Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Placeshifting Walmart

One of the buzzwords of late is Placeshifting.  Seems natural, as we have been bound by space and time, then we have Tivo and now we want that concept everywhere.  Timeshifting lets us turn flows into stocks, the ultimate in convenient consumption. 

Placeshifting has been used to describe turning a media center into a hub accessible anywhere.  Sony, Orb Networks or Sling Media all fit this mold and the meme accelerated at CES.  It presents an interesting quandary for vertically integrated Cable, which is granted legal monopolies according to geography and intellectual property.  The convenient consumption of Placeshifting well serves our increasingly nomadic lifestyle, if we can afford it.

As such, I have also heard the term used to describe services for global tribes, the ethnic networks that span the globe.  Even in the context of Moroccans consuming homeland media 24/7 while living on the dole in Germany, destined for cultural isolation.  Now I personally think this is a good thing, as odds are there is more cross-cultural exchange than if everyone stayed in their homeland, but regardless people and cultures will continue to be on the move.

But lets extend this concept.  Say you are a business traveller stranded in Wichita. You may be able to get your daily dose of the Daily Show, but is that enough of the creature comforts?  Nah, you head for your favorite retail brands for the convenience of consistency.  Latte at Starbucks, Lunch at McDonalds.  For now, that's not the best you can do, although you long for your trusted barista and burgers at the Peninsula Creamery. 

Seth Godin pointed out the Walmart Paradox today, in which suppliers long for choice beyond the short tail.

The answer is to tell Walmart to go away. Toy companies are beginning to discover that they can't win this game. The answer is to find a new and better and more consistently profitable way to launch the remarkable stuff.

But you are still stuck in Witchita wanting to consume something Walmart doesn't sell and with one one to trust otherwise.  So you log on and find a way to have your friends help without them threatening to timeshift you.  We are not quite there yet, but social media like blogs and social networking services will become convenient enough for this kind of Placeshifting.

Which brings me back to brands.  Leading brands don't blog, or encourage their employees to blog, as the perception is a loss of control is not worth risking convenient consistency.  But they are listening, even to posts like these.  So the big question, in my humble opinion, is what happens when brands owned by a network are worth more than the brand of a single firm?  When choice in placeshifting, for example, is as easy as choices in your own neighborhood.  Wouldn't you want your employees to be part of these conversations, just like they are when they come in your stores?

Government 2.0 Slammed

When I came back from talking about Emergent Democracy at Howard's Cooperation Studies class at Stanford, I saw a post about Government 2.0 (my first "nofollow") -- and shot this off in haste to the Extreme Democracy editors:

Seriously, there needs to be a concerted effort to slam this consumption-based model of emergent democracy.

I implore you to read the whole thing by Jon Lebkowsky at WorldChanging about William Eggers on "Government 2.0", or politics as "constituent relationship management" vs a politics of democratic deliberation.

So while nonprofits and campaign organizations are still focusing on top-down organization to raise money and build less informed support, other groups are working to build environments for a deeper kind of democracy that's based on collaboration, talking, listening, and learning, much of it mediated by social technology. I can't imagine that democratic social networks will quickly replace the consumption-based model, but we may be seeing sustainable evolution.

Mitch Ratcliffe opens his Notebook, to summarize William Eggers' Government 2.0 argument:

Citizens become customers, but customers don't get to set the rules of the market. Instead, they make the best deal they can given the offers available, and that has nothing to do with government and democracy. It's a social Darwinist environment in which the most influential participants (them that gots the money) set the rules of the game.

All I want is a government that deliberates and cooperates with me, my groups and our voices in a way that apathy is irrational.

We're Slashing Prices!

Kidding.  But we did just make Socialtext more affordable.  $10/month/user, $5 for non-profits.  Simple stuff for smart people.

Liquid Democracy

Tomorrow afternoon at Stanford I am guest lecturing cooperating at Howard Rheingold's class alongside Zack Rosen from CivicSpace on Emergent Democracy. 

Personally, I haven't found motivation and opportunity to participate since the campaign.  I have been supportive as a toolmaker, but fell out of practice six months ago.  The general lull in political activism, let alone participation, is hopefully a calm before a storm. 

The big questions now are how to keep the current administration accountable, reform the Democratic party where Dean may give us a role, drive issue and cause specific initatives -- and cause change abroad while respecting soverignty.

Andrea posed a fantastic riddle on water privatization:

What are some ways the countries like Peru, Bolivia, and others could develop alternative or hybrid solutions to this social dilemma?

If any Emergent Democracy participants have suggestions, I would love to bring them into the conversation tomorrow.

The Spy Who Monopolized Me

We've looked hard at the nature of this problem, and made a decision that this anti-spyware capability will become something that's available at no additional charge for Windows users -- both the blocking capability, and the scanning and removal capabilities -- Bill Gates at RSA.

Somehow I find this development disturbing:

• Not because of the irony of providing a solution to a problem it created
• Not because it portends another monopoly to a convicted monopolist
• Not because the spyware is spyware itself

Because under the rubric of safer computing, this is the next browser war, and a new way of filtering out competition.  Microsoft was right to realize that the insecurity of its solutions presented a significant threat to customer satisfaction and its core business (although, spyware does cripple your average user's computer by forcing clean installs and in many cases, upgrades). 

A big move is required in this area, not just to protect the core, however.  This is a large and growing market with strategic consequence.  McAffee pioneered a business model of lower cost consumer security solutions with enterprise upsells. Microsoft will still charge for its enterprise solutions.

I don't think there is a good definition for what is spyware actually is.  One man's rouge program is another man's amusing toy.  A spyware or adware program seems to be simply a program that runs unsanctioned by the user.  With relatively secure computing, prompting a user to sanction each install is not an unbearable burden.  When insecure, its too much for one man.  Like anti-virus, sanctioning can be offloaded to a service like Microsoft's which runs on pooled definitions to enforce.  Regardless of the intent of the program or users, anti-spyware can filter out valid programs and media files. 

Especially when administered by a company with a significant stake in DRM, when it finds a legal copy of a copyrighted work, it can flag it as suspicious.  And then send the basic computer information about the user to the cloud for enforcement.  Or what happens when a promising but unsanctioned open source application starts to run tasks in the background?  Bittorrent is an extreme example in this case, but nowadays almost every client application leverages the cloud.  To be fully analogous to the browser war, the giveaway browser would also have to block unsanctioned websites.

But let's consider for a moment what happens when the PC is secured by Microsoft.  Yes, this is highly unlikely given the company' history when it comes to security, but stay with me.  With anti-virus, adware and spyware services tightly bundled with a free and security improved IE, consumer's lives will on the face of it be improved.  But as these services are filters for net activity, and will be tightly bundled with the operating system -- they raise the very same antitrust issues decoupling the browser from the OS sought to regulate. 

Further, when consumers are confident in their computing, they will share even more personal data with the new Microsoft lockbox.  Even with regulatory oversight, which is surely a function of this scenario, privacy abuse is more than possible (AT&T was a provider for the Do Not Call list, yet was one of the first to be fined for cold calling the list!).  Even further, some of the better applications on the horizon will leverage sharing of personal data, files and media.  If this is locked down, not only will innovation be stemmed, so will be the production of social goods.

I am actually less worried about these issues than I would have been if I was developing Windows applications a decade ago.  Now we have open source alternatives and the browser is a viable application platform.  But this is a scenario that, while we don't fully understand it, quite frankly makes me very insecure.

Oh, and I have to add this.  Picture how this scenario would be different if Microsoft embraced open source for anti-ware.

The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become double agents and available for our service. It is through the information brought by the double agent that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.  -- Sun Tsu

No One Gets Fired for Using RSS

A voice from up North.

Access to Inventory

Here is a very simple way to think about the value of advertising on blogs.  About.com was acquired by the NY Times for $410 million at a multiple of over 10 times About's 2004 revenues and a multiple of over 30 times EBITDA.  Several analysts say there is a dearth of ad space inventory.  But of course it's more than that.  When you own or deal with a wholesale property you can work a sponsorship deal. 

Now consider blog inventory.  Unless its part of Weblogs.inc or Corante, you can't work that deal without significant transaction costs.  Like Denton's Sony deal for $25k/month.  This points to the opportunity, not only for aggregate micro-pubs -- but for a system where publishers aggregate themselves through commoditization.  How to value this inventory is another thing, however.

The Cost of Ethics

JD Lasica has an in-depth article on shilling, influence and blog ethics at OJR.  He suggests these norms have emerged:

• Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency – of actions, motives and financial considerations – is the golden rule of the blogosphere.
• Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.
• Be honest. Write what you believe.
• Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.
• Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity – lost trust is difficult to regain.

A pretty fair account, and probably not the lowed common denominator.  In the interest of the first principle, I decided to accept George Bush's Headphones.  When they arrive, I'll let you know if they are rose or white-colored.

Seattle Bound

Heading to Seattle tonight for our first off-site retreat.  Seeing how Socialtext is distributed, I guess you could call it an on-site.  Anyway, the company that works and plays virtually is getting together in person.  Many will meet for the first time.

Why Seattle?  Two of us live there and one's girlfriend is out of town, leaving us with a house to trash.

Googlepedia is a Good Move

News flash: John Dvorak has a conspiracy column that makes no sense.  He suggests that Google's support of Wikipedia hosting will see, hear and do evil.  According to Usenet analogies, corporate incentives will drive them to neglect, or worse, block Microsoft crawlers.  This theory misses both the context of the cause and the cause that markets.

Back during the Hurricane season, a big one was coming and Jimmy Wales reached out to Socialtext to see if we could provide interim hosting.  We scrambled to see if our tiny startup could help, we would have in an instant, but it was a bigger operation than us at the time.  I asked him if I could share this private conversation now, because it helps provide a context of genuine need for a community project.  Wikimedia has one real underlying cost and risk, Google may help them address it and unleash peer production for the masses.

Why would Google support Wikipedia?  Not out of goodness of their hearts.  Wikipedia represents the best of the web and the best in all of us.  It produces social goods that any company involved in the web should be aligned with.  What's more, Wikipedia isn't a site, its a community, one with a history and a culture of openness.  Any moves a supporter of the community would make against the social contract would spark virulent reaction.  These interdependencies will keep parties in check, and the corporate world is well aware of the profit motives of social responsibility.

John is right to keep Google, or any powerful company, in check.  But this is not the storm to build against them.

Socialtext Includes Convoq Presence Links

Right about now, Convoq is on the stage at Demo.  They just announced ASAP Express, which provides free 1-to-1 conferencing, video and IM.  Upgrade to ASAP Pro and you get a low price alternative to WebEx.  One of the things they are showing is how Socialtext and Convoq work together.

With Socialtext Workspace 1.5 we added Convoq presence links.  All you have to do is type "convoq:asapname" and you get this:

Contact ASAP Sales

People use Socialtext and Convoq in tandem.  When working on a document within Socialtext, you can escalate to real-time with a shared view of what you are editing.  While in Convoq, when the meeting ends, you can de-escalate to asynchronous and more persistent collaboration.

With similar support for AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype, you can also do simple things like a presence dashboard for a team or simply make your contact information richer.

Above image from Blogging DEMO's writeup of the Convoq demo.

Intel CEO Blogs Inside

The Mercury News has the scoop on a high profile CEO blogging inside, as in Intel.  You might think that's good news for enterprise blogging, but it isn't. 

A copy of Paul Otellini's fledgling blog was leaked.  Now the issue isn't about a superior communication tool, it is an issue for the lawyers.  Too bad, as in practice there is little difference from a leaked group email, but in perception it is something misunderstood as more.  At least this should spark a conversation about communication inside Intel, an opportunity to establish norms and guideliness, that may still include some well considered freedoms.

And here is a thought for you, if Paul was one of many contributors to a wiki with a group voice, would the issue be the same?

Collaborative Video Production

Here's a pretty cool story for two reasons.  First, using Socialtext to support television production:

Intuitive, lightweight tools that required no explanation from me how to use got us sharing video and audio samples that enabled us to collaborate in the editing and design process. In the small time we had to prepare and supply our first episode, I really don’t think we could have coordinated everything with such polish without Socialtext’s flexibility and ease of use.

Second, which discounts the first for us, its a great accomplishment for Eric Jones.  Eric worked with us at Socialtext as an intern and then landed a gig with Tribe.net.  Tribe's CEO Mark Pincus is also one of our investors.  It is a success story, but unfortunately there is too much bias to post it as a Socialtext case study. 

But the real accomplishment is how a talented guy is making his way through the Social Software world and creating some cool things. 

So Eric, when will Tribe TV be Vodcasted?

Balancing Personalization

My post on Personalization and Socialization rustled a few feathers, as intended.  Susan Mernit captured the key point: customized personalization-- smart, self-adjusting, filtered system--limits discovery.

Greg Linden, creator of a great Personalization portal for blogs, Findory, naturally took issue with Socialization.  You can find us both taking sides, but note that all approaches are needed to derive value from the long tail: personalization, customization (how Greg describes My.Yahoo!) and socialization.  Where you lay your bets is another issue.

Christopher Carfi nailed a problem statement (these are the things you pay attention to when looking for opportunities):

Being a customer in the long tail takes work.

Steve Gillmor cracked the code (he also notes I'm filtering myself, sorry Steve):

...attention AND human filtering are the disruptive intersection at which the new Web stands.
...RSS is about time, and RSS will win. Attention is about what we do with our time, and attention will win. Friends and family are about who we do it with, and we will all win.

Andrew Nachison from the API Media Center not only aptly summarizes the thread -- but makes a deeper point:

Will we all win? A lot of thinking and capital flows into the quest for economic winners and losers. But if we wind up with a world no better than the one we have now – war, poverty, hunger, hate or name your social dilemma here – then RSS, social networks and fabulous new tools to create and access information, doesn't really matter.

So my question is: among the "players" scrambling to influence the information systems of the next generation, who among them are thinking about the social outcome - about benefiting humanity? Is this the realm and responsibility of the open source movement? Bloggers and non-profit media? NGOs and governments?

Might this be the calling, the defining quality, of the new Fourth Estate?

This amplifies a point made by Dan Gillmor on the first night of the event.  The grassroots energy of the newest media will undoubtedly triumph in form, but there is a danger that the function doesn't inherit support for the public interest. 

I almost see a new system of checks and balances between personalization (corporate interest, information-centric), customization (personal interest, information-centric) and socialization (social interest, relationship-centric) as memes lobby for attention.

Susan also made a key point:

He's right again, but organic, web-like organizations don't fit corporate structure, so we'll see those networks grow outside and around the new tools as they're fitted into the mainstream--and see additional tools (maybe FOAF?) radiate out from their hub.

Which brings the issue back to business models, unfortunately the topic of a future post.  The difference this time is that if the business model does not account for the production of social goods, users will produce their own hubs.

The Unscripted Demo

While vendors are sweating it out at the DEMO conference in Arizona to deliver the perfect pitch, user-generated demos are turning marketing on its head.

The art of the demo is executing a perfect script that shows off the best of your product, a triumph of Murphy's law with the perfect message. But not only is Murphy rigorously enforced, vendors can't control the message any longer. We all know that blogs and other open source media have decentralized messaging, but what happens on the network when the demo is the message?

Screencasting demos is really cheap and easy. So simple, in fact, that users of software are developing their own and sharing them. While they may lack professional production, there is something real and visceral about peering over the shoulder of a user openly playing with a product.

Demo production is in the hands of everyone, more diverse stories can be told. Jon Udell developed a screencast to tell a story about how Wikipedia works, tracing the history of a page. The result condenses years of ad-hoc collaboration into 8 minutes of motion and narrative. this story is far more instructive than if Wikipedia was a commercial organization and scripted its perfect demo.

John Broughton asked the big question: Is screencasting the future of learning (about software, at least) - short movies that are easy to create without professional help?

Socialtext user Raymond Kristiansen put it like this:

I really would love to see more screencasts showing how People use software. Not some idealized screenshots that do not show the context.

So he produced his own user-generated Socialtext demo. His first question was if this infringed on copyright, but we encouraged him to share it openly. It doesn't bring out the best in our product, but watching him create a new workspace and listening to him click his keyboard in the dark of Nordic night shares how he really uses the tool.

As it gets easier to create, remix and share media -- expect your customers to generate their own demos. Your first instinct may be that this is a loss of control, and to shut it down. But encourage the creation of these artifacts, or they will be created despite you, and they are a vital new part of the conversation we call marketing.

Personalized Aggregation

At a Yahoo! briefing on Personalization and syndication this week, I had three questions:

1. After the most likely true claim of being the largest, how many aggregator users do they actually have?
2. Given how user testing shows that when people click on an orange RSS button they think their browser is broken, how can we get to a single subscription button for people who don't use My Yahoo?
3. More critically, why doesn't personalization have social discovery available in other Yahoo! silos, or how do we get from personalization to socialization?

Follow that link for a rant on personalization in general.

The Long Tale

Chris Anderson at the Media Center seminar.  Starts by reviewing the content of The Long Tail, go read it again.  His presentation used dark red letters, which in a brightly lit room was a demonstration of the long tail, there was abundant knowledge to be read, but it was hard to discover.

Distribution of income vs. goods reveals a power-law, a new market beyond the 20% mainstream market.  Every single digital inventory item being sold at least once, in a world of unlimited shelf space and abundance.

Holds up a copy of the SJ Mercury News with an article on Eric Schmidt talking about the long tail more than financials in yesterday's Google analyst briefing.

Schmidt is a fan of a concept, popularized in a Wired magazine article last year, called the ``long tail,'' which says that a large number of products with low sales volume can collectively make up a sizable market.

For Google, the long tail includes the tens of thousands of businesses not being served by conventional means of advertising. Schmidt believes Google has an opportunity to appeal to those businesses by offering them the ability to create highly targeted ad campaigns.

Low Marginal Costs, all eliminated except Rights (a huge issue).  Eliminates constraints.  The long tail is abundance. 

Carver Mead's book Understanding LSI, building what we now call Moore's Law, his rule: "waste transistors."  For instance, graphic user interfaces, what could you do if transistors are free? 

Virtually unlimited capacity plus virtually free distribution equals custom streams, not mass markets.

20th century about hits, the next is about niches.  The biggest money may be in the smallest sales.  Google's advertisers are people who were not advertisers before.

Two models:

1. Digital catalogs: Services such as Netflix and Amazon, with unlimited offerings but physical
2. Digital retailers: Like Rhapsody, lowest profit threshold for stores with no physical goods.

Rule 1: Make everything available.  Embrace niches like documentaries.  Go deep with archives, versions, remixes, outtakes, edits for different audiences and language, background material.  Bring on the Bollywood. Our children will never know the meaning of the phrase "out of print."

Rule 2:  Price it Right. Entertainment (want) prices down the Tail, Information (need) prices down the tail.  For information, you have an audience which is price insensitive.  Amazon gives access and people are willing to pay (this seemed odd to me, Amazon could also just be lowering prices for what they buy in bulk).  You can compete with free, convenience is worth paying for.  $0.99 is designed to prevent channel conflict, the right price is $0.29 for a college student.  The further you go down the tail the more important links to help you find stuff.  In 1990s you had and explosion of goods, now there is an explosion of information about goods.

Where the book will go:  Implications outside entertainment: physical goods, ads.  Will also talk in depth about recommendation engines (where an archived Ska band is four clicks away from Britney Spears).  Tivo recommendations suck.  Wants to act on recommendations the moment I get them and seamlessly integrate my trust networks.  Right click on Evhead's post about a TV show and have it recorded for you at home.  These recommendations are everywhere and will drive attention down the tail.  Make it easier to make choices.

Does the availability of the long tail reduce the demand for hits?  Flatten the bell curve into a power law?  The effect of the tail wagging the dog?  Cost for marketing is significantly lower, so you can save marketing resources for hits that deserve it.  Talks about TV's Long Tail, good graphs of Tivo season passes, from Desperate Housewives to a college baseball season pass with two people at the end of the power law.

Outside entertainment examples

• Google, Ads (I'm working on how Sell Side Advertising works within the Tail)
• eBay, Goods
• CapitalOne, Credit (of course, now you have a national plague of debt)
• Offshoring, Child Labor (enabled by the telecom bubble)

Rise of secondary markets: used, gray and overstock goods (add commodity to this).  Prahalad's Pyramid, irony that the poor pay the highest prices.  Products that sell for $0.01 to $0.10 that are profitable.  The cell phone operator of a village. 

Dr. Sheddy revolutionizing health care in India through telemedicine and x-rays.  Capping factor was the consumables (X-ray film), going digital let them do 3,000 a day around the clock.

Newspaper have done pretty well at this, such as by monetized archives.  Classified sweet spot will be hard to compete with,  Yahoo wants to take the classified business.

Mary asks about smaller companies leveraging them  The long tail is the units of what they share, not what they produce.   Broadly the power comes from lower marketing costs, (within having something good, getting access to distribution and marketing), word of mouth.   Looking at Netflix, Reid Hastings sees it as not just access to marketing content but as a marketing vehicle to others.

He actually believes spam will be solved, has 4 levels of filters and it works for him (no wonder he doesn't respond to my email!), Typepad is not solving the comment spam problem, but there should be group filtering applied. 

Scarcity of advertisers and outlets, how does this apply to publishing?  At Wired, we are not allowed to do anything online because of the Lycos purchase.  Transactional ads and brand ads, former want to go the Google route.  Bill Gross solved the targeted ad problem, through algorythms.  Putting a brand in proximity within something you feel good about continues to do fairly well.  Until someone comes up with something as revolutionary for brands, the market will remain the same.

Most media is in for a real shakeup as distribution and revenue models change. More than 90% of music is still sold through CDs, but Tower is seeking bankruptcy protection.  The Rights issues don't allow them to clear rights in time to provide industrial scale availability.

Overall, the talk focused on examples of transacting niche goods, or models of consumption.  But far less focus on models of production such as open source and open content.  The exploration in recommendation engines will be fascinating, but   Greg Elin asked about the secondary effects of the tail...as niches are revealed, what new niches are produced as a byproduct. 

In a world of abundance, you can't understate new capacities to produce.  I think Chris' talk must be fascinating for larger companies with under leveraged assets.  But if they focus only on the low hanging fruit of monetizing archives, you end up with an unblogged WSJ (its kind of like producing RSS feeds as your sole investment into Social Media, which doesn't necessarily open conversations or engage the energies of your constituents), and they will not take the key step of sharing control with the former audience.

Embargoes are Dead

Does this need saying?  What's the role of the information officer when exclusivity is a fallacy?

Media Disintermediation

Media Center session on Next Generation Media: How Do Businesses Change as Disintermediation Nibbles Away at Their Margins?

Scott Rafer, Feedster

Google, Yahoo Local and A9 Yellow Pages as new intermediaries.

Microsoft takes a $10 billion market and crushes it into a $1 billion market they own. Revenue drops by 90%, technology lowers costs by 99% and $90 million is "left over" every year. We are all using open source, cost infrastructure will be based on it.

25% of new eBay auctions posted via eBay web services according to the Pew Study.

In a month jobs.feedster.com will have more job listings than Monster.com. Anyone can build a job site on top of their data. Suggestion to the audience: become part of the problem. Be an intermediary. Use lightweight structure. Be the center of an ecology of content and technology. Specialize and integrate. Use open source.

Sold my Oracle stock a while ago, MySQL provides service on 2% on 7M deployments and are making good money.

Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director of Strategic Planning, The Associated Press

155 year organization has faced these issues before, hired one guy to row a boat, telegraph, etc. Innovator's Dilemma, but want to advance technology. The container is not the thing that we set up and hope people come to it, the net is moving bits where they need to go, balance of power shifted from suppliers to makers of content and they will reassemble it in their own way. Desktop, settop and cell phone as new containers. Have to play and move to platforms -- consumers use our brand needs to attach to the content and not just the container and we have to be okay with people picking up the content and even playing with it in its own way. How can we make it simpler, easier to get the info they want instead of searching through a mess of feeds. All for free and open access, but not free as in doesn't cost anything. There is a continuing value to the journalism we do. Even with tremendous growth rates of online advertising, it doesn't come close to funding a news organization.

Jay Harris, Publisher, Mother Jones magazine

30 years old next year (the magazine). Associated with progressive political values and investigative reporting. Something we try to carry forward. A non-profit. Citation of their stories accrues to their reputation. Got in early and adapted to use the medium for what it was good for (e.g. putting database of campaign donors online). Sell subscriptions, take donations and advertise online. But its a centralized brand. Making the shift means keeping the quality of the journalism intact. Fact checking mechanism. Tapping into the grassroots energy while maintaining the quality is the issue. Grade The News project.

Jeff Clavier is speaking on behalf of BuzzNet (Flickr didn't show)

Jeff worked with Reuters for 10 years, on the VC side, but gets the issues. Simple mobile and web-based mobile communication platform. Demos Buzznet, he has a cool Winoblog. Business model: Buzznet.com has premium services, advertising and sponsorship, e-commerce; but unlike Flickr, they are a Platform for event and artist promotion, brand development (co-branded or white label). Shows the example of the Ventura County Star and a fan site spammed by an independent Goth band.

Discussion

Lingering question for Jim Kennedy is, what's the business model in all this? The expense of covering the news is getting bigger all the time, how to get partners to help fund it, fund the infrastructure (mentions DRM, B2B commerce)? Infrastructure for the user experience is highly advanced, but the infrastructure that helps people get paid is immature. Huge undertaking. What will happen while working on it, the missed opportunities, is like taking the engine out of the plane while in the air. When asked, what if you didn't have the legacy, is there enough audience left? Combination of pieces must be different content, subscription, classifieds has worked well, but now need to rethink the model. Will it be at the scale and margins that big public companies demand?

Dan Gillmor at the Center of Media

Last night Dan Gillmor held a conversation at the Media Center seminar with his former and future peers.  Media executives in attendence were all ears trying to figure out what Dan is up to. 

He provided a framework for how media is transitioning from lecture to conversation, with journalists (the least interesting group, also includes PR/Marketing functions that need to find a new role), newsmakers (now bypass the funnel) and the former audience (who rolls their own media and participates in it).  New tools make it all possible.

Here are some of the outtakes:

• On industry transition: "Worried about the unraveling business model of media.  It needs to be replaced with something that  honors the public interest.  Otherwise you end up with a cacophony instead of a Tower of Babel."
• On doing a startup and market timing: "if you pre-empt everyone else, it will fail...contrary to wildly wildly over the top speculation, I have not 'cracked the code'...getting a business partner to figure out monetization..."
• On best practices: "have to capture the fevor, knowledge, energy and talent of the grassroots that is waiting to have a role"
• On Hyperlocal media: "Local papers have a position in the community and one of authority.  Apply the tools for the community for where you do not have staff and do not vouche for what they produce.  If they do not do these kinds of experiments, there are new startups that will."

The overarching theme was the innovator's delimma that faced the decision makers in the room, one participant even described it as such, "stuck defending standards, practices and infrastructure."  Dan noted media is a high margin conservative business, whose margins are erroding.  He highlighted the role of analysts and capital markets which trickles down to loose the trust of citizens.  Blogs are a "goad to make journalism better" and new competition is "nimble, financed, lower margin and not interested in journalism."  One commenter said there is also an issue of the arrogance of newsroom culture and no-one disagreed.  Dan sees a real role for traditional journalism practices and opportunity for established institutions to leverage more than their brand.

At some point, campaign politics came into the discussion.  What I love about Dan is he doesn't hide or hide behind his politics.

There is no Supply Side

This one is for Doc.  What happens when the demand side supplies itself?  You have a commodity market.

What Doc usually means switching choice and the ability to build upon.  But consider Sun's creation of a Computing Commodity Market.  Buyers can sell excess capacity.  This option, provided contracts allow (this is where the details matter), reduces the risk of buying too much in the spot market, and can increase liquidity.  If Sun overprices the spot market, the buy side can sell instead of use.  Volume will bring leverage in this market, but even the smallest buyers benefit from this option, even more than selling their extra servers on eBay. 

Many will value different options and not take the risk of volatility -- but there is a risk management product that will be available for them -- the next opportunity.

First Bloglines Presentation After AskJeeves

Impressionistic transcript of Mark Fletcher's first public talk after AskJeeves acquired Bloglines, at the Media Center's Etech.

First slide is out of date, "one of the worst kept secrets on the web," now part of AskJeeves.  Bloglines is where users meet RSS: search, subscribe, share and publish.  Hide the technology as much as possible from users.  Used to have his own bookmark list and going to 100 sites a day needed a better way.  At the same time RSS began to get popular.  Bloglines is my solution to this problem.  Main screen is modeled after email, it does the work of tracking changes for you.  Average number of subcriptions is 20, but that's skewed with some people having hundreds and they need a tool like Bloglines to deal with information overload.  Three audiences:

1. Consumers: managable access, spam free, web based, free
2. Publishers: solution for building maintaining and measuring audiences; prevents "distributed denial of service attacks" from desktop news readers (they bear the burden of traffic as a proxy)
3. Advertisers: a new venue, interesing info: subscribed to, read before, generates profiles which can be used in one scenario for advertisers.  They have not focused on revenue (they have none), and will continue to build out the service with AskJeeves.  Must be beneficial to users, content providers and advertisers.

Future developments: Convergence with web search, Mutimedia, functional RSS feeds for more than just news, Richer blogging tools, more sharing and social networking features.  3.6 repeat visits per day on average.  Sticky vital part of their online experiences.  Share your information and feeds with other people in your network.

Bob Wyman asks if he is the friend or foe of the publisher.  We can't be the enemy, it won't work for our business, we have to be friends.  Then asked about friendliness to readers.  RSS is a friend of the user, our viral growth and addictiveness is a proof point.  Business model hasn't been figured out yet for publishers.

Then Bob asked about content click through (as opposed to ad click through).  Have not measured that at this point, have not been focused on a revenue model.

Steve Gillmor: you say you haven't figured out your business model, but I suggest you have. 

Our business model is volume (kidding)... we have a lot of options, doesn't take imagination to slap ads on it or use profile data, or charging subscriptions, or PayPal for RSS feeds.  Tons of possibilities, haven't figured out the right model for us.  AskJeeves sees this as a way of driving search traffic.  Still early, when you say syndication they think Seinfeld re-runs.

Make it easier by not saying RSS and hiding tech, it is an education issue and will take time.  It is an iterative process to make it easier, a journey, no end point.  Raising awareness with AskJeeves, which will integrate links.

So it seems that the merger means traffic and link sharing between Bloglines and AskJeeves, plus further funding of development.  What I haven't heard is the user benefit from the combination of search and aggregation.  Finding new feeds is not a big user problem, IMHO.  Finding archive value has yet to happen.  Finding each other in ways we can't socially process is a fascinating frontier.

Some end of the session discussion outtakes:

• Susan Mernit points out the erosion of brand value for news sources and the creation of services by users by subscribing to Craigs List as her personal early adoption story.
• A publisher: We play a key role in moving adoption forward in an easier way
• A publisher: Need for this to work at scale, which hasn't happened yet
• Wyman plugging his category: Two kinds of feeds: site specific or amalgamated
• How does this translate from fringe behavior to other more rational forms of behavior
• Steve Gillmor: Fletcher and Scoble are fringe, but solving their own overload problems.  Scoble is the second most recognizable person at Microsoft

Some thoughts of mine about branding, prompted by this discussion...  Which promise do you trust more?  Promises you make to yourself, or promises a media brand makes to you?  My guess is the former.  They may end as broken New Years resolutions.  But if you gain confidence in your own ability to produce, or at least manage your own consumption, you regain a lost sense of control. Then what happens when you gain affirmation beyond Stuart Smalley -- from your friends, your network.  This is a core disruption to brand value.  How value of self and social networks is a promise we want to believe.

UPDATE: Video interview with Mark on what's the big deal with RSS?

Nokia Using Socialtext

Just announced that Nokia is a customer of Socialtext.  Actually, they have been for a long time now.  Great group to work with. 

This helps explain my trip to Helsinki and Stockholm last November.

New Socialtext Release

We just released Socialtext Workspace 1.5, a nice mix of boring behind-the-scenes stuff that enterprises care about like directory integration and fun new toys like including RSS within wiki pages.

UPDATE: Matt Hicks at eWeek has the details.  Just for fun, we issued a press release, afterwards.

Sun Opens the Computing Commodity Market

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun. -- John D. Rockefeller

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. -- Mark Twain

Sun's move is more than openly asking $1/cpu-hr. -- they are forcing the commoditization of computing by making a market.

A friend of mine from the RateXchange days (B2B Bandwidth Commodity Exchange) forwarded a press release about a MIPS Exchange fostered by Sun foray into Grid Computing, pointing out the similarity to our old business plan.   The Over-The-Counter exchange is hosted by Archipelago, giving it level of neutral positioning and real trading infrastructure. Some short term impact:

• Price transparency begets more transparency
• Price setting shifts negotiation to service level, credit and settlement terms
• Setting a standing offer to sell at a given price is half of the role of a market maker, expect them to offer a price they will buy at as well
• Fostering a Secondary market for your own product pools some customer risk and should increase initial sales
• The creation of a Forward market is where it really gets interesting

IBM is offering cycles at half the price of Sun and HP has a grid barter plan called Tycoon.  Jonathan Schwartz challenges IBM for not having a standard offering.  When market debate shifts to standards, commoditization is settling in.  Analyst Michael Dortch puts it well:

"The ability to acquire compute cycles economically as they are needed is incredibly compelling. However, questions about how requests for those cycles will be prioritized, and whether or not priorities will be governed by service agreements, auctions or other mechanisms are just the beginning for interested IT decision-makers," he added. "The fact that these questions are being raised is good for all concerned, but actual, specific business benefits will have to wait until at least some of these questions are asked -- and answered -- by Sun, its partners and at least some of its competitors."

Jonathan offers this table as a commodity definition:

Elements	Sun's Grid	IBM's Grid
Industry Standard Server	V20Z Opteron (2.4 GHz), V210 SPARC	?
RAM per CPU	4 Gig	?
Cache storage per CPU	20 Gig	?
Operating System	Solaris 10	?
Is OS open source?	Yes	?
Is OS Protected by ALL* corporate patents?	Yes	?
Minimum Commitment	4 hrs.	?
Price per hour	$1 US	?

While this is an admirable stack, and is significant progress in a consistent redefinition of Sun's strategy, it has little to do with the commoditization of computing.  How the commodity is produced is irrelevant except as a temporary source of advantage for one actor.  What matters is defining price, quantity, quality and delivery mechanisms.  What Sun has defined is price and quantity, and now its time to hire some lawyers into the marketing department.

It is in Sun, IBM and HP's interest to come to a common table and pool risk.  This will not happen anytime soon, and first there will be alternative definitions and markets.  Sun's initial asking price is a ceiling, not a floor or a table.  Expect for them to trade in and out of the market leveraging information arbitrage (the real reason you want to be a first mover in commoditization).  Watch for when a second seller enters (Google?), an agreement is standardized by early movers, volatility ensues and liquidity explodes.

Gold like the sun, which melts wax, but hardens clay, expands great souls. -- Antoine Rivarol

Socialtext Did Not Invent Tagging

Good article in the Guardian about Tagging.  Except this statement:

But, extending an idea developed by SocialText for its wikis, del.icio.us also encourages users to "tag" bookmarks...

This implies that Socialtext invented tagging, which is, uh, categorically false.

Socialtext Categories share similar properties to tags, and was implemented two years ago, but takes a different approach.  Its a flat namespace, anyone can add/delete/modify a category with a simple interface, very wiki-like.  We also added rel tags to Categories to support Technorati's tag search.  You can play with it here.

On the other hand, we did invent metadata ;-)

Customer Generated Demo

How cool is this?  One of our customers, inspired by Jon Udell's Wikipedia screencast (the best illustration I have seen on how wiki pages evolve over time), created his own Socialtext demo screencast and shared it in the Socialtext Customer Exchange.

The Socialtext screencast isn't a polished demo, but a great way to look over the shoulder of Raymond Kristiansen from the Norwegian Liberal Youth party (yeah, we have some very cool customers) as he builds a Workspace from scratch.