barnett
Look at this post by Alex Barnett and check out the graph.
I can’t help but think that a large part of the people calling the shots in the Newspaper Industry fall into the “empty quarter” of non-adopters of 2.0 tools. This includes many veteran journalists as well as business folks.
Look at all the examples of Jarvis gives for the changing landscape of news. There is a pretty big gap between these news services and the average newspaper staff.
So the bet on whether they can transform their business before it’s irrelevant really comes down to this. Will the non-adopting group of managers be retired or replaced before it’s too late. Unless they can change themselves, but I doubt it.
That may sound harsh, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just an opinion based upon years of observation.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
Dear everybuddy,
When I got home from Syndicate, I had an email from Adam Green. He wanted me to help out with a session at OPML Camp about the relationship between OPML and Attention.
So I’ve been thinking even more about Attention.
If you’ve read this blog, you know those two topics are pretty big for me, but this blog is really about conversations.
And I think I’ve done a good enough job making my point (at least to myself) about the importance of conversations in the new economy.
Now I must move on and tackle a related but different subject.
I’ll continue to post during OPML Camp here, and then I’ll wrap things up.
Not sure of the name of my new blog or where it will be, but I have a few ideas.
If links weren’t dead, I’d have to thank Dave Winer for the biggest traffic day, when he pointed to a one minute snowstorm movie. (step aside RocketBoom)
Thanks to all who participated here, especially James Corbett, Alex Barnett and Danny Ayers.
I’m sure the conversations will continue when you find my new home.
Sincerely,
everybuddy.org
P.S. The Old Media Doomsday Clock will continue to be active.
SYO subscriptions like mine. No surprise to me. Although that’s true with most of the top fifty.
1. Pete Gilbert 554 8.043
2. Adam Green 25 4.508
3. Alex Barnett 593 4.391
4. Amy Bellinger 91 4.352
5. Tom Morris 344 4.148
UPDATE: That was my work OPML which is not in sync with home anymore. Slight difference here.
1. Adam Green 25 31.823
2. Richard Edwards 53 18.559
3. Pete Gilbert 554 12.713
4. Tom Morris 344 11.295
5. Alex Barnett 593 5.357
Sounds like the Borg to me, but I agree with Alex, who agrees with Tim, that Ajit has it figured out.
Alex Barnett gives his take on the current status of the semantic web.
I can only add one observation.
We often say about site users that to successfully gather metadata, we need them acting in self interest.
For example, the del.icio.us users are tagging for themselves, and everyone benefits from the collective wisdom that can be imparted.
The same should be applied to site developers and designers and even plain old bloggers.
They will only add the extra effort of making their data available in a semantic web friendly format if they can see a return on that investment.
They only cleaned up their designs when they needed to rank high in search engines.
They only linked and permalinked when it was obvious what the benefits were.
In other words, if Google started heavily favoring semantic friendly content, there would be a rush to incorporate all the great ideas brewing out there.
It reminds me of Heiman Roth in Godfather II.
I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business
Until business folks can see an ROI, it’s tough to get them to act altruistically. However, I will leave open that the citizens can be the leaders here and create the market, as is happening with so many other fronts.
Then the business folks will follow.
If you don’t feel like clicking ,
Stowe Boyd
Alex Barnett
Robert Scoble
Ken Yarmosh
I’ll let you know that all these posts are about dissatisfaction with memetrackers. That’s just a sample of a growing feeling.
You can just as easily put together a list about the attention problem caused by generic feedreaders.
I could pontificate today about possible solutions, but instead I think I’ll take some action. I’ve been looking for a project. This seems to be the one.
I’m launching an open-source memetracker at http://glistn.com , but it’s going to heavily integrate reading lists (glists) and just approach the whole problem differently. In fact, I mean it to be something more than that. I want it to be a metacommunity. More on that later.
Since it will be open source, you’ll be able to know exactly how the filtering takes place and scream if you don’t like it.
If you want to be notified when it goes live, you can sign up at the site and also subscribe to the blog.
If you’d like to take a larger role (perhaps advisory or hacker), just contact me at matt {at glistn dot com}
Mar 19 2006 08:43 pm |
RSS and
SSE and
OPML and
web2.0 and
Attention and
barnett and
Glists and
scoble and
RDF and
blogging |
1 Comment »
Alex Barnett and Cori Schlegel both raise some very valid points which dispute my theory of complete disintermediation.
For now, I’ll point out that we are all in agreement that the infomediary is moving from the center to the edge.
Will it disappear?
I’d still be willing to start or invest in a company which acted as an infomediary.
Of course, these new types of infomediaries that find success on the web act differently than the old ones.
Their primary task is to enable the users to communicate.
Like Craig Newmark says, “Get out of the way.”
I’m going to hold off for the moment on whether these gentlemen have convinced me that this is not just a transition to another level where there is no middle man.
I’ll re-fuel and be back guys.
Mar 16 2006 05:28 pm |
media and
barnett and
schlegel |
4 Comments »
A new concept is sprouting in the OPML landscape.
The allusion to flora is not accidental, even if banal.
Consider these two unrelated posts, the first from Lisa Williams,
OPML’s biggest impact will be in making it as simple to add a record to a self-assembling worldwide directory as it is today to write a blog post. (Did that make any sense at all? I hope so.)
Yes, that makes sense Lisa.
It sounds like an “organically” created web directory, seeded and fed by the natural actions of an ecological-like community.
Next we move on to James Corbett, commenting on one of my posts,
I’ve been wondering if we should label these multimedia Reading List as…. SEEDs = Sensory Feeds. Seeing as SEEDs are the fruit at the leaf nodes in a tree I think this will tie in nicely with the direction some feed grazers are going. And as a SEED meme accumulates momementum it can actually spawn a whole other OPML tree, just like a real SEED.
Before we get lost in this placid garden imagery, we must also note one of Corbett’s posts that indicates there is also a food chain, or feed chain, if you will, that is in intense competition for our ravenous attention.
He concludes,
Of course the fleet footed Feed Aggregators won’t die out, they’ll just evolve Feed Grazing capabilities.
Our current crop of aggregators are likened to reptilian eating machines. The next generation of consumers, the mammals, will use adaptability to flourish where the reptiles could not.
Man, however, is the only creature in history to have conquered agriculture. Thus, the information consumption tool that wins will not only hunt and forage, but harvest.
This, I think, is a key conceptual transition that must be made to address the growing attention inundation issue.
To consume what is available naturally will not be enough. Social structures must be built to enhance the bounty which abounds.
Adam Green’s River of Feeds is certainly pointing us in the right direction. Annotated lists turn that river into a mill. Lisa Williams hints that we are at the dawn of a new type of information economy, one built upon the small actions of the masses. And so we stand at the launch of a new era, similar in many respects to the industrial revolution.
Large economies of scale, mediation and complex societal structures were produced by the historical industrial revolution.
In this metaphorical one, we will produce some of the same, but moreso, an ecosystem. Both economy and ecosystem, stem from latin for household or habitat.
It seems to be largely held that these social communities can be sown out of the metadata that exists like tagging, linking and subscribing.
I’m going to conclude this post by contending that a more definitive gesture will arise that will create smaller communities among the larger ones that we conceptually know of today.
In fact, I’m going to borrow a concept from the science of ecology called the metacommunity [PDF].
{End of Part I}
I’ve been reading a lot of Alex Barnett lately ( the guy who is related to Traci Chapman). I don’t know anyone named Alex personally, so if you mention the name, I might think of his blog or maybe Attention.
Eight years ago, if you had asked me what I thought of when I heard the name Alex, I would have said “Philip Greenspun’s dog.”
A piece about social aspects of tagging triggered the thought.
Interestingly, the daily expert definitions and the Web2.0 spoof sites (Web 2.0 validator and Web 2.0 or not) attempt to do what tagging systems do not - put boundaries around the concept in a more definitive manner.(2)
I’ve never felt foolish about using the term web 2.0 and yet I’ve never felt necessary that I need a hard and fast definition in my mind, or argue over it’s definition.
Maybe the ones who argue and make fun do so because they don’t understand the important underlying principles that abound these days like the one mentioned above.
The ideas are not necessarily new, but now they are more widely understood by good site creators.
These principles were around when I bought my first web book, “Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing“, and I especially refer to Philip’s contention of a “multiple truth society.”
Without getting into the philosophy of whether this is true in a cosmic sense, it’s always been true on the web and is especially so for tagging. Clay Shirky defends this much better than I can in his “Ontology is Overrated” piece.
I remember a day about five or six years ago when I was in a meeting with various members of our newspaper organization, talking about our strategy.
“Should we charge them to subscribe to the site?”, they asked.
“Certain site users are going to be adding great value to the community.”, I said.
There was silence.
Unfortunately, I’m still trying to get colleagues to understand some of the things Greenspun introduced me to back then.
Thankfully, blogging has allowed me to find and interact with many who seem to understand these concepts much more than I .
How can I make my company understand? Cluetrain? Naaa.
Maybe I should start by sending them to photo.net.
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