Can Second Life be Second Business?

Kent Newsome is on a roll lately.

In his latest post he rags a little on Steve Rubel for saying that he believes

. . . that 3D virtual worlds are going to become a place where people will increasingly spend time and conduct business online.

It’s a fair enough skeptical look that he presents, but in all fairness to Steve who says,

Second Life is like Geocities was in 1998 - a big idea, but a little ahead of its time. I suspect that within a year or two robust 3D virtual worlds will eventually get far easier to use and run completely in a browser. Then they will become more mainstream.

I think there are a couple of major questions to consider.

The most important is whether these 3D worlds will ever provide a richer experience than a web-based collaboration. If not, then Kent is right.

Right now it seems is more productive to use “traditional” means of online collaboration to accomplish things.

But here is a little anecdote.

One day I knew that a conference being webcast on the west coast was happening and that I was interested. I also knew that Kosso (Koz Faraina) was simulcasting it in Second Life. So I signed on and joined a group of five or six others and it was a much better experience than watching the webcast alone.

Second Life is embryonic, but it’s the potential that has people excited, I think.

No, it’s not a viable threat to online collaboration yet. But online collaboration itself is the future of business, and when the day comes that a 3D world is as easily accesible as other online collaboration tools and provides a richer environment to do business, then it will be a place to do serious business.

It may not happen, but it’s certainly possible.

Ad Hoc groups are key to media dying

Kent Newsome and Tom Morris both opine about how Techmeme and Techcrunch have become less satisfying than going directly to the sources themselves.

Well, yes those sites have become media themselves and we all know that media is dead.

I like Kent’s idea that the Techmeme algorithm is actually working so well that it’s exposing a Web 2.0 flaw:

Maybe the Techmeme algorithm has deduced that all of this Web 2.0 stuff is really just the media business in some new form. If you have no product to sell, what are you? If your primary or only revenue source is the sale of ads, what are you? You’re not science. You’re not a seller of goods. You’re media. You’re the new TV. A million pages of user generated content broadcasting your AdSense banner over the new air.

I also have to give Kent a hand for referencing Mike Brady. It’s an interesting reference since that popular show was about ten years past the era when it should have succeeded. That type of humor should never have been popular by the late sixties and early seventies, yet it was.

Likewise, mediation should be dead, but it’s alive and well at these sites. Why is this?

Well, I still don’t think we have the tools to manage our own information consumption. Lots of people have been talking about them, but not too many delivering.

Tom is right when he says:

If you are in the media business, you need to fully grok the consequences of AdBlock and BitTorrent. You don’t have to like the consequences, but I imagine most of you haven’t even understood the full consequences of a system whereby anyone can share anything with anyone else without seeing any adverts in the process.

The only problem is we still need a whole new generation of software to help us manage and find information that we like.

A major part of that new software or services is social. For now we have just come to rely on a few bloggers that we trust, but this means we get a lot of junk and miss some important stuff too.

I think applying VRM to news and information will help produce some new tools that gcan deliver the information we need when and how we want it.

Also, I’m still thinking that ad hoc group creation, moderation and subscription will also revolutionize blogging in such a way that that we can slip in and out of conversations, file sharing, and marketplaces fluidly and instantly.
A kind of Share Your OPML writ large.

Identity is the first step toward that end, and then a spec to allow adhocracies to form. It’s not so difficult and SSE might play a role.

There has to be a simple way for people to form groups, and a relatively simple way to develop web applications that use this power.

Until then, we rely on trusted people and services, and some of these become like old media themselves even if spun in a new way.

Looking for a greasemonkey script to adjust font size

Kent Newsome wants the ability to adjust text size on a site by site basis.
Yes, more sites should offer this.
It also sounds like a great greasemonkey script. Has anyone checked?
It’s funny that Yahoo doesn’t offer this, but did spend the time to allow the search homepage users choose their color.
Now that was important.

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.

Hey Grandma, what big ears you have.

Newsome.org on what newspapers need to do to survive:

Remember- you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other guy.

Unfortunately, it may be a pack of wolves coming, dressed as Grandma.

New some ideas for Mercury News

Kent Newsome points out how to save the Merc in eight easy steps.
Don’t think that’ll do it.
Of course I’m with Kent on the RSS stuff, but he leaves out exactly what Newspaper companies have been leaving out for the last ten years.
There is no mention of the users as contributors or community at all. In fact, he’s calling the users “subscribers.” Those days are over.
The only thing that can save any local media company is to become a local community, again, and somehow leverage those relationships.
I’m not even sure it’s possible, and if it is, we are looking at a drastically smaller organization.
I’ll go so far as to say that everyone using the word “save” is sending the wrong signal.
The only chance is to leverage the existing business to create a new one.
The old one will surely die. (Old Media Doomsday Clock)
The answer is to step down and join the conversation. Be leaders of the conversation, not enders.
One last note. I don’t believe any Newspaper bringing in substantial revenue from print has the guts to pull the plug on that and all the jobs it affords.
Is that to say that the price of buying the company would be worth the brand name and the editorial staff?

Rise of the semi-back-channel

Kent Newsome asks what’s next. This in response to Seth Godin’s plea for Bloggers to practice conservation when contributing to the growing noise that is the blogosphere.
Again, I’ll tell you what is next.
Communities and conversation.
I won’t specify a number, but if you have a certain amount of blog readers, you may no longer be conversing, but publishing.
You may fall into conversation with some of your readers once in a while, but by and large, you are publishing.
A single human can only maintain a certain amount of meaningful conversation.
The internet has amplified that ability, but it has also amplified the amount of potential attention-giving situations.
It just can’t continue to grow. If the software doesn’t filter it, your mind will. It’s that simple.
This is not a mass medium.
It’s just in a confusing transitional state, where it still seems possible to keep up with several thousand geeks.
When it becomes clear (very soon) that this is not the case, you will see dynamic and fluid communities forming, which will shut out unnecessary noise.
I call it the semi-back-channel.