Below is a video of a panel I was on with Heather Champ from Flickr, Frederick Mendler from Rackspace, Pratap Penumalli from Google, and moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe at Customer Service is the New Marketing.
After the event, Socialtext signed on to the Company Customer Pact.Last month I gave a talk at IDEO, the leading industrial design firm, as part of their monthly KnowHow series. It's a one hour stream of consciousness for an audience of designers set in an L-shaped room that has me glancing left to right. They were kind enough to let me redistribute it:
Robert Scoble and I spent an hour talking wikis and other stuff. The result is this video.
What I learned from watching is I say 'right," "let's put it this way" and 'the interesting thing is" way too much. Heck, you could create a drinking game around it.
But mostly this was sitting down and having a conversation with a friend.
When we launched SocialPoint on Monday, I had a chance to sit down with Sam Ramji of Microsoft. A video of the conversation and Sam's thoughts are on Port 25.
Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint"). This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure. My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis. I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications. We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.
Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing -- MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in. I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven't missed something big. That's the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.
Today we have two new and seriously great kinds of attention tools. Newsreaders give us the ability to personally personalize. Combined with persistent query feeds, you can follow the people and things you know you want to read. Similarly, social networking services with a purpose let you aggregate the objects of your friends, be it pictures with Flickr, or posts with Vox. Tagging then lets you pivot for social discovery, but that is digging deeper than you often have time or interest for.
TechMeme and others show us mass popularization. Different communities help things bubble up. In Social Software, you first saw this with Blogdex and DayPop. What in the blogosophere has the most attention within a given time period. Now we have Digg, del.icio.us/popular, Reedit, Netscape, Technorati, YouTube, Dabble, Last.fm, Flickr Interestingness and a gazillion other increasingly rich examples. This is a Wisdom of Crowds we couldn't gain before for discoverable knowledge.
As an aside, I wonder how original Slashdotters feel about Diggers' favor for a popular answer rather than a leading question.
So more concisely, what I hope develops:
* Tools that let me personally personalize should give me just one more degree of interestingness and popularization.
* Tools of mass popularization should give me social popularization
Since Flickr has both kinds of attention tools, let me give specific suggestions for extension. For within My Contacts's Photos, show me the most viewed, favorited and commented by my contacts. Then show me the most viewed, favorited and commented pictures by my contacts in Everyone's Photos.
Now, this is just one user's greedy suggestion, and there serious usability and algorithmic challenges to overcome. But what I'm getting at is part of the future of media.
The other night I watched the evening local news broadcast for the first time in a while. Its funny how local news attempts to localize national news. The idea is that if they show you a Mom in the Bay Area of a Soldier in Iraq, you can relate to that and it brings the story home. But unless the story originates from that Mom or Soldier, it is just an overlay with too much of a contextual shift. Similarly, when an item of local news is made national -- it is too shallow for our local tastes and we are attracted to it simply because or fair city is made popular.
I empathize with the expert editors behind these mass media and their attempts to connect the interesting for me, when me is lost in a demographic. But I've had a taste of going direct. When I carry the burden of discovery, and float around YouTube's popular and related clips, I can compose a broadcast for myself. The outstanding political commentary, funny stuff and best soccer highlights from around the world.
But after a long day of work, I'm tired, and want the network to work for me. Cue up not what is popular, or what the people I subscribed to produced. Cue up what my social network has found interesting. At any given time it may be local, national, international, topical or mundane. Of course, in the process of actively consuming it, I'll leave behind breadcrumbs of attention to make it better for my friends.
UPDATE: I've been ranting about this for years. Sam Ruby hacked together a nifty MeMeme and the result shows a clear and simple foci of attention (a post by Spoksky at last glance), FeedDemon has something in the works and Tailrank has something close.
An Impressionistic Transcript of Brewster Khale's talk at Wikimania...
You are really on to something. There is something big going on here and a lot of these talks are about trying to figure it out. At the beginning of the talk I'll talk about things I know about and at the end talk about things I don't know -- how is that for a VC pitch?
I'll talk about open source, open content and the rise of the technical non-profits. Universal Access to All Knowledge is a big goal, and if you accomplish it, what are you going to do? Move to Florida?
Wikipedia is the 15th most popular site on the web. This is because of the enlightenment goal. The goal isn't a technical one, but a structural one. Despite centuries old balance...1976 radical expansion of US Copyright Regulation. Property of IP is perhaps the worst idea since the Domino Theory. Information is knowledge, not property. Valenti's crowning achievement radicalized copyright regulation. Most people talk about 130 year protection, but it is the vast scope and repercussions.
First casualty was software. The response was Open Source licenses. MIT's sale to Symbolics, which forked development and RMS' experience lead to open source. This is Brewster's revisionist history, but it may be where it came from.
The second casualty was Music and Video. The response was Creative Commons licenses. Another response was organizations to facilitate community effort. We lost the help of institutions like MIT so we built new ones. The Free Software Foundation. DejaNews was a for profit, sold to Google, dissapated. IMDB, 6 guy community project was bought by Amazon. CDDB became Gracenote, Inc. WAIS Inc was sold to AOL. FTP Software sold to NetManage. Cygnus sold to Redhat. All commercial companies built upon community effort that don't last long. FSF is still around.
The response is the rise of the technical non-profit. Apache software foundation has no full-time employees, but is incorporated to last a while. OASF has gotten money not only from Mitch but from Foundations. Mozilla Foundation is a great success with Firefox and the Google toolbar (money) they spun off a for-profit company. Interesting ecology to watch and try and understand what it means. Linux. Internet Archive is based on the open access model -- can we get paid for the administration we do so everything we do can be openly accessible. Wikimedia foundation you know about. The rise of the technical non-profit is an interesting addition to the ecology, we went wrong with the over-corporatization post WWII. EFF., Public Knowledge and Open Content Alliance exist to enforce rights and serve us. We massively screwed up our law structure and the general approach of knowledge of property.
Open Hardware. Petabox, a cheap machine that is open sourced. The $100 Laptop Program has interest in the order of 5-10 million. What would happen if the next major laptop company is a non-profit? It is because they are non-profit that they are trusted and base on open work.
The structure is now in place to proceed towards Universal Access to All Knowledge. We have institutions dedicated towards these goals, but how are we doing towards it?
In Text, getting the 26-28 million books in the Library of Congress. 1 megabyte for a book, 26 terabytes, $60k cost for the entire library on a Linux machine. But I actually like books, the printed page. Created the mobile bookmobile, which has printed a million books. The cost is a penny a page, a buck a book means you can give books away. In our first debut of this was the supreme court when they were arguing to extend copyright another 20 years, but we lost that one. Erik Eldridge has one, two in India, one in Egypt, one in Uganda... this gets closer to universal access, but what we realized is we need to scan more books. One way to do this is send them somewhere else. The Million Books project sends them to India, but we had to buy 100k books to send to them, but not many others wanted to send books to them. So the Indians were scanning their own books, which may be the right thing for them to do. Put the scanners next to the books. Sending to India to scan is $10 per book, in the US it is $30. The automatic scanners are not effective, so we made our own scanner and can do it at 10 cents a page. Scanning 400 books a day. $750 million dollars to digitize the Library of Congress. About a year an a half of the LoB budget.
Books are within our grasp technologically. There are issues about if it will be done by non-profits or projects like Google Books. We have an orphaned works problem. The way you ask a question in the US is through a lawsuit, Khale and Eldgrige. But if you get to frame a problem (orphaned works) you have already won. Who would forget the orphans? Give the orphans a home!
Next is in-print works. Amazon is working the other way, from print to out of print. We have found with the Open Content Alliance something that works. Even Microsoft is giving us money.
In Audio, if you take all the published works, there are 2-3 million musical works. A fairly litigated area. Some precedent that ripping them and putting them online might not be okay. A lot of musicians just looking to be put on the internet. The Grateful Dead allowed people to trade music. The key was, as long as no one was making any money. This allowed people to feel good about it. Legitimate bootlegging copies by other bands. So we went to this community and said: "would you like unlimited storage and bandwidth for free." They said, "we don't believe you." And they didn't like lossy compression. We said try us. Got lots of Okays. 2k bands, 30k recordings, everything the Grateful Dead played. Many versions of each concert, as there are debates over microphone types. If you give something for free, not only is it not taxed, but you get a tax rebate. Getting Slashdotted is a nightmare, your ISP bills could make you sell your guitar or house. Europe has a different copy-write scheme for performances (50 years), so we are working with the Dutch government to make old stuff free.
In Moving Images, 100-200,000 films. Not much, makes putting them online conceivable. We want to do this with DVD quality, but we are finding lots of archival films that never had distribution. Have 30k films on the Archive, dwarfed by YouTube, which is cool. Discovering genres like Lego Movies. Lots of these things end up in closets. Putting them online is $15 per video hour. We will host it, if it generally belongs in a library and it is okay to share it.
Television, we have a big Tivo, captured a Petabyte so far of 20 channels over a couple of years. We made one week available, the week of 911, we put online a month after. We are now understanding in the US that the news comes with a point of view. Chomsky used to say you should read 7 newspapers a day, recently this might make sense. Getting multiple points of view.
Television is technologically possible, there are some rights issues, but we could do it all -- all text, music, movies and TV is within our grasp. We got a change in the DMCA, yea! But we need a lot of help.
Web. We are best known from our web collection, about a Petabyte in size. In the history of libraries, they tend to get burned, usually by governments, and then they are sorry for 100 years, but it is too late. The lesson from the Library of Alexandria is don't just have one copy. Give copies away. Our first shot at this was with the Library of Alexandria version 2. If we had six or seven of these around the world I could sleep at night. We are trying to do this through large scale swap agreements.
Here is Wikipedia in the Archive. But most people are using it to look at their own stuff, their old websites. One of the reasons this is working is because we are non-profits.
Books, Music, Video, Software and Web -- it is all possible. Some open questions if it is public or private, for-profit or non-profit. Is Google the only shot we are going to have at scanning Harvard's library? Looks like it.
I'm going to use this opportunity to advertise some projects we need help on.
Non-profit Open Networks like SeattleWireless.net or MIT roofnet. Telecom company interests are not aligned with an open internet.
Distributed ownership network -- SFlan mesh network.
Open and transparent Web Search System -- Nutch. Let's build some alternatives and be more creative. Recall which does time-based search on the whole Archive, a project done by one woman that indexed more pages than Google, then she went to work for Google and hopefully she will come back.
Privacy and Anonymity. It is now known that the US Government is monitoring us. Tor.
Defensive Patent License. What if you did a GPL for Patents? The DPL is a license that reflects a public commitment to defense, so our patents are forever defensive. Any organization may freely use these licensed patents while so publicly committed to defense.
An Open Textbook system, started by Wikipedia. The number one request we get for books is textbooks.
Add Attribution to Wikipedia. Gutenberg guys didn't were nervous about the copyright thing. We should know where the facts from Wikipedia came from. Go read about Transclusion with Ted Nelson, backpointers. Richard Feignman, a physicist in 1982, was talking about how many layers it would take from Propedia to Micropedia to books as sources.
Open Library: annotate the book collection. Why is this book interesting to someone in the modern world. What can we do to re-inject old books into today?
We can pull off Universal Access to All Knowledge. This is where Wiki is going towards, one of the great things that humanity will be remembered for, up there with a Man on the Moon in the mythology of humanity.
Congrats to Mary and the whole team for launching Dabble. The smarts of this video remix community are just coming out now (at the time when YouTube is rumoredly valued at $1B, but that's another thing).
More than worth a dabble, and full disclosure I am an advisor.
Dan Bricklin prepared a screencast (7Mb, .swf) as an introduction to using wikiCalc. In it, you will see him paste from Excel and mashup stock quote and charting feeds. The Associated Press posted a in-depth profile of Dan that's a great read. Also read his blog posts working with Socialtext and the Beta release.
UPDATE: Podcast with Eric Lundquist from eWeek and Dan Bricklin.
If you liked EPIC 2014, the Googlezon film, and have dreams of perfect liquidity, you will love Sean Park's AmazonBay 2015 -- a future film on Financial Services disrupted by the net. From his making of post:
My premise is as follows: the basic structure and ecosystem of the financial services industry has remained relatively unperturbed by the internet revolution...
My point is that while there have been very important and very real improvements in productivity in financial services due to this investment in ICT, the underlying business models have changed very little - if at all - and there has been no ‘disruptive’ newcomers to the party. This is not completely surprising as the barriers to entry in financial services are very high: highly regulated, powerful (financially and politically) incumbents, extremely high customer inertia and a natural embedded conservatism given that we are dealing with people’s money. So if I am an eBay or an Amazon or Google or the next great WebCo, it is natural that I aim my innovation at softer targets like media or retailing (or even sports betting!) first. Main Street before Wall Street.
But while this entry barrier is very high, one day it too will be breached. It may be a few years away or more, but I believe it is ultimately inevitable.
Although speculative, Sean would know, he happens to run Digital Markets, and previously ran the Credit Business at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. One fascinating aspect of this scenario is the rise of sports betting as a dominant asset class.
Akimbo is an IPTV service for video and subscription on demand that is as simple to use as Tivo. To get content to your couch, you use your existing broadband connection (I plugged in a WiFi USB keychain and was downloading in minutes) and take advantage of 150 hours of storage. You can manage downloads with a Tivo-like interface as well as a web-browser (can't watch your content over the web, yet).
VoD has been a dream of the cable TV industry for years, and it just happened without them, almost. Akimbo is a relatively new network that has to contend with IP regimes that have vertically integrated. Content is relatively sparse with about 400 channels (RSS feed for what's new) -- with two notable exceptions.
Porn. Like all great new communications technologies, porn portends future. In this case, there are gobs of it, perhaps more than any content type -- but it does come with parental controls. My wife and I jokingly call it the Abimbo.
Video Blogs. Okay, this is where it gets interesting. Today there are only four video blogs on Akimbo, but Rocketboom and Clint Sharp are pretty cool. Subscribing to them are dead simple -- and video is still best watched on the couch. When I started seeing my friends on some of Clint's episodes I think I saw the future. With great independent content today, the launch of the video iPod with iTunes and new Flickr-for-video startups -- there will be a wealth of video blog content next year (more on that later). Akimbo is about to open the network -- Video bloggers will be able to submit a registered RSS feed with enclosures to get their clips on the network -- which will blow the doors wide open.
Until this happens, the utility is limited and you could end up with a big bill for premium downloads (not just porn). It does provide a good entertainment alternative, but they are stuck playing MPAA wargames. But the enticement today is a holiday special for $69 for the player (normally $199). The subscription service runs on the player or the Windows Media Center for $9.99 monthly or $199 lifetime.
Full disclosure: I got a player and one year subscription for free as part of the Silicon Valley 100.
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