Monthly Archives: January 2008

Scoblegate? No – Scobleizer ads are NOT a sellout.

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Mike Arrington, hanging in Davos with the global power elite, has a great title today with “Scoble Sells Out“, a fake jab at his pal Robert Scoble who is finally putting ads on his hugely popular blog (and is also lounging in Davos with the power elite!).

No big deal in my view – Scoble has been good about disclosure and perhaps even more importantly is a basically stand up guy, so I hardly worry that he’s going to start misleading readers in favor of sponsor B.S. 

That said, the blogging community would be well advised to develop disclosure standards if people want to maintain credibility and avoid the huge ethical gray areas that come about when socializing, economics, and blogging come together as they have over the past few years.

My view on corruption in politics (and blogging is similar) is that the challenges don’t come from basic dishonesty or payola – there is some of that, but the key problem is  more subtle.     In systems where economic support flows to those who *already* share the set of opinions with the money folks you don’t need any dishonesty to have a major distortion of the process in favor of those groups that can fund the people who share their ideas.    Often people wrongly suggest that votes are “bought”, when this is rare.  Rather support flows to the candidates who share the views of the supporters.     This system would actually work OK if the contributions were small, but loopholes have allowed certain groups to have hugely disproportionate impact on our system.    

This is why the conversational marketing model is bogus.  Bringing businesses into the conversation is a good general idea.  But if it only involves those businesses who can afford to buy a conversation  it’s just a step away from basic advertising, yet disguised as real dialog.   That isn’t corruption, but it is distortion. 

Video Games Rulez!?

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Video Gaming is a substantial economy.   Last year saw over 18 billion in US gaming sales, about 9 billion each from games and 9 billion from the sale of the consoles – gaming computers like XBox360 and WII.  

Gaming saw a whopping 28% gain over 2006 which is particularly conspicuous in a year where music sales saw a 10% decline and motion picture revenues were flat at about 9 billion.

Ars Technica Reports

Virgin Galactic’s Open Source Spaceship

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What a great concept!   Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is launching a spaceship project where they’ll apply to space flight the principles from Open Source software development – ie shared development by community without the encumbrances of profitable ownership.  Profit works best for some things, but in a space as innovative as space this is probably the best approach to get the job done faster.   Space Kudos to Branson!

Pownce vs Twitter

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I’m experimenting with Pownce, on which I’ve had an account for some time but which is now taking off as a social application after public release a few days ago.     So far it seems a lot like a “prettier” twitter with a few more features.   I’ve been very impressed with the way you can import friends and contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and many more applications.    I still don’t like the fact that no productive person has enough time to really engage with any of these networks – thus the idea application would be one that would carry me around as I’m online rather than force me to log in and off and participate on the applications terms rather than mine.    MyBlogLog still – for me – offers the best functionality of all of them and now with their new API I think it might be the best platform for our US History and Travel website where we are hoping to build something of a travel community from the many users who just drop in for a bit of info.

Death by Google

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My Airport Codes Website, AirportCityCodes.com , was completely removed from the Google index last month.   Not at all clear why and I’m hoping it’s just a a fluke.    The site was very stable and although it was somewhat uninspired it offered airport code and other information on about 9000 airports.     Google traffic has become so critical to a website’s success that without Google a site is generally almost “dead” in terms of traffic and revenues.

The site had enough sloppy construction and odd duplication across directories – problems that I had simply left intact after taking it over several years ago – that there could be hundreds of reasons the index didn’t like the site, but usually Google reserves a complete deletion like this for a major transgression against Google guidelines.    

I’ve posted questions over at the Google forum and the answers should be interesting.  

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

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Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.

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Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray.   Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure.   I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization.   Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.  

Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.   

Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:

I wrote over there: 

…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.

I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.

Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.

I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one

The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring.

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OK, I officially don’t get it.  Don’t get all this talk about how online video is the next big thing.  Perhaps more accurately I do get it, but don’t understand why so many bright and well connected folks don’t seem to understand that there is a very important challenge with video that makes it far less significant of an online force than most of the early adopters seem to understand.     Online video has a role to play in the information landscape, but it’s not nearly as significant as many seem to think.

Here’s a BBC story about the very clever Loic Lemeur and his clever SEESMIC project.   We’ll see more of these stories over the next few years as mainstream press slowly figures out that the early adopter online community is very enthusiastic about videos, video blogging, and pretty much any moving pictures that you can pump online.   Seesmic is a combination of video and community and thus offers the killer combo if you buy into the idea that the online world is going to revolve primarily around two key components: social networking and video.     

I’m very skeptical.   Not about the internet, which continues to rule.   Not about social media, which clearly has become and will remain a key driver of online life.  The internet has always been about people far more than technology, and the best definition of “Web 2.0” is an internet driven primarily by people and their needs rather than technology and its constraints.   But I’m very skeptical about online video, and I think the early commercial challenges of companies like RocketBoom, PodTech, and YouTube are an indication that it is very difficult to build a business or a community around video, let alone create a highly profitable environment that will drive future innovation in this space.

The biggest single challenge to video is obvious but overlooked by most of the sharp folks I see working that angle:  Most video clips are very boring.   Unlike a wordy blog entry you can quickly scan for the quick info buzz, and unlike pictures which you can review at the speed of an eye blink, with a video blog entry of video clip you’ll need to pay a lot of attention, and take up much of your attention span to glean the nugget or two of interesting content you’ll be lucky to find.     

Video online enthusiasts often agree with this, but then suggest the answer will be better video indexing services – applications that chop up the video into dialog chunks or “ideas” that are then indexed and easy to search and easier to surf.    Sure, that is an improvement, but if I want the goods I’d rather have a transcript and/or a few still pictures than a video any day, because unless you are a very slow reader a transcript is going to be easier to deal with efficiently than a video.

So, is there any room for video online?    Of course, it’ll continue as a major force for cheap little entertainment bits and perhaps even could become a minor social force as tech enthusiasts use tools like SEESMIC to communicate in a more robust and intimate fashion than you can do with writing.      However the lack of monetization potential combined with the fact that 99.99% of all video clips will bore to tears means that ultimately video will NOT create the kind of sea change in internet focus many have been waiting for.  

In fact, the video revolution is so boring it’s not even online yet, and it may never be.

Your kids are not so smart after all

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A prevailing assumption of the past several years holds that young internet users are very computer and search savvy, but  recent study of children and internet in the UK suggests otherwise.    ARS Technica Reports

The study of young searchers found they preferred visual over text information, liked to cut and paste, and tended to do simple searches.

My own observations of how kids use computers lead me to think this study is correctly characterizing use and also offers some profound insights into the future of computing – a future that is *less*, not more intellectually sophisticated in terms of how people interact with the internet and with each other.

Several forces are conspiring to make the average internet user “dumber” than in the past:

* Entertainment usually trumps education, and as entertainment value of online environments becomes increasingly compelling kids (and adults) will increasingly spend time “playing” rather than “learning”.   

* Short attention spans now rule everywhere, and this trend is unlikely to see any reversal.    We are replacing contemplation and reflection about experiences with … more experiences.

* Human nature.   We are not designed for personal enlightenment and long term planning – rather for short term gain and satisfaction which until very recently was a better survival strategy.

So, strap in and watch out, because things are going to get a lot …. dumber!

Social Networking = Facebook? Myspace is more likely to be an average person’s social space.

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Marshall’s at Read Write Web is right to question some of the prevailing social networking wisdom. 

He notes that the ongoing Facebook frenzy is driven in part by folks who are infatuated with Facebook while they keep foolishly thinking Myspace is of little long term significance.   The numbers show how Myspace remains *the* key social media player, and trends suggest this will be the case for some time.