Lance Ulanoff is a fool.

It’s amazing that a company would pay this guy to write.

It’s an old article. I just stumbled across it in a search.

I’m no fan of MySpace, but where does he get off criticizing what a site looks like when the one he is writing for looks like a circus itself.

What a fool. His musings about Twitter are ridiculous if only for the reason that he is pontificating on whether a service will be around five years from now. Who the hell knows?!!

I’ll bet PC magazine will be irrelevant before the name Twitter is, even if the company survives longer. What am I talking about, that’s probably true already.

What newspaper sites should be asking

Washington Post reports the Tribune sale of two local newspapers, where I am the Senior Web Producer.

In fact, I was the first person within the company to ever work on these sites, back in the nineties, when I volunteered to get them listed in the Open Directory, Yahoo, and Search Engines.

Back then I was (thanks to Philip Greenspun) trumpeting around the company for an idea called “community.”
You know, what they now call UGC (User Generated Content).

Personally, I feel we should go back to calling User Generated Content “community” again. It’s more accurate, and less derogatory.

But most newspaper folks would not understand what I mean by saying that UGC is a derogatory term. Because it defines the user as lesser than the site “professional.” But most people in this business would say, “yeah, they aren’t on the same level.” Most smart bloggers realize that’s just not the case.

However, when I say this, I don’t mean to devalue the work done by many “professional” journalists. Some of it is great.

Unfortunately, media is a commodity. Even good media is a commodity.

Do these companies still have something of value? Absolutely, but we live in a “hit and run” web society. I read this story in the Washington today. Tommorrow, It’s BuzzMachine that get’s my attention. Next it’s my family’s group blog, pointing out late spring lift ticket deals. After that, it’s TechCrunch, Library Clips, and CNN. You get the idea.

Back to “community” on a news site. They all thought I was nuts. Now it’s one of Tribune’s main initiatives.

A little late to the party, and I’m still not sure they fully understand it. They think community is getting people to contribute to their sites. They should be asking, “what can we contribute to the community?”

In the nineties, message boards and other community features did, in fact reside on sites. Today these features are distributed across a million sites. (I know about myspace. If they don’t open to the rest of the distributed social network, they will go the way of the old AOL. It may take ten years, but they will)

If they asked me now, where I would focus. I think I’d say “syndication” (thanks to Dave Winer). Be cog in the distributed web of information flow.

However, these news companies cling to a page view model, and a home-page-centric view of themselves, even if they are aware of all the story-level traffic they are getting.

Ajax, RSS, widgets, downloads, OPML and the rest of the trends all indicate to me that the future winners are the people and businesses that provide value in the relationships and conversations happening out there, not the ones who try to corral their “users” into a one size fits all product, that so many news sites are.

Ask not what the users can do for us, but what can we do for the users.

Media is dead

Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.

The Golden Fleece

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.

The changing identity of the blogosphere

Funny and interesting look at how MySpace is changing the blogosphere from Tech Evangelist Ed Kohler.
More evidence that the Tall head will slowly lose its geekiness.

Questions for us all

Sarah Littman is an author and a columnist for Greenwich Time, a newspaper site I am a producer at.
She and her son were recently featured on the NPR site. It ’s a nice story and the list of questions raised by her son are certainly some good ones. . . for all of us.
Sarah is author of “Confessions of a Closet Catholic” published by Dutton Children’s Book *Winner of the 2006 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers* and has a growing number of blogs
here,
here
here and on myspace
Sarah is a proud member of AS IF! (Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom)

Side Notes:NPR is powered by PHP . I also wonder if we are going to see more and more bloggers promoting both their blog AND their myspace page in the future. Seems unlikely for the geeks reading this but the times may be a changin’