“Castration on the fence”
Heard a Phil Windley podcast today and thought I heard the guest say “castrated on the fence.”
Not sure, and looked for a reference on Google and I don’t see any, but it seems to be a great metaphor for what some traditional news organizations are doing today.
A chain-linked fence will allow some stuff to pass through, but it’s a completely limited way of interacting.
This is a great metaphor for traditional news organizations that are trying to save their core business by dabbling in the web.
Some people will climb the fence and get to the other side . . . the winners.
Others will try to straddle the fence and gain the advantages of both sides.
That results in castration.
Pick a side and go for it.
Media is dead. So is new media
Heard a GG podcast recently and the question of whether old Media was any different than New Media was raised.
Gillmor kinda said no.
At least it seemed to me that the consensus was that New Media wasn’t the “all changing” entity that geek bloggers have heralded it to be.
Well, maybe that’s kinda true, but for me it’s also kinda off.
Semantics aside, New Media was just a transition from old Media to where we are heading now.
No Media.
Media is dead. It’s been disinterMEDIAted. Pun INTENDED.
What is left is a world without the need for organizational mediation besides the software companies that enable the communication to happen.
But if those companies try to get in the way an alternative will show up to allow the public to do an end around.
What we have is pure conversation in a very clue-trainish manor.
Step aside and allow me to send a classified to the world . . . or release my new music album . . . or whatever I want.
Get out of the way because the train has arrived.
The future of newspapers (the real answer)
Jarvis on the challenge of revenue decline in the newspaper industry again.
You have to have your head in the sand not to realize that online revenue will never replace the loss of print revenue.
There is one positive note on the transition (or lack of) to the web. The costs of running a web site are zero compared to a printing press.
Your average local news company that survives will consist of a few editors/reporters/photographers(including video), a salesperson (maybe) and a tech guy (probably not. . .just use Wordpress.com).
Whether this group will be a whittled down traditional incumbent or a new blogger startup is the major question.
If the incumbents don’t realize this is the case (most don’t) and get off their high horses, my bet is with the newcomers.
Cloud computing ball moves forward for smaller websites
Amazon just announced a few nice features for EC2 users, Elastic IP and Availability Zones.
Elastic IP allows users to associate an IP address with their web services account, rather than being tightly coupled to a specific EC2 instance.
The benefit is being able to more quickly recover from an instance failure. Presumably one might be able to move to an alternate instance without making any DNS changes, or if the static IP address was being used for a service, there would be no need to update that either.
The Availability Zones have been a heavily requested feature. What it does is guarantee that two instances are actually on different hardware, thus allowing for extremely high availability.
Others may wish to keep instances in the same zone, ” to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.”
All in all, this is great news for web publishers who can now enjoy a high level of reliability with both modest cost and a relatively easy deployment .
How to achieve ‘real’ democracy for web
It’s been an interesting week in regards to the users asserting their authority.
Conference goers at SXSW made a clear statement that they weren’t willing to sit back and just listen politely.
Digg users are trying to thwart an acquisition.
On Newsgang Live 3.10.08 (not released yet), Gillmor claims it’s 1968 again, and we better watch out if the people don’t feel the Democratic Party candidate was chosen with a fair shake.
I was born in 1968, so I can’t say, but It does seem that the tipping point has happened and it’s no longer about ‘what the users want’. It’s now ‘what they have a right to’.
I’ve said it before, though, that Digg is no democracy at all, certainly when it comes to an acquisition stance. Digg users have only one vote, in that case, and it’s with their walking shoes.
That’s not democracy, it’s free market. Ahhh, but wait, it’s not so free, because they still have the data.
We want democracy and free market and we only get it when we control our data. That much we agree on.
Until the algorithms that feed us are free, and the data that we are fed is unloosed then we have no democracy, and that includes Twitter.
The federation that was talked about on Scripting News a few weeks back would do the trick, but it doesn’t have to happen in a formal way. In fact, I don’t think it will.
As long as we control the endpoints, we can control the center, and that’s where an open tool like gangbuster will pierce a veil of opacity, if not pave the road to the new CRM, Cloud Relationship Management.
In order to turn the tables on the silos, we can’t ask them to change their ways. We change our ways, and if they want our attention, they will have to transform to get it.
Ad Hoc Relationship Campaigns
Any time we want to accomplish something, from here on called the campaign, we rally together our digital forces to achieve (or fail to achieve) that goal.
For each given campaign, we gather assets, if only cerebrally at first. Bookmarks, search results, trusted members of our social graph, all the tools that fit the given campaign. These will be different based upon our goal. Our social graph is not one size fits all.
Likewise we will use various tools to accomplish this. Email, Del.icio.us, Message Boards, Twitter, a blog post. Each has its own strengths.
Each of these campaigns lends itself to a different view of the world, and thus requires a different filter or lens by which we distill the digital mass into a meaningful result in an ad-hoc manner.
As of yet, there are no unified tools to manage these campaigns, to harness the Ray Ozzie or Howard Rheingold “swarms” of collective intelligence, which more than aid these campaigns, but are the essence of them.
This is one reason why the rumbling of discontent with Google search is in the air. It’s a static tool for a live web. And Mahalo works as a mass media method in a personalized world. The latest project management and collaboration tools are probably closest in nature to the solution, but fail to meet the felxibility and speed requirements that a personal tool would need.
This tool would need to harness all the social platforms and search methods from one unified vantage point. As we change our focus, the tool changes its focus, and our view of the ‘river’ is adjusted to trickle out only what we need for this campaign.
Steve Gillmor’s Newsgang.net is so close to achieving this, it’s as if he’s holding a magnet over an opposite pole, waiting for it to flip. Apply to much pressure and it will slide away.
We are only one or two features away from a watershed moment on the web. A groundbreaking tool which changes the way we position ourselves in the information river.
I’m confident that this tool will come with no great fanfare. It will be ‘neat’ but not heralded or understood for years to come, in the way that Google crept up on us.
P.S. The ‘river’ analogy is a great and often used one for services like Twitter and FeedReaders. I guess it goes back to Dave Winer’s River of News, but we need a new one to handle the fact that this is not mass media, and we can (or will) be able to control the flow. It’s not a faucet, not a firehose.
Programming languages don’t matter
Ted Leung has post (via Newsgang) which, among other things, exposes Sun’s desire to have numerous dynamic languages run atop of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
I’ve often said that one of the coolest things Microsoft ever did was allow developers to use a .Net language of their choice with the ability to compile into their CLR (Common Language Runtime).
I’m also surprised that Sun never caught up with the idea. I’ve been suggesting it was going to happen for years now, but it never did. From the Leung post, it looks like they still have a ways to go.
Once all these languages are interchangeable between .Net and Java, and can be deployed as applications that run equally well on Silverlight, your cell phone, or your desktop, who will care what language something is created in, as long as it works.
Of course, that’s true already.
Twitter vs. Pownce: The Great Debate
Or is it Twitter vs. Facebook?
Or is it AIM vs. Yahoo! Messenger vs. GTalk?
Or Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. MySpace vs. . . .
Okay. You get the picture.
Is this a ‘winner take all’ game, or can we expect that people will use many different services for some time to come?
It is most likely that everyone reading this post uses at least two of the services mentioned above and there are countless others out there. Those are just some of the big ones.
Not to mention, we are on an unstoppable path toward data portability. That is, it shouldn’t be long before moving our data between these services becomes incidental. It’s happening now.
The commonly held theory about a marketplace such as this is that it will consolidate to two or three main players, as has historically been the case, and this is somewhat true already.
But that’s the thing about the web.
It may be that Yahoo! photos is more popular than Flickr, but just try persuading the Flickr users to change. Since both companies are owned by Yahoo! it ’s certainly possible that they would merge, but that may be a long, slow move.
Flickr has a much more dedicated following than JotSpot, which was recently folded into Google Apps. It would be a more complicated merge.
I digress, somewhat, because even if consolidation is inevitable, we are only on the cusp of the explosion of new services to be created.
The glasnost occurring with customer data will fuel countless new services that will use that data in innovative ways. Many of these services have already been conceived but never gained traction because they couldn’t attract a critical mass fast enough to make them stand the test of time.
So let’s agree that we currently use a number of these services, and likely will find new and interesting ones to add to our arsenal in the coming years.
Let’s further not debate that one service is better than another (in most cases), but that each has it’s own merits and will attract it’s own followers. Look at the automobile industry for proof that one size does not fit all (literally, in that case).
Are we doomed to bounce between these services and to own accounts in more than one of each of these verticals?
Probably, but I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as it sounds. In fact, I think we are seeing the worst of it right now.
We need inter-op. Everyone knows that, but let’s not hold our breath and wait for the big players to fall into line. That might take years.
The smaller players will cooperate because they have more to gain. A few semi-big services (like Twitter) have shown the willingness to be open enough that it’s workable.
If we create our own marketplace, the big player will have to follow, or risk diminishing their mind-share and stature within our Attention spectrum.
How do we create our own marketplace? By flipping the coin on these services with the help of the smaller and more cooperative ones.
In a highly VRM fashion, through individual action, we can force these services to come to us. If they want to be part of our social fabric, they’ll need to play by our rules.
Many readers are now thinking the author is speaking of a pipe dream. I disagree.
All that we need to do is take active control of our data, something even I am guilty of not doing. Once we have done that, the game is over.
Here’s how:
1. We need a single sign-on. Despite the great progress with OpenId, many important services don’t offer this. (Listening Twitter?)
2. We need a unified interface to communicate with these disparate services. that is, read and write to each from a single point of contact.
3. We need a backup of our rivers of communication that is stored in a portable way.
4. The social graph needs to be stored in a distributed manner. Lot’s of progress being made here as well.
That’s it. I hope I can help.