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.
The (open) future of news
First, we must start by defining news. At least I’ll explain what I consider it to be.
News is not something solely created by a high priesthood of journalists in non-smoky back rooms of some media organization. They do create news there. Lots of it.
Nor is it merely news organizations coupled with the fast and loose, breaking posts from a talented squadron of bloggers. They create news too. But wait, there is more.
The fact is, there is no strong line between who can create news and what is news.
The Rodney King video was an act of journalism. My wedding video was probably not (it could be, you don’t know my family).
My recent tweet (see Twitter if you don’t know what that is) saying “Good Night, all” is not journalism, but my next one about Google is definitely breaking news.
It’s not the creator or the medium that makes something journalism, it’s the substance. No doubt that professional journalists create more news than your average MySpace user. It’s their job. No doubt, they are more diligent about trying to be objective and telling both sides. But they make mistakes. They are even, dare I say, biased, even if they won’t admit it.
Okay, enough about that. The point is that we get our news from a variety of growing sources, fueled by syndication methods like RSS and Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook. Cheap devices and bandwidth have made it possible for countless people to contribute to the fabric of news flow than ever before. Nuff said.
Back when I studied Mass Communications at the University of Connecticut, we used to lament about the shrinking number of news sources. We used to say things like, “the number of media organizations has gone from over one hundred during WWII to less than 25 now,” or “you can fit the number of executive board members of all the media organizations in the country into one room.”
Well, those days are over. And with all the sources I mention above, it should just be one big party. . . right? Well, look out. There is a new editor in town; it’s the algorithm.
You see, we once criticized that the back room editorial policies weren’t transparent enough, and we heralded the transparency of the blogging world as the answer to that.
The only problem was that there are now too many sources to manage. We simply can’t handle it all. Yes, we rely on our digital social networks to do some moderating for us, but these grow as well, and contribute even greater amounts of noise. It’s not a self healing problem.
As well, we sometimes like to get a broader picture of what’s happening than our social network might afford. After all, that’s the beauty of greater sources. Greater perspective.
This has led to the rise of aggregators like Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum and Techmeme. As well, it is a predominant way in which a whole bunch of mainstream web users consume their news with services like Google News and MyYahoo. Yes, you can personalize many of the systems, but an algorithm is often deciding what stories bubble up.
Perhaps you can see my concern. If we begin to rely on algorithms to filter our news consumption, if only partially, have we not discarded one opaque system for another.
It’s not a simple issue, but let’s try to use a simple example.
You may have heard that Google is going to archive the print editions of many newspapers, going back hundreds of years.
Now imagine that at a crucial point in history, many people want to know what happened in World War II . They search for it and Google displays the results. The black box algorithm that decides what articles rise to the top of that search will influence what people’s perception of that historical event was.
How about a more current example. People voting in the Ohio primaries on Tuesday may go to Google News and search for “Obama” and/or “Hillary.” Good for them. We need to know the issues.
The top results for articles could have a profound effect on the vote, and therefore the world. Did the results favor views that might lead voters on the edge to settle on one side or the other?
You might find the example extreme, but the fact is that an opaque system decided what people read, not a transparent one. It’s no longer the editor that sways public opinion, it’s the programmer.
Even Digg, a site that feigns democracy, has an algorithm that apparantly only a small monority of it’s users have have figured out and exploited. Or are they being exploited by the algorithm?
What we need is transparent algorithms that aggregate news, so that we are aware of what decided the results, even if we not in complete control.
In an ideal world we could mix and match plugins that controlled how the news is aggregated and sorted. Some will want to rely on a broader network, some on a less broad. Some will want to give greater weight to certain individuals and organizations.
The possibilities for forming our news consumption decisions are endless, and may never be perfected. We should strive to keep those decisions under our control, not the editor’s, not the programmer’s, and not the algorithm’s.
SIDENOTE: Prior to publishing this, I broke news about Google archiving old newspaper editions, on Twitter, just to prove a point. Most of the first readers of this post followed a link from there to here, so necessarily had the background knowledge I mention above.
P.S. Jeff Jarvis and some contributors are talking about the future of news organizations, a different but equally meaningful topic I’ll try to explore in another post.
New Paradigm Emerging
Steve Gillmor’s latest show Newsgang Live has two conversations going on. One is the presidential race, in particular the rise of Barack Obama, and the other revolves around what Bruce Lerner observes is the growing pervasiveness of “propellorhead technology” as it stretches into the mainstream.
This is not just “Web 2.0″ gaining wider acceptance, as one might be tempted to characterize it.
The platforms have emerged already, Steve contends, though they might still be in their infancy and subject to maturation. These platforms are RSS, Twitter, Facebook , iPhone and the like. They are all disruptive in their own way because they become part of our DNA.
Like the web before them, it becomes difficult to imagine how we would cope without the tools, despite the ironical fashion in which they simultaneously cause our overload.
But the emerging concept of a unified web identity(e.g. OpenID and inames) coupled with the Web OS (e.g. Silverlight, Ajax, Google Office) and the looming VRM revolution, leads one to believe that the coming years will be more innovative than even Cluetrain imagined.
If it sounds a bit nebulous, well, that makes sense. I think it’s no accident that the concepts of non-particular Social Change and non-particular Social Technology have intersected so beautifully in the Newsgang Live episodes. In fact, one has to wonder if Gillmor knew exactly what he was doing.
Obama is just a symbol of the emerging desires of a nation. Twitter is the web corollary.
It fulfilled the blogosphere’s desire for an central identity system. We just couldn’t wait for protocols and open-standards to catch up with what we needed now.
What’s missing is the decentralization that we love and still sorely want. That’s why the periodic downtime of Twitter causes the Blogosphere to erupt with negative passion. The same thing happens in the enterprise when the Exchange server goes down. It’s just unacceptable.
Dave Winer wants a backup. The XMPP advocates claim that they’ve had the system in place for years, but Jabber has never produced a (really popular) way to manage the social system beyond IM buddies, which tend to be more personal contacts than Bloggers or Twitter friends.
We need to have a “squelch,” or else we’d all still be using Usenet or email lists, which both still maintain active users. Before that, there was Ham Radio.
Perhaps more importantly, we need unity across all these wonderful services.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision unified communication. Achieving it has been more elusive.
One of the more interesting projects I’ve come across is Social.IM. Yanda Erlich gave a nice description of where the service wants to go on a recent Newgang Live. Of particular importance is the desire for Social.IM to work across other social networks, not only Facebook, which is now the case.
In that way, it’s similar to the aspirations for the humble designs of Gangbuster. Abstract out the services we love into one unified client, not to replace them, to but to increase their pervasiveness.
For a service to do this, it needs to be open source, to eliminate silo lock-in, as well as retain a carbon-copy of our gestures and “prosumption,” a term Doc Searl’s came up with to identify the fact that we produce and consume. It is the very nature of the web.
The need for open source is two-fold. One, that we might never lose our data, which becomes our real identity. Two, is to eliminate our reliance on any one service, in the case that it is down, or changes it’s nature in ways we did not anticipate(e.g. Google reader).
I may have recently coined a term (at least Google implies that), when I implied to Steve that the “cloudosphere” is the one service we really want. And every service needs a client.
Hello cloud!
Welcome to Gangbuster. The aim here is to create an open source multi-platform client that speaks to numerous cloud-based services all from one easy to use interface.
Tired of bouncing between your feed-reader, Twitter, email and your IM client. Gangbuster may be for you. Stay tuned.