November 29, 2005
Dare Obasanjo - Brand X vs. Brand Y: Social Effects and Competition in the Software Indistry
So what does this mean for search engine competition and Google? Well, I think increasing a search engine's relevance to become competitive with Google's is a good goal but it is a route that seems guaranteed to make you the Pepsi to their Coke or the Burger King to their McDonalds. What you really need is to change the rules of the game, the way the Apple iPod did.
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Brand X vs. Brand Y: Social Effects and Competition in the Software Indistry
November 28, 2005
Compare and contrast
An exercise for the reader (and me too when I have time) .
Nicholas Carr's Hypermediation 2.0
BubbleGen's Edge Competencies
Something else, which I now can't seem to find, where I wrote that the future would see more "indexes". Not particularly original but slightly different from the two above.
Nicholas Carr's Hypermediation 2.0
BubbleGen's Edge Competencies
Something else, which I now can't seem to find, where I wrote that the future would see more "indexes". Not particularly original but slightly different from the two above.
November 27, 2005
OPML and XSLT
Les Orchard : Yeah, I think that’s one of my biggest frustrations with OPML - I can’t trust it to always play nice with XSLT. That’s *really* all this XML Geek wants, in the end.
Multimedia outlines
Kosso compares outlines with video and audio scripts
Read the comments. Lots of people are buzzing about the idea of an outline as a way for :
a) creators of video and audio streams to organize their scripts. So as a sort of alternative to Director and HyTime
b) as a way for people to manage and navigate collections of multi-media. For example, a magazine program can be decomposed into a list of media snippets and browsed as the user wishes.
Read the comments. Lots of people are buzzing about the idea of an outline as a way for :
a) creators of video and audio streams to organize their scripts. So as a sort of alternative to Director and HyTime
b) as a way for people to manage and navigate collections of multi-media. For example, a magazine program can be decomposed into a list of media snippets and browsed as the user wishes.
November 26, 2005
World of Ends applied to SynWeb vs. SemWeb
In a long ranty comment I made to Danny I started thinking about applying World of Ends thinking to the SemWeb / SynWeb debate. Here's what I said :
In an earlier comment, I'd said something to the effect that there was an 80/20 rule. If 80% of potential users were satisfied with a format, that would make for a viable standard.
Danny asked :
So here’s an interesting one I thought of : 8-bit ASCII - where the second 128 chars are indeterminate and available to be adapted by whichever country or special interest that wants them. There’s lots of incompatibility as people try to pass files containing accented vowels from one country or operating system to another. But ASCII is a phenomenally succesful standard despite all this potential for error. Most of the time, most people, stick within the working subset.
Danny also wonders about Atom :
I don't really have a strong intuition about this either. My guess is that Atom will do well in the things where it doesn’t compete directly with RSS, such as the API. And Atom Syndication will be parasitic on the degree to which people buy-in to the Atom community for these other reasons.
RSS (in some mangled form) will become core to MS, and will be with us for a long time. Aggregator writers will keep finding work-arounds that make RSS do anything that Atom can do.
Hmm. I wonder if another way of thinking of this is a “world of ends” type argument with the data-format playing the role of the network-protocol and programs playing the role of the “ends”.
The SemWeb argues for smart protocols (ie. semantics in the file-format) whereas the SynWeb argues that semantics belongs at the edges : in the programs that produce and consume them.
The OPML format doesn’t know or care whether it’s carrying a playlist, a blogroll, a blog, a subscription-list etc. It just concentrates on allowing the data to be moved from one program to another. Meanwhile, the OPML editor is continuously being upgraded to know how to get more “meaning” from the outlines it creates.
Why is it “better” for the meaning to reside at the edge?
a) edge points can be upgraded individualistically. If I want OPML to represent my attention data I just have to upgrade to the new version of FeedDemon which will support this. If I want to upgrade to a new version of a specially crafted Attention RDF I have to get the whole network to buy-in.[1]
b) The corollary of that is that if you’re crafting a model like Attention RDF, it’s really important to get it right. Because upgrading is such a pain. On the other hand, it’s far less important to get attention in OPML perfect from the start. It can be continuously tweaked with new releases of the software.
This again reflects on the question of “applications”. OPML as a format is worse than Xoxo or some other XML. But it’s gonna be the winner here as long as Dave Winer can keep up the development momentum in the OPML editor and the rivals don’t offer a compelling alternative.
Les Orchard writes a great concept demonstrator but then abandons it. [Danny] does a lot of coding. But because [he's] focused on putting the semantics into the protocol, [he does’t treat his] programs as the primary vehicle for getting his meaning into the world.
If I want to use Attention RDF as a user, what do I do? Wait around until people have thrashed out the spec on the wiki and then install a very generic RDF database and query language? Why wouldn’t I rather follow regular updates of an existing, already useful tool, which is promising to add this functionality in small sips over time?
[1] I recognise the usual respost : about atomicity of SemWeb tags which means it isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. It’s just that I don’t see that this actually helps here.
For example, what would be an incremental roadmap for geting to widespread Attention RDF adoption?
We can’t say “well, we’ll roll out the att:readtimes tag to begin with, and then once people have started using that and seen the benefits, we can add att:lastread.”
But that’s exactly what a program-oriented SynWeb strategy can do. “We’ll start with ‘rank’ in the next version of the code, and then go from there.
In an earlier comment, I'd said something to the effect that there was an 80/20 rule. If 80% of potential users were satisfied with a format, that would make for a viable standard.
Danny asked :
There should be plenty of data points, but thinking about it they’re rather hard to pin down.
So here’s an interesting one I thought of : 8-bit ASCII - where the second 128 chars are indeterminate and available to be adapted by whichever country or special interest that wants them. There’s lots of incompatibility as people try to pass files containing accented vowels from one country or operating system to another. But ASCII is a phenomenally succesful standard despite all this potential for error. Most of the time, most people, stick within the working subset.
Danny also wonders about Atom :
It’s hard to predict e.g. whether Atom will totally supercede RSS 2.0 or fall by the wayside itself
I don't really have a strong intuition about this either. My guess is that Atom will do well in the things where it doesn’t compete directly with RSS, such as the API. And Atom Syndication will be parasitic on the degree to which people buy-in to the Atom community for these other reasons.
RSS (in some mangled form) will become core to MS, and will be with us for a long time. Aggregator writers will keep finding work-arounds that make RSS do anything that Atom can do.
November 25, 2005
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal
Very disturbing. People who own the pipes want to take over and charge by the packet!
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Degeneracy, Disruptiveness and Preservation
Worth reading this in light of my previous post : ::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Degeneracy, Disruptiveness and Preservation
November 24, 2005
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The MySpace (bottle) rocket
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The MySpace (bottle) rocket
Nicholas Carr suspects the attraction of community hosting and social network sites might be ephemeral. That the sites just aren't interesting enough to hold attention, and only the act of initial migration is actually fun.
Would this be such a surprise? Isn't a lot of consumerism about the initial fun of shopping for and getting a new thing, while just having stuff is pretty much a disappointment?
If this is true, and a large chunk of the web 2.0 audience are essentially a swarm of cool hunters, always chasing the next big thing but never interested in staying in one place, what does this mean for strategy? That you need to keep developing new spaces?
In fact, does this mean that "stuff hosting" (whether MySpace or GoogleBase or Flickr) is actually a hit-based industry? No long tails here. Who wants to be part of a failed community or failed social bookmarking service?
The argument against the idea that this is all ephemeral is that, once developed these have lock-in properties. I won't take my bookmarks from del.icio.us because the degree to which it's become intertwingled with everyone else's data.
How compelling that vision is, is hard for me to guage. I've never used del.icio.us, prefering my own personal folded network of annotated bookmarks.
What I think is revealed, though, is a tension between personal and public / shared.
The problem with public / shared anything is that it isn't personal. Your shared bookmark list is everyone else's. Your posts in your blog are part of a continuum with everyone else's. They'll say much the same thing to the reader if they turn up as yet another bubble on the river of news. The media is the message, and the media is homogenized. And so is the message.
I want to put this together with the ongoing discussion about OPML and Attention. If your OPML is your personal subscriptions file, and that says something about where you're putting your attention, then that is a personalized slicing of the world.
It's the opposite of your del.icio.us bookmarks which are getting creamed in with everyone else's. (Although, undoubtedly you'll be able to publish your subscriptions, and probably sync. them with del.icio.us too.)
Nevertheless, there's always the tension. How much of your attention do you reveal? And, more importantly, how much do you allow your attention to be blown along with the swarm?
The swarm finds and filters good stuff for you. But at some point, you'll want to strike out on your own. To look into things no-one else in your peer group is. To manage private attention.
This is the big problem for the social host-stuff platforms. Ultimately you don't want to depend on them, not because they might be unreliable, but because they'll cramp your individuality. Blogs are a personal asset, so you'll want to be able to move them : from Editthispage, to Blogger, to TypePad to WordPress, and beyond. Ultimately you'll want full control (and archives) of your blog in some kind of format you can take elsewhere, or manage from your desktop.
If your stuff is tied to other content on the platform, that still doesn't mean you'll want to stay.
Instead you'll want to leave and have the benefits of connectedness too.
You'll still want the photos you added via Flickr to Blogger, to appear on your blog, even if you've left Flickr and your blog's gone to TypePad. As we rush to throw our content into web 2.0 applications, we're actually storing up trouble ... or rather demand - for a new wave of products which will rescue us from dependency on these platforms. For a new kind of indirection or later-binding.
Update : Actually, one pessimistic thought. The chances are that people will be driven off platforms by spam rather than because they get bored in the way Carr predicts. Can I start mis-tagging bookmarks in del.icio.us or pictures in flickr?
Nicholas Carr suspects the attraction of community hosting and social network sites might be ephemeral. That the sites just aren't interesting enough to hold attention, and only the act of initial migration is actually fun.
Would this be such a surprise? Isn't a lot of consumerism about the initial fun of shopping for and getting a new thing, while just having stuff is pretty much a disappointment?
If this is true, and a large chunk of the web 2.0 audience are essentially a swarm of cool hunters, always chasing the next big thing but never interested in staying in one place, what does this mean for strategy? That you need to keep developing new spaces?
In fact, does this mean that "stuff hosting" (whether MySpace or GoogleBase or Flickr) is actually a hit-based industry? No long tails here. Who wants to be part of a failed community or failed social bookmarking service?
The argument against the idea that this is all ephemeral is that, once developed these have lock-in properties. I won't take my bookmarks from del.icio.us because the degree to which it's become intertwingled with everyone else's data.
How compelling that vision is, is hard for me to guage. I've never used del.icio.us, prefering my own personal folded network of annotated bookmarks.
What I think is revealed, though, is a tension between personal and public / shared.
The problem with public / shared anything is that it isn't personal. Your shared bookmark list is everyone else's. Your posts in your blog are part of a continuum with everyone else's. They'll say much the same thing to the reader if they turn up as yet another bubble on the river of news. The media is the message, and the media is homogenized. And so is the message.
I want to put this together with the ongoing discussion about OPML and Attention. If your OPML is your personal subscriptions file, and that says something about where you're putting your attention, then that is a personalized slicing of the world.
It's the opposite of your del.icio.us bookmarks which are getting creamed in with everyone else's. (Although, undoubtedly you'll be able to publish your subscriptions, and probably sync. them with del.icio.us too.)
Nevertheless, there's always the tension. How much of your attention do you reveal? And, more importantly, how much do you allow your attention to be blown along with the swarm?
The swarm finds and filters good stuff for you. But at some point, you'll want to strike out on your own. To look into things no-one else in your peer group is. To manage private attention.
This is the big problem for the social host-stuff platforms. Ultimately you don't want to depend on them, not because they might be unreliable, but because they'll cramp your individuality. Blogs are a personal asset, so you'll want to be able to move them : from Editthispage, to Blogger, to TypePad to WordPress, and beyond. Ultimately you'll want full control (and archives) of your blog in some kind of format you can take elsewhere, or manage from your desktop.
If your stuff is tied to other content on the platform, that still doesn't mean you'll want to stay.
Instead you'll want to leave and have the benefits of connectedness too.
You'll still want the photos you added via Flickr to Blogger, to appear on your blog, even if you've left Flickr and your blog's gone to TypePad. As we rush to throw our content into web 2.0 applications, we're actually storing up trouble ... or rather demand - for a new wave of products which will rescue us from dependency on these platforms. For a new kind of indirection or later-binding.
Update : Actually, one pessimistic thought. The chances are that people will be driven off platforms by spam rather than because they get bored in the way Carr predicts. Can I start mis-tagging bookmarks in del.icio.us or pictures in flickr?
michael parekh on Google's "Click to Call"
Interesting story.
Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).
Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.
michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising
Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).
Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.
michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising
November 23, 2005
Danny Ayers on GoogleBase
[Google] is leaning a lot closer to Paul Ford’s prediction than some people might suppose.
Danny Ayers, Raw Blog
Jon Udell: Dueling simplicities
Must read : Jon Udell: Dueling simplicities
I can't do justice to this without quoting the whole thing. Better if you just go and read it.
Now that more of the cards are on the table, we can begin to compare two fascinatingly different approaches to building out the data web
...
we have both Google and Microsoft flying the banner of simplicity -- a word that can mean different things in different contexts.
I can't do justice to this without quoting the whole thing. Better if you just go and read it.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
I'm quite intrigued by the ideas within Fourth Generation War.
Here's a good intro to John Boyd's "grand strategy", which may have some relevance to platform wars.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
Of course, platform wars are usually a kind of competetition where two platform vendors compete to see who can make theirs the most attractive platform for developers and customers. Whereas Boyd's strategy is aggressive, trying to deliberately cut the opponent's informational and moral connections to the wider community.
But if we see the platform war as also being a struggle for hearts and minds of developers, those physical, informational and moral connections with the wider community may have a role.
Consider the ongoing syndication wars between Winer's (and now Microsoft's) RSS and the ATOM community. A great deal of the intemperate sniping that's going on is actually an attempt by each side to try to sever the moral ties between the opponents and the wider community. Is Winer autocratic, dishonest, untrustworthy? Is Google a "politically motivated" wannabe monopolist because Blogger doesn't support RSS?
Let's keep watching the rhetoric in the platform wars from this angle. Who (particularly companies) is trying to cut who's informational and moral links? Who's trying to confuse the other with fire and motion (or FUD)?
Here's a good intro to John Boyd's "grand strategy", which may have some relevance to platform wars.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
Of course, platform wars are usually a kind of competetition where two platform vendors compete to see who can make theirs the most attractive platform for developers and customers. Whereas Boyd's strategy is aggressive, trying to deliberately cut the opponent's informational and moral connections to the wider community.
But if we see the platform war as also being a struggle for hearts and minds of developers, those physical, informational and moral connections with the wider community may have a role.
Consider the ongoing syndication wars between Winer's (and now Microsoft's) RSS and the ATOM community. A great deal of the intemperate sniping that's going on is actually an attempt by each side to try to sever the moral ties between the opponents and the wider community. Is Winer autocratic, dishonest, untrustworthy? Is Google a "politically motivated" wannabe monopolist because Blogger doesn't support RSS?
Let's keep watching the rhetoric in the platform wars from this angle. Who (particularly companies) is trying to cut who's informational and moral links? Who's trying to confuse the other with fire and motion (or FUD)?
November 22, 2005
Feedburner Weblog on Feeds
The Feedburner weblog has an interesting mini-paper :
Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: Feed for Thought
Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: Feed for Thought
Darwinian Web: Monday, November 21, 2005
Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it.
Darwinian Web: Monday, November 21, 2005
A VC: Posting, Subscribing, Tagging AND Search
A VC: Posting, Subscribing, Tagging AND Search
I still don't seem to have anything interesting to say about GoogleBase. Is it better to be a centralized database or merely index edge databases? Will Google be evil and prevent other people crawling and using the data? Is this an outrage?
What about poor little Craiglist and EBay and Tribe? Is this what Paul Ford was getting at?
Etc.
I dunno. All I can do is wait to see.
My main question is still ... where's Orkut in all this? Where's Blogger? Google has these great big community and blogging sites. Are they going to be plugged in?
Are we going to find our tools upgraded with the capacity to add Googlebase friendly metadata anytime soon? And if not, is this a fumble by Google?
I still don't seem to have anything interesting to say about GoogleBase. Is it better to be a centralized database or merely index edge databases? Will Google be evil and prevent other people crawling and using the data? Is this an outrage?
What about poor little Craiglist and EBay and Tribe? Is this what Paul Ford was getting at?
Etc.
I dunno. All I can do is wait to see.
My main question is still ... where's Orkut in all this? Where's Blogger? Google has these great big community and blogging sites. Are they going to be plugged in?
Are we going to find our tools upgraded with the capacity to add Googlebase friendly metadata anytime soon? And if not, is this a fumble by Google?
November 21, 2005
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
Ross Mayfield :
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
... we are in a ping server war. It's a little hard to see, but the ping server will become the new center of the net. Verisign's acquisition of Weblogs.com was the first salvo. I'm not sure Robert Cringley is right about Google-Mart, but he isn't entirely wrong. Google Base isn't just about volunteered structuring of data, but pushing pings ... The important point is there is tremendous value being the first to have information pass through your central node.
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
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