tommorris
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.
Tom Morris has a nice thought about using SPARQL as a universal API.
Makes great sense, but I followed the link and it was another long and seemingly academic RDF article. Well, he did warn me.
The problem is, I like this stuff and will probably get back to it later, but a lot of web developers might not, and that’s why we are seeing slow adoption for SPARQL, I think.
Then again, maybe adoption isn’t really slow, but I am.
Apr 12 2007 07:01 pm |
RDF and
tommorris |
1 Comment »
Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.
I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.
Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.
It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.
Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.
Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.
A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.
Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.
Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.
James Corbett asks where the integrated read/write web tool is, and claims Google Reader will morph into it.
He also claims comments are dead this year. I don’t like them either but I think that’s aggressive.
James, if you and Tom Morris want to eliminate comments, I think we could do it with SSE, like I showed at OPML camp.
We are blogging on three distinct platforms (Wordpress, Typepad, OPML community) so it would be a great start if we could get it to work between the three of us. Then we can widgetize it with Grazr ; ).
Grazr script, which allows you to make widgets with the Grazr app, and potentially much more, is now public.
In case you don’t know, Grazr is sort of an OPML. . . well grazer. It’s a very important concept in this future present world of a web that is built on top of RSS.
If I was forced to choose whether I could only use RSS or HTML, I’d choose RSS.
Luckily, I don’t have to. I just think it’s more important in the paradigm shift that is taking place right now. The move toward services and relationships, that is, over distribution and consumption.
I was allowed to test it out in the private beta, and found it to be pretty damn cool. Maybe when I have I minute I’ll post an example of my experiments. I promised not to talk about it before it went public, and man it was tough.
One thing I know. It will be an important piece in the next web application I build.
Expect to see a lot more action in this area. I’m sure Tom Morris has a few things brewing already.
Here is the spec..
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.
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.
So, Im back from RSS Alley and OPML Camp today.
I did not blog from the conference simply because the conversations were so rich and thought provoking that I didn’t want to only give them partial attention.
Attention itself was in fact a big topic and there is some big news coming our way on that topic. Other topics included namespaces, the spec, RDF and tags. Oh and Second Life seemed to permeate the breaks. I even talked a little on SSE, and I think we might see some progess on SSE used with OPML soon.
Special thanks must go to Adam Green, who did a great job organizing and Berkman for hosting, and Halley Suitt and the Top Ten Sources folks for hosting the party.
And if Dave Winer is listening, we all thanked you for RSS and OPML in general. Great work.
The whole weekend was truly inspirational.
But speaking of conversations and attention, this one is nearly over for me.
Perhaps a couple transitional posts and I’ll be moving on.
A couple things are for sure. OPML and Reading Lists (Glists if you ask me, Beeds if you ask James Corbett) have a huge future. Attention and gestures have a huge future. Grazr has a huge future and Second Life-like environments have a huge future. I’d like to be in the middle of it all.
Or I could just hang out on the podcast.com platform(search for podcast in second life) and listen to streaming music.
Either way.
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
