Connecting the Dots

Yawn...Apple's "Fun, New Things" Not So Fun?

Maybe all of our collective expectations are WAY too high for Apple, but a new Mac mini, iPod hi-fi and leather cases? Not gonna change the world.

Conjecture was a Mac mini-based TiVo-killer media center, iPhone, and a movie download service. Instead, we got an upgrade and a couple of accessories that made even the Apple fan-boys yawn.

Engadget was live as were others, but there is virtually ZERO buzz in the blogosphere and it's been a couple of hours since Apple's special, invite-only event ended.

The lack of conversation is a collective yawn from the blogosphere.

Power of Innovative Communication

Came across this portfolio site of a recent graduate (Dave Werner) of the Portfolio Center in Atlanta (via John Nack at Adobe via Scoble).

Now I don't often push people to view sites like this -- and am often quite weary of gratuitous Flash animation -- but this guy has so effectively communicated with multiple media that I found myself smiling, delighted, moved, and wanting to pick up the phone to hire him (though I don't have any work now but was thinking of how I could hire him anyway).

One of his presentations, reflect/respect, was such an interesting way to engage people in the essence of a message that I found myself mesmerized by it. Make sure to peek at it as well as launch sites to which he's linked. You can get the essence of this entire site in less than 15 or so minutes.

Where is our attention now?

It doesn't seem all that long ago that everyone's attention was focused on the same media...since there were few available outlets to focus our attention. One such place was The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. People often talked about what happened on the show the next day since so millions watched it simultaneously. Made for interesting and focused discussions around some given topic or humorous event.

Today almost no one watches the same thing. We don't read the same newspapers, magazines, blogs, web sites, or listen to the same podcasts. Our attention is all over the place. Or is it?

Tonight I read Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine post where he linked to a BBC journalist lamenting the state of the American Democratic party and the now diluted ability to get a liberal message distributed to the masses. What caught my eye were these passages:

Most importantly, the worlds of entertainment and news (which used to pipe a vaguely left-wing message into the nation’s homes) have been blown to bits by technological changes which render them powerless.

There are 600 channels on my television. I never watch any of them.

Next I read Matthew Ingram's excellent post about Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 whose premise is that the Web needs filters (i.e., learned and knowledgable editors) and that social promotion of article sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com are useless since they're random.

I mostly don't care about the lion's share of articles that bubble up to the top at Digg and Reddit. But what I *do* like is that I can see what other people think is interesting enough to read. Helps me stay on top of what is hitting the consciousness of others.

These social promotion sites (and I'd put ones like YouTube in the same category) are places where the collective can all see, hear or read those items worthy of mass attention. That's when the "aha!" came: people who are paying attention are making their interests known by viewing, clicking or downloading and soon will be, "...and did you see that video about _____ on YouTube?" If someone hasn't, they can immediately go there and see what everyone else is talking about.

GooglePages: Even my Grandma would want to edit the HTML

Tried out GooglePages this morning. Like so many other web-based offerings, it has "beta" under the logo. It's not beta...it's in a pre-alpha stage.

l say this since I've been deeply involved in Web-based tools for years -- both desktop and hosted. From hand-coding HTML in 1996 to using PageMill, NetFusion, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, GoLive and other WYSIWYG tools, I ended up at arguably the leading edge, most robust content management/portal vendor (Vignette) during the dotcom heyday. I know high level tools and GooglePages isn't one of them.

In addition, I've invested a tremendous amount of time on the small business side with my bride's company and others. So I've learned a great deal about the toolsets available for individuals and small to midsize businesses...and this tool isn't yet ready for anyone but the least skilled among us. It also creates incredibly pedestrian looking pages. It's not useful since the non-savvy can't even create navigation for the pages they create!

Why didn't Google look at CityMax, Bigstep, or even Yahoo before releasing this product? CityMax in particular is also a brain-dead-simple page creation offering, but they have forums, ecommerce (including digital downloads), site creation (i.e., navigation to pages), and much, much more. I haven't recommended CityMax, though, due to one fatal flaw: no staging and production which means the second you save a page it's live.

That was the only feature of GooglePages I liked. Not only the ability to create pages and then publish them (staging and production tiers), but there was rollback capability (i.e., unpublish). Alas, that was the only thing I found useful.

Just like my initial and ongoing reaction to GoogleTalk ("...and they delivered this piece of _____ why?"), my reaction to GooglePages is the same. I wouldn't even recommend this to my 11 year old son, since there are so many other simple, yet much more functional ways to build pages and sites. It is so crystal clear that left-brain engineers designed this tool and probably didn't even have a cup of coffee with someone who understands web or graphic design. Just look at the templates if you don't believe me.

I understand Google wants to be in the game (and probably has a multi-year roadmap for GooglePages), but they've embarrassed themselves again by releasing something so basic, so rudimentary, and lacking so much functionality that even my Grandma would want to edit the HTML.

Read more here, here and here.

RSS and Advertising

I want ads. However, I also want no ads on my TiVo'ed shows, podcasts, emails, web sites or especially in my RSS feeds....unless they're for something I want or might be interested in.

Just read Robert Scoble's post which focused on full vs. partial RSS fed posts. What I saw in his post loud-n-clear was this: advertising is intrusive to early adopters (his premise...most readers of feeds in aggregators are early adopters). Scoble is also a pragmatist like I am: people don't or can't work for free and content production doesn't happen without some sort of incentives to make the system work.

As people's attention increasingly is focused on the Web -- and traditional distribution of advertisements wane -- there is a level of desperation in ad-land to figure out what is the next smart, targeted, measurable, learning and adaptable method to give people what they want, what they're interested in, and what people actually welcome.

Scoble continues with some smart ideas on unobtrusively placing links within the RSS feed to content on web pages that have ads on them vs. obtrusive ads inside of the feed itself -- whetting the interest of a reader to click-through instead of the old way of shotgun-blasting ads at people -- and I find that brilliant. Get creative on giving value, advertisers, and adapt to this new method of people consuming content. (By the way, I find it amusing that in-line RSS ads are just visual noise to me now...and I ignore them inside of an aggregated feed just like I ignore ads on web pages!).

I submit that the cleanliness of an RSS feed is imperative too. When I think about all the mashup'ed sites and aggregators out there already, interstitial ads would destroy the overall look-n-feel and simply add to visual noise (plus, it would be trivial to strip them out making all the effort of insertion be a moot point).

Could a partial solution be in the Microsoft-proposed Simple Sharing Extension to the RSS protocol? Why couldn't SSE be used to update a stored profile of me based on my actual click-through and consumption of an ad? Based on what I know of RSS protocol and the SSE extension, it would seem that a simple mechanism of synchronizing what I actually view with a constantly updated profile of Steve Borsch (a profile I would own and would reside in my InfoCard repository along with my attention data). Updating synchronously would enable the profile to become more-n-more useful to advertisers so they could deliver what I want, am interested in...as well as how those wants and needs will change over the duration of my online life.

RSS: We haven't seen anything yet...

The more I experience the power of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the more I realize that it is increasingly the lubrication for the gears of the content machine.

Like any successful protocol, opportunists want to bend it to their will and market forces push on it to become better or end up irrelevant to some superior one. Dave Winer's post today is a positioning statement that proves "the mental doors are wide open" to ideas that favor market forces over the opportunists.

Aggregators have changed my research and analytic life. RSS has allowed me to add multiple streams of consciousness and information which feed my ever flowing, nearing flood stage, river of knowledge...but made manageable because of the protocol.

Think about just one development, tagging, which is sparking services like Edgeio (maybe the Ebay of blogs?) and the increasingly valuable offerings from Technorati (making sense of the blogosphere through clustering and search of them).

At the same time, I am seeing opportunities to leverage RSS absolutely EVERYWHERE. From mashups like Newsvine (news feeds + seeding articles + social promotion = a network customized newspaper) to ScoopGo (ScoopGO! lets you create "Scoops": search engines which search through feeds you choose), the acceleration in capabilities and ideas -- all built on top of RSS -- are incredible.

No question that at some point in the next few years, Dave Winer will be viewed as the creator of one of the most important market catalysts of the 21st Century.

Hot, Naked Geeks

Listening to a Gillmor Gang awhile back, Doc Searls stopped the discussion and said something to the effect of "...and we're a bunch of geeks talking to a bunch of listeners who are geeks." He also said something about "...us doing alot of navel gazing." While I'd bet that the listeners are somewhat beyond just a geek crowd -- and that the Gillmor Gang have navels worth gazing at -- he nonetheless made valid points.

This next generation of the internet will only succeed if the message is carried beyond just those who are in-the-know or in-the-Valley.

There are about 100 blogs that I follow every day. Many of those are thought leaders in the tech space and many are not. There are people with valuable opinions and perspectives who happen to live, say, in Boston or Atlanta, and don't show up on the radar screens of the cognoscenti.

I also follow techmemeorandum and Topix among others. So imagine my surprise when seemingly every blogger who was at the invite-only TechCrunch book party for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book "Naked Conversations" wrote about it and linked to one another. It was quite a love-fest.

One could argue that having this blog book out there is carrying the message. Valid argument...but I've already heard from people that I've asked to follow techmemorandum questioning "What's up with THAT?" (meaning all the navel gazing buzz around the party and all the cool things that happened there).

I was goofin' with Photoshop over lunch today and thought it might be humorous to re-purpose something I did before, add a new photo of Robert and Shel and put together a People magazine parody. My point is that -- outside of the Valley or a closely knit circle -- most of humanity doesn't have a clue and many are going about their merry way building the next Skype in some place like Estonia.

UPDATE: Hot, Naked Geek pics here.

Google Analytics: Study up before you sign up

Been thinking more about Google Analytics and how fabulous it is that they're providing so much power for free. They're just so nice! It has to be that huge market cap that is driving them to be so altruistic.

Yeah, right.

As a young guy just starting out in the sales game and negotiating with a major mass merchant, I was taught some baseline knowledge by an old mentor of mine. He drilled in to my head to *always* think about and try to determine the other party's incentives. That way you'll have a fighting chance to do some realistic scenario planning and understand possible outcomes and negotiate toward a win-win.

Imagine that you got a call today from a Google representative asking how many customers you have. What they buy from you and how frequently. How many respond to your direct mail campaigns or sales calls. Would you tell them? You will...if you sign up with Google Analytics.

Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing as I don't have all the data and they've allegedly claimed they have no such plans. I'm not the only one who sees the implications though.  Just be aware. Study up before you sign up.

Too many "Web 2.0" value propositions

There are SO many new offerings coming on the scene every week it seems, that it's increasingly difficult to not only figure out what their value propositions are, but also whether or not you want to invest time, energy and effort in them.

Case in point: I received an invite to the new edgeio site. "edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet's edge.

Anyone with an RSS enabled website can publish content through edgeio. Using tags, publishers direct edgeio to index and organize their content. No more listing fees, complicated forms to fill in, and struggling to keep content synchronized across multiple websites. Just post it, use appropriate tags, and edgeio takes care of the rest."

There was a registration hiccup on the site this morning so I'm waiting to actually try it out, but the value proposition seems cool. Simply tag something you want to list (for sale, etc.) on your blog, and edgeio can watch for it, track it, display it, and "Voila!"...your thingamajig/doohickey is listed. Valuable? YES. Effort, energy and time investment? Yes. Will the blogosphere embrace just one new tag (Listing) if it's incredibly useful? Probably.

Takes study to figure out the value props of all these different offerings:

• Rolling your own search also is useful (Rollyo). Lots of effort, however, to find all the sites/blogs you'd want to list in your narrowsearch engine AND figure out how to work Rollyo
• Collaborating with documents (Writely), a whiteboard (Writeboard), or a joint collaboration site that does these and other needs (Joyent).

I could go on-and-on but you get the idea: you have to figure out each value prop, learn how to use it, participate in it (registering, uploading/creating content, etc.), and either get others to join or hope others do.

Just like the first dotcom adventure where there were an enormous number of really valuable companies started doing amazing things, it was nearly impossible to keep track of all of them and even to fully figure out what they did.

I fear that Web 2.0 value propositions will never be heard in the noise of all the rest of them out there and never gain the traction they need to survive.

Participation is what's creating the value

There is so much focus today on tagging, RSS, on social this, or social that, but what's fueling this next generation of the Web is participation.

Web 1.0 was heavy on people being passive recipients of content and performing minimal interaction (exception being ecommerce). Those organizations building the first Web were all about "first mover advantage" while trying to attract people and build a critical mass of "users" with "eyeballs".

Web 2.0 relies on participation of people as the primary creation of value. It also relies on others that -- by virtue of their consumption of this user created content -- promote the most popular of it within these applications thus adding to its value. Even offerings like Writely and MySpace exist due to collaboration and interactions that occur within the application itself.

One could argue, "Hey Borsch...participation is obvious. Web 2.0 is really about the technology and and the internet as a platform.  What makes this nextgen Web different than the first is search, tagging, rich internet user interfaces like Ajax, microformats, AdSense, The Long Tail, yadda-yadda-yadda."  Valid argument...but the difference between the dotcom bubble and right now is that it's the input from people that matters and is what supplies the energy to drive these new offerings. Not just consumption. Nor only viewing or listening. But adding value to the Web application by virtue of it being used and accelerating in value through the network effect.

One space, blogging, amazes me with its use as well as the acceleration of tools and technologies harvesting the participation of the masses (though the buzz today is that blogs are in their twilight or have peaked). Technorati, Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and other blog search tools, the emerging "conversation trackers" like memeorandum, CoComment and Topix, all exist because of the participation and input from bloggers, commenters, and readers. These others are extracting ever increasing value from the conversations occurring in the blogosphere.

Open Source CMS: Does Design Matter?

Talk to a coder/developer...it's the keystrokes that matter. Chat with a designer/artist...it's the brushstrokes. Get the direct mandate from the leader responsible and accountable for the success of the Web asset itself...it's both. The user cares that a site meets their needs and expectations -- which continue to rise as the Web evolves -- and unconsciously they expect the experience they have there aligns with the brand and values of the organization delivering it.

For several weeks, I've been involved in an analysis of open source content management systems (analyze for yourself at Open Source CMS or CMS Watch) for use at a client who will be delivering on one aspect of their strategy with a new Web asset. The most amazing part of this analysis has been getting a peek behind-the-curtain on these three projects and learn something about the teams and the ecosystems around the projects. If you think there are religious wars between Windows, Linux and Macintosh, you've seen nothing until you read threaded discussions or talk to people who have aligned themselves behind one of these projects!

Which one did I choose and why?

Balanced Brand: Find the Higher Ground

You are a brand. Whatever you do and who you are is your brand. If you, work, coach little league, volunteer, or blog, podcast, and deliver vlogs, you are delivering your brand value to the world. The essence of who you are, what you believe, and how you act on it, your reputation -- is what you put into practice every day and how the world in turn reacts to your brand.

Do you have credibility? Are you full of hot air?

EXACTLY the same thing holds true for companies or organizations of any kind (including government). The messages people believe, possible purchase of products and services delivered, and willingness to even pay attention are commensurate with the essence of a brand. Is the organization putting a spin on the truth when confronted with a negative brand-affecting event? Are they delivering shoddy products or lukewarm services? Are they doing one thing but saying another?

A guy I know, John Foley, has written a book called Balanced Brand. I attended the launch party for the book and gained insight in to it even before reading it (Disclaimer: I'll be helping out John's new firm, Level, in the future). Then I read it.

Balanced Brand guided me to higher ground.

Typepad: A blogger's friend?

As blogging increases in value -- and more people come online as evidenced in Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere -- giving people the tools they need is critical. Statistics on pageviews and referring pages that brought people to a post or a blog is one thing (as long as they're working), but with the acceleration of use of news aggregators, it's absolutely imperative that a blogger knows how many people have subscribed to their RSS feed and are reading posts through an aggregator!

Here are two examples:

1) Pageview/Referrer Stats:  Typepad (my blog hosting provider) has had outages recently and their customer's have not been happy. Though Typepad offered compensation after their first major outage, I find an amusing lack of transparency in this company and also a woefully inadequate use of the tools they sell. For example, their statistics have been offline quite frequently over the last several weeks. On January 26th, stats were down and they refer customers to a SixApart status page where it said this:

Jan 26, 2006
TypePad Service

We have temporarily disabled the display for visitor stats in the app. Status updates to follow.

Updated 1:26 pm PST

It was like that for 17 hours before I emailed Barak Berkowitz, Chmn/CEO of SixApart (though heard nothing).  Why does this company not blog and keep their customers informed? Are they afraid of being found out that they're not yet reliable or can't really scale yet?

Stats are table stakes to be in the blogging game and bloggers need to know who is reading, where they're coming from, what search strings in a search engine brought them there and more.

But there is another HUGE area where Typepad doesn't even play!

A Gnomedex registration tale...

Want to tell you a tale of somebody doing the right thing and an interesting example of conversational marketing.

I'd registered for Gnomedex in Seattle and there had been an error on my part. My trip to London ended up at the end of June now overlapping the Gnomedex dates, and I informed Chris and Ponzi by email -- 12 hours after registering and paying by credit card -- that it turned out I couldn't attend.

Apparently there was a non-prominent "no refund" clause on their registration page (still don't know where) and they informed me by email that, unfortunately, they couldn't refund my dough though they'd try to "fill my spot". Dismayed since I've been on my own since December and the $499 -- while certainly not a big deal it nonetheless could be put to better use -- I protested. We went back-n-forth by email several times. They saying we'll try, but no...me pointing out the unreasonableness of it all and pleading my case.

This team is running something akin to an unconference and needs the dough for initial expenses and setup. There has been (and is now) a no refund policy. The stand up thing they did? Chris gave me the benefit of the doubt and, after further analysis of his own event site, concurred the no refund policy was non-prominent and agreed to the refund (and no, don't try registering and backing out since the site now prominently displays: TICKETS CANNOT BE REFUNDED, ONLY TRANSFERRED).

This impressed me. Yes they put on a good event which is worthwhile in-and-of-itself, but the way this situation ended up demonstrates to me their integrity and values. It further proves to me why these two deserve our support, conference attendance, and my best wishes that they enjoy continued growth and success in their endeavors. I plan on attending next year (provided I'm in the country) and will certainly be following the blogosphere during the event.

Photo credit, Lockergnome

Your own Virtual World

How would you like to be able to build your own virtual world? Run a virtual trade show, hold a conference, build a haunted house for Halloween, create events, hold customer events, perform sales pitches, the list is endless. My friend, Graeme Thickins, is out at Demo '06 right now and has been posting about what he finds cool out there. Today's post mentioned Multiverse, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) or virtual world platform which you can use to build whatever world you can imagine.

I've spent time in Second Life and have enjoyed wandering around. I've been very reluctant to invest time and effort there, since I can see how easy it would be to become addicted! That still doesn't take away from the fact that virtual worlds will be places where people's consciousness is located. Maybe infrequently. Maybe often. But if you've tried virtual worlds in the past or you're 'living' in one now, you can see how powerful the social interactions are within them. (Note: the most recent cool event was Stanford Law professor, Larry Lessig's, lecture within Second Life).

What will these worlds look like 20 years from now?

Technorati: Making Sense of the Blogosphere

Though there are pretenders to the blog searching and conversation tracking throne -- and most people discover my blog through a simple Google, MSN or Yahoo search -- there isn't a more solid and useful service than Technorati's.

Everyone is posting today about Dave Sifry's blog post about The State of the Blogosphere. While this is, without a doubt, incredibly enlightening, something more fundamental happened last week that most people have either overlooked or didn't think all that important: Explore the Blogosphere on Technorati's front page.

As I've been thinking more and more about how all of these blog 'conversations' and individual input within the blogosphere can be harnessed (i.e., clusters of affinity blogs, tags or a high level taxonomy), Technorati has a head start on all others. Though a first effort that will be refined over time, already it's almost thrilling to be able to go to, say, Advertising and see listings of advertising-centric blog posts that are high in the rankings.

Go to Explore the Blogosphere and start to read, say, the top five posts in any given category. You'll quickly discover that (for the most part) the high ranked posts are from thought leaders in any given category. Neat stuff and is a good way to get a feel for what the conversations are within these affinity areas.

Connecting the Dots podcast for February 5, 2006

No...I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat but instead am connecting the dots. This week's dots are U.S. intent on geopolitical, space and cyberspace dominance. The pieces are falling in to place to ensure that, over time, the ability to control (and perform surveillance on) the internet is achieved. Discussed in this podcast are the following:

* Project for the New American Century. The PNAC proposes to control the new "international commons" of space and "cyberspace" and pave the way for the creation of a new military service—U.S. Space Forces—with the mission of space control.

* National Security Agency warrantless surveillance and the issues surrounding it and as a precursor to control of cyberspace.

* At Stake: The Net as We Know It. "(I)n a Nov. 7 interview with BusinessWeek Online, AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. declared: "What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that." Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth."

* EFF Sues AT&T to Stop Illegal Surveillance: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T Tuesday, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications.

* Esther Dyson on CSpan discussing "The Future of the Internet". Provides an interesting perspective on the internet, U.S. position and other countries lack of participation.

Download or listen to this week's podcast

Best Buy Hates Non-PC Users

I don't really think Best Buy Company (BBC) hates non-PC users, but I'm stunned that a mainstream retailer like BBC does not support web standards and thought I'd put in a provocative headline.

In typical short-sighted fashion, I discovered this evening that BBC's Reward Zone program only supports Internet Explorer 5.x and above if you want to print off the rewards you signed up for and earned through purchases.  You have a Macintosh?  Tough. Linux box?  What...are you some kind of geek loser? If you are the geek loser, just reboot in to Windows and use the insecure Microsoft browser, willya?

Wait a minute though. How about the discontinued IE 5.2 on Macintosh? Not supported. OK then, how about on the slowing, but still fast growing IE alternative, Firefox? Nope.

So BBC apparently doesn't want a material share of the market to participate in their loyalty program. They're walking away from the roughly 5% of the PC market that Apple represents as well as the >10% share that an alternative like Firefox represents. How is this somehow OK to BBC information technology management? (Even to the outsourced to Accenture I.T. leadership?).

Most importantly, how does this fit in to BBC's "customer-centricity" effort?

Video distributed everywhere!

Let's see...we've got iTunes, Google, You Tube, vSocial, Veoh and dozens of others in the video distribution game already...and now one of the broadcast networks (CBS) is getting in to it too.

Oh great...yet another place to go to find content. Another subscription. Another log-in. More fees. Enough already and we haven't even started! But is there already a better way?

Om Malik discusses Mary Hodder's new startup, Dabble, which is setup to be an aggregator of video content and more. Here's the amusing thing: when I first read about Mary's startup on Om's blog, I chuckled to myself and thought, "Why in the world would I want an aggregator for video? Certainly one or two companies -- like what happened with satellite DirecTV and DISH -- will become THE dominant distribution hub."

I now see the opportunity. The 'net will bring us a finite, yet enormous number of distribution points for moving images. Perhaps multiple mass distribution hubs and, eventually, narrowly focused ones will appear. Until then (and for quite some time), there will be a need for aggregation. I intend to do more investigation to discover if -- in Mary's startup -- I'll be able to aggregate content and turn around and publish my own aggregated feed. Now THAT would be powerful.