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
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 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
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 respect Mary 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.