Ross Mayfield: Web Services

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A .Net Answer to Java.net

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 20:35:04 GMT

"Microsoft officially rolled out version 1.0 of its Workspaces collaborative development environment this week. Workspaces is a lot like the open-source SourceForge environment, providing developers with a place to create, host and manage software-development projects for free."

Has blogs. As all development communities will. Must be an answer to Java.net.

Wikis & Weblogs in the Java.net Developer Community

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:29:24 GMT

Last week Sun launched Java.net, the first large scale developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs (disclosure: Socialtext consulted on its design). Serving up to 3 million users, it will expose new users to these powerful communication and collaboration tools. But it is no accident that the largest business case of weblog use is a developer community, developers have been using these tools since they were invented.

The community also leverages editorial content from O'Reilly and CollabNet developer tools. Any developer, particularly open source projects, should consider taking advantage of the free resources provided. Smaller companies should consider hosting their own developer communities there as well.

Aside from the community-wide weblogs (Daniel Steinberg, James "the Java guy" Gosling) and a wiki, each wiki and weblogs are tools within sub-community projects. You can even view weblogs by community. One evangelist blogged JavaOne using his phone cam. This community is bringing some great new voices into the fold (all RSS enabled), like Richard Gabriel who lays out the vision of Java.net:

...We think of creativity as an individual talent, but communities can be creative, too. And the sorts of things a community can build are considerably larger than those an individual can. There are many examples. Cathedrals in the Middle Ages were built by a long-lived community of builders, artisans, carpenters, sculptors, stone cutters, woodcutters, ceramics makers, glass makers, painters, and ordinary people working as laborers, based on a model created by an architect perhaps decades earlier, but inspired by a common vision of what that cathedral will be.

Programming languages have been defined by widely dispersed communities using email and similar tools. Linux -- itself a cathedral-like project -- has spawned tens of thousands of other projects, some adding well-known pieces to Linux and others stretching the imagination or bringing to Linux functionality once found only elsewhere. The software patterns community was self-created without any support whatsoever from funding agencies or corporations; similar stories are true of the Agile and eXtreme Programming communities. These are all highly influential and widespread communities now.

The vision of java.net is to build a self-creating and self-governed web place where communities can join together -- either loosely through federation or tightly by living on java.net -- to build something like a diverse city of diverse communities, individuals, and companies who are engaged in using the Java language and technology in both routine and innovative ways. The purpose is to bring people together to increase the density of triggers so that new markets and resources are created...

Now its only a week old, there are more projects than you can count, and some really active communities like Java Desktop and Java Games. The community isn't all Sun and Java, other communities are either hosted, federated or linked. By design, communities can easily cross-polinate to spark new projects.

Other open developer communities leverage wikis, like OSAF's Chandler project, Technorati and the Social Software Alliance. Its a natural fit because the tools work for more than talk, but getting things done. What's different about Java.net is the corporate initiative, scale of participation and breadth tools made openly available. Sun, to its credit, provided this in an open ethic to create new opportunties for new people and stands to gain the just reward of loyalty in return.

Its a rather simple equation, give people tools to meet people, talk and code and great things happen.

Communication and Collaboration Convergence

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:54:45 GMT

Uh oh, there's that word again. Convergence. The solution to all our problems.

Siemens has released OpenScape, which integrates phone, voice mail, e-mail, text messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing services. Its all centered on IM to synchronize use of different modes of communication, with a SIP server (Session Initiation Protocol) for telephony integration. OpenScape 1.0, however, requires Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 and Greenwich collaboration server. Its the latest in a long line of communication and collaboration solutions to leverage Outlook as a platform. And its estimated to cost as much as $400 per seat.

This may just be unified messaging redux, but Mike from Techdirt is right that it has potential as a productivity tool if its simple enough for people to use. People use many modes of communication. Optimize only a one or two and you may make communication in its entirety even more sub-optimal.

With the falling cost of more traditional communcations (original videoconference sessions were $100k a pop), putting users in the driver seat is not a bad thing. Problem is this approach of deep integration creates greater costs and risks.

Corporate IM is a good center for user management of complexity, but who knows if they have gotten this right. If as advertised, its designed to fit within workflow, it may be on the wrong track. Communication is not a process, its an informal practice whose patterns cannot be pre-defined.

I Sense a Cage Match

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 02:14:55 GMT

The People's Mesh vs. The Core Object.

But with the right leadership, the "vs." could turn into an "and."

Paying for Software

Mon, 26 May 2003 15:00:54 GMT

Dave expands upon his rationale for paying for software: "If you pay nothing for software, you probably won't die from it, but you may lose data, you're virtually certain to waste time, and at some point, money."

I had to learn to pay for software. Not the hard way, mind you. Growing up in Palo Alto distorted my propensity to pay. My first exposure to software was when user groups were rampant. 3 1/2 floppies were circulated as the norm at user group meetings. Social networks were the source of service. The hardware was damn expensive and it seemed natural that software sharing was the exercise.

Some of my elementary school friends had parents who were Apple developers. They had the best stuff. We hacked together games in BASIC on Apple IIs, traded in the computer lab at middle school and the worst punishment concievable was a flying eraser from the teacher (Mr. Spinoli's favorite pastime was flinging blackboard erasers at students in good fun and occasional accident).

I still hesitate to purchase packaged software and instead often simply go without. Maybe its all the times I purchased software only to become rapidly obsolete by new generations of hardware that purposely obfuscated backward compatibility. Or when I bought tools that ended up not being suitable for the job. Where I really hesitate is upgrading my operating system; feels like donating bottles of Thunderbird to a wino instead of buying them a happy meal.

But all that changed when I could buy software online. Not because it plays into impulse purchase proclivity. The ability to trial software or have a lite version with an easy upgrade path reduced my risk and led me to greater purchases.

Now I have turned on the spigot. Not because I work in the software industry, like paying for the right for customer support or have some enlightened consumer guilt. Because I can buy software as service. There is a confidence instilled from software that changes over time. Bugs get addressed, demands are met and risk is reduced. I don't care where my data lives, so long as it works for me. Better yet, when the software comes with information services it becomes alive.

I buy software when I know it will get better, rather than worse, over time. Appreciate appreciation. But that's just one consumer's take.

The Matter of IT

Tue, 20 May 2003 06:38:47 GMT

As the technology industry emerges from the bottom, it criticism has been lowered to the nature of being. Information Technology has always been a source of competitive advantage. At the bottom of the business cycle, advantage is basic survival, risk taken only on low hanging fruit. But now, as the leaky pipes have stopped dripping, some wish to relegate the job of IT to that of a plumber.

Friday's article in the NY Times by Steve Lohr asks the question, "Has Technology Lost its Special Status?" Technology as an industry is 10 percent of the economy and 60 percent of business spending. According to John Gantz of IDC, technology spending has increased 2-3 times the rate of economic growth since the 1960s. The question is if the industry will return to its historical growth rates, the driver of valuation multiples. Lohr reports:

That assumption about technology's special role is questioned in a provocative article this month in The Harvard Business Review, titled "IT Doesn't Matter." The article asserts that information technology, or I.T. for short, is inevitably headed in the same direction as the railroads, the telegraph, electricity and the internal combustion engine — becoming, in economic terms, just ordinary factors of production, or "commodity inputs."

"From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered," Nicholas G. Carr, editor at large of The Harvard Business Review, wrote in the article. "That is exactly what is happening to information technology today."

John Hagel and John Seely Brown believe this is an important article because it very effectively captures the backlash sweeping through executive suites against IT spending...But Carr’s article is also dangerous because it endorses the growing view that IT offers only limited potential for strategic differentiation....and are preparing a rebuttal in the July issue of HBR:

Extracting business value from IT requires innovations in business practices. In many respects, we believe Carr attacks a red herring – few people would argue that IT alone provides any significant business value or strategic advantage.
The economic impact from IT comes from incremental innovations, rather than "big bang" initiatives. A process of rapid incrementalism enhances learning potential and creates opportunities for further innovations.
The strategic impact of IT investment comes from the cumulative effect of sustained initiatives to innovate business practices in the near-term. The strategic differentiation emerges over time, based less on any one specific innovation in business practice and much more on the capability to continuously innovate around the evolving capabilities of IT.

Some tech executives have countered in the NY Times article:

"I.T. is the vehicle by which you turn ideas and content into intellectual property products," Mr. Craig Barrett (of Intel) said. "As a nation and as a company, you either upgrade your I.T. infrastructure or you won't be competitive."

Samuel J. Palmisano, chief executive of I.B.M., made the case for his industry's growing at twice the rate of the economy when he spoke to analysts on Wednesday. "The industry is fundamentally a growth industry because it underpins productivity," he said.

Kevin Werbach speaks of new models in the Post-PC era in his Supernova report:

...The point of the article is not that tech is dying, or that innovation is drying up. It's that enterprise technology is moving into a new phase. Bigger, faster, and more feature-laden are no longer selling points in the same way. Smarter, simpler, more efficient, and more flexible are the new criteria. It's much harder to make powerful system simple than to make them complex....

Zack Lynch points how IT drives growth in other sectors:

For instance, although not a punctuated leap in competitive advantage, social software has the potential to accrue significant value for companies that leverage its potential to accelerate innovation. In some industries, two product cycles can be the difference between corporate life and death.
For example, decreasing innovation cycle times in the pharmaceutical industry by 10% could slash years off product research, development and approval processes. When translated into revenue and market capitalization impacts, intelligent adoption of social software could significantly disrupt the balance of power in this multi-billion dollar industry. Who says IT competitive advantage is dead?

What is unique about IT compared to other revolutions is how it extends the capabilities of people and groups. IT fuels competitive advantage by enhancing productivity. Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT has demonstrated that productivity gains occur not through IT in and of itself, but when it is introduced with new business practice and process.

This is actually a contrarian point for many. Some private equity investors shy away from technologies that require change of behavior, for example, because it adds risk that users will resist change. But in fact, that's the real promise of IT, to extend our capabilities in new ways. Changing behavior is good in a changing world.

Brynjofsson's studies have been in process-intensive areas of organization. Areas where economies of scale can be easily realized. When business process is defined, it is almost immeadiately outdated because environmental conditions change presenting new sets of information. This underscores the need for business practice that realizes economies of scope (agility), but also the limits of process itself.

What remains is knowledge work. Most jobs in the service sector spend the majority of their time undertaking unstructured tasks in social context. And this time is where innovation occurs (Palmisano points to IP creation, but that's just one set of montetizable outcomes).

IT will continue to drive competitive advantage for business because an incremental enhancement of how groups work still yields exponental benefits.

Technorati API

Mon, 12 May 2003 14:31:02 GMT

Technorati API 0.9. I'm proud to announce the first public release of the Technorati API, the application programming interface to Technorati's weblog index and search engine. [Sifry's Alerts]

Remember all that blogspace innovation that happened with Google's API. Double that.

Good Social Software Read

Tue, 06 May 2003 15:56:10 GMT

Seb summarizes a good read on Social Software on Many-to-Many:

Smarter, Simpler, Social. Smarter, Simpler, Social: An introduction to online social software methodology is the title of a recent, lengthy article by Lee Bryant. Bryant collects a wealth of observations on the current shape of the social software landscape and reflects on where things are / ought to be going.

SmarterXML/RDF/RSS syndication technologies Distributed, collaborative metadata Ontology development and the Semantic Web Adaptive design and context-awareness SimplerSmaller, modular software with common methods and properties Web services and shared protocols Usability and ‘unfinished’ user experience design Shared and open source code Social

In the way it is conceived:

In the way it is built:

In what it does:

messaging, etc.

In how it works: adaptive qualities, personalisation, agent technologies, etc.

While I feel the article lacks a well-defined structure and spreads itself in too many directions at once, most of those directions - emergent networks, social network analysis, knowledge sharing, and social capital, to name a few - highlight significant aspects of the theme. There's a large and worthwhile set of links throughout the text, as well.

The strongest part is at the end, where Bryant discusses methodology for implementing and deploying social software. The following quote nicely summarizes his position, which I find quite sensible:

Instead of imposing centralised one-size-fits-all software and then using a combination of coercion and marketing to encourage people to use it, we should be building smaller, more modular and adaptable software services around the very people who will use them, and they should be simple to use, ideally transparent to the user.

All in all, a nice fly-through. [Corante: Social Software]

Social Software Alliance

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 14:50:41 GMT

CALL FOR DISCUSSION: Social Software Alliance

PURPOSE AND SCOPE

We propose a trade group of social software developers and other interested parties who work together to create and promote open standards for the social software community. Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis.

Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability between different developers' products.

The alliance will:

aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
help promote each standard to gain wider adoption

The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc.

PROPOSED SCHEDULE

First CFD published: April 16, 2003
SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): April 18, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
BoF at Etech conference: April 22-25, 2003
SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): May 2, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
Alliance announced with founding members: May 15, 2003

DISCUSSION

There is an email list and a wiki set up for the purpose of discussing the formation of an alliance.

list subscribe: blank email to social-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
unsubscribe: see List-Unsubscribe header in any list email
help with list server: social-help@lists.polycot.com
digest: social-digest-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
archive: http://lists.polycot.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi/2/

wiki: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/
registration for editing: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa-registration/

It is expected that similar and/or additional discussion and collaboration tools will be migrated to the alliance's web presence, once it is created.

FOUNDING MEMBERS

Danny Ayers
Ideagraph

Stewart Butterfield
President, Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd.

Marc Canter
Chairman, CEO Broadband Mechanics Inc.

Ward Cunningham
Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Greg Elin

Noah Glass
Listenlab, LLC

Mark Graham
VP of Technology, iVillage

Meg Hourihan
Co-founder & Director, The Lafayette Project

Peter Kaminski
CTO, Socialtext Inc.

Elizabeth Lawley
Asst. Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology

Jon Lebkowsky
CEO, Polycot Consulting

Kevin Marks
Instigator, mediAgora

Ross Mayfield
CEO, Socialtext Inc.

Matt Mower
Novissio Ltd.

Mitch Ratcliffe
President, Internet/Media Strategies Inc.

Clay Shirky

Benjamin Trott
Co-Founder & CTO, Six Apart Ltd.

Mena Trott
Co-Founder & CEO, Six Apart Ltd.

Paolo Valdemarin
Evectors Software

David Weinberger
Writer

Nancy White
Online facilitator, Full Circle Associates

Easy News Topics

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 14:57:16 GMT

Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0.

Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification. ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products.

RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well. We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications. I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do:

group posts from many feeds by interest.
filtering posts I don't want to see
scoring & promote posts
recombe different feeds dynamically.

I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer. We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data.

We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a Creative Commons License) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet.

I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant. At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed. We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it.

We look forward to your comments. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Great work guys. Just what RSS needs to be smarter yet stupid -- metadata that can be used at the edge. From feed to feeds.

Ratings in Social Software

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 05:30:41 GMT

Brit Blaser on the role of ratings in Social Software:

...I can't imagine software more social than Xpertweb which, though its purpose is unabashedly commercial, intends to socialize its users by the character of user ratings it tracks and publishes. You might say that Xpertweb is a set of values expressed through users' valuations. As Einstein is quoted, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

Social software then, at a minimum, should at least make sure that things that matter are easier to count than they are without the software. Any other attributes may make the software elegant or compelling or easy to use, but the social part seems to be the trick of newly exposing communal activities or opinions that were not previously visible.

So that sets the bar for social software. We recognize it because it lets us start to count things we care about, but the designer has to figure out what those things are. Presumably they're not obvious yet, or we'd already be counting them. What characteristic, theme perhaps, might indicate something needs new counting tools?

Harkening back to the days of yore, in the medevil bazzar, some crazy guy was probably going around trying to get everyone to agree on the concept of coinage. Initially people resisted. A cow is a cow and a sheep is a sheep and never the twain shall meet. If I think gold is worth one thing and you think its something else and lordy know what it will be tomorrow, how can one commodify? But, low and behold, you can carry a coin in your pocket and a cow only with great difficulty.

People are in constant pursuit of the commoditzation of everything. Not just goods, mind you. We abstract concepts in commonly digestible forms. We archetype and then debate over value. Things must be simplified to be social or we end up talking about different things.

A rating is a price. We define a good and deliberate over its value through signals. Sometimes we express price not for transaction but to communicate value in its simplest form (a guy at Stanford won a Nobel Prize on this). A price is the simplest method of communicating value.
A rating is a mode of communication. What I value when. When I send a smiley to someone, its a rating.
A rating is a signal of trust. Whom I value when. Trust is credit and credit is priced.

If there is a theme that indicates we need new counting tools its when things become too complex and when we need to simplify through the language of a rating.

Where Worlds Collide

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 16:22:00 GMT

Means to Ends.

Jamie Lewis: Ends and Means: Identity in Two Worlds.

Jamie is President of The Burton Group (which he founded with Craig Burton) and one of the world's leading authorities on enterprises, networks and related matters. [The Doc Searls Weblog]

The Net must accommodate more than one form of digital identity. Identity is contextual. It has many aspects. Customer-centrism is only one aspect of the digital identity infrastructure we need. So, it stands to reason that the identity infrastructure will be polycentric: flexible, dynamic and capable of pivoting and changing according to the context...

These different forms of identity: customer-centric, government-issued, and enterprise-managed, will develop in parallel, more or less...

Both the World of Ends and World of Means are right and inevitable. The gray area is where worlds collide, what Doc calls Our Identity, where means and ends will continually negotiate. The resulting friction and absence of trust may call for intermediaries that provide proxy value and a balance of control.

Eric Norlin is right that organic growth may prevail, particularly in the area of Our Identity. Identity is a competition of networks. Clay Shirky recently suggested the strength of the organic network growth of Earlynets over Permanets for physical wireless networks, which I believe applies to logical networks as well.

Caveat Venditor

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:25:55 GMT

Mitch Ratcliffe:

I've been working with Britt Blaser and Flemming Funch on the design of the Xpertweb and it has got me thinking about a number of questions raised in recent years about the role of the buyer, the employee and the citizen, who always seem to come out on the short end of the deal when there is some pre-existing power arrayed against them....

The buyer has needed to be wary since the Romans coined the phrase "caveat emptor" to excuse the seller of poorly made goods or poorly preserved foods. If you were too damned stupid to recognize that your fish sauce was spoiled, tough luck. What Xpertweb does, by flipping the process of a transaction around and making payment dependent on the delivery of quality and quantity promises (whether of stuff or services), is give us the potential for an economic system that both improves the seller's responsiveness to the customer and eliminates the free-rider problem that could afflict a system of payment after delivery....

The full flower of individual choice will come in the midst of what free marketers have espoused despite it's total absence: massively accessible information for decision-making. As a tool for recording accountability, Xpertweb is a model for what is needed: It doesn't impose any particular structure and can work to support interactions among equals in a variety of settings.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]

World of Ends

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 05:41:48 GMT

Dr. Weinberger and I decided to sum up a whole bunch of stuff in one big site: World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to stop Mistaking It for Something Else. Dr. W. explains more here.[The Doc Searls Weblog]

The Nutshell

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
a. No one owns it
b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

It all begins with Simplicity, turns out bandwidth is a commodity, and let's be stupid and not screw it up.

Berkeley DRM Conference

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 23:05:08 GMT

Liveblogging from the DRM conference. The Berkeley DRM conference is in full swing, and a number of livebloggers are on the floor, so if you couldn't make it (like me!), you can at least get a number of running accounts as they go down. Check out this Mindjack entry where legendary cypherpunk Lucky Green does battle with a MSFT DRM evangelist, then go read Dan Gillmor's excellent-as-always liveblog of the show. [Boing Boing Blog]

I was supposed to go, but had some analog rights management to take care of today. Looks like I missed a fun day.

Berkeley's Hal Varian puts it DRM in perspective: DRM is just one of many business models, including advertising, bundling content with other things, subscriptions, low prices for authentic versions, micropayments. Pluses and minuses in each. In DRM, seller should want to maximize value, not protection. More you give customer, more valuable customer finds the product. Pick the right tradeoff. [from Dan's notes]

Also check out the Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog for coverage.

App Server Commoditization

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 15:54:19 GMT

Sun's project Orion will provide an Application Server for free with Solaris. A move that repositions Sun and BEA in conflict.

BEA, the market leader, has already faced similar pricing pressure from IBM. J2EE App Servers are a commodity. Now its a battle of the bundle, with Sun seeking to sell hardware, BEA development frameworks and IBM integration services and datacommodities.

AO Article

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:31:52 GMT

My post on Google/Blogger and the Annotated Web is up and running on the Always On Network.

Bloogle's Annotated Web

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:59:47 GMT

Dave thinks Bloogle will be focused on serving enterprises, but implementing weblogs in the enterprise doesn't fit Google's appliance model (yet). Bloogle has been blogged to death in more ways than one, but Im still offering my take -- that they will fulfill the dream of the Annotated Web and corner the market on free micro-content.

The Google acquisition of Pyra -- makers of the most widely-used weblog platform, Blogger -- left those unacquainted with weblogs scratching their heads. When weblogs first appeared a few years ago they seemed like just another method of building vanity websites. But the technology and social norms that have grown out of these simple publishing tools have changed dramatically. Real people are now engaged in building the Web, not just consuming it, creating a larger opportunity for Google than search alone.

A weblog is the simplest way to produce a website -- for publishing, communication and collaboration -- through standards-based structured data exchange in a spam-free medium. These simple tools with simple rules yield complex results. Google is tapping into a new form of social infrastructure, and perhaps returning to its roots.

Google co-founder Larry Page in a recent talk: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank...Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation."

This vision of an Annotated Web where people make editorial judgments on content has existed in blogspace for some time now. Every blogger develops a link-rich annotated resource. People still outperform technology in qualitative decisions. The problem is people don't scale and not all judgments are equal (Third Voice was an attempt at the Annotated Web, but couldn’t discern which annotations were relevant). Google knows how to scale and already uses weblogs as a source of dynamic link-rich judgment to inform PageRank. Tapping into the natural intelligence of people to enhance the relevancy and meaning of search results is low hanging fruit, but there is more to this opportunity.

What Pyra and weblog platforms (Moveable Type, Radio and others) do really well is make publishing simple and affordable. Creating a post is as simple as using a WYSIWYG editor and clicking a button. Posts are structured in reverse chronological order, easy for readers to comprehend and writers to recall. Each post is also formatted in an XML specification called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), which allows other bloggers to subscribe to posts in a news aggregator that scans in P2P fashion for updates once an hour. This open innovation has spawned others bundled aggregators/editors, Topic Exchange for group forming and Technorati and Daypop.

At Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference on decentralized technologies (including weblogs), Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to an audience of bloggers by agreeing to work with weblog platforms to accept ping notifications of new posts. The potential to synchronize and syndicate annotation posts to a service like Google News is a timely service and a model for the Web to come. The Google/Blogger combo (Bloogle?) can also distribute annotations, relevancy and AdWords to the Blogger Weblog platform to put each post in context. Bloogle is becoming a platform for the production, marketing and distribution of micro-content.

Predicting what Bloogle evolves into matters less than how weblogs are engaging people in a two-way Web. Google may dominate search and publishing, and others with follow, but weblogs as communication and collaboration platforms still remain open opportunities.

Not all links are created equal. Links between blogs are also conversations within social and creative networks. This social infrastructure, denser and more purposeful communities than newsgroups underpinned by real relationships, is very different from the information infrastructure that is Google and Blogger’s core competency. When people are engaged in the Web beyond being consumers the real opportunities arise.

Three Degrees

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 15:39:25 GMT

Three Degrees from Microsoft. Microsoft is targeting the Internet generation with a new product called Three Degrees.... The product is a powerful extension of instant messaging with the ability to create ad-hoc personal communities. Once you establish these groups, there are a variety of tasks that can be shared including pictures, listening to shared playlists and the ability to send animated “winks” to other users. Newsweek has the story. [Michael Gartenberg]

..."We really wanted to have a different set of skills that would allow them to meet new people online in a way I, for instance, cannot," said group manager Tammy Savage. "They have a way of vouching for each other as friends, figuring out who to trust and not trust."...

..."If you look at Threedegrees closely, there are broader implications for this product for Microsoft, (such as) driving IM use for corporate purposes," Gartenberg said on Tuesday. "Take the Threedegrees functionality and apply it to corporate work groups and you have the extension from communication to collaboration that goes beyond IM. If you look at the shared-picture feature and imagine that was a PowerPoint file, you get the idea of where Microsoft could go with this." [C-net]

Microsoft's first relationship product should be taken seriously. By initially targeting the younger IM set, they don't have to hold back on multi-modal features. Their proprietary FOAF functionality enables community building similar to that of Live Journal. It could also host a trust/reputation system. And as a platform for other applications and gateway for P2P file sharing it is comparable to Groove. That and it bypasses blogging. The question is if we want our kids growing up hooked on monopoly.

Google buys Pyra

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 04:29:04 GMT

Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time
• posted by Dan Gillmor 07:41 PM
• permanent link to this item

NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a special column running in tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News. We're posting it early to get the story out.

Weblogs are going Googling.

Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

"I couldn't be more excited about this," said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn't discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the "resources to build on the vision I've been working on for years."

Part of that vision, shared by other blogging pioneers, has been to help democratize the creation and flow of news in a world where giant companies control so much of what most people see, hear and read. Weblogs are also becoming a valuable communication tool for groups of people, and have begun to infiltrate the corporate, university and government spheres.

Just three and a half years old, Pyra's Blogger software has 1.1 million registered users, Williams said. He estimated that about 200,000 of them are actively running weblogs. Pyra charges for some higher-capability services not available in the base configuration, but most of its registered users don't pay.

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago Google bought Deja.com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet "newsgroups," Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net.

But now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."

"We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies," he said in a statement on Saturday. He didn't elaborate further on what those synergies and opportunities might be, but said more details would emerge soon. Users of the Blogger software and hosting service won't see any immediate changes, he added.

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.

How Google manages the Blogger software and Pyra's hosting service may present some tricky issues. The search side of Google indexes weblogs from all of the major blogging platforms, including Movable Type and Userland Radio. Any hint of proprietary favoritism would meet harsh criticism.

Blogging was moving mainstream even before this buyout. Several weblogs draw a large readership, and bloggers demonstrated their collective power to keep an issue alive even when the traditional media miss the story, as former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his dismay late last year.

Major technology companies are seeing the potential. Tripod, the consumer web-publishing unit of Terra Lycos, recently introduced a "Blog Builder" tool. America Online is expected to be on the verge of doing something similar, and no one will be surprised if Yahoo and Microsoft do the same. Are more buyouts of blog toolmakers in the offing?

Developers of blogging software have been finding user-friendly ways to help readers of weblogs and other information find and collect material from a variety of sites. It's in this arena that the Google-Pyra deal may have the most implications.

More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear.

Radio-Groove Interop

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 15:58:44 GMT

Exploring Tim Knip's Radio/Groove interop tool. When you install Tim Knip's Groove/Radio interop tool you specify three tools in a shared space. First, a discussion tool whose items are sent to your blog. Second, a files tool whose contents are upstreamed. Third, another discussion tool that collects the RSS items fetched by your news aggregator. ... [Jon's Radio]

I deployed Groove at a small startup that is a consulting client. It decreased reliance on IT support, but is primarily used as a distributed file server. Perhaps this tool will engender collaboration use as blogging is participatory.

Open Source Disclosed as a Risk

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 15:36:42 GMT

Microsoft: Open source threatens our business model [InfoWorld: Top News] Finally recognized as a risk factor in their regulatory filings.

Modelling the Web

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 07:06:57 GMT

Just came across an interesting 'Power Law' paper, published by a team at NEC, which offers some thought-provoking data: "NEC researchers discovered that the degree of "rich get richer" or "winners take all" behavior varies in different categories and may be significantly less than previously thought." The key is competitiveness: in very competitive scenarios (NEC looked at ecommerce sites) 'preferential attachment' resulted in distributions that were very close to power law. But, in less competitive environments, the distributions moved steadily away from power law. In fact, deviation from power-law distribution becomes an index for competitiveness. I wonder what the Weblog index looks like? The team also pointed out that 'preferential attachment' did not prevent the rapid rise of a new star (they cite Google)... [Chris Gulker]

This paper makes a bold claim: "The model accurately accounts for the true connectivitydistributions of category-specific web pages, the web as a whole,and other socialnetworks."

Now its known that link structure drives traffic and traffic in e-commerce drives revenues. The chart to the right (right most point being Amazon) is a clear example of a Power-law in effect. By this example, the business of the net is in the hands of the few.

Aside from a fit and viral node's unlikely emergence, this is the world we live in. Or is it...

In "less competitive" markets, such as the one to the left for photographers, the distribution is less skewed. NEC Researchers offer geographic concentration as a possible reason for this decentralization.

But I believe the structure of the net is changing because the cost of sustained entry has fallen. Blogging, Web Services and other decentralized models allow new nodes to develop linkages at a lower cost. And these links aren't just driving traffic, they are conversations -- Micro-content forming micro-markets.

As the Net evolves, the definition of a link becomes more refined, the notion of Local blurs and the emergent pattern may trend towards more shared opportunity.

ID at the center

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 23:35:50 GMT

Jon Udell rightly centers convergence around identity and Marc Canter rightly centers on open digital identity.