This is Doc Searls great prescription for ailing newspapers, which are threatened with extinction as online activity trumps all things offline.
However I’m not holding my breath. It was recently pointed out (can’t remember the source) that almost no innovation comes from within an industry. Rather it is outsiders who bring the innovation and then often eat the lunch of those who generally fail to adopt the new strategies.
This Article is an excellent summary of the wisdom of crowds idea and of several online projects trying to leverage that wisdom in practical or profitable ways.
The always insightful Venture Capitalists Peter Rip and and Jeff Clavier are speculating about what’s up with Web 2.0. Peter’s suggesting that there’s a lot more sizzle than steak in the whole Web 2.0 equation while I get the idea from Jeff’s writing and some of his excellent presentations at Mashup Camps that he thinks there is a lot of life left in the new web world.
However the most striking item along these lines was Don Dodge’s recent mini-investigation that suggested the average VC may be losing money based on the fact that it appears more is going into the new web than is coming out of it. I hope Peter and Jeff shine some light on this eventually.
A German Artificial Intelligence lab is working on a travel information network that will use on board navigation to alert drivers to trouble down the road. Working in real time the system would alert drivers just a few minutes down the road to dangers ahead. As autos get smarter and transportation info networks evolve we should see a lot of benefits. Traffic congestion could be reduced substantially in metro areas simply by providing “early warning” to commuters via websites and alternative routing using on board navigation systems. Rural problems tend to arise from weather problems and this type of information is already flowing online, though it’ll really be useful when drivers can easily access this information from their cars. An example is Oregon’s TripCheck website which displays road cams and conditions information and Yahoo’s integration of mapping and traffic information for some metro areas.
SmartKom Website (warning – this odd site is NOT the way to write for a non-technical audience, or even for a technical one?)
Too deeply buried in the (very interesting) discussion here and here bout how hard it is to get enough traffic to a website to make it generate big money is a more provocative question, to wit:
Who owns YOUR attention and how much is your attention worth?
Big players are making huge profits reselling your attention in the form of placing targeted advertising while you search and surf for info. I have no complaints about that in principle (in fact I feed my kids from that!) , and even agree, somewhat reluctantly, with the assertion that advertising can often enhance the search experience by providing you with sales info on products related to your searches and surfing.
However I’m not sure the power curve is properly placed right now. Rather the big players like Yahoo, Google, MS call most of the shots and reap most of the profits while we, the little sheeples, use their (good) services, often at no charge. It’s certainly a win-win scenario for most, but you can make a strong case that Google, as the big recipient of the big bucks, wins more than you do. Frankly though I don’t know the equation here – what am I worth to Google or Yahoo or MSN?
Over at Battelle’s during a discussion of Microsoft’s new plans to pay big users to use MS products a reader suggested it would take over $50 per month for him to switch to MS search rather than his preferred Google. This raises a very interesting question about what he’s worth to them. I wrote over there:
Pay to use may be the shape of things to come as users begin to realize that they, and not the big players, are the key to internet success. Yaacov’s point is key – would he really want $600 annually to use MS search? If so he’s not typical. I bet you could get most people to abandon Google in favor of LIVE (which is close, but not as good as Google), for $50 per year or less.
In fact I bet you could get most people to switch engines for $10 per month and some for $5 or less. Why don’t they do it? MS had plans and I think they eventually will try this “pay to search” model, which is strong and moves closer to the user ideal of owning their own attention.
When you sell my attention to the highest bidders, shouldn’t I get a piece of the action?
Another related NYT Article
Thanks to Pete Cashmore for answering my question about wazzup with Twitter, the new and skyrocketing-in-popularity social networking tool that really does not seem to make much sense … unless … you want to throw out little tidbits to friends and to the world every so often and see what others are doing or thinking about. Pete calls this “talking about your cat” and I think he’s hit the nail on the head. Most of us, as humans, like some attention, and bloggers are usually hungry to interact with as many people as possible, superficiality be damned. Enter Twitter, which allows you to follow friends or the Twitterers at large who are throwing out a little piece of their life every so often. Unlike long, often boring or repetitive blog postings the twitter stuff is a quick look into the lives of others, and that’s always a fun thing even if they are having a boring life/day/twitter posting.
I’ve been playing with Twitter for the past day and although I’m not hooked (yet?) I can understand why this is taking off in the digital community so fast. In fact I’ve already made friends with John Edwards, Presidential Candidate dude. That’s pretty neat, right?
Twitter also has another thing going for it – founder Evan Williams also brought Blogger.com to fruition as a Google buyout, and as such was one of those who really helped bring blogging to the mainstream as a simple way to share.
I’m not even sure I understand what Ross Mayfield is saying about Twitter Tipping the Tuna, but it’s a nice alliteration. Perhaps he’s suggesting it’ll be a flash in the pan after initial surge of adoption? That’s possible, but I think Twitter’s got a long life ahead, though not sure if that’s good for the world or just another goofy internet thing to keep uninspired levels of productivity … as high as possible.
Metaweb‘s been working on a semantic search routine called “Freebase” that seeks to provide information from cross connected databases all over the world. NYT Article.
My understanding is that they want a simple, natural language search engine for people which will then access a huge network of data they have assembled from existing sources. Then users will be allowed to tag and add to that data, creating even more detail for the database.
Tim O’Reilly notes that Freebase:
… turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items …
So, why is this better than Wikipedia or DMOZ? It’s got more data sources, will be easier to use, and hopefully won’t suffer from the many insufferable editors and participants that plague other user driven social media like DMOZ and DIGG. However I think you always need to be cautious assuming people will participate in these projects as intensively as appears to be needed here to make this grow and gain popularity. Maybe I was missing the point but I got bored with Del.icio.us after a short time and did not feel it was creating an infrastructure that would be all that helpful to me, though I certainly see how integrating tags into search will be helpful in the long run.
Isn’t everybody getting tired of working for big, for-profit projects by helping them categorize, rank, index, and detect spam? Where’s the project that lets me do whatever I want on my own terms (write, surf, learn) and then automatically integrates that activity into the indexing and distribution processes?
Over at Techmeme I’m struck by three stories that nicely showcase the importance of *community* to dot commers and to the expanding online universe.
The most interesting is that Yahoo Answers is going social, offering social networking as part of the answers concept. I was bullish on Yahoo Answers a year ago and it appears they’ve done a great job at growing this project. Incredibly the number of answers users is comparable to the number of Myspace people. This is not entirely apples to apples comparison because I’m guessing the Myspacers spend a lot more time online at Myspace, but if Answers can get the community ball rolling there is huge potential to become something of a “thinking persons” (or at least a “questioning person’s”?) Myspace.
The second item is Kevin Rose reporting that Digg has a *million* users. That is quite a milestone (though a long way from the approximately 60-100 million users claimed by Yahoo Answers and Myspace. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Digg as more than a superficial way to identify oddball news, feeling that dedicated diggers tend to prefer goofy stories rather than substantive ones, but the concept is brilliant and provocative.
Third, and perhaps most significant, is SONY’s Playstation 3 virtual world that launches this spring. Critics are raving about SONY’s brave new world, some suggesting it’s superior to the top virtual world “Second Life” which suffers from technical complexity, a steep learning curve, and a lot of skeptics who think second lifers are just escaping their first lives. It seems to me the Playstation world could become the “Myspace” of virtual worlds and captivate the teen crowd that already is practically living online ( WI or XBOX could also get smart super fast and get their own virtual world going. Both appear to be on the road for more widespread adoption as gaming systems than Sony’s PS3, though this can all change quickly).
Matt M, Simon, and the WordPress gang strike again with a simple yet extremely intuitive and useful solution to OpenID challenges. They are allowing WP blogs to pass ID info to other applications. For the WordPress gang I guess it’s just another day at the office but this really is a great development that will help a lot of folks who don’t want to hear about standards and technical issues and just want a simple solution to online ID issues. Other applications are doing this as well, which will make the OpenID transition a lot easier.
This seems so simple compared to the recent developments with Yahoo’s BBAuth and other OpenID approaches – I think these have focused heavily on ways for developers to build on, for example,Yahoo’s ID and bring it into applications. Good, but better to first establish a bunch of simple OpenID implementations for people’s Google, Yahoo, blog info.
I would like Yahoo to just establish a simple system like WP has that allows me to authorize Yahoo to release my Yahoo info to others as I’m doing with the WP solution. (did they do this and I missed it?).
I think we may all be surprised how registrations have been more of a barrier to entry than it would seem they should be by just requiring a few minutes of sign up. It’s a brave new world of short attention spans and attention deficits and as OpenID becomes ubiquitous and easy we can roam the wild online range even more quickly and superficially than before.
Props to USA Today for going social with their online edition, now complete with blogs, comments profiles, and more. Here’s the USA Today explanation.
I just set up a profile and it was fairly easy, though it’ll sure be nice when this type of information is portable and one click will sign you up for such things.
Tech folks are currently wrapped up in fairly obscure and/or proprietary issues about how transferable ID information will best move around the web and I hope this gets resolved soon.
Also it’s getting ridiculous to set up a new blog at every Tom, Dick, Harry, and USAToday site you want to post at rather than do what Facebook has done which is allow you to bring your own blog content into Facebook effortlessly. This allows them the benefits of your content without forcing the user to post at several different places.
I should also say that although I’m glad “old” media like USA Today is “getting” the social networks part of the Web 2.0 online revolution, I’m rooting for “pure” online news sites like NewsVine and TechMeme because I think they do a better job of democritizing the news process than legacy media can ever do. In fact I learned about the USA Today changes from Techmeme since I’m not a regular USA Today reader.
Steve Rubel as a nice post about the social networking implications of USA Today’s changes while Matthew Ingram‘s wondering if mom and pop really even care about this stuff.
Joe Duck 