BookBlog

The best breaking news from New Orleans I've been able to find...

is from the Times Picayne Breaking News blog. Very local coverage of Hurricane Katrina with updates several times an hour.

Update: The Times Picayune is evacuating their building and they're not posting right now. WWL-TV is evacuating also. WWL is posting blog-style updates every few minutes.

Update: Also, StormDigest blog coverage is collating original reports from the mainstream media.

A local tv station had been on the air with substantive interviews with local officals interspersed with vacuous tv chatter; the stream isn't working anymore. Update: they now have CBS broadcasting WWLTV

Best of luck and prayers for the people in New Orleans.

Innovest research shows returns on "natural capitalism"

Doing some homework on alternative energy and sustainable investing, I came across a paper in the Financial Analysts' Journal using data from Innovest showing superior returns for a portfolio of companies rated highly on environmental metrics.

The difference between this study and earlier research is that green performance is measured, not just by reducing pollution, but by eco-efficiency, "defined as the ratio of the value a company adds (e.g., by producing products) to the waste the company generates by creating that value." This makes some sense -- attention to material efficiency, like supply chain efficiency, would improve a company's performance.

FlickrFrame

Imagine a flat panel wall-mounted screen with a very slowly alternating selection from Flickr. The FlickrFrame could come with a remote control that lets you fast forward, pause, and navigate through friends, interesting photos, themes.


flight of the rainbow, Originally uploaded by linny.


Traditional art selection is a commitment. Unless you are wealthy enough to rotate a collection, you get a photo framed or buy a piece of art and live with it for years. The FlickrFrame would provide visual variety without Martha Stewart's budget.

There are images that are emotional or loud, that I'd want to look at sometime, but not everyday all year long. The FlickrFrame would allow the viewing of jagged and soothing images, without being locked into states of permanent angst or tranquility.

Looking at the Flickr API docs, someone has done a little bit of this with a hack that lets you display Flickr photos on a TIVO. "You can choose to display pictures searching by tags, groups, sets, users or just the most recent photos. This is configured by a GUI on the PC, or command line options for the adventurous." It doesn't have the very-slow-rotation feature, and it requires a Tivo.

The idea of transient art is implemented in 3d by the Canvas Gallery, a cafe and gallery in San Franciso that has art for sale or rent. I haven't seen the model in other places, not sure why. If there is furniture rental, surely there should be art rental.

MiniFlickr

Thinking about different settings to surf image, it would also be cool to have a Flickr browser for a handheld or screenphone. This would want a similar interface as the FlickrFrame's remote control, allowing navigation of tags, people, and other streams with a few keypresses and good lookup. Good for meditative time on trains, in line, and other time spent otherwise waiting.

this looks like one way to do it.

Thanks to Peter Kaminski for Flickr-inspired brainstorming.

Neighborhood veggies

The new Farm to Market Grocery on South Congress is a super-convenient and friendly little storefront with fresh organic vegetables from local farms.

It's not cheap, but it's better food-per-dollar than takeout, and a fraction of the hassle of Central Market or the Whole Foods theme park, or HEB's sad little organic produce section.

The veggies are the star of the show, but they also have fridge cases with organic dairy and frozen food, and shelves with packaged staples and condiments.

They also do a fine job with small quantities of fancy treats. A few days ago, I was buying dinner and craving dessert. They had a tiny container of goats-milk ice cream (no photo). Yum. For the money, less volume and more happiness.

Unlike the local Disney-qua-grocer, which requires you to get a permit to take a picture of their displays, the Farm to Market crew were happy to see a customer take snapshots.

Web platforms are as dangerous as desktop platforms, until...

Google maps, Flickr, Ebay, and other web services with APIs are pulling the relevant platform away from the desktop and toward the web.

Still, the network effect of powerful, privately owned web APIs is potentially as dangerous as the network effect of Microsoft's desktop APIs. On any given day, Google or Ebay have the right to change their APIs and make life difficult for their developers. They have the right to change the terms of service, and increase prices on services that their developers depend on completely.

The lockout effect could be even worse, because Google and EBay own the servers, and changes can take effect in real time. When Microsoft bakes DRM into every copy of Windows, users don't need to upgrade their PC immediately. But if Google or Ebay changed terms of service, those dependent on the service would need to comply immediately.

Google and Amazon, and Ebay's big servers are a big deal. A web service can start small. But once service becomes popular, it takes a good amount of capital to complete. Currently, competition between GOOHOO and AMABAY are keeping things lively. But oligopoly could lead to complacency and extractive economics, as in other industries.

The owner of a dominant API/service is in a very powerful position. Google has the ability to adhere to its corporate slogan, "do no evil." That ethical stance does make a real difference. A powerful ruler can choose to be a benevolent dictator or a tyrant. But the temptation is there for power to corrupt.

I can imagine a way out of this oligopoly bind.

What if there was peer to peer for web service requests. Many small servers could run the popular service, and publish their availability. When a client issues a request, the request would be taken by an available server. This wouldn't work for services that require a pre-existing content store (like maps?). But it would work for services that require large amounts of individual content (like calendars?).

Maybe the technology already exists somewhere, and is waiting for the killer app. Maybe I'm missing something -- this is just musing outloud. What do you think?

"Why can't I burn a song, even if it's in my music"

A few days ago, I disagreed with the argument that Yahoo was more closed that Google because Yahoo hosts commercial content. In a "long tail" world, popular content helps attract users and doesn't displace peer content.

DRM and license terms are more relevant dimensions of open-ness. So long as the Yahoo Music Help section has a page called Why Can't I Burn a Song, Even If It's in My Music?, the jury says "closed".

At the same time, Yahoo's MediaRSS has the opportunity to be a disruptive technology, coming from the bottom up to change the market share of DRM.

In the words of Wired News, "Niche content creators syndicate their content with an MRSS feed, which includes metadata about the work. The information goes out to subscribers just like a blogger's RSS feed and incorporates video and audio... Yahoo! made sure MRSS was open and nonproprietary. Thanks to that hands-off policy, MRSS has caught on: Both Google and AOL encourage content creators to use MRSS to help their search engines identify and index video.

Motivated amateur and mid-list music and video producers can syndicate with RSS. Good search engines will get the word out. When this approach starts collecting money (the way blog ads do), less restrictive distribution terms will start gaining market share.

Google kicks open closed IM services

Yowza! How long will it take for Google's IM and voice chat to meet and surpass the usage of the whole sorry proprietary lot of AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. And how many minutes will it take to open their networks after Google's announcement?

In a world where you can phone anybody and email anybody and fax anybody, the IM vendors created absurd islands.

Google's service is based on the open Jabber protocol, unlike Yahoo, which fought and lost a guerrilla war last year against the third-party clients Gaim and Trillian, which patiently reverse engineered the repeated protocol changes that Yahoo used to fend off other clients.

By contrast, Google's site proudly advertises other clients, including Adium, Gaim, iChat, Psi, and Trillian. The developer site invites developers to build more tools to help more people connect.

The vile AOL terms of service claims that AOL owns the content of its customers' conversations: ""Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content." AOL makes customers agree to those draconian terms, and then has the gall to claim that they don't really mean it, it's just boilerplate, the lawyers made us do it.

By contrast, Google's lawyers know who's the boss: " Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not otherwise claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload or transmit from, or store using, your Google Talk account."

I look forward to hearing from voice gurus about Google's choices for security and voice -- they're starting off with XMPP, and adding support for SIP, and are federating with Earthlink and Sipphone service.

Summary -- the anybody talks to anybody approach will destroy the island approach. Reed's Law wins: the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

tip from Chip, who explains that the server supports TLS security to encrypt your words in transit.

p.s. critique from the folks at Techdirt that the Google IM client is missing some important features -- it doesn't save conversation history, and it doesn't search. It's hard to imagine that Google will forget search in future versions.

I still think that major provider + open network + developer community will beat the closed islands over time.

PR is listening

I was on a panel last week for the Association for Women in Communications, a group of PR professionals. The topic was blogging in business, and it drew a lively crowd.

Teresa Estrada told the story of IBM's blogging policy -- they're for it. As IBM becomes more of a services, company, they see blogging as a way of changing the impression of IBM as a faceless behemoth (not her words). She had sensible answers to people's anxieties about unprofessional behavior.

Sean-Paul Kelly, aka the Agonist gave a fiery talk about how blogs compensate for the failings of mainstream media, and have a symbiotic relationship with mainstream media.

The hot button conversation topics are the ethics of blogging; blogging "vs." the mainstream media; "getting fired for blogging".

These topics distract from what seem to me to be the major theme for communications professionals. Blogging turns PR from mostly pitching to mostly listening. You can find out what people are saying about you, and be part of the conversation.

Traditional media (think mediation) is a workaround for the inability to talk to people directly, and to hear what people are saying.

Yahoo personality crisis?

via Peterme, an Economist article argues that Yahoo's business strategy is contradictory -- they want to provide content, and to provide tools for user-generated content.

The Economist's analysis misses two key points about networked business models.

• the Long Tail. Chris Anderson rightly argues that businesses providing "niche content" benefit from having popular content as a draw. A shopper might come for ColdPlay and find less popular artists through the recommendations. There's no conflict, and a lot of benefit, to having a broad spectrum of content from commercial hits through homegrown productions
  
• the Lead User. Services like search and blogging and mapping are streamlined for convenience-seeking, mainstream users. At the same time these services have APIs that allow "lead users" to craft more specialized applications that build on these basic services.
  

The Economist quotes John Battelle to make its point:

Yahoo!'s “business model is necessarily in conflict,” says John Battelle, the author of a forthcoming book on the search industry. With so much content owned by Yahoo! or generated within its site by users, the quandary for the firm will be: “Do you point people to your own stuff or to the most relevant stuff?” If the former, Yahoo!'s reputation as a trusted internet search and navigation brand may evaporate; if the latter, its content may not earn the returns to justify Yahoo!'s investments in it. By contrast, says Mr Battelle, Google, which has chosen not to make content, does not face this conflict.

Jeremy Zawodny says that Yahoo is becoming less of a "walled garden" because they are opening up to more user-generated content. More user-generated content is good, but they're not actually in conflict with each other.

In a world of infinite shelf space, Britney Spears doesn't crowd out obscure bluegrass. Battelle is concerned that Yahoo will favor popular commercial content. But that would be self-defeating -- Yahoo will make more money if they use the "head" to help cultivate business in the "tail." Amazon discovered the opposite of the "Battelle effect". Amazon makes more money when it sells gear from merchants than its own gear. So it adds feature to recommend third party goods.

So, I don't think there is a conflict between popular content, niche content, and peer content. The more the better, with search and community tools to find and share.

There is a conflict, I think, but it's different than the tension between popular content and peer content -- and Google has just as much of a conflict as Yahoo.
For both companies, part of the product line is software, not just content. Google provides its own search software which is optimized for mass use. And it provides APIs for developers to extend searching to a million niches.

The conflict between central provider and developer is perhaps greater with software. Google and Yahoo owns their own mapping APIs. Its developers don't. The big kids have some benefit from keeping its APIs stable to gain network effects. But if they choose to change the APIs, developers are stuck rebuilding.

Belated praise for Library Lookup

Jon Udell's justly-praised Library Lookup bookmarklets snag the url of a book you're admiring on Amazon.com (or BN.com, or other book site), and finds out if it's in stock at your local library.

You can find the Austin link on this page. On Firefox/Windows, you can "right-click" to bookmark the link, and add it to your Personal Toolbar folder.

The only thing it doesn't do is return the books for you.

Conversation Clouds

Here's what I mean by conversation clouds:

The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time.

You can start with a participant (the url of a person's weblog), or a search term (a word or tag) Nodes are clustered based on closeness, measured by number of links and reverse links over a period of time (comments, too, if you can measure them).

If the picture starts with a link, then that link is at the center of the picture. The picture shows the links between the first node and the other nodes, and between other nodes that are connected to each other.

If the picture starts with a word, topic, or tag search, then the cloud contains a cluster of blogs that include the term or tag in the last time period. The picture shows lines between blogs that link to each other. Unlinked blogs are thrown out.

The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.

This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities.

Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with Mary Hodder's post on blog metrics, and then traverse to Dina Mehta, danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield.

The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or Blogpulse search would -- who linked to the post. And it would also illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you zoomed out the time horizon, you'd see some relationships become more obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks.

I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation.

The results would be more interesting than a diagram of an email thread -- where participants already know who's talking to whom. It woudn't be particularly rankist, since webwide popularity isn't relevant to the picture. It would let you browse to related people, or related ideas that the same people are talking about.

The next step is to test this idea, maybe with a manually drawn picture, and then with a dataset and a toolkit like TouchGraph. This seems like a good experiment to me. It could be somebody's done this already. Or somebody's tried this and proved that it doesn't work. Please share if you know.

p.s. Zawodny talks about the need for content discovery. I don't know about you, but a lot of the content that I discover comes from browsing through a conversation and finding voices that I want to keep hearing.

Lead users vs. "Crossing the Chasm"

MIT professor Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation studies the role of user innovation in product development, and concludes that businesses should follow their lead users to find profitable new products.

The book cites research showing that a surprisingly large number of users —from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent—develop or modify products. Open source software is the example that first comes to mind, but user innovation is found in a wide range of business and consumer products ranging from pipe installation to medical equipment to camping gear.

People who customize their products belong to a class of "lead users" who are "ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there." In one study, Von Hippel's team followed the product development process at 3M. The researchers concluded that following lead users can lead to greater success in the development of new products than following traditional market research methods that focuses on identifying the needs of broader market segments.

Von Hippel recommends a business strategy to "follow the lead users". This can mean taking their lead on product direction. Many "lead user" customizations are one-offs. But the ones that are repeated point the way to the most innovative and successful new products. Companies can supporting "lead users" with toolkits that help modify products. Some industries, including chip design, have been retooled to support the creation of customer designs almost entirely.

This advice is nearly the opposite of the canonical strategy in Geoffrey Moore's 1991 classic, Crossing the Chasm. Moore argues that for high-tech companies, focusing on lead users can lead to business failure. Moore observes that high-tech products follow a market adoption curve, starting with "early adopters", who are eager for advantage through innovation, and continuing through the more conservative "early majority" and mainstream buyers.

In Moore's analysis, the "early adopters" have more in common with each other than with everyone else. Because early adopters are the first customers of a high-tech product, high-tech companies can get caught in a trap attempting to please their early adopters, and never break out of the trap into mainstream success. Mainstream buyers are put off by the customizeable knobs and levers that attract the "early adopter" tinkering class. Instead, mainstream buyers prefer ease of use, packaging, and service.

Geoffrey Moore advises high-tech companies to stop trying to please their early adopters. Instead, they should identify market segments that need the product, and product a feature-rich, well-serviced package for these market segments. Once there are enough of these segments to prove the viability of the product, the product may join the main stream. At that point, the product experiences a"hypergrowth" phase, when the best thing thing the company can do is to ignore customer request altogether, and simply ship product.

Why do these two strong theories contradict each other?
* is user innovation increasing with the spread of design toolkits and open source software, so that more users are becoming "early adopters"?
* does Von Hippel's work simply focus on an earlier part of the technology adoption life cycle than Moore?

Comments are most welcome.

The state of the world looks sunnier

After weekend time reading back issues of the Ergosphere, the fate of the world seems a bit cheerier. Using knowledge of chemistry, mechanical engineering, and a great flair for napkin-level modeling, the ergosphere draws compelling pictures of ways to displace energy systems based on cheap oil and wasteful practice. This piece on domestic cogeneration is a great example.

It will take capital to make this happen. Since I last looked into the market after getting jazzed by Natural Capitalism before September 11, there's a lot more attention and money flowing intoventure investing and more support in the public market.

Much cheerier than reading the survivalists over at Peak Oil/

Blog rank and popularity

On the other hand, I recoil from the implication by Dina Mehta that we should turn blog rank into an explicit, Orkut-like friend rating system.

I like this measure - "i enjoy their company" - maybe someone should use that as some form of index? There are some bloggers who come up with really 'popular' posts which get linked to heavily - they may be 'popular' in a mechanized sense, but it isn't always the case that they make for relevant reads most of the time. There's value in what Alok says as it may lend itself to a more holistic approach - if someone loves hanging out at your blog, enjoys your company through conversations there, that's the best measure for me. It is what builds my network and community in ways that are far more compelling than from just links I may generate.

Hmmm.... rereading Dina's post, it is not clear whether she is talking about implicit metrics and visualizations, or explicit rankings. I like the first idea and hate the second. This goes back to the critique of "friending" during the social network service fad. Explicitly declaring the emotional valence of a link or comment -- fondness, congeniality, prickliness, etc. is not socially a good thing.

Although, going back to the discussion that sparked this conversation about the differences between men's and women's patterns of relationship, this brings to mind a social pattern from girl society in grade school. Little girls have explicit friend ranking. A girl will say that Heather and Myra are my Best Friends. I used to be friends with Sarah but I don't like her any more. Girls compete explicitly to be friends with popular girls. Rank is bolstered by deranking girls who are less popular with mean gossip.

I suppose we could revolt against the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism by implementing an explicit, short-list, constantly changing, competitive "best friends" feature. Let's not.

On the other hand, it would be interesting for discovery services to reveal the strength of ties, through the pattern of interlinking and commenting among subcommunities. For example, at Socialtext, we did an analysis that showed the strong ties between the cross-disciplinary design team at Ziff Davis, and weak ties between the designers and the sales and marketing staff.

I would much rather reveal that I enjoy and respectMary Hodder's facilitation of the conversation about alternative blog metrics through the visualization of links to Mary's posts and cross-links to others in the conversation, than to rate Mary.

Unlocking the value of topic blogs

Carson of Buzzmetrics talks about the financial value currently hidden in the midlist. A blogger in the so-called midlist might be highly influential in their subcommunity.

One thing which I think might be interesting to add to the discourse, would be something around topicality. i.e. "influential on what?" Because BuzzMetrics is typically answering questions of influence within a commercial setting, we are rarely looking for "top bloggers." We are looking for "top influencers amongst wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform."

Exactly. Many bloggers are not general celebrities but are influential in some domain. Compared to traditional research, blog search is a very low cost way of finding those networks of influence.

Technorati's broken for the midlist

Lately, I've found that Technorati searches to find who's responded to my posts have become unbearably slow. Often it takes a few searches in a row for results to show up.

A Technorati employee explained that they've got a problem in the queue to fix that affects only midlist blogs. Currently, searches are more efficient for blogs with a great many links, and those with only one or two links. Searches are painfully slow in the middle.

This makes Technorati less useful for conversation discovery, particularly for the people who desire it most. Will Wheaton is a celebrity with high link rank from adoring fans. He probably isn't interested in talking back to all the fans who write about him, except in a selective "fan letter quote" manner. He's probably most concerned with the size of the audience, because that helps drive the audience and word of mounth for his books and television shows.

Midlist bloggers probably care most about conversation discovery -- they are blogging in order to participate in a conversation, and each cogent reference is valuable.

Whether the segment is valuable to Technorati depends on their business model. Niche blogs with subcommunity connections ought to have value -- more value than can be unlocked yet. The question is whether Technorati's customers are marketers and advertisers to whom they simply sell metrics -- in which case it doesnt' matter if the system performs poorly for the midlist. Or whether there's value with those users directly, by showing ads to them or providing paid services.

Conversation, not rank

In Mary Hodder's roundup of comments on the discussion of community metrics, I agree wholeheardedly with Dina Mehta. Dina says that the value of Technorati to her is conversation discovery.

For instance, I have no interest in what my ranking on Technorati is, but I do visit it daily to see who is linking to me and how they might have progressed a thought. Yet, I'm not so happy when these get transformed into lists, ratings and rankings. Are you merely well-known, or well-read?

Yes, exactly. I use Technorati to see who responded to what I wrote, to discover distributed comments. I also use Technorati to find out who's written about something I'm interested in at the moment. Then (if I have something to say), I'll comment on their blog or link to them. Technorati is for discovering and continuing conversation.

Link rank is a not-so-interesting byproduct.

Exburb power and oil

Michael Lind wrote a post on TPM Cafe with a seriously problematic argument that cities are parasitic on suburbs. The article was roundly criticized in comments and follow-up posts. But there's a grain of truth about the political and economic power of the far suburbs. That power (among other things) is threatened by the rise in gas prices.
An Associated Press poll reveals that surburbanites are starting to worry.

The poll conducted for The Associated Press and AOL News found that 64 percent say gas prices will cause money problems for them in the next six months. In April, 51 percent expressed such concerns. Those most likely to be worried are people with low incomes, the unemployed and minorities. However, the level of concern was rising fastest among women, retirees, married people and those living in the suburbs.

The phone companies entering the cable business

The phone companies are spending large amounts of money, in business investment and lobbying in order to enter the video business. In Texas, SBC just won a victory that lowers their cost compared to cable television by allowing them to start out with statewide franchises, instead of negotiating with each city.

The phone companies have been eyeing ways to diversify away from phone service for decades. In the 80s and early 90s, AT&T made a series of disastrous attempts to enter the computer business after the anti-trust settlement with the US department of Justice.

Video distribution seems a better fit than PCs. It's a familiar business model, where where a being an oligopoly owner of a distribution channel makes you the leading provider of a service. Owning big servers and pipes is surely a competitive advantage, as is managing an itemized billing service.

The phone companies know they need to slug it out with the cable companies with price wars and features. But cable won't be the only competition. The market is also seeing entrants with new distribution models."Long-tail" business like Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Google have the ability to leverage big servers, ecommerce and ad platforms, search and recommendation engines to become major distribution channels. Peer to peer distribution is becoming a notable alternative to get video, and ad models are emerging for p2p. Content providers like the Comedy Channel can host Daily Show clips themselves. The low cost of video is starting to create a generation of video podcasters. Services like Ourmediaare emerging to host amateur audiovisional content.

This is going to make the video business much less of a comfy oligopoly. The phone company will have to fight for the market.

The Broadcast Niche

Broadcast contains two kinds of content -- things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won't die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.

Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban's blog. Cuban post focused on technology -- he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn't being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.

The video market has been migrating to "personal schedule" for decades. But there are two things that kept "event" and "program" content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create "pseudo-events" -- broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.

Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce's post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce's article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.

The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast -- whether over-the-air, or on cable -- gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.

Steve Hannaford's Oligopolywatch

OligopolyWatch covers the business news and underlying business trends of industry consolidation. Nice stuff for market research geeks.

On prejudice against southern white people

This from Boing Boing, a crew that would be offended by stereotypes against black people, gay people, Jews, asians.

On the one hand, there's a bit of a hesitation for a liberal to fight cultural stereotypes of uneducated southern white people, because of the risks of the opposite stereotype. In the wrong places, one might run the risk of insult or even violence for being: liberal, non-christian,
gay, asian, black. It's hard to immediately defend people you imagine might beat you or your friends up.

On the other hand, the "coastal elite" / "redneck" stereotype wars are counterproductive, create personal offense, provide opportunities for destructive "wedge" politics. Some friends of mine have strong southern accents, and report that they are treated like idiots when they travel North.

Criticizing intolerant and ignorant actions, absolutely. Ethnic stereotypes, not so good.

MSN Filters: blogging as mass media

Ross is scathing about MSN's new "Filters" project, a commercial group blog in the business niche that Weblogs Inc occupies.

Ross argues that by creating a blog zine with paid writers, MSN Filter is competing with its customers. That implies that blogging is a mass-medium with limited channels. During the height of the portal frenzy, there were stats suggesting that the Web was consolidating to three home pages. The "Long Tail" discussion and Google Adsense have put that to bed.

To the extent that part of blogging joins the mass media, more power to them. MSN and AOL already have portal home pages with pictures of celebrities and celebrity gossip. I don't care, and I don't have to care. Radio is a top-40 wasteland, but satellite and internet offer diversity. As long as I can find and read the blogs I care about, they are welcome to compete with Gossipster.

I suppose it's competing with those customers who are doing blogging for money. If MSN had social smarts, they'd be looking for the popular bloggers on their service, and promoting them onto the portal for extra traffic, and compensating them. Given their terms of service, they could just take the content and not compensate the customers, which would be legal but reprehensible.

Purple pro and con: the insight and the argument

Chris Dent writesin praise of purple numbers. These paragraph-level identifiers enable re-use of content. Chunks of good ideas are locked inside larger units, within documents and discussion threads.

The benefit of purple numbers is that they unlock insights, increasing the liquidity and flow of ideas. The drawback is that they break apart arguments. Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.

Sometimes, picking apart the individual points is what's needed to find the holes and strengthen understanding. Sometimes, picking at individual points is a sign of a flamewar -- people are searching for points of disagreement. Picking at points can increase the quality of thought, or reduce the quality of thought by reducing the incentive to build toward a larger theme.

In general, the wiki form is conducive to concensus, by bringing people literally on the same page. It will be interesting to see how wiki+purple affects the quality of thought and level of agreement.

Information service, communication service, and bad law

The FCC exempted phone companies from having to lease lines to internet service providers. They did this by re-classifying broadband as an "information service", which was ruled not to be subject to line-sharing.

In the words of Light reading the FCC ruled that the physical facilities that deliver broadband, and the broadband service itself are indistinguishable and inseparable. The two things together -- the facility and the service -- are now called an “information service.” The “facility” part of that service can no longer be separated and called a “telecommunication service,” and as such can't be subject to common carriage rules.

The FCC is doing exactly the wrong thing to adapt to the change in telecom technology. Back when phone and cable were different from each other, there were two categories of regulation -- telecommunication services (phones) and communication services (cable companies) -- to regulate very different kinds of services.

Now, the network is the same. Internet broadband can carry phone, video, and any other kind of content.
* Broadband connectivity has a tendency toward monopoly. It is expensive to lay fiber, which creates the broadband connections.
* Broadband services are a hyper-competitive market, with low barriers to entry.

In order to increase competition, you'd want to treat the oligopolistic connectivity market separately from the competitive service market. You'd enable competing connectivity providers on the wire, to increase competition. You'd watch for signs of monopoly power, and regulate if needed. And you'd treat the hypercompetitive service with as little regulation as possible.

The FCC's response is backward -- they are squelch competition, by considering services inseparable from access.

Avoid rankism with clouds

In response to Mary Hodder's concern about "rankism"... I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right.

A cloud presentation would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in. It may show secondarily the influence strength within that community, but that should be secondary in the presentation.

A cloud presentation might enable navigation along topic axis. For my blog, you'd be able to traverse to social software and austin clouds.

Influence would be calculated within the cloud. So, Jon Lebkowsky would have separately-calculated influence level within Austin and environmental blog communities.

Perhaps the presentation would allow the browser to traverse communities. One could find "blogher", and traverse to the "sepia mutiny" south asia community.

Time would be an interesting factor. Perhaps one could view the cloud by week, month, or year. See how participation ebbs and flows over time. A longer time frame would be interesting -- I wonder whether other bloggers are "bursty" in their topics of interest. A long time frame would catch people who come and go.

In sum, a cloud presentation would avoid the worst of rankism, because it would focus on the community more than the individual, and allow a browser to traverse communities.

Mary Hodder on Blog Community Discovering

In a thoughtful essay, Mary Hodder explores what it will take for blog search to go beyond the "top 100 syndrome" to discover the interesting patterns of influence and community.

...this is about going beyond lists and links, to understand that the social relationships of expression between and across blogs is really about searching for a "metric for identity" or "metric for affiliation", "metric for community", or "metric for influence".

Mary is ambivalent about creating new forms of "rankism".

I have to say, I've resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others.

The algorithm would weight links in posts higher than blogroll links, and new blogroll links higher than old ones. It might include new terms like time read, comments, and topic score.

Hopefully, the tradeoff for more rank-ism is better discovery. This weekend, I spent some time exploring Sepia Mutiny - a group blog for South Asian writers - and its cousins, after meeting one of the authors at BlogHer. This form of indirect discovery is delightful. A tool that helps with such serendipity would hopefully be more like the joys of a used book search database, and less like "sororitization", the turning of social groups into popularity contests.

I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right. Clouds would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in -- and may show secondarily the influence strength of that community?

Blog search: Tell me something I don't know

I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it.

On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:

#1 Michelle Malkin
#2 Captains Quarter Blog
#3 Eschaton
#4 Powerline
#5 Crooks and Liars
#6 Austin Bay
#7 Think Progress
#8 TPM Caf�
#9 The Anchoress
#10 Daily Kos

You can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):

Liberal Politics
#1 Crooks and Liars
#2 The Left Coaster
#3 Eschaton
#4 Think Progress
#5 Daily Kos
#6 TPM Caf�
#7 Talking Points Memo
#8 Political Animal
#9 The Huffington Post
#10 America Blog

So please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don't know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and... I don't care. It's not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there's going to be a single winner.

Where are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don't fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.

Here's the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It's stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don't already know.

Splitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It's more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it's still stable, and doesn't convey much new information.

The top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That's an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.

The bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn't know already

The Success of Open Source

Steven Weber's excellent book, The Success of Open Source is a superb complement to Yochai Benkler's classic essay, Coase's Penguin. Benkler looks at peer production as an economic system and concludes that it has become a third major form of organizing production, alongside the market and the firm. Weber takes a closer look inside the open source production process, and provides a fascinating analysis of how and why it works:

• the origin of open source software
  
• why people participate
  
• how projects are organized
  
• how open source fits into surrounding organizational and economic structures.
  

• Counter to the myth, the open source development process is not a teeming bazaar, with "bottom-up" self-organization composed of local signals. The largest and most successful open source projects have identifiable, hierarchical organizational structures, with a leader and/or inner circle, up to a few hundred active contributors, and a much larger group of occasional participants.
• While Open source licenses protect the right to "fork", to take the codebase off in a different direction than the original project, projects stay together more than a skeptic might think. Weber observes that project leaders depend on developers and developers depend on the community. The ability to get more done together than separately.

• Developers contribute to open source projects even though most users are "free riders" who benefit from the software, and contribute little or no code. This is less of a paradox than it might seem, since software is a "network good" that gains value the more people who use it. The more people who use a program, the tbugs that are reported and fixed, and the more robust the system becomes.

• Since the origins of the phenomenon, there have been different approaches to licenses. The West Coast, Berkeley-style licenses are easy-going about the ability to include open source software in other, non-open source code, so long as credit is preserved. The East Coast, Free Software Foundation GPL (Gnu Public License) is strict about requiring that redistributed code must always be free software, and any software including free software must be distributed by GPL
  

Perhaps the most insightful conclusion Weber draws is the relation between open source and intellectual property. Weber observes that open source redefines property around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.

Weber is able to make this observation because he avoids polemic. Weber doesn't try argue that open source software is good because intellectual property is bad. And he doesn't argue that that open source software is bad because intellectual property is good. Instead, he is able to observe how open source redefines property itself.

Weber's pragmatic analysis leads him to focus on the vibrant intersection between open source production and traditional business, with a look at a variety of hybrid business models, from IBM's focus on hardware and service, to Red Hat's packaging and branding, to MySQL's service and customization, to Apple's addition of proprietary chrome and polish. Weber predicts continued evolution and innovation and this boundary.

The book was published in 2004, and so it misses one of the most interesting trends in the last couple of years -- the rise of open source software that's not just for hackers. Netscape/Mozilla is included in the book as an example of failure. Weber looks around at Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc, and concludes that open source software may never be able to make software that works for non-hackers. This was before before the breakout success of Firefox, and the popularity of GAIM, an instant messaging client with a consumer-quality interface.

Weber examines the brash and blunt hacker culture, with its focus on technical decision making through vehement debates on project mailing lists that hash out solutions to technical problems and decisions about technnical direction. I wonder about how the culture will evolve as interactions grow with non-geek users, and hybrid companies face decisions that have external constraints driven by customers.

Towards the end of the book, Weber speculates about how the organizing methods of open source software might affect the production of other kinds of goods -- writing, music, biotech, business ideas. I thought it was interesting, but less substantial than the parts of the book focused on open source itself, with analysis based on observation.

The end of innocence for Mozilla?

Dave Coursey laments the End of Innocence for Mozilla with the founding of a taxable subsidiary.

The danger of the Mozilla Foundation forming a for-profit business, Mozilla Corp., is that the result may be as nasty and political as your average nonprofit and as money-grubbing as your typical software company. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's a wide departure from the egalitarian notion of "free" software that has carried Mozilla this far. And with that departure, I am feeling a touch of loss.

Richard Stallman, the prophet of free software idealism, says that free software is intended to be "free as in speech, not free as in beer". Open source software never was intended to be free of commerce. You can make money with open source software. IBM makes oodles of money with Linux and Apache. MySQL makes money with its database. You just can't sell the source code.

I think Mozilla lost its innocence a long time ago, and in a different way. Much of open source software is by geeks, for geeks. Open source developers have focused on creating tools for developers, and avoided the burden of developing for people who aren't programmers. An open source developer is "scratching his own itch", not developing code to please other people.

For whatever reason, Mozilla isn't like this. Mozilla is designed to be usable and attractive for ordinary people, and extensible for geeks. The Mozilla team designs with empathy for users. They have already lost the innocence of solipsism -- they are serving others than themselves.

I can't help feeling that the foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people.

Coursey writes these sentimental lines for a salary earned from a magazine publisher that makes money from advertising.

Mozilla is maintaining its license terms. That means that people will continue to be able to look at the code, modify the code, and fork the project to create their own products, following the terms of the license. That's the freedom that counts -- not freedom from being able to make a living.

Thanks, Joi for some clarification about the business structure.

Peak oil and air flight

Descending to Newark airport a few weeks ago, ribbons of street lights and twinkling cars make a glowing carpet. Is this future nostalgia? In the near future, will we be able to afford highways? Will we be able to afford airplanes?

Since Ezra Klein went on vacation and turned his blog over to Prof Goose of the Oil Drum, I've been reading some of the peak oil bloggers, and it seems like there's something to worry about.

* there is one major variable in the world's oil equation, the Saudi supply. Information about Saudi capacity is closely held, and the Saudis have every reason to lie.
* new extraction techniques get more oil out of the ground sooner, and the depletion curve is steeper after a field's production peaks

Worldchanging covers the opportunities for new technology and increased efficiency with some practical optimism. Things might get very different in the non-distant future.

Update: Just read this Washington Post discussion with an analyst who concludes from research that Saudi production has peaked already. Yikes!

Blogher and identity politics

Jay Rosen writes that one of the themes he recognized at the BlogHer conference was fear. Women bloggers were more likely to admit that they felt afraid, about job risk, stalking, and other risks of blogging. When I read through the Blogroll in prep for the show, I noticed people talking about pre-conference jitters. I suspect there are fewer posts admitting to butterflies about, say Always On.

My pre-Blogher jitters were about the potential level of identity politics. I blog about women in technology and business occasionally, but most often about other things -- social software, tech policy, books. If there was a conversation about what it's like to be a woman blogger, I don't think that I'd get that far.
When you assemble a group focused on "identity x", there's the risk of rathole discussions about whether people and things are "x enough".

Overall, Blogher avoided the perils of identity focus, and got good things done because of the focus:
* Mary Hodder started a speaker list to identify female conference speakers. There is no good excuse for conference program organizers who just can't think of women panelists.
* Blogs and the mainstream media have even fewer excuses for stupid stories about the scarcity of women bloggers.
* Ideas about alternative blog metrics beyond the mass-market A-list were catalyzed, as a result of conversations among people who care more about their "long tail" subcommunities than overall fame.
* In the panel on investment, audience members asked basic questions ("what is the difference between angel and venture investors"), and got answers that were friendly and informative. The questioners might not have spoken up at the investment panel at a general (mostly male) event.
* Reports say the Mommy blogger panel rocked.
* Interesting insights from the globalization session about the challenges of blogging in multiple languages -- what to say to whom, in what tone.