Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: sno.oker.ed

sno.oker.ed

Good comment :

Or you could look at it as Yahoo buying the ongoing search/classification services of 300,000 geeks for maybe $10-$100 per geek.

Steve Case : Set AOL free

Steve Case argues that the AOL-TimeWarner merger produced nothing useful.

Here's how AOL could become relevant again.

Really Big Button

Today, thinking about user contributed content remined me of one of the early classics : the Really Big Button that doesn't actually do anything.

Bubblegeneration On Yahicio.us

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab : Why Yahoo bought del.icio.us

As someone who's not a user of del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking service, it's a little hard for me to understand exactly what the real excitement is here.

OTOH, another bubblegen story just caused me to write this comment :

Yahoo analytics : "The most popular tags / bookmarks from people who clicked on your advert are ..."

PowerPoint to OPML

PowerPoint is probably the most widely installed "outliner" even if not used that way. So why not a way to plug it in the new OPML platform?

Umair on Television

Bubblegen has a must-read piece on TV 2.0: How To Think Strategically About the Future of TV

TechCrunch : Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us

TechCrunch : Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us

Danny Ayers, Raw Blog : Web 2.0 and Scale

Good piece

Why don't the media "get it"?

Umair Haque :

I mean, it's the end of 2005. Isn't it intuitive and obvious how the media industry could utilize Wikipedia, blogs, and podcasts (etc) to revolutionize their strategies and business models?

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab

Clearly it ought to be. But isn't.

Why? Lack of creativity? Lack of any business model from the perspective of the media companies?

I'd (charitably) assume the second. Although, it's so cheap to dabble with this stuff that media companies ought to be able to afford to do some experiments.

Instead of writing about how lousy and untrustworthy Wikipedia is, why not :

• A "howler of the week" competition for the reader who finds the dumbest (or most egregious) error in Wikipedia
  
• Make sure Wikipedia (and Yellowikis) have accurate, up-to-date information about your company and journalists


• "Adopt" other important Wikipedia pages. Pay someone to look at them occasionally and correct errors. Write about the process and invite your readers to contribute suggestions


• Create a whole farm of wikis on your own site for your readers. Don't try to do news or editorial in these, but create wiki-like catalogues about less controversial subjects : eg. description of local bands if you're a city; about gardening or wine or fashion if you're a lifestyle sort of paper; about soap opera characters if that's the kind of rag you are.


• A wiki-like place for readers to suggest stories and give leads on things that should be investigated and written about.


• Reinvent your internal workflow process as a wiki. Maybe it can be publicly readable and commentable


• Train reporters to use wiki-like personal organizers so they can more easily keep track of the context of what they're writing about.

And the above are just wiki-related ideas. There are even more things you can do with blogs, RSS, podcasts, OPML, attention etc. Not to mention the cross-overs between them.

Cringely on the gSpot

Who is going to win the triple play? It doesn't matter. Who is going to win the game? Any player with deep pockets and no particular technological dependency. At this point that could be Yahoo or Microsoft or AOL or some new player altogether, but it probably means Google.

PBS | I, Cringely . December 1, 2005 - The Sweet Spot

Update : actually, read the previous story first.

Ongoing : On Beyond Java — the JVM

Tim Bray has an interesting point.

The Java Virtual Machine has a huge installed base. Has the JVM actually won this battle? Or, how does it fight against Microsoft's Common Language Runtime; Parrot, the free common VM coming out of the Perl / Python community, which should also support Ruby etc.; and the one that Bray misses : the Flash player)

Having spent some time looking at what GUI library to use for my current Python project and seeing things haven't developed very much in the last five years in terms of standards and resources, I think the JVM / Java platform is in a strong position. Swing isn't wonderful but, as Bray notes, neither is the competition.

Two things that would be interesting :

- a XUL or XUML on top of the Java platform.

- open sourcing the JVM. Strategically this must be worthwhile for Sun now. It's not like Microsoft, who are commited to the CLR are likely to try to embrace and extend the JVM.

What about the web-as-platform and AJAX? Some interesting stuff is happening here too.

With the inclusion of Canvas and SVG in the new Firefox (and Gecko), this becomes an interesting component to build graphical applications.

Excitingly, it seems there're some hints of using Python for XUL and the same document talks of a new Javascript.

So we could see Gecko as a common between both web based applications and for stand-alone desktop applications. Although maybe the distinction will much dissolve.

Maybe there's a whole potential zoo of cool available in a Python-Parrot-Gecko hybrid as a rival to Java-JVM-Swing.

RSS and SMS

Yahoo! just enabled every blog and news service in the world to update 200 million American mobile consumers instantly. Every feed, from any source online is now a potential mobile alert service, instantly notifying readers, customers and users of any updates, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week anywhere they happen to be.

Russell Beattie Notebook

Greg Linden: Microsoft Fremont is impressive

Geeking with Greg: Microsoft Fremont is impressive

Commented below

Me :

I prefer to call them Greenspun category 4 models.

Damn, I wanted to post a comment to Jeremy telling him about my previous post.

But it looks like my ISP is on some blacklist. That's the second time my attempt to post or edit something has fallen foul of these people.

I'm pissed, but having closed my own wiki due to spam, I have a bit of sympathy. Hope this doesn't become widespread though or I'll be voiceless.

Discussion on Mashups as viable business models

Started? Geeking with Greg: Can Web 2.0 mashups be startups?

And my original comment :

I think you're [Greg] sort of right - in the literal sense. But may be missing the bigger picture.

A lot of web-services are built on (and dependent on) somebody else's web thing. Search engines are a classic example : "how could THAT work? How can Google trust that people won't delete or change the contents of their pages that Google went to so much trouble to index? Isn't the value in the pages themselves, not something as ephemeral as links?"

In the real economy, an awful lot of people act as brokers or middle-men between two sources of value, and they DO (apparently) add yet more.

Mashups certainly add value that doesn't exist in either of the original sites. The only question is a) whether there's a business model, and b) whether the mashup is unethically parasitic.

A lot of mashups have no business model and are done for fun. But that doesn't mean that there can't be something mashup-like that became a huge business.

Now Greg thinks Web 2.0 is mashups.

Jeremy Zawodny asks a classic question (by way of mashing the meme with another one, about markets) :

I claim that these two discussions are actually related by the notion of a platform.

The platform is what you must build today in order to create a new on-line market. To be clear, the process goes something like this:

1. Build new "open" platform


2. Get critical mass (this is where mashups start to come in)


3. Add financial incentives, creating a marketplace


4. Profit!

That leads me to ask the only unasked question so far. In the Internet of 2006, what's it mean to be (or create) a "platform"? What is a platform? Is one necessary to create a new marketplace online?

What do you think, based on the evidence we've seen so far?

(My emphasis)

Once you start thinking in terms of platforms, then mashups are just applications. We're in the realms of the architecture of participation.

But it's a tricky question. Here are a couple of thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a while :

• a platform is based on an AddressableThings. You build a platform by finding something in the world that people care about, and allowing them to reliably refer to it by either :
  
  
  
  • a) assigning it a UID (eg. when it was uploaded to my server, we put a barcode on this lobster) or
  
  
  • b) finding some other reliable identifier (I can talk about books using an externally defined ISBN number, I can talk about this person using FOAF (which hashes the email address), I can talk about place using GPS coordinates.)
  
  
  
  
  Note 1 : I guess tagsonomy means you don't have to give a perfect reference to one individual. A trustworthy way of finding eg. pictures usually of "this type" is OK.
  
  
  
  Note 2 : Can't you just see those VCs reading Strawson and Kripke? :-)
  
  
  
• Once you can refer to something, it can become the subject of a conversation between people. (Some conversations are, of course, markets)



• In tech. terms. Conversations are interoperability. Which can procede without pairwise co-ordination, and where ideally the intelligence is at the edges.



• In conversations, you have to listen. Everyone who thinks about building a platform emphasizes the rights of the stakeholders : the application builders and the users. If you don't listen, application builders and users don't talk to you.

OK, that's not very coherent. But it's a start. More refinements of this discussion to come.

(Bonus question re: advertising markets : How come all the cool companies are encouraged to use viral, word-of-mouth, gonzo marketing - because word spreads so easily on the internet, but the advertising market is set to keep growing?)

Dabble

Hmm. What's that?

Paul Graham on Web 2.0

Paul Graham starts off like he doesn't really get the whole thing.

But then he does :

Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term "Web 2.0" so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new-- that it didn't predict anything.

But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The "trends" we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.

(My emphasis)

Google and RSS

Richard MacManus made a good point.

Google can't embrace syndication because they're so heavily dependent on advertising on web-pages. They'll experiment with ads in feeds, but this is unpopular.

In this sense, RSS is disruptive to Google. It's a technology which their business model won't let them get into.

Update A pedant writes : "how is RSS a challange to Google's own business which is search?"

Answer : Well, there are several RSS-like search competitors. Things like Technorati have been searching blogs and feeds for ages. Google was slow into blog-search. Or here's a recent idea OPML Sampling, which essentially runs a popularity-based (PageRank-like, though courtesy of Yahoo) search within a set of feeds (defined by an OPML file).

New searches, not made by Google, because Google doesn't want to engage with something they haven't yet figured out how to sell ads on?

Don Park : Get out of the web

Don Park suggests MS gets out of the browser-space.

I like this suggestion. It's not necessarily sensible. But it is bold. I wonder what would happen.