and wrote, "I added a page for Mashup (web application hybrid) to Wikipedia." If you're reading this, I'm pretty sure that you care, so go over there and pitch in your two cents to improve the definition.

And yes, the musical definition of mashup is also in the Wikipedia.

John Robb's Global Guerillas

When I was doing my PhD work at Berkeley, I often said that I was interested in the intersection of science, technology and society. At the time, I focused more on how society influenced science; for instance the effect of Victorian Bengali culture on the physics and biology work of J.C. Bose. Over time, it dawned on me that it was much more interesting to look at technologies' impact on society; and warfare is one of the cutting-edge social applications of technology (sex and profit being the other two).

John Robb is flat-out the smartest thinker out there on the impact of technology on warfare; he thinks in systems, kind of a mashup of Bruce Schneier and Henry Kissinger. His blog may not be well known to a lot of people in the technology sphere, but I guarantee you that you'll spend a fascinating half hour there, or half a day if you've got the time.

A sample:

The rapid innovation of the Iraqi open source insurgency is yielding improvements in guerrilla technology. In the words of one British Army bomb disposal officer, "These guys have picked up in two years what it took the IRA a quarter-century to learn." The most recent innovation (after the arrival of shaped charges) gaining popularity are infrared triggers for IEDs (improvised explosive devices). These triggers are a conversion of the simple "light" beams used in burglar alarms (see image) and as safety mechanisms on garage doors. The beams are activated remotely by radio controls when a patrol approaches. When the light beam is crossed the bomb goes off. Unfortunately, unlike radio controls the beams are not easily jammed. These new triggers have been used in numerous deadly attacks on British forces over the last several months.

This innovation may be due to Iranian involvement, but a more probable explanation is that the insurgency itself is finding low-tech solutions to difficult problems through an open source development process. Regardless, this innovation will rapidly proliferate throughout Iraq. Our problem is that the cycles of innovation that yield deployable counter-measures for US and British forces are slow and non-responsive by comparison. This is another aspect of global guerrilla math: our deployed innovation is measured in years and theirs in months. -OR- that a $1.2 billion program for IED counter-measures could be trumped by a $10 burglar alarm sensor.

Check him out.

Minion notes: New Yahoo! Mail

The Minion writes to me that Yahoo! has updated their mail, and notes, "Sounds like gmail will have to improve now." Thank God. Gmail is yet another cool idea that Google has launched in to the world, and then failed to turn into a real product. I've been waiting for Yahoo! to integrate the awesome functionality of Oddpost, which they acquired over a year ago (July, 2004). Looks like it's finally happened.

This is yet another jab from Yahoo in the battle of heavyweights... I love watching this prize match.

Remote comment on Searchblog: How to Search

John Battelle's comments seem to be broken - I get sent here when I try to post one. So here's the comment I was trying to post in response to this post from John:

I'm surprised that you don't mention in this post another interesting thing that you said in Mountain View last night - namely that you're teaching search at your kids' school. While that is the elementary facet of this problem, it's the same problem, and I am curious for your thoughts or anecdotes from that experience.

I can imagine a new version of "media studies" - the sort of classes that help you, as a viewer, deconstruct the staging, editing, and filming that goes into producting a TV news blurb, and help you to understand its relationship to fact and truth. Seeing inside the sausage factory of news production can help us make informed decisions about how to evaluate its product, and with search, that same kind of informed decision seems critical to a) getting what we want out of search and b) knowing what *to* want, and what to expect, from a search result.

Blogs are the universal editorial opinion layer

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, and I've finally been spurred by the emerging reality of FM Publishing to lay out my thoughts before John Battelle goes and changes my mind.

I don't have a handy history of journalism at my fingertips, but I'd say that all of our model of how it's supposed to work is Ben Franklin at Poor Richard's Almanack, or Cary Grant ande Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Those intrepid folks who go out and gather the news, and have a pretty direct and individual relationship with both their sources and their readers. That directness has been lost over the years, partly through the growth of society from Franklin's Philadelphia of perhaps 12,000 people, and partly through intervening layers of technology and bureaucracy and the rise of giant media conglomerates.

One of the things that these conglomerates have done is to vertically integrate, in order to maximize profit -- and if you look at the profitability of local newspapers and local television affiliates, still the repositity of the majority of journalism in this country, they are staggering.

In a previous post, I said that editorial + reporting + advertising = news. Well, those three + distribution = media, and your typical newspaper or television puts them together like this:



The three major categories of blogging that first emerged were political blogs, technology blogs, and teenage girl blogs (aka LiveJournal). If we look at the blogging phenomenon across all three, what is apparent is that a blog is a way to express an individual editorial opinion about some body of knowledge or events, that can be pointed or linked to. Blogs are the superstructure on the ship, and must point to an engine room which drives them.

In the case of technology and political blogs, the bloggers pointed to the widely available volume of reportage available online; and the drumbeat, time-driven nature of political and technology news is kind of like a CPU clock, making sure that the conversations continue to be synchronized and move along in a nice orderly fashion -- today we talk about the iPod Nano and FEMA; tomorrow we talk about Sony's cool new gadets and the collapse of the stock market. Or whatever.

In the case of teenage girls, I don't know what exactly started it, but one day they were suddenly all online gossiping about each other, and the content of their editorial layer was themselves, and intense recirocal linking activity unknowable to mere male mortals occurred.

I read several political blogs, and I get my news from the New York Times. The New York Times is either picking a moment in history to make its stand, or shooting itself in the foot right now, because they're closing a lot of their content off behind a paid subscription wall very soon. But I'm not sure that I care - the only Times columnists I regularly read are Friedman and Krugman, and they are fairly formulaic at least 40% of the time. The guys that I do read -- Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall, among others -- I find to be more interesting, more complete, and more persuasive on a regular basis. Once they actually get a business model figured out, Kevin or Josh should be able to make millions of dollars a year from expressing their opinions -- MORE than a Krugman or a Friedman can make, because they've gone free agent vs. the profit-maximizing intgrated media monopoly of the NYTimes or other big papers.

My take on MySpace is that, without quite realizing what they'd done, they enabled and captured music blogging. We (by which I mean NSVG) have done a lot of work with some big phone companies which has caused us to coin a phrase, the "Extended Conversation". Conversations today already happen across many mediums, and involve complex references, creation of content, commerce, and in many cases, actions. Politics is a huge area of conversations; technology another huge area; and teenage girls are the world's leading acknowledged source of conversations.

Music (specifically, hip emerging indie music) is a very fertile conversational area -- just watch the movie Slacker to see -- and MySpace built a 'platform' of band sites, band schedules, band singles, and band photos that allowed the fans of those bands, the conversational participants, to all converge in one place, and to start expressing their opinions about music. Voila -- music blogging, and $500m. As other forms of content become widely available in linkable, bloggable form online, I think that we will start to see the emergence of whole new categories of blogging, which can't exist today because the foundations of linkable information are fragmented or have high hurdles to discovery and discussion.

Blogging is the wave of the future for editorial opinion. We'll have a whole class of financial blogs, movie blogs, gadget blogs, local blogs, food blogs, music blogs, political blogs, health blogs... you name it, it'll be blogged. Because as this ecology emerges, it will be the most profitable and interesting way for the best writers and editorial opinion creaters to express themselves.

This of course begs the question, what will happen to reporting and journalism, the ship on which this superstructure sails? Dan Gillmor has and idea - citizen journalism - that I'm not sure I entirely believe; and the short answer is that I don't know. But I'm quite certain where the editorial opinion layer will go, and blogs will lead the way.

So what is Federated Media? That speculation is the topic for yet another post. But I don't think it's a coincidence that a couple recent interviews of John have included the capitalized phrase, the Force of Many.

Google to launch blog search

I just met John Battelle offline at his Mountain View book signing. Isn't it a strange reversal that with the term "offline," reality has now become a referent to the Internet? At the event, he said that at 9pm, Google would be pushing something live, and he'd blog what, exactly, as soon as he got wireless connectivity. Well, I presume he's sitting at Red Rock right now, because he's written that Google is launching blog search. Somewhere, Dave Sifry is screaming. Or, chortling that his category has been validated and his acquisition by a Google competitor assured? Stay tuned. This is probably a propituious time for me to finally write a long-delayed post about the blogeconomy... coming next.

Update: Google Blogsearch is now live and can be found here.

Skype + eBay, ridiculous number and all

Well it happened. Skype + eBay, $2.6bn plus big incentives. Wow.

Let's see how OnoTech fares:

Them: "“Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community,” said Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay."

Us: "People have conversations. About topics. Extended Conversations. And one of the things that people talk about -- *a lot* is commerce."

Them: "Online shopping depends on a number of factors to function well. Communications, like payments and shipping, is a critical part of this process. Skype will streamline and improve communications between buyers and sellers as it is integrated into the eBay marketplace. Buyers will gain an easy way to talk to sellers quickly and get the information they need to buy, and sellers can more easily build relationships with customers and close sales."

Us: "What to buy. Call a friend. Talk to the seller. Ask a question. Think that Skype might reduce friction and increase trust in eBay's core business, which is connecting geographically dispersed buyers and sellers? Hell yes -- reach out and build comfort with someone. Think that eBay would like to track "off marketplace" communications between buyers and sellers, and better understand the entire cycle of commerce around its transactions? Hell yes - and reduce fraud and ensure commission compliance at the same time."

Them: "PayPal and Skype also make a powerful combination. For example, a PayPal wallet associated with each Skype account could make it much easier for users to pay for Skype fee-based services, adding to the number of PayPal accounts and increasing payment volume."

Us: "And then there's PayPal... telephony+payments is a marriage made in heaven. Mobile telephony is the most interesting facet of this marriage, but Skype will soon be a mobile telephony solution, or so I hear through the grapevine."

Them: "In addition, Skype can help expand the eBay and PayPal global footprint by providing buyers and sellers in emerging ecommerce markets, such as China, India, and Russia, with a more personal way to communicate online. And consumers in markets where eBay currently has a limited presence, such as Japan and Scandinavia, can learn about eBay and PayPal through Skype."

Us: "And then there's the geography angle... eBay has clearly been thinking iternational for a while. They're really interested in owning marketplaces in countries where they're not yet dominant - the lessson of Japan, where Yahoo! Auctions stole the country from them, must still weigh heavy in their minds. Skype is an international customer set that can be turned into marketplace customers in all sorts of interesting ways."

Too bad I'm not always this accurate.

It's a ridiculous number. But Skype+eBay makes sense.

$2 billion? Crazy. $5 billion? Insane. Rumors (sourced from Bloomberg via the Wall St. Journal) that eBay and Skype are in talks have the historical business punditocracy mouthing "don't get it." in various forms.

"Whenever a company may do something that's completely different than its historical focus, there is risk,'' said Norm Conley, who helps manage $950 million, including about 225,000 EBay shares, at St. Louis-based J.A. Glynn & Co. ``The potential they may acquire a real technology leader in a space that's growing as fast as voice-over-internet is intriguing.''

There's a real problem with the level of analysis here. The problem is that this guy hasn't spent a moment thinking about *why* people communicate on Skype. He hasn't spent a moment thinking *who* communicates on Skype. he's to be stuck in the old silo mentality of "telephony <> commerce". The old mentality of "telephony = pipes".

Wake up, everyone! People don't "communicate". That's a technical term. People have conversations. About topics. Extended Conversations. And one of the things that people talk about -- *a lot* is commerce. What to buy. Call a friend. Talk to the seller. Ask a question. Think that Skype might reduce friction and increase trust in eBay's core business, which is connecting geographically dispersed buyers and sellers? Hell yes -- reach out and build comfort with someone. Think that eBay would like to track "off marketplace" communications between buyers and sellers, and better understand the entire cycle of commerce around its transactions? Hell yes - and reduce fraud and ensure commission compliance at the same time. This is simply a step toward turning the purchase transaction into a buying process, and it sounds eminently sensible to me.

IM auction alerts are an obvious win -- a way to drive many more bids from people who used to forget, and miss the end of the auction. That alone could justify the purchase, and IM is a business that eBay has to be thinking about.

And then there's the geography angle. My friend Raj, who works for Cisco and sells in Asia a lot, personally takes credit for at least a million Skype users. As he tells the story, on one of his selling trips, he told a Chinese telecom company guy about it, and the guy wrote an article that was widely read, and Skpe has been growing like wildfire in China ever since. Most of the people I know on Skype are Europeans - high-cost telecom in places like Greece means that any wired guy there uses it for business whenever he can.

eBay has clearly been thinking iternational for a while. They're really interested in owning marketplaces in countries where they're not yet dominant - the lessson of Japan, where Yahoo! Auctions stole the country from them, must still weigh heavy in their minds. Skype is an international customer set that can be turned into marketplace customers in all sorts of interesting ways.

And then there's PayPal... telephony+payments is a marriage made in heaven. Mobile telephony is the most interesting facet of this marriage, but Skype will soon be a mobile telephony solution, or so I hear through the grapevine.

It's not worth $5 billion, but this is a very interesting match indeed. Stay tuned.

Nivi gets that content = communications

I just discovered a fantastic blog by this guy Nivi, who has a smart piece up called "There is no such thing as user-created content." Sample blurb:

User-generated content is all the rage! Unfortunately, there is no such thing.

Users are not interested in generating content.

They are interested in communicating.

Blogs are not content. They are communication.

The “15 million” bloggers out there do not consider themselves publishers. Probably only a few hundred or a thousand of those bloggers are “publishing”. The rest of them are communicating. Just like they communicate over email or telephone or IM. They are regular folks who are just talking.

I love it. I agree. I have written two posts during the past year that discusssed the "Extended Conversation"; my recent Cringely/Skype post, where I said:

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.

and back in January, I mentioned the Extended Conversation:

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.

This guy Nivi is smart. Read his blog.

Web 2 is in the water

So within a couple days, three Web 2 API sites launched - WSFinder, Ivan Pope's WebAPITracker, and Programmable Web. Ivan had a nice post over at TechCrunch, and hopefully these can all find their niche and benefit the community.

WSFinder, Web Services API Directory, launches

There's a fantastic vortex of activity happening around here at NSV, and two of the guys right at the heart of it are Chris Law and Paul Martino, both ex-Tribe.net founders. Chris and Paul has just launched a Wiki directory for Web 2.0 APIs called WSFinder. They've already gotten a shout-out from TechCrunch. Check it out, and contribute!

It's all about owning future customer intent

Over at the Oodle blog someone (Craig Donato?) has got it nailed - "It's all about love-in, not lock-in." The number one reason that Google is valuable is that they own future customer intent. I use their search, I love it, I plan to go back. As long as that is true, they don't need any of my customer data, or any hold over me. The instant that stops being true, then they have problems. Big problems.

Search sites that are attempting to personalize -- like A9 and Snap -- should be doing so to lock in future customer intent through value, not lock in future reluctant usage through pain.

If you do it right, it's no longer "locked in" so much as "nested". Thinking about nesting your customers is such a better idea then incarcerating them...

How Wired is Ethan? 2:19 behind the curve

Per sent me an email at 9:35 about Google Talk. I checked Battelle for the gold standard on Google news; he posted at 7:30pm. Since Technorati apparently uses relative pointers on their search URLs (bad, Dave, bad!) by the time you read this post, this search will probably no longer point to the two-hours-ago transition from "preview" to "released" in the blogosphere; but I clock in at 2:19 behind that moment as I write this.

Despite the fact thatTechnorati was built on the premise, "who first and how fast" usually isn't a very interesting a question. But admit it, every once in a while, you want to see how fast your car gets from 0 to 60, don't you?

Update: Doh! I must not be very wired... I originally posted this to the wrong blog.

Google Talk's biggest winner: Global IP Sound

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Robert X. Cringely was wrong to consider Vonage and Packet8 the equal of Skype. Skype has fundamental advantages over other VOIP services, I argued, because they use the awesome Global IP Sound codec.

Well, today Google launched Google Talk, and lo and behold, it uses GIPS as well:



I'll repeat what I said three weeks ago:

"And someone really smart should buy Global IP Sound."

How do I know so much about GIPS? A mis-spent youth:

Liquidity Changes the Definition of an Asset

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.

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?

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

There's gold in them thar hills, I think...

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.

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:

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?

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.

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.

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

"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 ;-)

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!

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.

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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

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.

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:

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.
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.

Again, all credit to the link which led me there:

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)

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.