Monday, January 13, 2003

First, Jon Udell of Infoworld writes about The disruptive web: "Thus a new service, potentially useful to millions of people, was deployed by blogging a Web page containing 900 links. The meme spread quickly in the petri dish that is the interconnected blog network. My published RSS feed spread the news to my subscribers, who passed it along to their subscribers, and soon the blog indexes picked it up and spread it even more widely. By the end of the day, the technique was verified to work with many libraries in the United States." [InfoWorld] Then, I run across Clay Shirky's (O'Reilly) LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?: "There is evidence that this two-step process applies to features as well, in a pattern Matt Jones has dubbed the LazyWeb. The original formulation was 'If you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.' But it is coming to mean 'I describe a feature I think should exist in hopes that someone else will code it.'" [O'Reilly's OpenP2P] Both of these stories exemplify how weblogging (and its technical underpinnings) have become the poor man's "knowledge management" system. If one agrees with Thomas Edision that "The value of an idea lies in the using of it," then Jon's story is a personal testimonial of experiencing a revelation and turning it into reality through the vehicle of the loosely-coupled weblog pub-sub network. So too, Clay Shirky cites two examples of situations where one mind delivered the "idea," and another mind delivered the "using of it," again through the magic of weblogs, RSS, and web-based pub-sub. Certainly, ideas are often highly valued in today's society; however, as recent economic events seem to bear out, not every idea, even when used, can produce economic value. I think I'd revise Edison's quote to read "The value of an idea lies in the effective using of it," drawing on Merriam-Webster's first definition of effective: "1 a : producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect." The "desired effect," of course, is sustained economic growth (not the short-term gains of the late '90s that vaporized so quickly). One of the opportunities of the web as demonstrated in the Udell and Shirky articles is the low cost of R & D for a certain domain of ideas (we'll call them "web services"). Experiments can yield success or failure in hours, and learning from those experiences occurs at a similarly frenzied pace. The time-to-market for Jon Udell's idea was simply his development time. His time-to-volume (Internet-scale usage) was less than 24 hours. Granted, he's not generating revenue or profit from this usage, but substantial numbers of users derive value, resulting in additional growth in eyeballs to Jon's writing, making him a more-marketable writer, and ultimately delivering added compensation to his bank account. 12:05:44 AM