Ross Mayfield's Weblog

[Link]

Happy Birthday Eveli!

After midnight, got a Technorati ping:

Joi Ito's Web
2013 inbound blogs, 3311 inbound links
... Happy Birthday Eveli ! Register your birthday New Comments ...

:-)

Gillmor Gang Up

I'm on the Gillmor Gang today.
While were originally going to read the G-leaves, the topic shifted to the breaking news of Longhorn delays. In the end, though, its the same topic as this opens up opportunities for Google and others developing the web platform.

Here's the Stream/Download Page

The delayed release of the file system either means that they are ceding it to the Google File System or completely rethinking their approach because they couldn't compete with it in the long run. (update: GmailFS)

Related: Mary Jo Foley, IT Garage, Channel 9, Shorthorn, G-spot, Gates

Influence This Ad

Battelle(383) > Mayfield(391) > SELL ($400)

John Battelle builds upon Cost Per Influence with Sell Side Advertising . A guy named Mike comments: "Easily the most interesting concept I have read on your blog." Seth Godin is cautious about what he calls upside down advertising (I prefer Bottom Up Advertising, but no matter), but: "On the other hand, I can't imagine a better scenario for the future." The other side is, of course, The Buy. Jeff Jarvis: I really like [make that Love] this new online ad model that's been bubbling up... be ballsy and Let the consumers create the ads. Mitch Ratcliffe: The fact that an ad was an implicit endorsement may have multiplied the price... Doc: I think it rocks. Joi: Anyway, awesome idea. Lets build it!

If this is starting make sense to you, please pass along this ad and influence others. Feel free not to, or sunsubscribe.

Starting a Tech Movement

Marc suggests how to start a tech movement:

- call Ross Mayfield - get a Wiki setup - keep it private at first

- use Wiki to constitue org with core members - ascertain scope, goals and rules of group

- then worry about a site, deployment, specs and opening up the effort to the public

IMHO

He's actually doing it with JD Lasica for OpenMedia, which looks really promising.

Note this is both core group theory and intimacy gradient pattern over time with a goal.

Blog Sourcing

Anytime you have news about funding, the phone rings off the hook with services firms. I try to answer the company phone as often as possible, and appreciate the hard work of sales, but have little tolerance for cold calls. But unlike previous startups, we are already take care of by our network:

• Recruiting -- a gazillion calls from recruiters, simple answer: we hire by blog
  
• Honest People Looking for a Job -- see above, but take introductions through LinkedIn.
  
• Outsourced Sales & Marketing -- by blog
  
• Banking -- still trying to figure how to do this by blog
  
• Conferencing Solutions -- ever try FreeConference.com or AVChat?
  
• Offshore Dev -- not agile enough
  
• Realtors -- um, virtual company and staying that way to make a better product
  
• Give Us Your Info -- sorry, evil company, what you do and your tactics like emailing every employee doesn't work, we are all synched by wiki

Now I know why Google and others only accept contact over the web. The phone isn't going away, but people need to realize that VentureWire should be correlated with the network at hand.

Decentralizing IT

This week I gave a private talk to an investment bank that was touring the west coast to hear public company pitches. As we were setting up, someone asked about my PowerBook. I pointed out that since I switched it hasn't crashed or caught a virus and simply runs everything I need (especially as the most important apps are web-native). The real point is that supports my lifestyle and how I want to mix with media.

Jonathan Schwartz traces the trend of decentralization of IT decision making from CEO to CIO to IT staff to user.

Does constantly being within reach of the network cause your work to follow you home - or allow you to take your personal life to work? Either way you answer, I'd argue the latter phenomena is one of the most important trends in the technology industry. And has been for more than twenty years...

Thus began the PC revolution, which put many CIO's and IT staffs into a defensive mode of reacting to the needs of the workforce - it was enormously empowering for employees, and a royal pain for CIO's...

Why? Over time, employees brought PC's into their lives - for budgets, for taxes, for letters and gaming. And that started driving IT decisions - in that employees weren't just bringing work home - they were bringing their home life to work. How many PC's in your enterprise have CD players? How many of your employees look at consumer web sites at work (can you imagine watching the news at work 30 years ago vs. peeking at cnn.com today)? Do you limit your daily email to colleagues and customers? Ever IM at work? 10 years ago, the consumer eCommerce wave began - has it had an impact on the enterprise? Clearly...

And continuing that trend, think about the following: who picked the search engine you use most often? It wasn't your CIO. Yet is a search engine a part of your business toolbox? Certainly, yes. And who picked your cell phone? Likely not your CIO, either - yet do you use it for business purposes? Surely, yes. And given that over a billion were sold last year - to a vast population (some 58% (!) of the US population, says the Yankee Group in the New York Times last week). Many of those buyers had jobs. And there's no doubt mobility will have a growing impact on IT infrastructure (accelerated by its security attributes, in my mind, but that's a separate blog). The era of command and control has come to an end. Long live massively scaled shared services...

Its a great read. Harkens back to a year ago when Steve Gillmor asked Jonathan in an interview about the whole consumer impact as a seeding tool for enterprise infrastructure. While the trend is quite blogged, I agree with Jonathan on its significance and the implications need to be explored further.

Its more than consumers being an inroad into the enterprise from the bottom-up, its users becoming developers and influencers Another dimension is DIYIT or what Doc would call the demand side supplying itself.

One aspect is that the people previously known as consumers can not only source and modify their own tools if IT fails to serve them -- but arm themselves with information to influence what should be group decisions. Especially as social agreement on how to use a tool is a determining factor for realizing productivity gains.

Good Service

Love this:

Kudos to Socialtext—a social software service that I never find down, or slow, or broken while utilizing the 15+ workspaces that I belong to there. This is markedly different than the experience on one or two other ‘social software’ related offerings that are ‘broken’ on occasions too numerous to count!

Kudos to Ed and team.

Good service also means having humans help humans.

Wiki and Blog-Mania

Matt Marshall's Venture Capital column in the Mercury News covers the funding announcement:

Wiki-mania: Money is flowing into Wikis, which are Web sites that let many users read, write and edit with a single page. It's kind of like a Web blog, but for many users at the same time.

Palo Alto's Socialtext, a company that develops Wiki technology, has received more than $500,000 from a number of investors, including Jun Makihara, partner with the Japanese venture firm Neoteny, and the Omidyar Network, a group led by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar.

Socialtext is trying to sell the Wiki idea to large companies, and it's beginning to make headway. It has 50 customers, including Kodak and bike-maker Zipp. ``Unless you cultivate a social network within your enterprise, sharing of information doesn't happen, and people don't innovate,'' says CEO Ross Mayfield.

Mayfield scored the funding in part after giving away the Socialtext software to the Omidyar Foundation, which used Socialtext to create the new Omidyar Network. Now the help is coming full-circle.

Blogo-mania: Blog start-ups are taking off too. A number of companies, including Feedster, Technorati and DayPop, track assorted blogs. Technorati, which tracks more than 2.4 million blogs, has reportedly raised $6.5 million in a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company's value was about $12 million, according to tech pundit Om Malik.

One correction to the above is Omidyar Foundation became a paying customer after a 30-day free trial (we have academic community and non-profit pricing available).

We didn't do a formal announcement for many of the same reasons as Dave Sifry (congrats!):

Making a big deal about VC investments is unnecessary, it seems to me. One of the biggest reasons for the dot-com crash was an imbalance of attention: far too much on investments, and far too little on building real businesses with those investments. In a sane and sober business environment, the proper ratio should be completely customer-focused.

But good news should be shared with friends, and I appreciate the kind words from the blogosphere: Om, John, Susan, Thomas, JD, Oliver, Dave, Scoble, David, Jeff, Joi, Mitch, Brian, Rafat, Loic, Sean, Anil, Russell, Jeff, Rick, Christian

How's this for serendipity? The day the news was blogged was the 5th anniversary of Blogger's launch and we closed the round on Friday the 13th, when Google went public and eBay invested in craigslist. On the other hand, and to Sifry's point, the same day a stellar bubble was spotted by Hubble. Planets in alignment, back to school and back to work.

Web2.0 Eventspace

John Battelle blogs the program highlights for the Web2.0 Conference. I'll be contributing a workshop on enterprise social software. Socialtext is providing an Eventspace -- a "Web as a Platform" for people.

Big News

Socialtext closed a Series A round.

Here is Pierre's post about what he has been up to.

Being Googly

Matt Marshall's story on the cover of the Mercury News business section provides the entrepreneurs' perspective of Google's success. Comments include empowering individuals to innovate on their own, good benefits, equity incentives, adhering to good ethics, developing for users first and having fun too.

``The garage is back in business,'' says Ross Mayfield, chief executive of Socialtext, a 10-person Palo Alto start-up, referring to the valley's tradition of starting innovative companies in a garage. ``Google has been a shining example for us.''

Doing good

Socialtext's Mayfield also took a page from Google's book by trying to ``do well by doing good.'' He gave his software -- which helps users collaborate -- to academic and non-profit groups. These users, in turn, are helping spread the word for him, and he's making inroads with the for-profit sector.

Another Google lesson, Socialtext's Mayfield says, is to let users decide what they want. Google demonstrated the keep-it-simple rule, he said. So Mayfield lets users provide feedback, and he has a testing site, giving users previews of products under development.

Finally, there's the make-sure-you-have-fun lesson, he says. ``We goof off, too.''

To clarify, we don't provide free services to academic communities and non-profits, but we provide discount (about 50%) pricing to them so we can sustainably serve them as any other customer.

Some of the lessons are borrowed from Google, but most have been entrepreneurial learnings from going from boom to bust. During the boom, we forgot that relationships were central to business and throught they could be simply disintermediated. To succeed through the bust, you had to value employees, customers and partners. Google's success validates the approaches many are beginning to take.

The unfolding opportunity is leveraging the Net to build your startup. You can leverage open source, the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache MySQL & Perl, and commodity hardware to develop a prototype rapidly at the cheap. Innovate in the user experience, commodity management (as Socialtext and Google does for its hosting complex and Appliances) and integration of services. Release early and often, empower users and developers to build upon what you do -- and enable the market to find you and shape what you supply. Distribute through the network and market in social networks to gain a base of enthusiastic users and you can build a sustainable business with less upfront investment and a greater total potential.

But its the weekend, time to get out of the garage and play with the kids in the driveway.

Extreme Democracy Chapter 10

My contribution to Extreme Democracy, Social Network Dynamics and Participatory Politics, has been posted. An earlier version is posted in wiki.

Olympic Blogs Banned

You may earn medals, but you have no credentials. On top of the IOC's ludicrous linking policy, they are banning bloggers, perhaps to further asocial broadcast media, like this:

Unfortunately, this is not Anthony Famiglietti, but Steve Ahillen. The International Olympic Committee has informed athletes that they are not to do diaries or any other types of stories while under the Olympic Games umbrella. This apparently is not a new rule, however, it is being applied to a new technology, namely blogging...

Some are rightly invoking the first amendment. The linking policy may not be legally sound. My read of the policy against Olympian blogging is to ban blogs set up specifically for the games.

But these are personal blogs, and since when have we been good at sticking to one topic? Make one post about your cat and you may be covered, but check with your lawyers or the ACLU, as there is no blogging legal defense fund.

I'm starting a boycott: Tivo the Olympics and Buy the Unsponsored

More: here, here, /., more, more, more, more, more, more

Feedroll Pro

Robb Interactive shares some of the early results of their Feedroll Pro project.

For example, since becoming available for syndication via Feedroll Pro six weeks ago, the Kerry-Edwards Blog news feed has been picked up for syndication by 13 other web sites, and across those has received 21,325 page impressions and 848 click throughs (CTR of 4%). This is all in about 6 weeks, which equals c.$12 of service, or $0.014/click...compare this to the minimum click rate on Google Adwords of $0.05/click.

Suddenly, syndicating your news feed looks like a very effective way of 'advertising' you web site...a great level of exposure, very contextual because only related sites will syndicate your feed, and extremely cost effective.

High performance click throughs are great to demonstrate. John makes the association between this link sharing program and my recent ruminations on RSS Ads. He is right that putting a publisher in between each endorsement decision provides contextual value. It also may temper saturation. But the self-selective nature of an affiliate-like network for ads may also curb a bigger problem for advertising -- guiding what is socially responsible.

Here comes the Marlboro Man, get a rope.

When Conferences Converge

It's always been a weird dream of mine. You are sitting at a conference at a bland convention center or hotel, say for the International Association of Widget Makers, attending another boring reception with much widget talk. Then, BAM. Suddenly the conference next door, say the National Wonka Union, crashes the party. Worlds collide. Of course this scenario is much more interesting with the NYFD & Canadian Nurses Association or European Demolition Association & International Dictyostelium Conference or the International Psychiatric Conference & the United Astrology Conference, but that's not my point.

Almost every conference has another next door that might as well be on another planet. After the first day of an event you have met all kinds of people and have a sense of the group. But what if an organized attempt to co-mingle groups rocked worlds? Maybe augment it with a little Social Software or n-tag for accelerated networking or just a nice party.

Something like that might happen come November. The Accelerating Change futurist conference is being held at Stanford from the 5-7th. Dave is putting BloggerCon right next door on the 6th. I let John Smart from Accelerating Change know about the overlap, and instead of pointing out the obvious conflict, it turns out he extended a very cool offer to have the events collaborate. Its a co-location agreement that would give a discount to BloggerCon attendees and provide reserved spots for Accelerating ones. Bloggers and Futurists share at least the future in common.

Not as exciting as firemen and nurses, but it could be cool. What groups would you put together?

Evolving Security Markets

NetsEdge produces a great newsletter (get a blog, please) on the markets of networking. John Katsaros and Peter Christy's latest issue provides a case on how markets evolve and their Latest Bubble: Vulnerability Management.

Network based security is an interesting example of how "new" markets evolve. The first elements were proxies and firewalls -- systems that blocked bad things from happening. But bad things kept happening so intrusion detection was invented -- means of looking for suspicious activity or evidence of it after the fact. Intrusion detection was a valuable but "noisy" technology, so security event management was invented as a way of dealing with high volumes of event information, looking for the wheat in the chaff. Then vulnerability analysis was invented -- means of looking at the assets in the network and seeing if their configuration settings or patch levels expose vulnerabilities (pretty radical thinking for network guys). Most recently it's been realized that you can use this vulnerability information to guide the pre-attack part of security (work on the exposures with the greatest underlying business risk) and even as part of the real-time security system (worry more when you see evidence of attack against important and vulnerable assets). On the one hand, after the fact this seems sort of like common sense. On the other had, the evolution is very real and important. The vulnerability management market is hot (and kicks off an investment bubble in this space) as evidenced by McAfee's recent acquisition of Foundstone for $86M.

Markets of arms merchants always offer the opportunity for new entrants to help retool. But vendors should recognize early they are in the business of risk management, which requires a portfolio approach.

Feedster Adds Ads

Matt Hicks reports that Feedster is adding contextual ad words to its feeds. Contextualization at a microscopic level for people searching (not browsing) should be an attractive property for advertisers, but it depends upon how its introduced to subscribers.

"We're giving folks a choice between ad-supported and ad-free feeds," Rafer said. "We're announcing this ahead of time to telegraph what we're doing to the community, because there'll be a certain amount of satisfaction and dissatisfaction."

The community reaction will definitely be interesting. Sifry notes that many prefer RSS today over ad congested mediums and Technorati is proceeding cautiously: "It dilutes the power and the strength of the results, even if clearly marked."

Commercialization is especially painful when people have a sense of ownership of the, uh, medium (Doc, please boil the alternative term down to one generic word). On the other hand, somehow knowing publishers personally may invoke some support for making a living off of doing what they love. Regardless, it should be seen as inevitable:

"If you're some kind of purist and think that advertising doesn't belong in Internet media, get over yourself or pay for it," said Bruner, president of Executive Summary Consulting, in New York. "It makes no sense that RSS should not be monetized, particularly if you're subscribing to RSS from a Web site that already has advertising on it."

Steve Rubel posts:

I bet within a year ads in RSS feeds will be commonplace. Why? It's measurable and it's one more medium that online marketers will use to establish direct relationship with consumers.

I wish it was as measurable as Steve says, but he is right about the feedback loop being fostered. My hope is that the pull model of RSS and abundant choice will prevent ad saturation:

And RSS has a clear user advantages over other media for online advertising, particularly e-mail, said Ross Mayfield, CEO of enterprise wiki software company Socialtext Inc. and an avid blogger. Users ultimately will decide whether or not they will accept a given level of paid links and messages interspersed in their feeds.

"Because it's RSS, if people don't like it, they can click unsubscribe," he said. "What people consume is under the control of the consumer."

Of course, as regular readers know, initial forays into RSS advertising will be undervalued because of the format and metrics.

Doing Well By Doing Good

The Chronicle has a nice in-depth interview with Craig Newmark, done prior to eBay investment. In it, he talks about doing well by doing good:

Q: Your site is one of the few that remains true to some of the earliest ideals of the Internet. It's fairly altruistic and basically non-commercial in nature. How have you been able to keep Craigslist a fairly organic community and why?

A: First, I don't feel like we are altruistic or anything like that. Basically, it's a matter of giving people a break. Just the same, we had to become a serious business. That became clear in early 1999. We were trying to do it with volunteers, and things were falling apart. Falling apart is bad. At that point, I started making a real company out of it, figuring that we would be charging for job postings and that would help us out.

That said, there is nothing pious or anti-commercial about us. The decision to make it a business was based on values I've been somewhat facetiously calling nerd values. The disease of my people -- the nerds -- is that we are very literal, which is a real pain in the butt, frankly. But again, nerd values are simple. It's good to make a good living. It's good to do well for your staff.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort. We're still looking for new and other ways of doing that.

...Q: You provide jobs. You provide salaries. You provide a service. Do you think there's a way that Craigslist could be a model for others to run a successful business while providing a service to society?

A: Well, there's a basic cliche that I guess applies: "Doing well by doing good." We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing. We're seeing the beginnings of a kind of environment like we saw during the bubble.

We're just trying to do our best to maintain that moral compass.

It used to be that companies only addressed the social goods they create when social costs (negative externalities) forced them to. It was a function of risk management and crisis communications.

Doing well by doing good is an old practice that generates results. Post-bust it has seeped into corporate conciousness. Its even at the core of a new business lifestyle magazine. Its encouraging to have founders like Pierre, Larry, Sergey and Craig baking the production of social goods into their companies while generating performance -- while having employees and investors value the same. Its just good business.

From Mesh to Network

The case is being made for opening the premium spectrum used by broadcasters in an article in The Economist and Shirky's Writings. The focus is on interference which previously required geographic monopolies managed by regulators, but we and our radios have gotten smarter since then. If we can get past the issue of interference, it means more than returning a public trust to a public commons, it unleashes innovation in areas we have just begun to explore.

The sheer waste of this system—the “opportunity cost” of services and technologies not offered because entrenched interests are squatting on the spectrum—is behind the third major intellectual current, after central planning and property rights, in recent thinking about spectrum. Starting in the 1980s and gathering steam in the 1990s, there have been calls for “open spectrum”, or a spectrum commons. These initially met with scepticism, since economists and most other people are familiar with “the tragedy of the commons”—the idea that a scarce resource will be inefficiently over-exploited (as in the case of over-fishing, the classic instance). For sceptics, the same fate would await the airwaves.

But this is wrong, says Kevin Werbach at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school and founder of Supernova Group, a consultancy. He argues that the assumption that public sharing of spectrum would lead to chaos presumes that spectrum is scarce; but this reflects a flawed understanding of the physics of electromagnetism. A common myth about electromagnetic waves is that they bounce off one another if they meet. They do not. Instead, they travel onwards through other waves forever (even though they eventually attenuate to the point where they become undetectable). Radio interference, in other words, is not a physical phenomenon, but always and only a technological problem, the result of dumb radios and dumb antennae mixing the waves up after receiving them.

Of course, spectrum owners disagree:

“Unlicensed spectrum is sounding like crack cocaine: the ultimate high that solves all your problems,” says Brian Fontes, a lobbyist who works for Cingular, America's second-largest mobile-phone company (and the largest once its acquisition of AT&T Wireless, a rival, is complete). But, “prove that you're not going to interfere; I mean prove it, don't just say it,” he insists.

Clay provides proof:

Unlike the 2.4 Ghz band, which was already used by microwave ovens and other appliances, the broadcaster's spectrum is only used for communications, so they will have to be shown that new devices can not only cooperate with one another, but operate without disrupting current signals. (The prospects for this are good -- in a related test in February concerning low-power radio, the company performing the interference tests concluded, "Due to the lack of measurable interference produced by [low-power] stations during testing, the listener tests and economic analysis scheduled for Phase II of the LPFM field tests and experimental program should not be done." Report in PDF.)

Setting interference aside, if not putting the issue to bed, enables us to focus on the opportunities of distance with yet to be deregulated bands of spectrum. Clay points out physical constraints and the value of some monopolized bands:

Like the diminishing height of waves that emanate outward from a rock dropped in a pond, the power of a wave radiating outward from a broadcasting antenna falls as the distance from the antenna increases. Worse, this falloff isn't just related to distance, it is the square of that distance. This pattern, called the inverse square law, says that power at distance N will be 1/N2 -- two miles from a given broadcaster, the signal will be 1/4th the strength of the signal at one mile, at three miles, it will be 1/9th, and so on.

...Because of the tradeoff between penetration and data rate, most of the useful radio frequencies are in the kilohertz (Khz) to Gigahertz (Ghz) range -- low enough to travel through walls, high enough to carry the data required for voice or video signals.

Nobody anticipated the level innovation that has occured with the scrap of spectrum left over for Wifi. Based on the success they have had, some even suggest that its enough: Dewayne Hendricks, boss of Dandin Group, a wireless internet-access provider, does not care whether governments open up more spectrum because, “all the spectrum we need is already in play.”

But wireless will not realize the death of distance until more useful radio frequencies are opened. The lower hanging fruit is providing services behind walls or across cornfields. But much prophesized decentralized architectures such as mesh networks also require new spectrum to play with.

I have long held that mesh networking with current architectures is crippled by economies of span. That is, each time a node intermediates in a path it introduces latency, a transaction cost that adds up quickly in mesh architecture. A digital signal is slowed down when processed. In a mesh, this cost is somewhat offset with the risk benefits of additional redundancy. But an optimal mesh uses a few intermediate nodes as possible. A structure less like a filter and more like a network.

The latent potential of open spectrum has yet to be realized, because innovation banned from frequencies with low latency in implementation. If we can get past issues of interference, benefit from new allocations and get down to building new architectures, there is ample room for innovation.

Hearing the Future

Ten years ago I got to know a gentleman who moderated a mailing list on Eastern European politics. I was living in Estonia at the time, working for the President and writing an opinion collumn in a local newspaper on foreign policy. It was a time in my life where as an expat I was completely dependent upon the Net. We developed a friendship and I held him in high regard for his knowledge of the relatively new network.

When he planned to visit Estonia from London I agreed to host and even set up a dinner with the President, who I had just tought to surf. Versed in six languges, he engaged immeadiately with a firehose of information that during the occupation was inconceivable. A writer, anthropolist and a filmmaker, President Meri had a firm grasp on the role the Net was destined to play and its role in history. He would describe this meaning in rich analogies from history (this was also a key mechanism in diplomacy, allowing you to make a strong statement by drawing delicately from the mistakes of the past -- to speak in metaphors all too real when tensions were). He described the Net as an artifact similar to the vessel for tribal cultures; their communication, trade and expansion towards Hanseatic prosperity. He recalled being a young anthropologist camping high on a Ural mountaintop, tuning in a distant voice with short wave radio and as dawn approached it signaled a new era.

That night, in the West Wing of the palace originally constructed by Peter the Great as a summer home, we had a formal dinner. One of the President's friends, a foreign policy expert from the States joined us. When my virtual friend arrived, I was suprised to learn he was mostly deaf. Even further, he had a hearing aid that emitted a high pitched tone at all tones. I hadn't a clue of his disabilities with all his abilities augmented by social software and standing in the community. The dinner conversation was at a decidedly lower bandwidth and with greater packet loss than any other exchange I had with him, but there was a great exchange when the topic became what the Net offered to the disabled. The President was of course diplomatic, but the two of them had trouble understanding each other.

Fast forward. While I had hoped to get to LobbyCon tonight, I did break away from work to get to the Future Salon and managed to hear something new. And meet my first cyborg. Computers and Drugs Working Together: The Present and Future of Neural Biotechnologies was a presentation by Dr. Mike Chorost of SRI International and Dr. Eric Lynch of Sound Pharmaceuticals.

Hearing loss is the most common neurosensory disorder and occupational disease, which costs the US $50B per year. Exposure to sound pollution as short as a single jet blast or through prolonged exposure within a flight cabin is enough to cause damage. Most hearing loss isn't because of nerve damage, but loss or damage of hair in the inner ear. Rogain does not apply, but a combination of computers and drugs are producing signifiant advances for a very serious problem.

Shortly before 9/11, Dr. Chorost's hearing aid stopped working for him. At first, he thought it was the batteries, but later learned that what hearing he had was lost. He had surgery for a cochlear implant, a device the size of four stacked quarters that snaps into a recess created in the outer skull with a set of wires fed deep into the chochlea (latin for snail, the shape of this part of the inner ear) to stimulate nerve endings. A radio transmitter affixed outside with a magnet sends audio signals at a rate of 1.1 Mbps from a microphone, powered by walkman sized battery pack and controler. Two months later, he regained his hearing, but the world sounded different.

Initially it took getting used to, as his brain adjusted to the new processing task of receiving sound through 8 channels. A software upgrade expanded his capacity to 16 channels. Its been shown that you can make sense from as little as 4 channel sound. But as Mike explained for the first time, the difference made by channel capacity is remarkable. First he demonstrated this visually by displaying a portion of a larger image, which each portion representing a channel. I was able to discern what the image was with just two channels, but our visual intelligence is greater than that of our ear. He then took us through a sound sample at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 channels and then full fidelity (3200 channels). By the fourth channel you could guess the phrase uttered in the sample, but the difference from there was clear. Four channels to real audio is like telegraph compared to telephone.

This advancement has brought new life to many. In 1985 there were only 5,000 cochlear implants and now there are over 50,000, at a difficult to be insured cost of $50k per surgery. One attendee of the talk had an implant herself, and flew all the way from Virginia in hope of learning where the science could take her.

Eric Lynch's company is breaking new ground through pharamaceutical techniques for both prevention of hearing loss and regeneration of capabilities. He happens to be Neurotechnology Blogger Zack Lynch's brother, so I am sure he will have more to say about Eric's presentation than I.

Amazingly enough, for hearing aids, only 1/6 of people who need them buy them and 1/5 actually use them Prevention is of particular importance not just for rock concerts (btw, earplugs don't cut it because sound travels through your skull and full body suits are just as awkward as hearing aids), but for occupations such as the military and construction.

Sound Pharmaceuticals has a remarkably effective technique for prevention entering clinical trials. The pictures of a lab rat exposed to deafening sound showed a difference between the treated through injection and control group were like a rainforest compared to a clear cutting. They are also working on regenerative medicine to help people like Mike and have had some success in the lab. But testing various complexes takes time. Getting a cell to divide, or precision cancer, could have broad applicability in medicine -- but Eric is squarely focused on the ear: "we love the chochlea, we know a lot about the chochlea."

It was interesting to see how the CEO of a life science company talks about competition, where either you have an advancement or cure or you don't. He surveyed the various approaches and for sake of the topic delved deep into techniques that used embedded devices for drug delivery, although they haven't advanced beyond passing blue dye and are prone to complications.

What was clear was that solutions in this field will have a deep impact on the lifes subject to hearing loss. And advancements will have a broad market impact. One day, perhaps 10 years from now, my virual friend may not need augmentation at all and his abilities can shine through in all occasions.

Internal and External Corporate Blogs

Fredrik Wackå categorizes enterprise weblogs:

The reason I draw your attention to this is the important distinction between internal and external. Many articles and posts fail to make this distinction, leading to confusion over what is a corporate weblog. Instead of the next six types Fredrik offers, I'd suggest the simple categorization of if the blog has a single or multiple authors. Inside the enterprise group blogs are more common and oriented towards collaboration. The topic or objective of a blog can change over time, as most things do, and most individual blogs defy categorization.

RSS Ad Networks

If RSS represents a network of subscriptions with pass through potential, shouldn't its ad format?

Scoble: So, over the next year, we're going to see these two philosophies bash heads once again. The "branders" versus "the users."

He is exactly right that a different format (richer than text) is required to move a significant portion of advertising from sites to RSS. Further, that it needs an Amazon-like affiliate model.

John Battelle is almost right by adding in publishers:

The users are readers, the branders are advertisers and publishers (including some bloggers) who want you to come to their site instead of read full text in their RSS feeds. I think the affiliate model is interesting, and worthy of paying attention to. But we still need good ol' fashioned ads in our RSS feeds if we are going to tap the market which is already in place to support content.

Yes, Ads in RSS will initially and largely be similar to other formats. But there is an obvious potential to have the ad format map to the network of subscriptions.

The difference is that an increasing share of users are publishers too. And as bloggers their attention is available to make decisions on what to endorse.

Unlike most affiliation programs, which run on autopilot after some personalization, an RSS Ad Network can be based upon the judgment of users as endorsers.

Simple example: A del.icio.us-like stream of ads that publishers can select to endorse and have spliced into their feeds could create a network overnight.

Of course, its all in the honesty and execution. My hope is that as these ad networks arise, they will keep (influential) people in the middle of the equation to curb pollution and keep the stream relevant. And that they are valued with the right metrics, which involves more than just subs, but links.

SIGGRAPH 2004

Flickr too. Furry hat tip, danah.

Stopping by SIGGRAPH 2004 Tuesday.

Cogito, Ergonomics Sum

This is my outdoor office/blogging chair, the LaFuma RSX. Its great for the back and costs 1/10th the price of most zero-gravity chairs. Folds up, doubles as a lawn chair and patio table chair. I've had it for about three years, have had to replace the bungee cord once (available by the foot at any hardware store). Before winter comes, pick one up and enjoy your little part of the outdoors.

Amazon: $149
eBay: $109

I'll Take the Bird in the Hand

Dave Pollard provides perspective on why a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush:

This would make Bush the first president since the great depression to record an absolute loss in total employment during his administration... Yet a recent AP-Ipsos poll reports 46% of Americans 'approve' of Bush's handling of the economy. Who are these people and what have they been smoking?

Fiscal mismanagement and misleading the public on jobs should be issues count this Fall.

All the while, Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County lost 231,000 jobs, more than the State of Ohio. Tech employment is largely decreasing this year. Feels good to be hiring now.

Global Market Knowledge

Jeff Nolan picks up his expertise on trucks and signals local market knowledge:

If you want to do business in China, more power to you. But don't think that you are going to show up and be closing deals a couple of quarters later. It takes commitment and time to build our your partner channel, localize your product, and demonstrate the dedication that is necessary for you to be taken seriously... Like every market, local knowledge goes a long way, lack of it shows immediately.

Ed Sim on global expansion for startups:

Many startups I meet with today are either taking advantage of offshore development or have pushed up plans to expand sales internationally...While you may think VCs only want to hear about your company using offshore resources and selling internationally, I am oftentimes underwhelmed by the naivete of some of the entrepreneurs about how and why they are expanding globally.

Ed suggests selling to your home market first, and to offshore development, not outsource (hire consultants abroad, which has high churn). Both posts are worth a good read and consideration.

Startups are under pressure to go global early. Global demand can pull you into markets quicker than anticipated. Many VCs are still dazzled by low offshore development costs and will take accompanying risks in favor of short term capital efficiency. The result can be startups to far from customers to listen and teams too turbulent to build.

But market pull is the demand you listen to with the greatest intent. Early customers abroad, the innovators who can accept an initial lack of localization, give you the best indicators for weighing options for expansion. Beyond product requirements, they will describe their network and their market in ways you can't study by commission. Its more than worth the 4am conference calls if you have a process for learning that goes past the deal you are chasing. Markets are networks, so when you do expand, work with influencers while building your own influence.

One node in the network you foster can be development itself, for indirect influence as well as learning. Its easy to write off the expertise development teams have abroad, but they are building their own centers of competence you can learn from. For startup outsourcing, the dominant software development process doesn't fit because it doesn't accommodate iteration. What you spec today may not match the market months from now, and the step of spec is enough of a delay to separate customers from development to hinder learning let alone what ships. Today, with the right tools, it doesn't matter where developers are so long as they can pair across time zones. But it does matter what practice you institute and if customers play a role in it.

Underlying market entry and working with the global talent pool is trust. It may be obvious, but relationships matter even more at distance. Not just because having a trusted partner helps execution, but it encourages sharing of local expertise.

In a large company you should fire people who horde information for power and reward people who share. When companies participate in vertically disintegrated ecosystems, a similar practice is needed for partnerships. Reward not just execution, but sharing that enables the next phase of growth.

Links Spliced

I added Linkorama, which I manage socially with del.icio.us, into my primary RSS feed using Link Splicer.

What that means to real people is that if you use a news aggregator, when you subscribe to this weblog you will also get the list of links in the right hand margin in your subscription plus their extended descriptions.

I might also splice in Flickr for photo sharing, but what I really want is a uniform experience for people who browse and subscribe. Splice-to-feed should also splice-to-publish (via the Atom API). Maybe these cool tools for publishers belong in a personal publishing tool.

But then again, Im forming one heck of a loosely coupled stack:

Blog: NetNewsWire (aggregation) > browser > Socialtext (sharing) > Etco (composition) > Typepad (publishing) > Feedburner (Syndication & Stats)

Linkorama: NetNewsWire (aggregation) > browser > del.ico.us (sourcing/composition) > Typelists (Placement) > Feedroll (Presentation) > Feedburner (Syndication & Stats)

Add to that Tribecaster & Blogrolling and a host of other goodies.

It isn't so linear, but even if you don't get all the buzzwords yet, you should get that lots of cool tools work together.

Slap on a Blogger, its Cheap

Another Calcanian and Dentonesque micropub, Mediabistro, has no qualms about not greasing palms:

A not-so-attractive business fact of life to this idea is that MediaBistro's Web logs [Weblogs], and bloggers in general, live off the work of others. "Blogging is a cheap way to (get) great content that people are attracted to," Touby [the Chef Executive Officer?] conceded. "If I had to hire a full time cable reporter, I'd be competing with all those cable trade magazines, and it would cost me three or four times as much."

They acquired CableNewser.com, but the above rationale, rather than influence, is dehumanizing. Its kind of a slap some blogs on existing play play, but if you aren't competing against trade mags, who are you competing with? Must be the broadcast mentality. Besides, there is no sign of blogs on the site (burried in a pulldown), just signs of Social Media bubblet.

An even clearer sign: CNN wants CraigsList to go public.

Technology Failures in History, Today

John Dvorak rattles off a list of the Ten Worst Laptops in History and says:

We need a publicly maintained resource — such as a wiki — detailing the history some of these old machines.

So I obliged him, and started a page on Computing History. Below are links to let you build upon his entries.

1. The Gavilan (1983)
2. Zenith Minisport (1989)
3. Apple iBook (1999)
4. Compaq laptops with screen trackballs (circa 1994)
5. IBM ThinkPad 701C "Butterfly" (1995)
6. Category failure: Ultra-small, full-featured machines
7. Category failure: Pad-based computers
8. Macintosh Portable (1989)
9. Dell 320i (circa 1993)
10. Gateway Handbook (circa 1992)

If the entries build themselves, I'll move it to its own wiki, or just contribute it to Wikipedia.

Welcome Sunir Shah

Sunir Shah is the latest brilliant addition to the Socialtext team. You may know him as the instigator of Meatball, one of the better meta-communities. What's great about Sunir is that he is far more than the code he creates, but how he is changing the world through code, community building and non-profit activities.

Welcome Sunir!

Socialtext is hiring, btw.

Building Buzz on Blogs

Jonathan Thaw of the Red Herring posts a well balanced tipsheet how to build buzz on the blogs: Love them or hate them, Weblogs could help make or break your startup’s marketing strategy. Here’s how to make them work for you. The first item comes from the interim vice president of marketing at Plaxo, which has been blogged to death.

Concludes Mr. Epstein: “Blogs influence the influencers.”

To his point, Jeff Jarvis:

I've been arguing nonstop, as you sadly know, that blogs influence the influencers.

They quote me as the blogging startup guy giving advice to startups:

5. Join 'em… Become an active participant in the blogsphere – by starting your own blog.

“Blogging is not a technology, it’s a community with its own culture,” says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a Palo Alto, California-based social software company. “Blog and link to other blogs, hold conversations, speak in your own voice and you will find a following and influence.”

6. …but not just for publicity

Bloggers can smell a rat: Public relations and blogs don’t often mix. “If you create a Weblog or start blogging for the sole sake of seeking publicity, you’re probably doomed to fail,” says Mike Spataro, an executive vice president at Weber Shandwick, a New York City-based public relations company.

Instead, Mr. Spataro suggests that blogs should be a way for companies to garner feedback on their products and services. “Think ‘thought leadership’ rather than pure publicity,” he adds.

In related news, Jonathan's blog is making news about making news according to the news.

Yahoo Localities

I had to pass on joining the Advisory Board for Yahoo Local, which launched today, because of other obligations. Have to say its very simple, clean and useful. Favorite feature is being able to layer results of a second query on a map. When you view a single result, it offers to map other standard conveniences nearby, but you should be able to add your own query. Wish it had portable links and I have to wonder about the value of its ratings/reviews given the participants over time. Someone could do wonders if they exposed and API.

Other local news is the revision of Topix.

Analysis, Discourse and Influence

Some interesting Analyst backlash around Radicati, which has produced some of the better messaging reports.

Jeremy Zawodny:

Earlier today, I read about Radicati recommending Yahoo Mail over Gmail. And my first thought was "yeay for us!." But then I realized how stupid that was. Gmail is a freaking BETA PRODUCT. If they'd recommended the opposite, I'd wonder what they were smoking.

The fact that they're charging $40 to read that report only adds to the stupidity of it all.

I really hope that the PR folks at Yahoo get this and don't start using such recommendations as a form of ammunition against Google and/or Gmail. It would just make us look stupid, and we really don't need anymore of that.

Ed Brill of IBM has been taking them to task about a different report (.pdf):

With good reason...

My view is that I'll risk my own credibility to shine a spotlight where needed -- in this case, I believe the exposure of this document to a wide audience actually serves me much more than it does my competition. For those of you reading it directly, you can form your own opinion of the report. For those you will need to influence, including management that might never read the full report, you are now prepared to discuss and easily rebut the report thoughtfully (even moreso when IBM's response is published). How does that hurt my credibility?

The report predicts demise in messaging, contrary to others. Ed is trying follow a money trail to Microsoft. They posted a response to Ed Brill, but they didn't link to him and vice versa. And IBM responds.

I point all this out because we have gone from a general distrust of analyst projections post-Boom -- back to case-by-case due dilligence. This kind of back and forth used to occur in email, but now its public and impacts influence.

Radicati would do well to start blogging, first inside (plug).

Music Linked

I haven't kept up enough with Tom Coates' thread on socializing music. But if you are working over the weekend, you can always enjoy this wiki directory of free and legal music, groove on Magnatune or lose yourself in the matter of music metadata (read and write only). What I haven't found yet is a good directory of CC licensed samples for the GarageBand.