Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Where the Wild Things Are

The one geek conference I wish I had gone for fun is Where.

The media writes stories with the Who, What, When, Where, Why and sometimes How formula. Great framing for any story. O'Reilly first did How which was the first question of the net, driven by some Whos. Most of the alpha geeks already went through WWWWH to figure out the net.

We spent 1995-2000 trying to figure out the What of the net. What are we building and how do we make the mooh-la.

We spent 2000-2005 figuring out the Who. The Who really tripped us out -- all that data, about me, connected to others, privacy invasions and a lot of yadda yadda.

From 2005 to 2010 we will be trying to comprehend the Where. Every new mobile device will transmit coordinates, every location device will be sensor aware. If you thought the public would freak out about the public knowing who they are -- imagine the social awkwardness of where you are. Yeah, much of it is mundane. Home. Cubicle. Home. But you won't be able to get off the grid. Anywhere.

From 2010 to 2015, Where will compound When. But about then Neuroceuticals kick in and we are so productive and have augmented memory to the point where real timeshifting occurs.

After 2015 Why is the big question. John Battelle joked that that's the show he wants to run (no better guy). After that it's all dolphins, lazer beams and transcendental singularities.

Open Estonia

  Feeling Estonian 
  Originally uploaded by jurvetson.

Had a fascinating lunch with Juhan Parts, Prime Minister of Estonia 2003-2005, his delegation and some local Estonian leaders hosted by Steve Jurvetson at DFJ.  I believe the conversation was off the record, was generally on the future of Estonia, so let me just say some things on my mind independent from the meeting:

Our little country as at interesting turning point.  After EU and NATO succession and the development of a stable and growing economy, the question is, what's next?  The cost of living is rising rapidly in harmony with the EU and the sources of growth over the past 10 years will decline.

I have some strong views given my experience as an expat entrepreneur and former public sector contributor.  And given that I am thousands of miles away, I can voice them strongly.

Estonians are bright, honest (although they also have many who game systems, which keeps it healthy), well educated and hard working.  However, the long road to independence and establishing an identity while overcoming 50 years of occupation has led to complacency.  Estonians have a superiority complex and are intolerant of real diversity and don't trust strangers.  In a flat world, this is a competitive disadvantage.  Immigration and language policies once designed to keep Russian colonists at bay now hamper growth.  Education is mired with cruft institutionalism.  Regulations are unfairly applied, sometimes you are guilty until proven innocent.  Entrepreneurship was discovered by some through hardship, but the culture punishes failure.

The solution to this is to Open Estonia.  Invest in developing clusters of capability by supporting entrepreneurs and investors in new areas of competency.  In line with EU intent, open immigration so the best people who want to work with Skype and others can more freely (in Silicon Valley 70% of CEOs are first generation immigrants).   Open the education system to leverage open courseware and distance learning. Invest in more exchange programs.  Open source software becomes a strategic investment in developing capabilities.  Continue e-government initiatives towards transparency, feedback and internet voting -- recognizing e-government is not just about efficient provision of services, but civic engagement.  Invest in language technologies to remove barriers with other culture.

I would live in Estonia if it wasn't for:
* Un-cosmopolitan intolerance of diversity
* Business risks (not costs) that stem from the government instead of the market
* Cold winters

This is all very strong language to head off a nationalist streak that is so tempting when either backed in a corner or experiencing short term success.  The reality is living in Estonia is great for expats who can understand the larger context and Estonia has a bright future, except for the approaching dark winter.

Podcasting is the New Napster

I love the smell of disintermediation in the morning.  The new iTunes software update enables a little Podcasts folder.  Suddenly you get a clean aggregation of a selected fat heat of the long tail in an integrated experience.  iNow wonder if a word other than Pod should have arisen in the nomenclature.

Honestly, it's a boon for consumers.  Podcasting is the new Napster.  But I want something more.  Two things, actually, that could be summarized by the statement Podcasting is the New Voicemail:

• Non-proprietary extensions to syndication standards.  How great that a convicted monopolist has co-opted RSS?  How crappy is it that RSS is a standard of one.  Atom attracts users in the know and if Apple had a an inclusionary and fair process to deal with, the extension could be well formatted.  Anywho, I'm not in politics anymore.
• This is personalization, not socialization.  Give me Odeo in a heartbeat over this augmented MSM DJ.  Even if it is legal and free (given recent events, maybe the title of this post should be Podcasting is the New Grokkster), there is no social network here.  I am not a consumer and want to share...
  

Oh, and another very big thing.  Isn't anybody else concerned that Apple has introduced DRM into Podcasting?  Adam Curry's headline PodFinder show is in AAC format! (and I can't link to it).

I guess we should congratulate the company that we really want to love for engaging in social software.  This will be a boon for them.  And it will serve the best amateur producers.  But I don't want my MyTV (haven't talked to Adam Curry yet, sure he is a nice guy) that is TheirTV, I want OurTV.

UPDATE: Please see comments and BoingBoing for how wrong I was.  AAC is not DRM.  The AAC extension .M4P is DRM.  I apologize for any FUD or confusion.  I apologize to Adam Curry and Cory.  Further proof that you can be an idiot blogger, even if you frame things as a question.  But, funny things, those proprietary extensions, which is the first point of this post.

Yahoo Social Search Act II

My Platonic (or was it Aristotelean?) relationship with Yahoo tells me there will be a third act, but here is act II.

New Yahoo! Mail Gets Odd

I got a sneak peek of the new Yahoo! Mail client released tomorrow under limited beta.  It's the first version driven by the Oddpost team acquired a year ago.  You may recall those guys doing Ajax before it was cool. 

On the upside, this is the first webmail client that doesn't feel like it's on the web.  It has the look of Outlook (with Yahoo branding and an ad box), slick drag & drop across 3 panes, real keyboard shortcuts and right click menu, and wicked fast autocomplete and caching that lets you scan through folders with thousand of message even faster than Mail.app and other desktop clients.  Some of it will be familiar to Oddpost users, but now it works across platforms (including Firefox for the Mac!) and with Yahoo hosting, storage, search and spam protection it's simply of a different grade.  This will be one of the best examples of Ajax pixy dust others will seek to emulate.

On the downside, they haven't incorporated some of the features that could make webmail rule the earth.  RSS in and out.  Tags are the new folders.  Social networks as filters.  Synch to support mobility and our occasionally connected reality.  It's also simply a different design philosophy from Gmail -- automation for the mass over augmentation for the next -- and only markets will decide.

Oddpost did have RSS aggregation as folders. I do believe that openness has sunk into the Yahoo! being.  This does give them a leading interface platform they can integrate across the Yahoo! portfolio, build upon and let others build upon.

Supernova Backchannel

I participated in the closing panel at Supernova with Mary Hodder and Suw Charman: a chat about the backchannel that was as chaotic as a backchannel.  Technical difficulties provided a disarming tension at first and kept us from showing a video Mary made.  Here's the posted version, unfortunately the funniest part was edited out for mature audiences.  Suw posted her notes here.  At one point, I ran through the silliest powerpoint I could come up with. 

Despite my best attempts, Rohit said it was the best panel of the conference, which had little to do with the panelists and much to do with participation.

Open Letter on Wikitorials

Below is a version of an open letter to the editors of the LA Times that provides a multiple-point of view.  UPDATE: Revision 49, copied here, was sent on June 26th 2005.

Dear Michael Kinsley,

Wikitorials were supposed to provide an opportunity for the readers to engage with LA Times Editorial Content.  And they did. Over 400 people engaged in the wiki (a group-editable website), held conversations and began to create a community around LA Times content. Participants even took a bad idea, opening a finished viewpoint to editing after the fact, and turned it into a good idea -- making room for participants to offer counterpoints.

But instead of wikitorials, you got shreditorials and the site was taken down. Vandalism happens and the wiki form is especially susceptible to these problems. Shutting the wiki down immediately took away the greatest weapon that wikis have to fight vandalism: its users.

Devoted users take care of their wikis. If you had left the Wikitorial up, users could have grown to love and appreciate the community you were creating. Given guidance and time, vandalism disappears, as if by magic, but actually by the work of a handful of devoted users who care about what happens to the common resource they help create.

Some relatively simple technical measures would have reduced both the chance and the impact of vandalism. Editorials don't need to have pictures in them; that feature can come out of the system. The built-in "Recent Changes" and "Watchlist" features allows users to track changes that are inappropriate and simply revert back to a previous version of the page, leaving the collectively built opinion intact. Additional measures such as requiring registration with clear policies for participation could be employed to enable the LA Times to open the community with reasonable measures of control.

We sought membership in a community you opened. We co-invested ourselves in creating a new resource and would have defended it over time. We would still like to engage with you to foster this community. Trust, engage and foster our community and you may find that participatory media can revive your business model and role in the community.

Just as the one wikified editorial called for a plan of action, we ask the Editorial Board to respond with a plan for a social contract. This social contract should embody:

• A timeline for opening the community
• A clear policy for when, if ever, the community will be shut down again
• Clarification of appropriate participation and guidelines to be enforced by the LA Times and the community
• An approach for content licensing that fosters collective contribution, such as the Creative Commons Non-commercial Attribution license.
• A restated vision for the community to follow.

Wiki-based communities are not made of software, they are made of people. Let us discover our own power to participate together.

Signed,
Your community

UPDATE: Michael Kinsley is a guest of Open Source Radio this Wednesday night

Podcasting is the New Voicemail

Hi there!  I can only get to the phone right now, but wanted to leave you a message after this beep.  Podcasting is the new voicemail.  Soon it will be one of the simplest ways to communicate with groups.  This is Ross Mayfield, and that's all I've got to say.

This week Odeo lassoed it's beta users with podcasting usable enough for many of the masses. The gang is putting the band back together and iTunes is about to bake in podcasting.  It's a good time point to where podcasting may be going.  At least so I can claim I invented it later.

First, let's admit that podcasting generally sucks.  It sucks time to produce and consume.  The attention economy demands we trend towards four casting models:
• Validated Hits that exhibit preferential attachment
• Social discovery where validation is recommendation
• Deep linking and discovery to overcome time-based media
• Group voicemail

At Supernova, Linda Stone went beyond explaining her concept of continuous partial attention to suggest that in such an overloaded world, value will shift to shared experiences with dedicated attention.  This would be mostly true if it weren't for our newly discovered power to participate in the Power Tail and rise to the Fat Head.  One powerful social incentive is stardom, which the Odeo disco taps into nicely.

The podcasting genre is certainly too early to define.  But when blogging, stereotyping is akin to metaphor, so what the heck.  Podcasting does enable amateurs to produce and distribute at low cost (except time, ack!).  Generally this means that lots of content will suck.  Remixing takes time and a bit of talent,  and the masses are not that talented.  But most everyone can talk, desires to and can use a phone.

Podcasting is the new voicemail.  Today you cast to your friends by leaving them silly, stupid or great messages -- one at a time.  Just like blogging, not everyone will podcast for the public.  It's too fucking weird!  But, when given the comfort zone of one or two degrees of separation -- they just might.  LJ for VM.  The phone and it's VoIP incantations will be the interface of choice.  Uploaders will evolve into clients as caches with the dynamism of web clients.  iTunes and iPod will have to join the two-way web.  You will cast audio messages to your groups, they will listen when convenient, and social signals will help you find your deeper voice.  A version of audio comments will provide deeper feedback, you will want to limit access to it for sake of time, and suddenly phone tag may become fun.  The best messages will be remembered, tossed around and perhaps, with permission, bubble up to cultural consciousness.

Since most of us with cast by phone, another direction the genre may go is the way of ringtones, a $500M market.  Intelligent ringtones are coming fast (rude ones too) and look at the social models unfolding in the Philippines.  The wire-tapped voice of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo discussing vote-rigging has become an overnight ringtone sensation.  Someone told me that in the Philippines you can download horntones, which are popular with taxi drivers, so you can imagine the cacophony. Who wants Carl Castel or other celebrity voice mail recordings when you can have your friends?  When the phone rings, why not hear the last 1 minute rant from the person who is calling before answering?  Think of the sound design for all kinds of spaces when it could reflect the tastes, context and networks of their occupants.

Maybe this is just an excuse to cast pebbles in the pond, or claim my Odeo channel, but for the scale of the podosphere to grow to it's full potential it will have to facilitate sharing the way most people do.  With people.

UPDATE: Looks like an iTunes Phone, sold by Cingular, may be a reality.  Get my point?

Social Physics Takeaways

John Clippinger of SocialPhysics.org provided some Provocative Take Aways at the end of his Supernova speech:

• Trust is biologically encoded and supported by emotions
• Can have principled strategies for acheiving high levels of trusted exchange
• Identity is multiple. distributed. contextual, role based and reputational
• Markets are a kind of social networks and depend upon the social emiotions - trust - empathy - reciprocity - to function
• Long tailed markets are aggregates of social contexts
• Trust feeds on transparency

Linda Stone on Continuous Partial Attention

Was too distracted to take complete notes for her intro to a Supernova panel on Attention...

To cope with complexity we have stretched attention to it's limit. it is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network. We feel alive when we are connected. To be busy and connected is important. We are increasingly over-stimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled.

Email free fridays as a mechanism. Sending emails around is a terrible way to make decisions. Some ban Blackberries at meetings. Three kinds of meetings at Microsoft: free for all, one where the front of the room has to pay attention (in the back it's okay to slack) and ones where total attention is demanded.

We count on experts to filter for us. It used to be that productivity made us feel alive, now its feeling connected. Social networking where quantity of connections makes us feel connected, but the lack of meaningfulness is disconcerting. Dan Gould; I quit every social network to be able to have time to have dinner with real people. The aphrodisiac in the coming era is committed attention. Experiencing engaged attention is to feel alive, through trusted environments that enable meaningful connections. Our opportunity is to create tools and technologies that really do enhance our quality of life.