Twitter is TechCrunch is the Blogosphere

Twitter seems to model TechCrunch:

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and TechCrunch eerily seems to model the blogosphere as a whole:

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Is this meaningful?

50 cent on the dollar sound good

Duncan from TechCrunch just posted about how artist “50 cent” gets the current state of the music business.
Maybe he does, I don’t know, but Duncan doesn’t give me any evidence that he does.
In fact, his presumption that file-sharing doesn’t hurt the music biz is ludicrous.
What he is trying to say is that if you embrace the changing world you can profit from the change rather than die. This is true.
Most recording artists have a better chance of making a living now than ever. File sharing helps in that regard, yes.
But the music business is hurting. Why? because they were all about distribution, and now that’s free. Just like Newspapers.
That doesn’t necessarily mean bad news for artists, because they can go direct to their fans. What the industry will consist of is smaller (and large) companies that support the artists as they tour and market their art.
Sounds fine, right?
Not if you are used to owning the artist and being in the drivers seat.
That’s where the music business was. If you belonged in that world, file-sharing is an axe in your trunk.
Mike Arrington should start editing these posts. Who is watching the register?

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.

Don’t forget Amaya, annotation freaks!

Nick at TechCrunch talks about annotating the web and mentions a bunch of services that do this and the history of the idea.

I’m surprised that neither he, nor any comments mention Amaya’s implementation of annotea.

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.

Leave out the bad stuff Daylife, not the good

It’s funny how quotes can deceive.

Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.

I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.

Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.

RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?

Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!

Stay tuned.

Unlimited Sushi for Arrington

It’s amazing how Mike Arrington gets all these scoops first.
By the way, unlimited Sushi for getting me a spot at TechCrunch NYC!
matt-at-classyfeeds-dot-com

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.

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.

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.