Category Archives: MIX06

Is Web Surfing Dying?

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I'm still big on "web surfing" and prefer bouncing around from site to site to RSS feed readers and customized home pages like MyYahoo.

However, as information online continues to explode and as blog content replaces website content as the freshest and most interesting stuff online, I think we'll all be moving to a more structured environment for pulling in information. This won't stop our surfing but it will tend to reduce the time surfing and increase the focus on topics of interest to us. Interestingly, this may mean we'll be less inclined to bump into "new" ideas. On the upside it may allow more in depth analysis as we refine the niche sources to the best of class in our areas of expertise/interest and learn to organize the information and data associations in more effective ways.

I think these RSS vs Surfing developments may be more profound than most realize. At MIX06 it was clear that Microsoft was going to focus heavily on RSS feeds as a key online distribution tool. Yet it was striking to me how Bil Gates (who I respect) and MS in general seemed out of touch with the big news of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee both are good at seeing the future and they seem to suggest there are profound changes in emphasis for the online world – a shift to community/collective intelligence/complex webs of interconnected dynamic data/ etc. This is not directly related to the future of surfing but will influence it greatly, and I think Web 2.0 may not be as compatible with "navigation via surfing" as the old web.

Watch out for the … Amazon!

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Over at Webmasterworld someone was noting Amazon's new free commercial website service and wondering if they were watering down their brand with all the new online services Amazon is offering. 

To the contrary I think the Amazon strategy is brilliant and the idea is to water down the OTHER brands by commoditizing things like commercial sites and search. The relationships they are establishing will pay modest but very long lasting dividends.

The global search niche, by comparison, is hugely profitable but is always threatened by "the next best thing" since users will tend to jump to the best search having little stake in the brand itself.

Amazon has nothing to lose in the areas of free website, storage, web services, etc. I think they are very clever to provide complex, data intensive services.

They are also lucky to have one of the best tech evangelists in the form of Jeff Barr who is spreading the word about some of the new services in his excellent presentations such as the one he gave at MIX06. 

Drats, Foiled again! Humbled by math and technology, which I’m convinced are EVIL forces of the DEVIL!

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There was me, priding myself on applying the elusive Monty Hall conditional probability math to "Deal or No Deal" TV show and thinking how clever I was to integrate DVD, touchscreen, and LCD Television for a snazzy new tourism presentation.     WRONG and WRONG was I, since it appears the math on Deal no Deal is NOT Montyfied, and the DVD touchscreen solution remains elusive.

Circuit City was very helpful figuring out the challenges and I learned that running DVD through a computer using the normal VGA outputs will give crappy picture.   The video is very high quality and keeping it that way is a priority.  Surprisingly to me, even with a hyped up graphics card and DVI output I may not get great quality on a 42" LCD TV.    The TV dude said that this is from incompatibilities in digital standards and helps explain why media center technology (much hyped by Microsoft at MIX06) is NOT taking off very well.

The problem is I need to interface with a touchscreen so the users control the presentation on the touchscreen but can also view it on the 42" LCD TV above.    The solution appears to be to get a touchscreen capable DVD player (which I did not know until today existed) and then hopefully be able to output from it to touchscreen AND the LCD TV.     If this fails it's back to the DVI PC solution.

Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.

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I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.

Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.

Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.

I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.

Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".

Check out this new search company called “Microsoft”

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John Battelle's excellent interview with MSN search engineer Gary Flake reminded me of a long talk I had with Andy Edmonds in New Orleans PubCon last year.  Andy is a former Mozilla geek now working at MSN to determine search relevancy.  Andy is VERY sharp and reminds me of guys like Jeremy at Yahoo who can see far beyond the narrow corporate interests into the heart of what's up with the evolving internet.  (though they rightfully are sometimes protective of those corporate interests).

Also, at MIX06 I was impressed with how hard the LIVE search team was working and felt that they are getting the resources and respect needed to make big changes at MS in search.

Back in June of 2005, Andy was very optimistic and obviously sincere in his assumption that relevancy at MSN would equal Google's sooner than most were thinking   It's not happened yet but the Flake interview suggests that Microsoft's use of artificial intelligence in their algorithm is improving fast.   If as Gary suggests MS has a superior configuration (using a 64 bit architecture) that will allow deeper analysis things MS search could get very good very fast.

I won't hold my breath, noting when talking to guys at Google and Yahoo they tend to dismiss MS search as "hopeless".      Part of this is their ego talking but mostly it's an assumption that Microsoft no longer is doing  bleeding edge research needed for a breakout in search quality.    People at MSN like Gary and Andy challenge that assumption.

Newsweek: Web 2.0 = The Live Web

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I enjoyed Newsweek's article about Web 2.0, which they preferred to call "The Live Web". It was fun to see several of the companies and people I've encountered recently mentioned in the article. Mary Hodder from MashupCamp was pictured and quoted as was Tim O'Reilly who I just met at Mix06.

They gave Tim far too short an interview. He is unsurpassed in his understanding of the new web but I'm guessing he was a bit too old (he's about 50?) to meet Newsweek's editorial slant on the story which was young, hip, and cool. (Whoops – they didn't mention how casual – sometimes downright disheveled – most of the new technorati tend to be.)

Newsweek's Cover girl Caterina Fake was supposed to be at Mashup Camp but missed it. I'd hoped to meet her and her husband who pioneered Flickr and then sold it to Yahoo. Caterina's blog is one of the most insightful personal views about 2.0 along with those of her amazing Yahoo tech dev co-workers Jeremy Zawodny and Danah Boyd.

Although I'm always VERY impressed with folks from Google, it's Yahoo that really seems to be aquiring the companies and minds that lie at the heart of the new Web's "social" vs "technological" emphasis.

Yahoo seems to have a better handle than Google (who in turn beats Microsoft) in understanding the implications of the vast social networking that is forming a new internet backbone. A backbone characterized by people far more than by technology. That said, I'm not sure anybody "gets Web 2.0", because it's changing fast, dramatically, and in unstable ways.

What a fun new world!

Scobleizer vs Mini-Microsoft

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Robert's April Fooling as well. You can never be sure with the new pace of business, but I think the guy who set up the prestigious few who had lunch with Bill Gates last week at MIX06 probably won't be jumping ship anytime soon. I'd be posting a pic here with me and Microsoft's king of Web 2.0, taken at the Myspace party in Las Vegas last week, but it didn't come out well.

Robert's Naked Conversations is intriguing at many levels, one of which has created a stir over at Amazon where the authors were received somewhat .. discourteously.

But Naked Converstation's intriguing points don't make them "right" about blogging. I'd suggest that Israel and Scoble overrate the positive aspects of corporate blogging and fail to note, for example, the significant harm done by bloggers like mini-microsoft , a mystery Microsoft employee with a blog that has become a very prominent whipping post for anti-Microsoft dialog.

I'd suggest blogs are more a reflection of what's up rather than a shaper of what is to come.

Taking Stock of Yahoo

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What do you get when you mashup Yahoo’s uber blogmeister with EX uber stockmeister Henry Blodget? A very interesting dialog about what’s up — or what’s NOT up — at Yahoo. The only thing for sure is that in stock terms YHOO is no GOOG, and this is THE key issue for many.

This follow up summarizes that mini-debate. I’m more interested in whether I should be buying YHOO or buying more puts on Google.

Jeremy’s bold stab was probably taken too far out of the intended context, though I think it will generate a good debate about a broader topic — that Yahoo and Google are similar in many broad respects but not even in the same ballpark in total company valuation. 109 billion vs 45 billion. Why is this?

* Search quality roughly equivalent according to objective measures.

* Traffic similar (though not search traffic in which Y lags significantly). I think search will begin to move vertically soon and people will use a different engine for different tasks. A9 recognizes this already. This could shake out in many destabilizing ways.

* Yahoo considered clear leader in Web 2.0 awareness

* MOST IMPORTANTLY, YPN is still in beta and will likely soon take a chunk of Google’s online publisher revenue stream (about 40% of G total revenues) as will MSN’s new publisher programs.

* I do think corporate leadership is VERY different at Google, and probably helps facilitate and motivate people in ways that are well tuned to the fast and flexible needs of the online biz world. I’ve heard that Googlers will be working in the wee hours on a project only to have Sergey Brin walk up behind them to ask them to explain the code they are working on. This level of interaction has got to be a VERY powerful incentive and motivating force.

At MIX06 I spoked with two ex-Microsoft people who noted slow change there frustrated them and inhibited the flexibility needed to compete in the new web environments.

But Yahoo is no Microsoft, and to my knowledge Yahoo was the company that brought the new informal but intense corporate culture to Silicon Valley in the first place. If this style has caused problems for Yahoo it’ll likely cause similar problems for Google in a few years. If not, then why is Yahoo stock languishing despite good fundamentals and huge revenue potential from online ads?

Wait … No free lunches at Yahoo Cafeteria? THAT must be the problem!

The DeviceOsphere – coming soon to a world near you.

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At the MIX06 conference the most provocative and exciting idea I heard was from Tim O’Reilly who also posted about this today on his blog. Tim suggests that we are on the verge of the evolution of a sort of *deviceOsphere* (I think this is my term not Tim’s), where the staggering amount of device data gets collectively shared in new mashup style applications.

Think of a traffic map where thousands of drivers are sharing in real time their personal observations and auto measurements (e.g. ONSTAR and GIS system data) about weather, road conditions, CRIME events, alternate routes, pictures, suggestions for restaurants. A moveable data feast where the conversation never stops and includes thousands of observers/reviewers.
Flickr has shown that people really want to share photos with the world. This notion gets really exciting when you broaden the idea of “content available to mashup” to include ALL the digital content that often simply swirls around in it’s own little world. Transportation road cams, navigation data from individual cars, camcorder and cell phone feeds and crime reports are only a few things that generally just swirl around in a limited space and are discarded or relegated to obscurity.

O’Reilly’s suggesting that this data store, combined with the collective intelligence of the burdgeoning online community, could generate masterpiece applications. And the best thing is that it’s not going to require a Leonardo Da Vinci to do it.