March 2006
A distributed turning point? A second life?
What is James Corbett up to?
It almost looks like he just created a model for a distibuted marketplace using reading lists, known to cool people as beeds and to others as glists.
I tend to be excitable so I’m going to spend the rest of the night thinking about this before I comment on whether I think this is a big deal.
In the mean time, I’m going to spend 1.5 hours on Second Life. If I can’t see the big deal in that amount of time, it isn’t for me (but I typically miss boats - I always liked U2, but it took me till Joshua Tree to recognize they were more than an 80’s band)
IE7 feed reading view is “forced control”
OPML grazrs look out!
Well, I know most probably don’t work with XSL but I wanted to get your attention.
This latest post from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog explains how feed reading view will work in IE7 and gives guidelines for mime-types to use for RSS feeds.
I’ve brought this up before, and here is why I don’t like it.
One of the coolest and under-utilized things about delivering xml to the browser was the ability to add a stylesheet transformation to the document.
And it worked pretty well with Firefox and IE.
Now I can’t accompany an RSS feed with an xsl stylesheet and have the browser IE render it on the fly. It goes directly into feed reading view.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable or technically difficult to check for a stylesheet and use it if it is present, and only go into feed reading view if it is an RSS feed AND no stylesheet is present.
Considering how much contribution Microsoft is making with SSE and SLE and RSS for other types of applications in general, this seems to counter that thinking, by assuming the party serving the feed has only one use in mind.
I hope they don’t do this for OPML! We want to create rich browsable applications with it, right guys?
Dainbramaged
Stowe Boyd points out that XP can boot on a Mac.
Interesting, but isn’t everyone really waiting for Mac OS X to boot on commodity PC Hardware?
Who would you pay for Mac hardware and run Windows, to see if the XP can freeze up that hardware too?
Would you like to borrow my Premium Cable package tonight?
I wonder how close we are to being able to access video stored in our homes remotely, and how this puts TV into the same boat as the music recording industry.
I know it’s possible right now, but when it becomes accessible to anyone with a remote control and and a broadband connection, things are going to explode.
Imagine going to friends house and saying, “Hey, let’s watch the Sopranos.”
“I don’t have HBO.”
“I’m recording it at home. We can access my personal copy.”
Okay, okay, nobody talks like that. I’m just illustrating the concept.
I guess that’s why Microsoft, Apple and Intel are scrambling to come up with a DRM system for home media systems, eh?
What is Steve Gillmor saying about gestures?
In the Steve Gillmor GestureBank Q n A post,
Are people really asking you how GestureBank is going?
No, is the answer he gives but links to this:
http://www.lenovo-tapes.com/kent.html
Hmmm. Can someone help me here? Is it unbelievable? I’m just not smart enough to keep up with stuff. Mike Arrington’s advice to explain this stuff more simply may be having the opposite effect.
“It’s not a metaphor,” says Steve. Okay.
Newspaper’s Value is in the Channel
I once had an editor tell me that the value of our newspaper’s organization was in the process we had created for producing good journalism.
Not so.
For newspapers, the business value was that they owned a press, and therefore a distribution channel, not in any of the journalism that resulted.
Read that carefully. I’m not saying there was no value in the journalism. It held tremendous value. It still does.
That editor, though, was not giving due credit to the medium. The product which is created is a direct result of the medium which it is created for. Remember your Mcluhan, folks.
Now there is a new medium, so the old product cannot just move into the new channel. We need a new product that reflects a a real-time medium, not a daily or weekly, and which takes into account the fact that information is a commodity, and so is the distribution.
A well-crafted newspaper article gathers information from various sources, fact checks, and bundles it all into a length appropriate for the given story and the space available.
A well-working internet community post will link to various sources, gather the necessary fact checking from comments and trackbacks and leave the information in a distributed format.
If you follow the links from many good posts, gather all the distributed sources, check the level of trust a user has in that particular community, and bundle it all together with the appropriate credits, you have something similar to an article.
One is not necessarily better than the other, but each is appropriate for it’s own medium.
The inevitable conclusion is that media will move to the edge of the value chain, if not completely disappear. The tools to create and distribute will be valuable, as can be seen with blogging software, and photo-sharing sites.
The question is not how a traditional media company can monetize content that was formerly only monetized because of the distribution channel. That content is innappropriate for the new medium.
The question is how a company can monetize being part of this new, distributed community. What value can it add, now that the value of the distribution channel is gone from the equation?
The idea of a new medium being causal for a new business model cannot be greeted with a nod of the head while clinging to the baggage held from an extinct value chain, one which is hard to mentally dismiss since it engulfed society for many decades.
Most likely, the whole debate will resolve itself, with those contributing value to a given community receiving due compensation, in one form or another. Good night and good luck.
Internet security at its best
Good thing TechCrunch smudged half of that email adress of Ben Golub of Plaxo.
I wonder what the email is . . . three letter word @ plaxo.com . . . hmmm . . .
Bear! No. . . . gol@plaxo.xom . . . could be.
Web users are the stakeholders
This post by Joshua Porter nicely sums up the changes in the way we must approach web projects if we want them to succeed, including iterative development (release early and often) and the idea of user-centric development.
Any software developer would be insane if they developed a product that didn’t have the stakeholders involved from the beginning and throughout the whole project.
Why then do we need to remind ourselves to let web users guide where our web products should go.
They are the primary stakeholders, are they not.
Sawyr 2.0 OPML directory
Lisa Williams points out a nice Phil Jones quote, and magnificently characterizes the sentiment of distributed content, by comparing it to Tom Sawyer (at least I think that is what she meant)
Putting stuff into somebody else’s directory feels a lot like whitewashing the fence.
Open source news algorithms
Mark Glaser says we are in control of our news experience online.
While he does touch upon the problem of the echo chamber, I don’t think he emphasizes enough the fact that personalized and “in control” are two very different things.
Once even one “unknown” algorithm affects the way our news is sorted, we have lost control.
I have a post on Doc Searls’ It Garage where I state that how surprising it is to me that this isn’t a bigger area of concern.
If anything should be open source, it should be the algorithms which are used to shape our views of the world by deciding what information is delivered to us and when.
This is true of news and search especially.
And this is where I am headed.