Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Year of the Enterprise Wiki

Jon Udell calls 2004 the Year of the Enterprise Wiki.

Update: Jon posts about it and discovers use of tags in wikis.  Socialtext has had tags since early 2003, we just call them categories.

DRM is Prohibition

An interesting debate between two realisms was kicked off with Cory Doctorow's take on Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM). 

It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.

He also criticised Wired Magazine for not being critical in their reviews of devices with DRM.  In response, Editor Chris Anderson offers his take on DRM:

This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

Cory Doctorow then makes a compelling argument on all DRM fronts (go read it, he sees a net loss), but especially on how effective DRM is in practice to prevent piracy:

DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. ... DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition.

Jon Lebkowsky summarizes that DRM breaks your technology and limits your access to content that you paid for, requiring you to pay more.  As all goods turn into services, the rights for more than digital content face redefinition, sometimes transparently, sometimes not.

Meanwhile, over on Zack Lynch's Brainwaves is a banned book review by David Knott of Reason.org:

Shulgin eloquently argues for individual liberty while debunking many myths that prop up the failed prohibitionist drug policies in this country. Prohibitions -- whether of drugs or books like PIHKAL -- predictably fail. In this era of de facto censorship, when people do not discuss drug use openly for fear of incarceration, it is deeply refreshing to hear someone reprise with truth.

DRM is Prohibition, not Protection -- an ineffective yet lucrative assault on your liberties (fair use). 

Family Tech Support

If you are reading this, you are probably an early adopter.  So when the holidays come around you spend time with your family doing In-law IT.  These days it can be dreadfully easy:

• If at all possible, switch them to a Mac -- You know that experience of visiting family only to find their PC infested with spyware and viruses.  Call it the crud of mainstream adoption.  They complain about things simply crashing, you have a solution, move them to a Mac with at least OS X.  This is the greatest gift you can give them, simplicity that simply works.  If not, reinstall and update everything.
• Solve that connection problem -- If they don't have broadband, solve that.  If they have laptops, wifi (especially if you get them on Macs, and of note, if you get them on Macs, layering on lifestyle services like photos and music is a breeze).
• Kill off IE -- One of the worst problems, just install Firefox.  Then load the bookmark bar with the sites they spend time on.
• Simple Start Page -- For media junkies, My Yahoo (a simple RSS intro opportunity), for those who want answers, Google.
• Move them to Webmail -- Email is really all they want to do anyway.  But running it on the client not only means problems, but you will have to migrate them in a year or two anyway.  Get them up on Gmail or Yahoo and the app will feel more than good enough.  Plus you won't have to help them in the hunt for the hidden email.
• Flickrdom -- While you are at it, set them up on Flickr so they get photos shared by consequence of your daily interaction.
• Communicate -- For more advanced users or stable systems, IM & Skype.  You can always set them up with Vonage if you don't want them meddling with headset periperals.
• Don't set them up with blogs -- What do you want, them to read yours?

I tried to keep suggestions as simple as possible.  Of course, you are highly technical and could install some fandooglydoo thats cool and sexy to you, but that just means a new problem for you when it conflicts with something else.  If you started from scratch, setting up such a system would cost around $1,500 at the least, so its not workable for everyone.  But at least get them on broadband and move things to web apps.

I'm interested in stories of the simplest thing that possibly works for families.  Being tech support for the family isn't an easy job, mostly because it isn't easy enough in the first place.

Long Tail of Latent Demand

I'm a huge fan of The Long Tail, but the demand it represents is nothing new.  What's new is how we discover it.

Latent Demand (also known as Induced Demand) is the potential earnings if a market is served efficiently.  Its the stuff business plans are made of, but its a difficult intangible to value.  Back when developing internet businesses in Eastern Europe, we argued that the fall of the wall unleashed the latent demand for technology that was pent up for years.  That argument proved true with how quickly consumers embraced the internet and mobility.

The argument was abused by the telecom market during the boom.  Gilder, Level 3, Nathan Myrvold and, well, just about everyone embraced Says Law: "Supply creates its own demand."  A "if you build it they will come" mentality ensued with a large-scale herd.  The notion that bandwidth could be a vacuum sucking in demand, without drawing indeflating competition was like saying lightbulbs suck dark.  It also blew a bubble.

But I happen to believe that the Long Tail represents a different kind of latent demand for several reasons:

• you don't create demand, you discover it
• what you discover mostly already exists and is largely measurable
• discovering latent demand doesn't require expensive tangible assets
• it does, however, require a different focus of attention within the power law (focusing on and within the other 80%)
• when its not discovered by the supply side, as Doc says, "the demand-side supplies itself"

The Long Tail represents more demand than we have realized, but its premised on market efficiency that brings competition.  So when someone comes to you with a business plan saying they are targeting the tail say: fine, go prototype it and bring me back some numbers and how you will be able to sustain the trend with competition.  That's the difference between a tale and tail.

But if you have an existing business, think about how you will participate in the early days of discovery before your new competition does.  You probably have one layer of data analyzed and at your disposal (e.g. unfilfilled auction bids), but probably miss social discovery and how to map it to supply.

2004 in Words

The NY Times covers 2004 in words. 

Now the great conduit is the blogosphere, both a neologism itself and an uncharted space that, the more we map it, looks more and more like our collective unconscious. It dreams up the new words and disseminates them directly into the language, no longer by IV but by instant messaging - a term, by the way, that may soon require its own retronym: messengered message.

Case in point are a few would be words that arose to prominence in the Glossary for 2004:

podcasting, n., the automated distribution of radio-like programming - interviews, music or even content from established broadcasters - to portable digital audio players. From iPod (the most popular portable MP3 player) plus broadcasting.

wiki, n., a community-built Web site that allows content to be edited by anyone. From the Hawaiian wiki, which means fast, or wikiwiki, which means very fast. Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews are examples, although many smaller sites exist, too, often for software projects.

While many are pondering consumerism today, its nice to think we at least produce words, even though we need them validated by mainstream media. Our new common understandings include not to be evil and how in a world of distraction, attention is the most valuable commodity:

"Attention is more expensive than it used to be," said Susan Crawford, an assistant professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, in an interview. But she noted that there might even be something positive from the data maelstrom. In her blog, she asked, "Are we just getting better at processing information - so that we really can listen to a podcast, write an e-mail, open a chat session and write the Great American Novel all at once?"

She then wrote: "Gotta go. Someone's IMing me."

Ditto.

Skinny Santa

Whew.  My eight year old still believes in Santa.  During the last two weeks she has been asking, why does Santa's voice sound like Daddy?  She laid plans to stay up and catch him.

Its pretty amazing we have been able to pull it off so far.  While my wife made a heck of a costume, I've been described as tall and gangly for good reason.  We celebrate Christmas Eve the Estonian way and Christmas day (its as good as marrying into Haunakka).  On Christmas Eve, after dinner, I sneak out back and get in the red garbs in the garage, hoist the bag of goodies over my sholder and announce myself at the door with a ho-ho-ho.  The trick is to get in and out as quick as possible.  No close eye contact, get the gifts in the door, give the munchkins a hug, Merry Christmas and get out while you can.  This year I even stuffed my cheeks with a paper towel to disguise my voice.

Now she is asking why Daddy always misses when Santa comes by.  And also said that when she hugged Santa his tummy felt like pillows.  If she starts Googling for answers I'm in real trouble (Hi Sweetie!  Hope the magic stays with you).

Happy Holidays

I'm writing elsewhere this week (more later), so I thought I would wish an earlier happy holidays.

Of course, the mere mention that I will not blog may compel me to, and I can't help but read and link blog, or flickr, but so-help-me I have some writing to do elsewhere!

Lab for Social Computing Launched

RIT has launched a new Lab for Social Computing directed by Liz Lawley.

The purpose of the LSC is to engage in research, technology development, and education related to social computing--the use of technology to facilitate social and collaborative activities.

Allong with a stellar stellar advisory board, external research partners include the NYU Interactive Technology Program and the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.  Socialtext is proud to be an industry partner, alongside Six Apart, and I encourage other companies to do the same.

Congratulations to Liz for making a dream come true.

Fresh Outta Defining Beta

Mary is absolutely right that the meaning of Beta for software releases is so diluted its practically meaningless.  Most startups and now major companies (except their flagship products) are perpetually in Beta.  This is, in part, a good thing.  If a vendor warns against flaws and develops a track record of improving them.  Users accepting products at face value and being involved in its improvement through testing.  Software is a flawed creature, not just because of the developers behind it or the users in front of it, its meant to be broken.  Accepting a little informality and being open to conversation leads to better products and can be the basis of great long term relationships.

However, the brand dilution of Beta may have gone to far.  Consider where it started:

"hardware or software systems often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?)."
"This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while."

"The Jargon File 4.1.0" via a Google Answer

Software development today has increasing overlap between design and implementation. You might recall that Netscape pushed the envelope of overlapping design and implementation while making Beta sexy for users. Yahoo took the practice a step further with tighter iterations and a practice of releasing Beta to a subset of users. These and other marketing and development models defined release cycles during the internet time of the boom.  Through bust it was sustained, perhaps because increasingly turbulet markets have led to failure, which leads to learning, which adapts practice -- the better practice is to release early and often.   

The decline of packaged software means constant connection between vendor and user, implying a different form of relationship.  Even if the user doesn't report bugs or demand updates, the software does for them.  In many cases, particularly for consumer apps, the default allows the user to decide whether to submit automatic feedback or update.  This is hardly conversation that leads to relationship, but the connection is there nonetheless.  Just as important, the software evolves before our eyes and we expect it to.

Language evolves as well, especially in marketing.  The brand of innovation that Beta implies has led to its wide adoption and consequent dilution.  Perhaps because industry standard software from major vendors is buggy and especially insecure, the bar has been set lower.  But that does not mean that users have necessarily become more innovative or less laggardly.  The psychodemographic segments of the technology adoption lifecycle still remain, although segments have greater influence over each other and the speed of diffusion can be accerated over the network. 

If Beta is diluting as a brand and it doesn't represent industry practice, a couple of scenarios could unfold:

• Status quo dilution increases the pace of commoditization.  When an industry cannot define relative quality, signaling quality has a higher cost while prices fall to the lowest common denominator.
• Users revolt and the market flocks to those who incur the cost of signaling quality.  Fresh Outta Beta would regain meaning and development is done in pursuit of quality.  In some ways, this is what is happening with consolidation in enterprise software as savvy buyers limit relationships to what they can manage.
• The industry attempts to standardize on quality, driven by a dominant vendor like it IBM did in the above excerpt.
• Language shifts to define the missing stage between traditional Beta and software ready for the mainstream market.  The emphasis of marketing shifts from information to relationships.  Products become judged less by their stage of development, but by their rate of change.

Perhaps the latter is already happening.  Where we used to have Fresh Outta Beta, we now have fresh out of the Lab or Research.  Somehow R&D has become a marketing mechanism.   But the reframing these terms provide  is really an aside. 

If value is shifting from software to information services and community, its not just because the network enables it -- its because the people behind and in front of the software demand it.  The only constant in software development is change, and its not just developers that want to embrace change.  Users want software that improves over time and to be a part of conversations on where it is and where its going.  This overlap in preferences, as well as the desire for a community that surrounds a tool to connect, provide an opportunity for relationships and incentives that are stronger than branding -- where we embrace change together.

While the conversations unfold, I'm not sure where the language is going.  Maybe to the next letter in the alphabet, Gamma -- implying a rate of change, a relationship of the highest energy.

iPhone before Wifi iPod

Got to admit when you are wrong.  Looks like the iPhone may preceed the Wifi iPod, way to go Russell and Mike. But does this mean I have to upgrade my Airport Express to play tunes from my phone? Still doesn't make sense to me and the rest of the installed base (stations).

Vodcasting

The Vodcasting wars have begun.

Estonia: If It Works, You Can Break It

Fantastic story on entrepreneurship and technology in Estonia in Forbes by Joshua Levine.  "If the Internet was reborn as a country, it would be Estonia," said a UNDP administrator.  This quote from Linnar Viik sums it up nicely: "People like to say, don't touch things that work, but Estonians like to look behind the thing and wonder whether there's anything we can change about it. In Estonia you might say, if it works, you can break it."

The poster boy on cover is Sander Mägi, who dropped out of school to work for me.  We later co-founded InterIris, a web software development company.  Sander gave me my first exposure to extreme programming methodologies, which was a tremendous gift.  His latest venture is doing great:

...The two founded Aqris Software, and introduced RefactorIT in 2002. Refactor basically works like a kind of spreadsheet for programs written in Java code, automatically remodeling an entire application to reflect changes in parts of its code. The benefit here is speed, saving the thousands of man-hours it would take to reprogram manually.

The biggest customer is Zed, a digital content supplier for mobile phones. Small sales have been made to Nokia, Philips and Fujitsu. Aqris has pretty much doubled every year, earning $1 million cumulatively. Last year it made over $400,000 on revenue of $1 million and won an award as Estonia's best technology developer.

Last time I visited, I also got to re-connect with Allan Martinson, who has just launched Martinson Trigon Venture Capital.  While its not a country full of Skypes, there are opportunities.

"I can see tons of interesting products in Estonia today, but they've stopped their development at €2 million and ten people...It's a good time to be in VC in Estonia," he says, "but it remains to be seen whether Estonia can be a truly global player. It's not just about IT, it's about attitude."

Just ask Steve Jurveston:

"After Skype, we saw tons of opportunities here to follow up. It's like the entire country has this eager, immigrant mentality. Except that in this case they immigrated back to their own country."

The article concludes on a note that the reserved nature of Estonian hold them back from promoting their economy and own brand of innovation.  Perhaps that's why I am so keen to talk about the little country that could.  Because it has, in its own small way.

Follow Your Passions

Great profile of our VP of Business Development, Rick Klau, who has followed his passions throughout his career.

Google Opens the Stacks

A number of major libraries are opening. Ed Vielmetti tipped me to how University of Michagan Library is digitizing its colllection onto Google, to be announced tomorrow, as is the Harvard and New York Public Libraries.

John Battelle points out Project Ocean traces its roots a Stanford founding.  The depth of this project extends into montetizing the long tail by bringing out of print back in to fair use.  Wandering the stacks without the wandering.

Wikis in Forbes Best of the Web

Nice article on wikis in Forbes Best of the Web, here's an excerpt on Socialtext:

One firm already focused on trying to apply wiki technology to the enterprise market is Palo Alto, Calif.-based SocialText, which offers a simple wiki interface that allows Web log-style posting, as well as integration with e-mail. Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO, says, "It's a platform for unstructured, ad hoc collaboration. If I want to form a group, I can give a group a workspace name, click a button, and then invite people in, using their e-mail addresses. Suddenly I have a group of people I'm collaborating with in a private password-protected Web site that's made up of wiki pages."

At Ziff-Davis, a group of 50 team members, who used to receive about 100 e-mails a day, were able to eliminate all of those e-mails by putting information on their SocialText wiki instead. According to Tom Jessiman, general manager of Ziff-Davis's 1up.com, it has resulted in soft-cost savings of perhaps $1 million because of the time that team members saved by getting the same information directly, bypassing email.

Mayfield says that SocialText, which charges $30 per user per month and offers volume discounts, currently has more than 50 customers, and has had two consecutive cash-flow positive quarters.

The article describes wikis as an evolution of blogging for the enterprise (Extreme Blogging, that is).  We, of course, see it as a complement.

I have a plaque on my office wall from the last time one of my companies was in Forbes Best of the Web.  The yellow cover is beginning to fade and the headline reads "An Economy on Steroids."   Ah, headlines.

Home-Brewed Ad

Wired points to a home-brewed ad for the iPod Mini as the future of advertising.  Steve Rubel is right to say this may be the first pure pro-am TV spots and that "The question is, what will the marketers do? Some will embrace it but some will shun it.... I hope (Masters) gets a job in Apple's marketing department. He certainly deserves it. But I'm surprised Apple hasn't shut it down. They can be very persnickety about their brand and trademarks."

Today Majestic Research is holding an event on sell side advertising.  This ad is a prime example of the creative market that populates the directory for the sell side.

Weight of Words

The 10 ten words of the year according to Merriam-Webster, based on lookups: with del.icio.us and Flickr tags.  Also links to currently blank wiki pages and Wikipedia articles.

1. blog: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
2. incumbent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
3. electoral: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
4. insurgent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
5. hurricane: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
6. cicada: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
7. peloton: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
8. partisan: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
9. sovereignty: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
10. defenestration: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

These are, of course, very different from the most popular tags.  I would love to see a visualization of the relative weight of these words.

The Network's Interpretation of Islam

An outtake from this morning's Open Affordances Panel:

Ziauddin Sardar: The most profound impact of the net will be on Islam.  Until now, the tools for education and interpreting Islam have been in the hands of a select group of scholars that have a criteria for being able to interpret text.  Now an individual can empower themselves very quickly, offer interpretations and make arguments.  The power to interpret is being given widely. Relgious scholars will loose power and we will get communities of interpretation -- an opening of Islam that we haven't had in hundreds of years.

Ulises Mejias: Perhaps thats why some why some countries, like Saudi Arabia, are clamping down.

Stephen Downes: Things change not specifically when the tech changes, but when people's attitudes change.   We have always had these capacities, but its like when people suddenly get opposable thumbs and say, hey, maybe I can open a door.  People take the attitude of free agency in the workplace vs. master and servant.  Islam doesn't change until individual muslims change.

Ziauddin Sardar:  Precisely my point, individuals use the net as a catalyst for change if there is a personal desire.  An availability of resources that have been not accessible in the past -- a catalyst that invites me to change.  Change begins in people's minds. saudia arabia fear of internet isn't just porn. You cannot bring in non-approved translations of the Koran through an airport.  They want to censor the availability of interpretations.

The Mouse

The very first mouse, at Doug Englebart's dining room table during the Blue Oxen 2nd Anniversary party.  Something like 1.5 Billion sold and the word adopted by every language.  The beauty is simplicity: X, Y and one button.  The next prototype had three buttons.  Why?  "That was as many as we could fit on it."  Notice the rounded curves.  This moment in history isn't in a museum, yet.
  The Mouse 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

Dan Gillmor Leaving the Merc

Wow. My hometown paper hero has moved on.

Congratulations Dan.  Whatever the future holds, I'm sure you will not only get it, but possibly now shape it.

The Opening of the PC Market

Now that Chinese PC Manufcturer Levono has acquired IBM's PC Division, the question is what's the strategy?  As acknowledged commodity business, the answer is in commoditization.

The last PC maker to arise to ascendency was Dell through supply chain efficiencies.  Today they also called upon Red Hat to lower prices.  Interestingly enough, they commented that: "When was the last time you saw a successful acquisition or merger in the computer industry?"

Levono will undoubtedly compete on price with a low-cost manufacturing base.  But I believe their commoditization strategy is more than hardware.  Levono was spun out of the Chinese Government's ICT Academy of Sciences, a hotbed of open source which also created Red Flag Linux, the Chinese Linux distribution.  Given their competencies in open source, longer term political and business incentives, the leverage of their home market size and acquired 3rd place global market share -- this is the company to bring open source to the desktop.

Jonathan Schwartz suggests the commoditization move will be a shift from PCs as products to PCs as services.  I'd suggest that that's Dell & HP's move, not Levono's.  IBM wins not just in exit and financial performance -- they are forcing the commoditization of non-core business while encouraging the opening of the client they need to compete with MIcrosoft.  Jeff Nolan points out that IBM is taking a 18.9% stake in Levono.  Consumers, of course, win.

The press and blogs have given zero attention to the open source implications of Levono.  The above is speculation and it will take either patience or real investigation to get to the bottom of this story.

Meaning of Silence

Small counterpoint to the last post. 

What you don't blog about, what conversations you choose not to participate in, is the strongest signal you can send around here.

Pulling Punches

Is it me, or is there a disturbance in the force?  Something about the tone and content of the blogosphere changed over the last couple of months.

Om and Jeremy sensed it as individuals. Bribery and ads in their first incantations.  There is a lot of talk of money these days, and new entrants are muting us and future bloggers.  The venture-backed stopped blogging a while ago.  Maybe we are all busy making money.  Maybe we don't want to say anything that would prevent us from doing so. 

But my take is that people are pulling punches these days. Even those who thrive on controversy or debate.  Heck, I'll admit I am (and regret it).  Its a shame, as this is just as much or more a defining moment as before.

I might be wrong, as this is a gross generalization. But I have a question for the more elder stateswomen and men of blogging.  Over the last five years or so, you pulled a punch or two when things were changing, something became more formal and context was shifting. 

Has the statute of limitations been surpassed enough to share what that was?  I'm not looking for idle gossip, but there has got to be something you regret not blogging as you intended.  Something we can learn from, just at the time when we need to retain the community that keeps us blogging.

Operations Log

Some small changes.  I have unspliced my Flickr feed from by Weblog Feed temporarily.  I am spending way too much time on Flickr, want to goof off, and don't want to visually spam my subscribers.  For readers, there is my Flickroll at the bottom left or you can see it here.

Instantaneous Pooling

Larry Lessig points to a new blog by Becker and Posner, a Nobel-prize winning economist and a federal judge.  Their first post has the best introduction in recent memory:

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers..

Their first topic, preventative war, is a timely one as North Korea has the bomb.  One provides the perspective of crime and punisment, or perhaps more accurately, whether its worth commiting a crime against those who cannot be punished after they commit theirs.  The other provides the perspective of costs and benefits considering historical data and given probable outcomes.  You are thinking that one is taking a perspective you would expect, when in fact, its the other.  A great read from great voices.  My only question: is punishment is the only option or can we provide benefits as an alternative to pre-meditation?  Subscribe.

Hello Grandpa

I'm watching the kids while my wife takes a much needed break in Cabo with her girlfriend.  No better way to gain appreciation for the real work that is motherhood.  While I have a sliver of sanity left in me, thought I would share a little story.

The kids and I huddled around the Powerbook to talk with her on Skype yesterday.  This morning, my 2 year old got on my lap while I was trying to work.  He leaned into the laptop and started to try to talk with grandpa.  How fantastic that his expectation is the computer is a door, not a box.  Not just a door for one person, but for anyone he knows to be present when he demands.  He may be conditioned otherwise in the coming years, fit in the boxes of other's designs, but there is something to be said for listening to formative social desires.

Post-powers

Jeff Nolan pointed me to a WSJ article that shows that despite EU accession, Estonia is still pressured by chauvinistic Russian foreign policy.  Sovereignty and the treatment of ethnic diaspora, are the very same issues that I dealt with 10 years ago -- but what's different is the ability for a very small country to begin to exert trans-national influence.  The question is if the context of Ukraine's second democratic revolutionary will help or hurt regional stabilization.

Political Risk and Advertising Markets

The Great Firewall of China is more than a political instrument of speech control.  It is a mechanism of market power to effect the valuation of attention.

Jason Calacanis notes the direct impact the Firewall has had on site traffic through Alexa rankings:

The theory right now is that the Chinese government has been blocking a bunch of top websites causing their pageviews to nosedive. As such those websites—Chinese language ones—took a major drop in the [Alexa] rankings. Their drop means the other (read US sites) spike. Assuming the Chinese government lets people back on those sites in a couple of weeks we should see all the US sites drop back down.

China has the second largest body of users in the world and is expected to eclipse the US in a few years.  Market sway in the most valuable commodity, attention, demands attention itself. Online advertising is only a nominal portion of GDP, so there is little incentive to block advertising markets for purpose of economic disruption.  But there is a marginal incentive to block the attention of Chinese surfers for protectionist benefits.  If the only way to reach the online Chinese consumer is through Chinese sites that play by their rules, US advertisers will place their bets there.

The net can route around speech filters, but consumption in commerce cannot adapt so quickly.  This is but a scenario, but one worth watching, as Market-Leninism is an evolving form.

More on MSN Spaces

You have to respect Scoble for calling it like he sees it.

From Michael Bazeley of the Mercury News:

Nonetheless, because of Microsoft's size and marketing power, bloggers have long anticipated the company's entry into the market. 

``They'd be foolish not to get into blogging,'' said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of Socialtext, an online publishing company in Silicon Valley.

But Mayfield said he did not believe Microsoft would dominate the market or shake up the blogging industry as some have feared. On the contrary, Microsoft's entry into blogging will probably raise the visibility of the practice and help other blogging services attract users.

``A lot of people thought AOL Journals would be bringing blogging into the mainstream, and it would change the nature of conversation and affect the market share of the other blogging vendors,'' Mayfield said. ``And none of that has happened. This is one space Microsoft will not dominate.'

Also quotes Forrester Analyst Charlene Li on integration,`They've put all the pieces together nicely."  Her blog goes further with some good analysis of benefits of proprietary integration:

The integration puts the blog in context of other communications, such as email and IM. If you’re about to email me, you’ll see my latest post/photo – instant context setting and traffic generation to my blog. If you mention the blog posts in an email/IM, I’ll have even more incentive to keep blogging. That integration distinguishes MSN Spaces from other services like Lycos’ Circles and other traditional blogging tool providers like Blogger.

People already get this through tool straddling, and if they don't get it, they can if the tools are open.