Ross Mayfield's Weblog

RSS Winterfest 2004

RSS Winterfest is a free two-day Webcast augmented by Socialtext Eventspace on, you guessed it, Internet Syndication and standards like RSS and Atom. We're also presenting alongside some good folks.

Dean's Difference

A NYT article Napster Runs for President explain's Dean's difference is embodying emergent democracy:

The elusive piece of this phenomenon is cultural: the Internet. Rather than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960 debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was "the goofiest idea since the Hula Hoop."...

"The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it," says the author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book "Emergence" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some candidates' sites, he observes, "there is no difference between a blog and a chronological list of press releases." And the presence of a poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of the Dean Internet campaign "are the opposite of a poll," Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux operating system's code through open collaboration, so Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters... It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person....

With each generation technology some try to implement it as the previous one. This decreases the risk of a behavioral change, but at the cost of change itself.

Vonage and Groxis Extensions

Two of my favorite products just announced major extensions, making them truely great products.

Om Malik gets the scoop that Vonage will provide Softphones for your PDA or Laptop (PC or Mac). But being able to take your land line with you anywhere you get Wifi without tool charges. This is the death of captured audience pricing so common in hotelrooms and airport lounges. Perhaps this is in response to the take-up of Skype, who will face greater barriers bridging circuit and packet networks. But more likely this is a pre-emptive strike against the rapid entry of incumbent telcos by the Internet telephone company. Worth the $15/month and you don't have to lug around either your ATA or incumbent.

Groxis, the search visualization company, announced a Google plug-in. This lets you cover more of the web in a way you can make sense of it. Damn, Google needs to buy this company. You should buy its product for $50 to see what you are searching for.

Open Letter of Apology

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Please accept my sincerest apology for not responding to your email. Maybe it was blocked by my ISP or yours. Maybe it was filtered by my client. Maybe it was scanned and disappeared below the fold without being flagged. Luckily there are so many maybes that its now a social norm to resend email that was not responded to. Please do this. Such is life these days, but I do apologize for the inconvenience.

Yours in ping,

Ross

Augmenting Social Interaction

The best tools and services can do for real world interaction is to simply augment it. It can't be replicated nor replaced. Now that we have a critical mass of people using the Internet as a facet of everyday life, there is a rich spectrum of methods for augmenting social interaction to explore. One key dimension is how tools and services compensate for how the medium isn't relatively rich.

Remote and In-person Collaboration

Over the past few days I spent a great deal of time with remote members of the Socialtext team. Inter-personal communication is more than talk. Its made up of verbal and non-verbal cues. With a distributed organization you have to make up for the lack of cues, which has costs and benefits. When we get together it makes the difference between real world interaction and augmented remote interaction even clearer.

What we have found through augmenting our remote collaboration with our tool, IM and phone is a productive way of working that de-emphasizes emotion. Its almost like how when someone looses a sense they make up for it with the remaining five. You become more attuned to cues on calls: pauses, inflections, grunts, etc. But what really makes it works is a heightened sense for when an issue becomes emotional, something natural when you are passionate about your work, and mediating differences as soon as they arise.

We largely work within wiki, a medium that begets trust by giving up control. It also de-emphasizes personality and focuses on the substance of written content. When we get together in person, we have a rich body of shared understanding to draw from, but positions and background are revealed. This helps not just to augment meetings, but pacify them, so we seek to get the business part of the meeting quickly so we can simply enjoy each other's company.

If you blog publicly you have had similar experiences when you meet blog buddies. So much shared understanding puts to rest portions of the conversation and provides a productive basis for higher bandwidth exchange.

Frontiers of Understanding Cues

Researchers have long understood the primacy of cues. Our brains process facial cues them quicker than spoken word. Now researchers are using MRIs to reveal the same is true for body cues. Follow that link to the new Loom blog and a story that begins with Darwin's study of the expresions of emotions. For more on the study of emotions and how we are augmenting our capabilities to control them through neuroscience, see Brainwaves.

Emotions and Relationships at Distance

Beyond Smilies :-), many technologies attempt to help convey emotion at distance. One of the more interesting approaches is 3dme, which allows you to convey mood entered along eight dimensions through an avatar. What works about this approach is it provides a representation of facial cues that is open to interpretation. It doesn't explicitly codify an emotion nor transmit it with perfect clarity, but that's okay, the point gets across.

Conveying emotions is similar to the concerns people have about conveying identity and relationships in social networking. Of course these services do not capture the essence and facets of identity. Of course they don't capture the varying degrees and facets of relationships. I don't think they try to either. They are simply games that provide iconic profiles and proxies of ties -- much is left open to interpretation. Similar to how a price in a transaction represents a shared understanding of value between two parties at a moment in time even through the two parties have different understandings of underyling value or utility. The price doesn't capture all aspects of exchange, but agreeing to one speeds the transactional relationship.

Text is an amazingly rich medium for expressing emotion and fostering relationships, but it isn't as efficient as other modalities. Bloggers who are accustomed to the dedication and relatively slow pace of building relationships post-by-post often find social networking too transactional. Different networks will require different approaches (e.g. personal, dating, cultural and business networking), each with its own balance of rich modalities and transactional proxies. Of all the social networking services, because of the network it seeks to serve, Tribe is perhaps at the golden mean within this rich spectrum. Meetup is at the rich end and LinkedIn accels at proxy.

A Walk Through the Woods

To understand the future you can shape it, but also look to our children. What's fascinating about the Netgeners is not just how connected they are, but how they have discrete modes of being on and off. The other way to understand the future is watch what Joi does.

Disconnecting for a while helped me realize the strong difference between on and off and how we need both. Similarly we need time for F2F and M2M, but its less binary. The spectrum of richness that our modalities afford is gradually skewing towards augmenting F2F in increasingly mobile ways. I don't fear this change because we have a profound ability to adapt and compensate. Whether in making up for a lack of social cues or an abundance of information.

Breather

Had a great completely disconnected weekend. Well, not completely disconnected. Just connected to people near me. Good to experience the life of distance.

Consolidation

One consistent theme I picked up on at the Red Herring conference was consolidation. Most of the speakers were either CEOs of very large companies or VCs and the line of questioning was very oriented towards public markets (the format didn't allow audience participation). If you are a market leader, admitting the prospect of consolidation is in your favor. A good party line is that customers are demanding a smaller set of potential vendors. There is the prospect of competitors that haven't flushed out their fundamentals. But when companies start buying technology for competitive advantage again, disruptive technologies create room for new players. Consolidation is inevitable discounting disruption.

Almost every single presenting CEO said they were in an acquisitive mode. Most mentioned an appetite for mid to small-sized companies because of integration risks. Combine this with an open IPO market and its a relatively healthy sign.

VCs historically lag the NASDAQ by one year in valuation and deals done. Venture is a lagging indicator. In the VC sessions, they all agreed that consolidation in their industry is inevitable and it was even said that it simply hasn't happened yet. Its well known that many of the funds raised during the boom simply have raised more money than they can generate a return for. Expect this quarter's aggregate investment to be tremendously active, but the coffers remain. The best hope for this consolidation is for it to be driven by limited partners. The problem is in a low-yield environment venture is an attractive asset class and available capital becomes abundant.

Most every industry has dealt with the pain of restructuring, save venture capital. Given the following nature of the venture business -- the pain most industries we have felt will be evenly distributed.

Decentralization Under Attack

Fears of a Net of Control are well founded. I was truely aghast at the comments by Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos at the Red Herring conference. Crystallized why ICANN matters -- this is a battle of control and profiteering. From an article (reg. req.):

“SiteFinder will come back,” vowed Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign in an interview at the Red Herring Fall conference in Monterey, California, although he did not give a specific relaunch date. “A group of 200 technical zealots were against it and they got all the headlines,” said Mr. Sclavos. “Did they misinterpret it? Of course. We're not going to let this go.”

...Mr. Sclavos took the opportunity to take a swipe at ICANN: “It is time for the industry to grow up. The Internet is the infrastructure running the economy for the next three to four decades. We should not have ICANN volunteers running the policy of the Internet naming scheme.” He noted that he may be the only CEO in history to ask the federal government to regulate his industry because federal regulation would trump ICANN’s powers.

See Mitch's notes for further transcription, but this was the line that cut my ear:

We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.

This is a genuine threat to the very decentralized nature of the Internet. Its a stupid network, and those who try to make it smart do it for greed. Druming up fears may lead us to the scenario of the Imprimatur where freedom is curbed for sake of unjustified security. There is only one company positioned to serve certificates for every session, and I cannot help but assume that's the direction we are headed. And on that note, its the 35 Anniversary of the Tragedy of the Commons.

Health and Medical Weblogs

Use of weblogs by health care professionals and patients is a positive trend. Such as here, here, here, and here. Sharing best practices, contextualizing medical advances and building support networks advance medical practice. Health policy and practice is one of greatest issues in the US, something that impacts us as certainly as taxes. But we don't have medical bloggers in the A-list, the thrust of a recent article in the San Antonio Express.

"I'm disappointed (health blogs) weren't able to cover anything new on the Medicare drug benefit debate," says former Wall Street Journal reporter Donald E.L. Johnson, whose The Business Word, gets between 500 and 1,000 hits a day. "We asked questions, speculated on the politics, but nobody (online) was breaking any news."

That will eventually change, predicts Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, which sells so-called "social software" for business applications.

"We haven't had a big enough story to take these blogs to the next level," he says. "I hesitate to say it, but it will probably take something like an epidemic, like SARS, for that to happen."

Donald is absolutely right that there has been some very big news in the medical sphere that merits more conversation than we have given it. Beyond bad policy we could at least take interest in pork. Part of the problem is these issues require domain expertise and time to sort through and we don't want to deal with health issues unless they directly impact us. Conversations on health, like most blog conversation, is fundamentally local. A conversation between doctor and patient. Discussions of the latest viruses that impact school or work. Conversation between employer and employee about benefits afforded.

Lately, I found that medmusings is actually an emergency care practitioner at my clinic. Where I found out that the clinic has run low on flu vaccine amongst other things that pertain to me and my family. I have also had blog friends impart their health issues to receive support, advice and encouragement in return. Heck, health is greatest reason I respect Dave, for his courage to openly quit smoking and stick to it.

When SARS broke a year ago, I worried about the cold Joi caught while reports were streaming in. Jerry lived in Hong Kong at the time and recommended the Wikipedia page on SARS as the best coverage of a fast-changing distributed story. Much like how blogs cover fires and hurricanes, but providing a more consistent shared understanding of meaning.

Medmusings the locality of health:

I don't think that people are googling or feedstering to find as much health info online as they are depending on emails to each other. Take as a point my local example:

When i look around for the most active groups of seekers of online medical info locally, i find the Palo Alto Menlo Park Mothers Club email list. [disclosure: i'm the moderator of the PAMP dad's email list and coordinator of their Dad's night out meetings] It's a group of a thousand moms who spam each other daily with a few dozen emails asking for tips, stuff to sell, and where to buy or seek care. Yup, they ask each other who are the best pediatricians or family practitioners aound, and if you get on their bad side, they'll lob you a long treatise of how they've suffered.

A recent dialogue between club members and a local group ended amicably after a few members complained about the services provided, mostly about the lack of sensitivity to the members' fears during the procedure, and the lack of enough communication during and afterwards. It's amazing to see how powerful electronic communications can be used to leverage change in an organization, and it gives me hope that patients are gaining more power to advocate for better treatment.

You can imagine the value this group would gain from using weblogs or a service like Tribe. But beyond the local level, something needs to happen to bring health issues to top of mind. Whenever we have a very big story. like Iraq, a new voice emerges to represent it. A year ago we had less than 1 million blogs, but since SARS, something has changed:

The availability of free and low-cost blogging software has, over only the past year or so, caused an explosion in the blogosphere. In June, Phil Wolff of blogcount.com estimated there were 2.6 million to 2.9 million active blogs worldwide.

"But this was before AOL and Yahoo at least their Korean subsidiary introduced blogging services for their members," he says, adding that he expects the number to reach 10 million by the end of 2004.

So I wonder if when the next SARS happens if some local conversations will go global, health researchers will mine them for intelligence, practitioners will share practices and perhaps a new voice will emerge that can take very complex health issues and help us relate to them. Or maybe we just need to care more.

io

The one piece of schwag I picked up was a Logitech io Digital Pen. The pen uses an optical sensor to capture what you are writing, you plunk it in a USB connector and it uploads what you write or draw. Here's a handscribed blog entry. The demo provided by Accenture Labs didn't use character recognition to convert it to text.

The form factor is a little thick, but its biggest drawback is you have to use a special paper with 0.3mm spaced dots. Of course, they sell this paper, Post-IT notes, etc. with this proprietary pattern. Should be said that another iteration of pen computing is worthwhile as its an interface some prefer. But the main application will probably be forms in work place settings.