TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Vint Cerf + Google: TV is Dead

Vint Cerf has emerged from his Google cave to say something insightful: TV as we know it is near death. VC suggests that shows will slot into one of two usage scenarios:

1. Pre-recorded (85% of our current viewing): The TV we watch with regularity, that fill the bulk of the programming grid. LOST. History Channel documentaries. Etc. VC suggests that these are going to be iPod-ified - downloaded when desired by consumers.
2. Live News / Events / Emergency (the remaining 15%): Broadcast & Cable TV’s last stand - stuff that needs to be communicated in real time.

It makes sense. When you want a book, you go to the bookstore and purchase it; you don’t hover around the bookstore on a weekly basis to read as many pages as you can during the one-hour window the store makes it available for viewing (but not for purchase).

How does this fit in with Apple’s strategy? Or JOOST’s? Or Google’s, for that matter? Who knows. I don’t know enough about any of this to comment intelligently. Is VC making some off the cuff remarks, or alluding to Google products in the works? Regardless, I do know that VC’s prognostications signal more pain for MSM owners, who will have to work harder for ad-dollars.

cerf google

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MySpace: Resistance is Futile

One of the sad things about our modern consumer economy is its ability to absorb & digest subcultures and regurgitate them as marketable, profitable, consumable lifestyle options. Witness skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, and the whole “extreme-sports” culture: marginalized activities, practiced by renegades, are now mass-merchandized, sponsored, made-in-sweatshop profit machines for big corporate interests. The spirit of their genesis is lost.

Like all things business, the Internet provides a means to accelerate the process of borg-esque absorption, with MySpace as the stated poster boy:

The move reflects MySpace’s strategy of identifying the communities of interest that have grown organically and the building official member communities around them, turning once-grassroots groups into content platforms for old-media companies and consumer brands. [from Business Week]

Steve O’Hear at ZDNet adds more:

We’re also seeing a trend where MySpace is attempting to mix more and more professionally-produced content — from big media and major brands — with user-generated offerings, and at the same time blurring the lines between the two. In doing so, marketers and News Corp. are trying to find out how much professional brands/content and UGC can live alongside and benefit each other. [from ZDNet]

Sigh. I don’t have much to say about this, other than (a) it sounds like an effective business strategy, and (b) its sad to see an explicitly stated strategy predicated on harnessing the “organic” passion of users to sell them crap.

Yeah, yeah, I know it happens everywhere all the time, and that the Internet has been commercialized since 1996.

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7 Definitions of Web 3.0

A few weeks ago, Google’s Eric Schmidt managed to sound like both a n00b and a tasteless PR hack in the same 2 minutes, while trying to define “Web 3.0.” I wanted to try and round up some useful things about “Web 3.0″ that Schmidt could have said. So - to that end, here are 7 definitions of “Web 3.0,” ranked roughly in order of plausibility, coolness, and common-sense compliance.

7 & 6. ReadWriteWeb’s Web 3.0 Definition Contest

RRW held a “Define Web 3.0″ contest to give away tickets to Tim O’Reilly’s farce of a conference, the Web 2.0 (TM) Expo. RRW’s contest chose three winners, two serious.

The first is a near uninterpretable re-hash of they typical Tim Berners-Lee “Semantic Web Spiel,” only tangled in with cult-y ATOM evangelization:

“Atom, the Atom API and semantics, particularly Micro formats initially, are the constraints that will make this happen. Atom features not because of technical merit but by virtue of it’s existing market deployment in a space that most EAI players won’t even consider a market opportunity. Hence Web based components start using Atom API as the dominate Web API – Feed remixing is indicative. Atom will supplant WS* SOA.” [from RWW]

The second can be summarized with this gem:

“Web 3.0 to me is video-driven social networking, video-driven news blogs and user created entertainment, and video-driven email (yep..one day!).” [from RWW]

OW MY BRAIN. Are you kidding? Video email is the best you could come up with for “Web 3.0?” And RWW liked this definition enough to pay you for it? Dude, why don’t you just sign up for 3D Mailbox? The future is here today!

5. Business Week’s Stephen Baker

Stephen Baker apparently lead a panel on “defining Web 3.0” in Monaco (what’s the broadband penetration there, I wonder?), almost a year ago. Unfortunately, the results they came up with can be summarized as “more 2.0.” More cheap, more pervasive, more access, better data security. Damn, Stephen, that sounds like a service pack release, not a new paradigm. Definitely worth holding that high-powered panel in a swanky location.

4. HowToSplitAnAtom’s Definition

This definition doesn’t seem to offer anything new over what we have now. RSS feeds? Search verticals? Results clustering? Search by content type? Sounds like the sort of well-intentioned but uninspired upgrade Yahoo or Ask would make to their search engine, and the sort of mathematical mojo that’s already incorporated into Google’s algorithm.

“Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If you are searching for information on Cars, for example, you would use the search engine as you normally would, but your results would be more specialized subengines. I would find BMW Search or Kia Search. From there, I would be able to dig deeper and find items that have been tagged as relating to BMW and sort them into their major categories (pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I can be alerted when something new is added to by search profile.” [from HowToSplitAnAtom]

3. Phil Wainewright - Layered Architecture, New Business Models

Phil tackles Web 3.0 from the enterprise direction, laying out a three level structure that he expects the next generation of companies to work in. API Providers are at the bottom, Service Aggregators act as middlemen, and Application Services (consumable products) sit on top. Profitability grows from the bottom up, with Applications being money-makers, and API’s being commoditized.

I’d like to make one thing is absolutely clear right from the outset: Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications. So this is not something that’s of merely passing interest to those who work in enterprise IT. It will radically change the organizations where they work and their own career paths. [from ZDNet]

Huh. Not bad - Wainewright has laid out an architecture for the delivery of next generation services, which certainly counts for something. What he doesn’t specify, however, is what those next generation services may or may not be - for the enterprise, or consumer spheres. Wainewright has a whole series of articles on this theme, however, which I admittedly haven’t had time to sponge yet.

2. Valleywag: Web 3.0 is still Web 2.0

Valleywag points to two examples of 3.0′ish companies - Radar Networks (semantic search engine), and Spock (people search engine). And then relates succinctly why they aren’t really 3.0 at all:

The problem with Spock and the greater ideal of a semantic Web is the continued need for human input. Intelligent tags for metadata don’t magically appear. Humans need to establish the relationships between data points. Even Spock claims to rely on users to ensure personal data is correct. Spock is going to have a hard time keeping tabs of all 6 billion people. How exactly is a semantic Web going to manage a world’s worth of data? Wikipedia can barely keep itself straight. [from Valleywag]

Well said. I love VW. These 3.0 services are just aggregating 2.0 data and functionality - an incremental step, but hardly a leap. As such, VW’s hasn’t so much provided a definition of 3.0 as it has eliminated pure aggregators from that definition. That’s an elimination I agree with; aggregation can add value, but crafting a paradigm shift out of remixed existing data is a big step.

1. Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

Yup: #1 is still the seminal definition, from the father of the internet. In a nutshell, TBL’s 3.0 is much more structured markup and automation via a device independent, hyper-connected services architecture.

In this version of the Web, sites, links, media and databases are “smarter” and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today. For example, Berners-Lee said, a Web site that announces a conference would also contain programming with a lot of related information embedded within it.

A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list. In other words, the “mark-up” language behind each Web page would be cross-referenced into countless other databases, once developers agreed on a common set of definitions. [from IHT]

My thoughts? The interactions and automation enabled by pervasive, well-structured and mappable meta-data would truly herald a “next generation internet.” But - at the core, this vision seems to be incomplete. While the means to store and communicate meta-data may be under construction as we speak (i.e.: evolving standards), the means of automating the creation of that meta-data is less so; without the always-in-the-future “intelligent agents” working to categorize & connect data, we fall back to algorithms, keywords, and the fragmented universe of human-powered tagging - which is where we are already.

So - while I can appreciate the vision and see its utility, my gut feeling is that TBL is talking about Web 5.0. The notion of “semantic information” has much thinking to go into it yet before it will truly revolutionize our day-to-day lives.

In Summary

The variance in definitions makes clear that 3.0 is still a moving target. The definitions out there oscillate between minor increments to the functionality paradigm we enjoy in 2.0 to AI-enabled visions of a connected future (5.0?). The reality will probably be both stranger and more boring than expected, landing somewhere in the middle.

Automated connections between databases, for example. Speaking to Valleywag’s concerns (or HowToSplitAnAtom’s vision), I think there’s still plenty of value to be found creating automated connections between human-populated databases. Del.icio.us tags could be adding semantic information to Yahoo!’s search algorithm, for instance (why they aren’t doing this already, I don’t know). Its a step towards TBL’s vision, but only about 1% of the way there.

Would integrating del.icio.us into their search algorithm make Yahoo! Search a 3.0 product? Ultimately, does it matter? As with 2.0, I think the definition will be emergent, defined gradually by a million small decisions, changes, and startup launches that take place daily. A few years from now, we’ll look back at today and be able to elucidate how whatever it turned out to be started; at the moment, however, were too deep in Weeds 2.0.

All of which makes me all the more annoyed by Eric Schmidt’s speech. With everything there is to talk about, and with all the mind equity at Google, he could have said something meaningful instead of just reading off a press-release about Google Apps.

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Testing Wordpress Geotagging Plugin

This post is to test out a Wordpress Geotagging Plugin that I modified. The original plugin would add a “view map” link to a given post (and a great geotagging UI to the admin interface), but the modified version I built actually adds technorati-friendly geotags to the post itself, allowing for indexing by external applications - such as BlockRocker.

geotagging

Show on map

geo:lat=49.8928788516078 geo:lon=-97.1449327468872 geotagged

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RSS Feeds I no Longer Subscribe To

Every so often (twice so far), I’ll remove a feed from BlogLines (yes, I know GReader is better). So far, here are the two I’ve taken out:

Steve Rubel (MicroPersuasion): Was the first. Jumping all over every trend, he came across more and more as a paid advertisement (whether he was paid or not) - a sycophantic babbler. Not interesting. Then there was the whole “I throw my PC-Mag subscription in the trash” Twitter blow-up. Yay, you’re an egotistical jerk too. Uncov tears into Rubel in typical fashion. FEED DELETED.

Dave Winer (Scripting News): I know he originated RSS, and is friendly with lots of A-list bloggers. But, as I commented on the ‘wag, he’s a mean spirited, web-centric incarnation of Wozniak - riding high on past contributions that most everyone’s moved on from. And he really does seem to be a mean spirited jerk a lot of the time. His blog is unable to hold my attention, he’s acting up like a tool — FEED DELETED.

On the topic of Uncov: I wanted to delete them, because I think personal attacks aren’t required to make an adequate mockery of the average online business. But I couldn’t - they’re too good.

dave winer, feeds, micropersuasion, rss, scriptingnew, steve rubel uncov

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Spock: Idiocy Writ Large

Well, well. According to Wired, hype-heavy people search engine Spock thinks people that write about pedophiles are pedophiles themselves, and isn’t afraid to share that knowledge with the world.

Jaideep Singh responded to Wired:

CEO Jaideep Singh claims Spock is no different than Google, indexing and aggregating information already available elsewhere on the web. Spock spiders major social networks and public sites, culling text and photos and adding descriptive tags to build your profile. If you’ve got a page on MySpace, Hi5, Friendster or Wikipedia, odds are good you’ve also got one in Spock’s 100-million-profile database. [from Wired]

Umm, no, halfwit. Google associates information with WEBPAGES. Spock associates information with PEOPLE. Those two things are different - in the latter case, mistakes are known as “libel.”

From the get go, Spock has reeked to me of dot com bubble. Hype, hype, hype. A technology that people don’t really seem to be clamoring for. Frat boy, misogynistic office environment. And now this: a technology that sucks, and stupid, deceitful means of driving adoption and collecting data (the “Mad Libs” app that Wired talks about). Back in the good old days, all of these clowns would have been consultants somewhere and at least inflicted themselves on clients only, instead of the the 100 million victims Spock has “indexed.”

google, idiocy spock

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Remembering Broadcast.com

Here’s an neat retrospective from the Cubanator on Broadcast.com. Going back to 1998 - 99, its easy to see why Cuban got fabulously wealthy. Walk though the Powerpoint at the bottom: its a compelling story for 1998.

broadcast.com cuban

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Identity 2.0: Great Presentation from OSCON 2005

Just stumbled across this presentation by Dick Hardt (CEO of Sxip) at OSCON 2005 on Identity 2.0.

Its a fantastic summary of the notion of “Identity” - starting with our physical identity, credentials, and the transactions we undertake (i.e.: buying alcohol), and walking through site-centric, silo’d “Identity 1.0,” and taking us to the notion of Identity 2.0: open, portable, extensible, secure identity, which is sxip’s business.

Download Quicktime: small, large.

Stream Flash Video: Launch from here.

identity, oscon sxip

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AT&T Censored Anti-Bush Lyrics in Pearl Jam Show

GigaOm tells the tale - AT&T’s admittedly overzealous censor removed anti-Bush lyrics. Overzealous?? How about criminal? What sort of half-wit would think that criticizing Bush was worthy of censorship? I hate to think like the tinfoil hat crew, but I have trouble imagining anyone censoring that without explicit instructions to do. We already know that AT&T is willing to do pretty much anything to curry favour with powerful political organizations (see: AT&T scanning your internet connection for copyrighted material).

For crying out loud. Americans, this is your country, and your losing it.

at&t, censorship pearljam

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Widget-Maker JS-Kit Gets Funded

JS-Kit, maker of comment, voting, rating, and ranking widgets has been funded to the tune of 1.2M by The Entrepreneur’s Fund III, taking Kim Miller, VP of Marketing for HP.com, into their BOD. JS-Kit, in their press release, claims 5,000 sites using their products, with 1,000 new additions monthly. JS-Kit monetizes via ad-supported widgets, or ad-free subscription options.

Significance: This underlines the importance of the widget economy and ads credibility to widgets as an ad-unit and messaging vector.

Congrats and good luck to JS-Kit!

funding, js kit, vc widgets

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