Attention based workplace

Greg Yardley posts about Google as an 'Attention-based workplace' because they have:

• infrequent meetings;
• no project management cruft;
• no management directives;
• the ability to switch projects at will;
• an utter lack of date-driven releases;
• motivation created through incentives.
  

They allow their staff to focus (or pay attention to) the things they care about.

He goes on to say:

I’m sure they think of it in different terms, but I suspect Google’s become so successful because they’ve brought the rules of the emerging attention economy back into the workplace.

However I disagree with Greg on this point - I am all for the Attention Economy, but I think Google is so successful not because of its focus on an Attention based workplace, but rather because it serves and monetizes everyone's ads for them.

However, that specific business (like search) is actually Attention based. Context Sensitive ads are actually about looking at what your giving attention to and determining your Intentions.

If I am looking up a movie, then chances are I want to buy the DVD hey?

Don't get me wrong though - I agree Google has a great workplace. That being said, our monitors are better than Google's - most of our team have dual 24' Dell monitors. All we need now is free laundry services and a gym.

Attention is Saturated - not Scarce

I have grown to like this quote very much:
 

"What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention."

So if scarcity in a marketplace creates value, then tools that help with attention scarcity are the brokers of the new economy.

I like it because it puts things in economic terms and some people like to think in monetary terms.

David Henderson, however, has another great idea. He claims that his Attention is not 'scarce', it is Saturated.

He says that:

Attention scarcity implies there is attention available. Come on in and I will give some of my remaining scarce attention. Attention saturation implies there is no attention available. It’s all used up. It means you need to displace some already engaged attention to get my attention.

I think that is a fascinating way to look at it.

Because, as he alludes and I have outlined in the Media 2.0 Roadmap, in a world where your attention is saturated, people don't need more ways to find stuff, they need a way to automatically and personally FILTER it.

In a post called 'The Aphrodisiac of Attention', John explains the sinister game that telecommunications companies are playing with our Attention and how filtering might play a role.

...a conversation I had ten years ago with a senior exec of a major telecommunications company. He proudly announced to me that his company had a twenty year plan: "In the first ten years, we will commercialize technology to help everyone connect anytime, anywhere. But the real money will be made in the next ten years. At that point, we will focus on providing technology to block access anytime, anywhere. Can you imagine how much people will pay for that capability?"

John also has the following quote:

Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Attention is Meme Sex

I just came across a facinating post by 'Stan'. He compares Attention to 'Meme Sex'. At first I thought that was a crazy idea, but then when I read further, it all made perfect sense!

He states that:

Biological sex is the penultimate act by which a gene may hope to achieve replication in another body. The genes of the mother and father combine somewhat randomly creating a unique set of genes for the child. This is basic biology.

Right - with you so far... But then he asks...

But how exactly to memes replicate? "Imitation" is often suggested, as in the Wikipedia article. But imitation presupposes something more fundamental: attention. You can't imitate what you haven't paid attention to. Attention is meme sex.

The best part, however, is when he goes on to compare advertising to a kind of sexual assault of our attention.

Read the full article - Attention is Meme Sex. Great metaphor!

I'm suddenly feeling a little randy.

Greg Cohn wants Touchstone

It always amuses me when someone who has not yet found Touchstone writes a post describing the need it fills perfectly. Reminds me why we started this project/company in the first place.

I will quote Greg word-for-word because he is spot on. Hope he does not mind! Check out the full, more detailed post.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places - both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing - but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

Follow up: Making money in the long tail

Guy Kawasaki has posted a follow up to his post 'A review of my first year of blogging' which sparked a flurry of interest from bloggers because it revealed just how little Guy actually makes from advertising on his blog (and by implication, how little money there is in online advertising)

The new post - entitled 'The Short Tale: Much Ado about Not Much' goes further - explaining that he did not mean to cause any controversy and explained, if not for money, why exactly Guy blogs.

He says:

In case you’re interested, the reasons that I blog are:

1. To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.
   
2. To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”
   
3. To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.
   
4. To test ideas with “reality checks.” How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?
   
5. To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?
   
6. To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”

As I explained - I personally never imagined that individual bloggers would blog for the advertising revenue. Not successfully anyway.

In case you're interested - here's the reasons I personally blog here on the Touchstone blog.

1. To join the daily discussion about topics and issues I am passionate about.
   
2. To explain to our testers/users, partners, investors and anyone else who will listen why we should all be paying attention to Attention.
   
3. To keep everyone up-to-date about our challenges, goals and intentions with Touchstone (as guy says, how else can you get such a large focus group).
   
4. It helps me structure my thoughts and clearly express them for our team and the wider community to see.
   
5. To encourage people to connect with me if they have similar ideas or potential opportunities that could benefit us both.
   
6. To be heard...

Making money from the long tail...

There have been a number of posts lately about the profitability of the long tail.

First Guy Kawasaki posts his year in review where he mentions how little he makes from his very successful blog.

Then Chris Anderson posts called "Don't quite your day job" a reaction to Guy's blog revenue talking about the long tail and its profitability.

Then Chris makes a follow up post where he clearly explains who in the long-tail ecosystem can make money, and why those that can't, shouldn't worry anyway because direct revenue is not the main motivating force or reward.

This is how he explains it:

1. Consumers. Effect: Largely cultural. People have more choice, so individual taste increasingly satisfied even if the effect is an increasingly fragmented culture.
   
2. Aggregators. Effect: Largely economic. It's never been easier to assemble vast variety and create tools for organizing it, from search to recommendations. Increased variety plus increased demand for variety equals opportunity. Also note that just as one size doesn't fit all for products, nor does it for aggregators. I think the winner-take-all examples of eBay, Amazon, iTunes and Google are a first-inning phenomena. Specialized niche aggregators (think: vertical search, such as the real estate service Zillow) are on the rise.
   
3. Producers. Effect: Largely non-economic. I responded to a good Nick Carr post on this last year with the following: "For producers, Long Tail benefits are not primarily about direct revenues. Sure, Google Adsense on the average blog will generate risible returns, and the average band on MySpace probably won't sell enough CDs to pay back their recording costs, much less quit their day jobs. But the ability to unitize such microcelebrity can be significant elsewhere. A blog is a great personal branding vehicle, leading to anything from job offers to consulting gigs. And most band's MySpace pages are intended to bring fans to live shows, which are the market most bands care most about. When you look at the non-monetary economy of reputation, the Long Tail looks a lot more inviting for its inhabitants."
   
   

Nik Cubrilovic still holds onto the hope that producers can indeed make money from blogging and suggests some alternatives to AdSense which should be more profitable.

But of course, each of these commentators have day jobs.

There were some posts from bloggers who do basically make a business out of their blogs. First Yaro Stark who posts "Is Professional Blogging a Sustainable Business Model" and Darren Rowse with a post called "Does AdSense Suck for Bloggers?".

This is an interesting topic to me because I have had a number of conversations with friends, partners, investors etc about 'where the money is' in this emerging marketplace.

My feeling is more closely aligned with Chris Anderson's. Participants who create long-tail content are not doing it for money. We don't write open source code, contribute to wikipedia or blog about our lives for cash. We do it because we want to contribute - both to our egos and to the world. We want to be heard.

Professional producers, however, need to pay the bills. But unfortunately they are finding it hard to monetize their 'participants'. That's why I think aggregators should give something back. But that's a post for another time.

I thought bubbles were pretty

Remember when bubbles were a good thing? When you had that bubble gun that you would fill with magic bubble formula, pull the trigger and giggle like a school girl? Maybe that was just me...

It seems now that I'm older (and arguably more mature) bubbles are far more sinister.

In my new reality, there are the sort of bubbles that politicians build for themselves so they can ignore reality and lead the world into disasters and there are the sort of bubbles that burst and ruin the hopes and dreams of young entrepreneurs.

Everyone is deathly afraid of it happening again. In the streets of Silicon Valley and San Francisco people can't mention the buzzword 'Web 2.0' without quickly apologizing and talking about a bubble.

To an outsider one would think that the IT industry had an unhealthy obsession with soapy liquids.

Most people forget, though, that some (very few) companies actually survived the bubble. Why? I can't promise to have the all the answers but I suspect it involved some hard work, sacrifice and a little thing called a 'business model'.

I however, like Michael, feel a sense of optimism around the latest wave of innovation, enthusiasm and investment. In his post "Bubble, Bubble, Bubble" (which further helps confuse people into thinking the tech community seems to like floating balls of soap) he explains the difference between the Web 1.0 house of cards and the normal ebbs and flows of the current Web 2.0 landscape.

As Michael explains it, the fact that we have had some failures is further indication of a healthy market - not a signpost of doom and gloom - or bubbles.

All that being said however, I do feel a sense of dismay at some of the investments being made in silly ideas - seemingly just because of the names and popularity involved.

The comments on the TechCrunch post "Rumor: Slide's Venture Round was $20 Million" shows a slew people who think that the valuation, if true, is a joke. Slide makes slideshows widgets - primarily for myspace and other social networks.

I commented there saying:

...what happens when myspace shuts them down and does their own widget like they have tended to do in the past?

The point is if you are aiming for 10x return it’s a pipe dream - the points of failure are many and highly probable and the revenue or buyout can’t be that high.

I could never stand every widget on any one of my pages (not that I’d use myspace) having an ad. Is it self-expression or advertising central at that point?

Sponsorship? So themed widgets with coke on them? I thought this was self expression not corporate branding?

Freemium? So what, I have to pay photobucket/flickr for archiving, and I have to pay slide or rockyou for display?

I agree with the sentiments above - perhaps consider the idea as well as the team? Look at the roadmap/beta’s a little closer - you might find some surprises.

Traction only gets you so far - if you want to go on adoption rates then maybe Cigarettes are a great business to get into too.

Pop...

I'm a big RSS user - 20 feeds or so

I just found this comment on a post about free desktop readers and it made me chuckle.

bardicknowledge Says:
December 11th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Hey, I’m a big RSS user, with 20 or so feeds that I keep an eye on regularly and there are two others options (the two I use ) that I would like to point out.

I guess I should not tell him about the 170 I'm subscribed to. And I know others with many more than that :)

FYI: I currently have about 12,000 unread items in my feed reader.

Channel ME

Mark Sigal's recently posted about Channel Me and the Rules of New Media.

He talks about concepts that we have long discussed here such as:

1. If content was king, then aggregation is now the master of the universe
   He writes: Unlike "old media," where content was the star, in new media, it is about the users and giving them control of what they digest, how they digest it and with whom. This article attempts to provide a framework for thinking about the rules of new media and how to work them to your benefit.
   
2. The audience has left the building
   He writes: Once upon a time, content was content, an ad was an ad and the audience was a passive consumer. No more. Increasingly, the lines between consumer and producer are getting blurry.
   
3. Personal Relevancy is more important than What's Popular
   He writes: These tools will have built in recognition systems (like deep profiles) to systematically connect like minds together, and filters that provide transparency that highlights what’s new, popular, recently viewed, talked about or related content.

And he finishes with:

The evolution of the Web from text, pictures and links to video-powered social nets is as profound as the evolution of broadcast media from radio to television, and it is destined to be no less exciting.

I wholeheartedly agree Mark.

Thanks for pointing this post out Randal

Cognitive Power

Attention and Attention Management have a lot to do with Cognitive Science. We never talk about the academics of perception etc here but I thought this picture was a great example.

The picture itself is funny - in fact that's why it was sent to me in the first place. But if you think about it - the only reason you have any clue what's going on is the negative space on the bottom right and the light next to it. From this little piece of data, our brain fills in a full picture, puts it in context with a set of circumstances that together make it funny to us.

Our brains are truly amazing...

Added to the Megite Index

Over the last few days some new stuff has happened in relation to this blog.

First, we seem to keep appearing on the TechMeme related discussion section whenever I post about a topic that happens to be covered there. Second, someone from Megite (or an automated bot) has commented on a post and declared that we should be congratulated because we are now part of the Megite index.

Does Megite work the same way that TechMeme works?

This is how I understand it:

1. They crawl a subset of blogs (the 'A-List') and then algorithmically determine and cluster the topics they're talking about at any given time.
   
2. They look for outgoing or incoming links from those blogs to find additional discussions to link to/cluster.
   
3. They look for patterns in outgoing links (from their index of blogs 'A-list blogs') to determine which blogs are worthy enough to be added to the index.

If this is the case, does this mean we have somehow been automatically determined as a Quality/A-list Blog by the Megite engine? Should we expect to be profiled on their home page more often now?

At the risk of angering the Megite gods, who's to say that this is a worthy blog? What is the definition. Is it based on how many A-listers link to us? How many comments we get? How often we post about similar topics to A-listers? How many links we get from A-listers?

And who's to say what the A-list finds interesting is relevant to everyone - or to me.

These questions are actually more relevant for Techmeme because Megite at least has a nifty feature whereby you can upload your OPML and it starts to build a personal homepage just for you. That's a great feature.

I have also met Gabe from Techmeme and he's a great guy. He tells me he is cooking up lots of new features so I am sure it's all in the pipeline.

But I am still interested in what constitutes a worthy blog for the public 'front page'.

As for Tailrank I'm not sure if it works the same way either. Kevin has not taken the time to explain it to me. I wonder if we are in their index yet? What's the go with that Kevin!

In any case - if we are now part of a few blogs that are considered Megite worthy - thanks. If this is a normal occurrence and nothing special (maybe even some comment spam) then... I am less grateful hah.

Update: Kevin posts about the Megite comment spam issue as well. He seems to agree this might be attention getting behavior that is a little over the mark as well. I think that if it was a personal message with a personal name or even a private note via email (our contact details are not hidden) it might be a better approach.

Touchstone/Attention Coverage Grows

It seems like 2007 really is the year of Attention. Everyone's talking about it. And I am very gratified that they think to mention us when they do.

Ian Forrester over at Cubic Garden wrote a wonderful review of the Alpha and APML (not wonderful in that it was all positive, but wonderful in that it was constructive, thoughtful and has helped us identify his personal rough spots). I am very interested in Ian's Pipelines idea as well. As he suggests, Touchstone's architecture could actually be considered a pipeline. We have always thought about it (from the earliest diagrams on napkins) as 'Inputs, Processing, Outputs'.

John Tropea has also posted a review about Touchstone. In typical John fashion he has gone into great depth about the applications and comparisons for the technology. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the RSS/Tools landscape.

Daniella Barbosa from Factiva/Dow Jones is always insightful - from her commentary on enterprise information tools through to great videos about unwrapping presents for Michael Arrington - she always brings a smile to my day.

Her latest post "Standing for Attention in the Enterprise" is no exception. She mentions that in the past year, enterprise users have gone from asking 'What is RSS' to 'How can we handle all this RSS we need to read'.

She goes on to post:

So something that i know i will be talking about in 2007 is... Attention

And i won't be the only one paying attention to 'Attention'i had already started this post on Attention and i remembered that in my inbox was a note from Greg Narian with the subject title 'Continuous Partial Postponement?' that i had seen coming in this morning but had not clicked through before i left for my appointments. It is an interesting look at two sides of the attention theme. The first one Continuous Partial Attention - constantly needing to be connected so we don't miss anything, the second is what we lose when as we constantly postpone one thing to get to the next. Kathy Sierra also has a good post on the problem of continuous partial attention from early December that links to multiple posts she has made about user behavior due to attention issues.

She also kindly mentions Touchstone and APML as key examples of emerging tools to help with the deluge.

Of course there are many others as well... we really appreciate the feedback guys - it keeps us all motivated and focused on making Touchstone as great as possible.

Creating passionate crowds

I've posted before about Digg and its deep underlying philosophical difference to Google. To recap, while Digg uses explicit 'Wisdom of crowds' approaches to generating a front page, Google uses an algorithm (which takes into account implicit votes based on links) to generate its Google News front page.

These are fundamental and philosophical differences and when the issue of Digg gaming came up (and will come up again I'm sure) it was an important discussion to have.

In fact, I recently came across a wonderful article from Kathy Sierra called 'Dumbness of Crowds' where she rightly states that the term 'Wisdom of Crowds' was actually meant in sarcasm. It was supposed to highlight that crowds (read: mobs) are actually quite stupid. Real intelligence comes when measuring individual actions in aggregate (and even then in some applications and not others - e.g. designing by committee produces bland or Frankenstein results) - rather than giving individuals collective and visible control over a process.



As I've stated before, the problem with both Digg and Google is that in an era of hyperchoice and information overload these engines only show 'What's popular' instead of 'What's Personally Relevant',

Today, however, DayLife launched, to a little criticism from one of its investors (who just happens to be Michael Arrington). It has been a long time coming and, as a result, seems to have felt a little 'over anticipation' from some in the community.

Worse still (shock/horror/sarcasm) it does not use the "Wisdom of Crowds" OR a Popularity Algorithm to generate its front page. It in fact proudly and loudly declares that it uses a 3rd, age old technique - human editors.

I'm sure the DayLife founders are very passionate about their company and I wish them best of luck with their plans. Maybe in a noisy media landscape, A site that shows simple, visual and effective headlines on the front page will be a refreshing change?

Personally though I look forward to the 4th 'front page' philosophy/technique. Using a Personal Relevancy engine to generate a front page.

The end of arrogance?

Tara, Chris and Ben from CitizenAgency are three of my favorite people in the bay area. During our visit they embodied the positive, insightful and supportive attitude we found there. From offering their office space to connecting us to their friends who could help, they were true champions of community spirit.

Tara recently posted her 2007 Predictions and as usual, they were less about Technology and more about community spirit.

Click through to read the list, but my personal favorite is this:

Those with little humility will have to eat it
What is with the lack of self-reflection in this world? I’m not only talking about the tech world. It happens everywhere. We are not gods, people. We are human. And we screw up. And we don’t know everything. Let’s stop trying to be the tough guy and protecting our sand castles and just work together towards a better world. We all have ego, but it’s knowing how to let it go that makes us great. (Oh…the prediction part of this is that, like Keith Teare’s fabulous De-Portalisation post, we’ll have our niche audiences and mutual respect communities forming while the braggarts/big dogs continue to fight one another to the death…Keith didn’t say it, but I see the parallel. I like living in the foothills).

I have long held a strong personal distaste of arrogance, ignorance and apathy. Listening to someone - especially someone who has passion - not only takes very little time, but could also help you succeed at your own endeavors.

Oh and of course there is the prediction that reinforces our own world view here at Touchstone...

This will be the year of connected desktop apps
Not that web apps won’t continue to be produced like mad…I mean…really…they are so simple to produce, aren’t they? But those beasts of apps (one reader once said, “Code in C++? F&#* that!”) on your desktop will start not only being ‘connected’ to the web, but interacting with it, too.

Congratulations to Google - Attention Data Matters

I have said a few negative things about Google recently - it seems like they have had a run of bad luck. But this post has made me happy - Mihai and Google have caught onto the idea of Attention Data (although he never quite calls it Attention Data) - and has created a 'Reader Trends' page for us all.






FeedDemon has actually been doing something along these lines for a little while though. I'd like to think that Mihai and the rest of the Google Reader team knew this? Why not give them credit?

In any case, seems like 2007 really will be the year of Attention Data. Lucky we at Touchstone are one step ahead of Attention Data and have moved onto Attention Profiling and Attention Management.

Via Micro Persuasion - Thanks to Marianne for pointing this out for me.

I am not dumb - I am wired

Chris Anderson recently posted a pair of articles about a Transparent Wired Magazine. What would that look like? The first post resembles my Media 2.0 roadmap. Read Post 1 and Post 2 here.

Post 2, is far more interesting however. He talks about revealing the internal staff hierarchy to the world, exposing internal staff wikis and scratchpads, publishing drafts and transcripts as they are created, giving users the power to rate comments and include them as part of the story, use their recently acquisition of reddit (or similar paradigm) to actually decide what makes it into the magazine, and my personal favorite - wikify everything.

Imagine that - a place where the articles on a given topic no longer represent a moment in time, but rather an evolving commentary on a given subject. Is this actually feasible? Would the result become unbearably long and detailed?

Something David Dobbs writes in response is very interesting...

Some of the unease rises from concerns that might seem vain or proud: I like to think that in many cases I really AM more qualified than others to write about a given subject and (more to the point) that doing a ton of research on a subject — reading hundreds of pages and talking to highly informed and involved people —gives me a deeper and more nuanced view of a subject that gives the resulting story a certain priority in placement and attention. Indeed, that's precisely what publishing is all about.

He does go on to admit:

(Yes, it's also about power and hoarding information that can then be packaged and sold, yada yada. I'll raise my hand and confess I'm almost certainly unwittingly doing all those things -- but then, so does a farmer or carpenter or plumber.)

I would argue that recently (and maybe for long, long time) in the 24 hour news cycle, the TV media especially has completely failed to provide any real context and neunce to ongoing stories. They seem to glob onto any piece of sensational news and fail to give it any broader meaning.

They use prejudicial words without giving any thought to their bias and they fail to consider the real impacts for real people.

As Chris is suggesting in his posts, Wired and other print journalists could be great at creating over-arching summaries or focusing a community around a topic and then summarizing the conversation at the end. Nuance, however, seems to come from bloggers - not professionals.

He also argues against publishing transcripts because...

Lots of ums and ungrammatical sentences and sentence fragments. Lots of digressions, side comments, and stupid failed wisecracks. All that clutter of broken strings and floating particles makes little sense if encountered on paper by a reader who wasn't present but makes complete sense (well, nearly complete sense) to the person who was there in the conversation.

I think that, unfortunately, Mr Dobbs is making the same mistake that most mainstream media outlets (including TV networks) make. They think we are dumb.

Transcripts reveal something about an interviewee that the resulting article cannot. It reveals character, personality and context.

I have been interviewed many times and, with no disrespect to my journalist friends, my quotes are often taken out of context for the purposes of narrative flow. That's fine for articles - but in this new transparent world - I'd like the option of digging deeper.

Is Advertising Dead?

In response to my post "Carefactor: 100" Scientaestubique posted a comment. It was a great question so I thought I would post it here along with my reply. What do you think? Reply in the comments.

scientaestubique said...

Is advertising as a paradigm now obselete?

Wikipedia defines Advertising as:
the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor.

Do we really need old style ads anymore?

Generations X & Y don't absorb advertising like they used to, however they consume more media than ever.

Maybe companies could try producing really good media about their products and services and skip the spruking altogether.

More signal, less noise.

Chris said...

I think fist that Marketing (paying someone to find ways to get people to notice) is always going to be around.

The requirements of the job will, however, change rapidly over time.

The most sophisticated marketers today know that marketing is not necessarily about shaping a clever message as it is about shaping a clever product that speaks for itself.

Look to CitizenAgency.com and ResonancePartnership (plus others) for that sort of thinking.

As for advertising, I think that it can sometimes be argued that people don't know they need something until they are introduced to the idea. Like marketing, however, it needs to change shape from yelling at people into something more akin to a conversation. Read: Cluetrain Manifesto.

Speaking of creating media for your product - there was a series of short stories directed by famous directors that were effectively BMW commercials. I believe it was in response to BWM loosing the deal to appear in one of the 007 movies. Was fascinating to watch.

What other forms of media would you suggest they produce though? I don’t really want to watch an episode about the sale on down the road...

"can one man buy a discount shirt... against.. all... odds"

haha

Google vs The World

There is a post on Read/WriteWeb about 'The race to beat google'.

Alex and Richard compare the Google Competitors based on their points of differentiation and come to the fairly obvious conclusion that:

So overall, even though there is a lot of activity in the space, it seems like Google will remain the search king for the foreseeable future. Various approaches will have different degrees of success in seizing bits of the market, but to make a serious dent will require time, flawless execution, big marketing dollars and, of course, a better technology. This is not a trivial combination of things.

Alex goes on to say:

...another promising contender (mentioned by Emre) is personalized search. With this technology, search results are going to be organized not by PageRank but by your personal interests. It is likely that a combination of a vertical search and personalized search is going to deliver fundamentally better results than Google, so that might have a chance. However, as we pointed out with the other technologies. Google is not going to sleep through this.

A commenter called Eric, however, hits the nail on the head:

The only way Google is going to be beaten is when the next great paradigm shift in computing comes along. IBM wasn't beaten by another hardware vendor, it was beaten by Microsoft's operating system. Microsoft wasn't beaten by a another
operating system, it's being beaten by the web. It follows then that Google isn't going to be beaten by another search product, it will be beaten by something else.

It stands to reason that if any of these other things prove viable, Google will incorporate it into their own product. Just like Microsoft never plays the innovator with Windows - when you're the leader, you just have to be "good enough" and copy the best ideas from competitors.

The question we should be asking is: what's the next paradigm going to be?

So maybe this is not about beating Google at search, but rather going beyond 'search' and towards a new paradigm that is more useful.

Im surprised that both Alex and Richard did not mention Touchstone or APML in the article when referring to Personalization of results by comparing them against your interests.

I think, however, the next frontier for search specifically is not finding better pages, but better structured data in the form of microformats or other forms of structured data from inside pages (like Blue Organizer, Edgeio, Vast). Again, surprised that Alex didn't mention Blue Organizer or the other - considering he owns it. Maybe he did not want to show bias.

Also, going beyond multiple results at all to return the actual answer. Very much like AskX - now THAT's innovation.

Carefactor: 100

With publishing power ebbing from the few to the many and AJAX killing the postback there are a couple of problems emerging.

1. Media outlets who make a living by selling eyeballs to advertisers are having to prove the value of their ad space amid growing competition from their readers!
   
2. When pages don't refresh (because of AJAX), the number of pageviews a site gets no longer matters. When something no longer works, people are forced to invent something new. When people invent something new they are forced to actually look at the problem. What have they discovered? There is a lot more measure than just 'how many eyeballs are there'. Things like 'how wealthy or influential are the eyeballs', 'how much do the eyeballs trust the publisher', 'how reactive and proactive are the eyeballs in relation to the author' and most importantly 'why do we keep ignoring the person and focusing on their eyeballs'.
   
3. Advertisers are finding it hard to work out who to give their money to. Is google really the best broker of my advertising dollars? Which ad network or publisher can promote our brand and product better?
   

As a result, commentators are abuzz about new definitions and algorithms to measure all this stuff.

Comscore is apparently working on a 'Web 2.0 Metric'.

".....While page views will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site's value, it's clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures. comScore is proud to continue carrying the torch as an industry innovator with the development of a new suite of metrics that will effectively address the Web 2.0 landscape by including enhanced measures of user engagement and advertising exposure. We will be introducing these new metrics to the industry in 2007."

And Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine talks about the Distributed Media Economy

So pageviews are obsolete already, thanks to Ajax and other unpage technologies and to the widgetization of content, functionality, and branding: Again, what’s a ‘page’? Audience measurements are obsolete, at last, thanks to the fact that the
former consumer is now also the creator and distributor: What’s an ‘audience’? Mass measurements are dead, thank God, because we are now joyfully fragmented into the mass of niches: Who’s a ‘user’?

Dion Hinchcliffe posts:

"it seems clear that users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a communications-oriented platform without any single owner except all of us, will be the only ones able to fully exploit the possibilities for online applications."

I find this last quote interesting. "Without any single owner". But I think it needs to be taken further. Media outlets and bloggers alike don't own their audience. In fact they don't even own their participants.

While people are happy to get trapped in walled gardens like MySpace for now, they will soon realize that blogs are the real social network. While they are happy to subscribe to 10, 100, 1000 blogs now, they will start to realize that there is far too much content and they actually need to subscribe to ideas/concepts/interests - not authors.

So perhaps if the audience is not owned by any single site/source then the metric should not be bound to them either. Perhaps the best way to measure engagement is not by domain, but by concept.

Welcome to 2007

Welcome to 2007. Happy new year!

Let's get straight into it.

Last year (Dec 19 to be exact) the clever people over at Read/Write Web published a list of their Web Predictions for 2007. Here is a very cut down summary with my annotations added in italics. Please note the full version from ReadWrite Web is far richer so make sure you click through and check it out.

RSS, Structured Data

• RSS will go mainstream in a big way next year
  Touchstone will provide a way for the mainstream to more easily understand and consume the value proposition of RSS. Particularly those who don't understand why RSS differs so much from email untill they see it scrolling across their desktop like a ticker or urgent/important headlines SMSed to their phone. Taking the 'RSS' out of the RSS experience will be pivitol.
  
• Structured data will be a big trend next year
  RSS is the most common form of semi-structured data out there. Microformats, however, will begin playing a very important role. A reader that can apply actions based on attached or embedded microformat data will be very useful.
  
• Widgets exploded in 2006 but will continue rising in 2007
  Web widgets are cool. They help create a loosely coupled web experience with functionality exposed all over the place. Desktop widgets, on the other hand, can just be a mess on your desktop. How many widgets can you look at while you work?

Enterprise

• Web Office continues to ramp up
  Touchstone will play a pivotal role in helping knowledge workers get alerts when their web-based office apps have new events/actions that need taking care of. The overflowing enterprise email inbox will not surive the influx of email if web-based office apps send an email for each of their alerts and updates.
  
• The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of web-based office apps and more collaborative systems.
  The participant (read: user/employee) is the most important part of any system. The fact that the web and web-based sofware is starting to realize this reality is a welcome change. As enterprises begin to catch up, tools that help individuals manage their own attention will become mission critical.

Web Development

• Rich Internet Apps will be a major force in 2007. The general trend going on here is that platforms that leverage both the desktop and the Web will be compelling next year, in terms of offering rich functionality that usually can't be found on purely browser-based apps.
  Exactly right. Ajax is great, but it still can't reach beyond the browser sandbox. Client-side applications will, for the foreseeable future, play a very important role in the mix.
  
• On the other hand, Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps.
  And yet they continue to build client-side applications as well. Google's only real successes however have been in services that use search/maths as the main value proposition (e.g. web search and email with search). Google has yet to have a real success at anything else including their web-based office apps or their fabled emerging GoogleOS.
  
• Semantic Web products will come of age in 2007.
  Semantic just means structured - and the most important structured format is already here. RSS combined with Microformats make the semantic web an emerging reality. Yet most readers treat RSS like news. Touchstone will force a change.
  
• Expect more big things from Amazon next year, to fill in the stack and to provide the foundation for a Web/Amazon WebServices-based OS.
  

Search and Online Advertising

• Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market next year.
  Maybe engagement will get some real consideration?
  
• Also due to ongoing issues with (CPC/PPC) online advertising, there's a real need for a better, more robust online ad model - perhaps something more than CPA. So watch out for developments in 2007 along those lines.
  
• 2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines. However don't expect Google to lay down and do nothing - they will counter the verticals.
  Google has already launched their custom search engines which is actually a clever way to get users to tag sites with categories. They can then build vertical searches based on this massive amount of accumulated data. They are using us to build their next killer app. Has anyone else noticed? I'd love to know about posts highlighting this fact - post in comments. They once again use our 'Attention Data' for their master plans. I just wish they were more transparent about it.
  

Microsoft vs Google

• Microsoft's Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year, thanks to Vista and also Live services.
  Surprise, Surprise. Microsoft will always use its platform and tools to drive adoption of their latest round of products and services. They did it with the browser, media player and portals and they will continue to do it for whatever they do next. When you control the keys you control the rooms that people use. You'd do it too if you were in their position.
  
• WebOS /GoogleOS: To counter the Vista and Windows Live threat, Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS.
  Refer to my previous statements about the GoogleOS in this post.
  
• Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in '07.
  Getting a growing number of users while maintaining a consistant share of the overall market is not really a sign of success.
  

Browsers

• Browser War II. In 2007 expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense.
  The browser wars were declared when Microsoft realized that IE can actually be beaten by Firefox and announced their renewed focused on a more aggressive update schedule for Internet Explorer. Expect the war to rage on for the foreseeable future (long past 2007 - think of it like a console war now).
  
• Speaking of browsers, 2007 will see an increase in WebKits. Adobe's Apollo will be WebKit based, enabling developers to ensure Safari compatibility as well as other browsers.
  I am not yet convinced about WebKits and hybrid applications. The web tool vendors want us to believe that web developers can build better client-side apps using web-tools/languages than more traditional platforms like .NET and C. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not.

Multimedia

• Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007, thanks to products like Brightcove and whatever Google does with YouTube/Google Video.
  Online distribution of TV/Movies is long overdue. Buying DVDs has been a scam perpetrated on the unsuspecting masses for too long. HD-DVD and BluRay look like they are going to extend the rain of crap for a few years more. All content should be delivered over the Internet and on-demand.
  
• Mass adoption of IPTV technology in 2007 and Bittorrent will be an important part of the online video landscape too.
  IPTV might be dead on arrival. TV over IP (important distinction here) will always be better. It's amazing to me that Bittorrent is not already integrated into browsers and used for distribution of medium to large files. Hopefully 2007 will see that happen.
  
• Virtual worlds: SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking.
  Or they will collapse as people realize that they are closed platforms and go in search of more open environments based on technologies analogues to HTML.
  

Consumer Apps

• The online real estate market will grow rapidly in '07.
  
• The search for disruptive business models will continue! :-) In other words, free consumer web apps still need to find a business model.
  Or die trying
  
• While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn.
  Tools that make Social networks available on the go will be critical. Messaging inside walled gardens like MySpace will have to give way to more open messaging/forum systems and alert routing technologies (I.e. Touchstone).