Hey, where’s Dave?

[UPDATE: It appears virtual Dave has died. ]

RSS: Not Just for Blogs Anymore. Really?

The folks from Feedburner, Bloglines and other RSS consumer/producers weigh in.
Chris Frye – Feedburner

• “our service should be invisible”
• oriented towards publishers
• “consumption has gotten very interesting”
• Creation->Deconstruction->Consumption

• Consumption – newsgator, yahoo, technorati, google, ask.com
• Deconstruction – news filters, spliced feeds, personal aggregators, blogs of remixed feeds (spamblogs)
• Considerations: attribution, ownership, usage tracking

Scott Johnson – Feedstar founder

• RSS history – “I’m not going there, I’m not talking about it”
• one of the most brilliant aspects of RSS is that it’s extensible
• might be the first XML that will “matter to mom”
• trivial to create, tougher to consume
• Apple specific extensions: USE THEM
• PODCASTERS – “have an RSS feed of everything you’ve ever done”
• Structred blogging – Marc Canter – micro-content architecture – parseable content
• Problems with RSS – “tracking is hard”, no JavaScript

Robin DeuPree – Bloglines

• crawls 2M feeds – 4 to 5M articles per day
• “value in finding out what the buzz is for today”

Levin – moderator – What happens with MS RSS strategy? Frye – increase RSS usage – huge uptake when iTunes came on…

Johnson – on OPML, “not too interesting”

Deupree – ” the common comment on bloglines is that it’s klunky but also that it’s functional”

MY THEME – Where’s the company’s interest in ethical treatment of their customers?

Deupree – Couple minute overview of Redstone’s acquisition and the potential for abuse. Says Bloglines privacy policy needs to be clarified/cleaned up.

Johnson – “to make my tinfoil hat observation: if people know what you read, they know a lot about you”

Starting the day with former Chapel Hillian Doc Searls and an exegesis of the seven year-old Cluetrain Manifesto 95 theses – good enough for Martin Luther.

Why cluetrain? A friend told him about a Valley company where “The cluetrain stopped there for 4 years but they never took a delivery.”

Theses 90 – Henry Copeland of BlogAds is pulling in Heather Armstrong – Henry “you’re getting more hits than you’re old company” Heather – “yeah – it’s [the software outfit] a real trainwreck” – Henry can’t tease the Los Angeles software company’s name out of Heather…

Searls, et. al. – 7 years ago realized Internet forces implied a switch in power from supplier to consumers.

“It was all about capturing eye-balls” … “Hey, wait a minute! The people out there had as much power as the [marketeers]”

Doc’s marketting friends kidded about his defection from marketting to the markets.

Clark – “I sent Cluetrain Manifesto to marketting company’s as a litmus test” – “that was in the days when integrated marketting meant you hired the same actors for both the television commercial and print ad.”

Clark to Searls – “you understand the net empowers people”…you feel the passion beneath the words

Heather as a empowered consumer – stumbled on Nikon – husband used the power of the net to research good customers – thousands of emails from readers had bought Nikons because she mentionned “this picture produced by Nikon D70” – she generated hundreds of thousands $$$ for Nikon but hasn’t heard a peep from Nikon…now she’s having problems with Nikon and is thinking of moving to Canon – wonders if she should be speaking about this on her blog – Searls “yes, you have to” – Henry – “you must”

Clark – “Isn’t the net writing the product manual already?” “These companys still don’t recognize the power of R&D on the net” – chaining the intelligence of the user community to improve your product – Searls mentions some coffee machine company that let their user community improve their product – they trust their customers.
Searls – “Very few CIO’s blog” – Edellman good – mentions debate between Jarvis and Edellmann debate last night “but that was on televison, so I don’t believe it”.

Heather – “Cluetrain will be realized when Bestbuy goes out of business” – “I love BestBuySucks.com – it’s like watching reality television”.

Henry – “My favorite company is threadless – they let their users design their products”

Searls – “OSS is the demand side providing for itself”

Clark – “Give the community something to do together” – “find ways for people to feel part of the solution.”

Searls – some history – Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace precedes Cluetrain by 3 years – what influence on Cluetrain (death from above recc. by Searls 1995) – asymetrical service in folks homes – future cluetrain manifesto – “saving the net”

Clark – 7 years out – “integrated media centers @ home” “gaming – basic human trait that goes with conversation” “play now is allowing people to do things that sociologist say you can’t do – like having 5,000 to 10,000 people working together collaboratively” [without centralized management] “using peer to peer processes” to maintain their efforts “tap the spirit of play”.

Searls – media revolution – HD quality cameras/televisions that will force the pipes to expand to shuttle info about “we’re completing the age of independence that was interrupted by the industrial revolution”

Armstrong – lot’s of lonely women – ‘blogs saved her during her 1st year of motherhood – blogs of fellow mothers direct her purchasing decisions – cribs, etc.

Clark answering on “reputation economy” – wikipedia starting the idea – the internet didn’t create crazy people – “it just makes it easier to search and aggregate them” – we’ll be measured by how we deal with difficult people.

Searls – “I don’t subscribe to blogs, I subscribe to subjects.”

Henry is practicing a little bit of product placement – the whole forum his laptop lid has been positioned in such a way WXYC was prominently displayed…

After reflecting on my experiences of the last couple days, Ruby Sinreich’s (local pol blog OrangePolitics) solid showing against the big boys, a fun time at Henry’s BlogAds party, I was all prepared to perform a major upgrade to my SxSWi calendar – to move to either Day 1.2 or even Day 2.0 (yes, I was that ebuillient).

But then I found the Austin Convention Center doesn’t have drinking water fountains – at least there’s none within a 200yd. radius of room 17AB.

Plenty of vending machines, no water!

Raleigh, how about creating a competitive advantage against centers like Austin’s and put hundreds of drinking fountains in for the $215+ million you’re dropping on the new convention center?

In honor of the Austin CC’s greedy behavior – today is Day 1.1.1 of SxSWi.

How to Make the Most of Maps.

From the first minute of this map-tech smorgasborg, I could tell this was going to be a rewarding (in a karmic sense) session.

OK/Cancel’s Kevin Cheng ([UPDATE: SxSWi 1.2 late] who, beside being a cool web-comic dude is a YahooMaps guy for Yahoo), moderating, starts with a set of filtering questions:

– “Have you used an online map?” Most of the room.
– “How many people use Mapquest? Yahoo? A9? Microsloth? Google?” Google %99 percent. Two for Mapquest, no one for Micro$loth.
– “How many have used map-mashups?” – About 50 folks.
– “How many have made map-mashups?” – Maybe 20 folks.

CommunityWalk’s Jared Upton-Cosulich – folks use their site “for weddings, bar crawls to the Pakistan earthquake.” He demos a new interface that integrates the “real-world” via Quicktime panoramic movies and GoogleMap points. He clicks to the Austin Convention centers entrance and the Web-application pops up the QTVR movie that shows the street outside from that viewpoint.

PJ Hyett – WayFaring – shows their most popular WayFaring tracking mash-up, the JackTracker which tracks TV show 24’s fictional Jack Bauer’s movements.

Recent (the day of the forum, to be exact) graduate Glenn Murphy demoed MeHere, a web-application for tracking people in realtime. Glenn opened with “Yes, kind of creepy”, a sentiment I share. He started with PlaceOpedia – map mashup between Wikipedia and your location as reported by MeHere.

Cool tech, troubling implications. He anticipates the day of highly mobile computers reporting your location in realtime and integrating your GPS position dynamically with other folks map-mashup applications is commonplace.

Murphy is using GreaseMonkey extensively to modify Yelp:Map-tastic to provide a “center-me” functionality using MeHere. Asks how many folk use GreaseMonkey – “I know at least one, the author is in the audience”. It’s Aaron Boodman is sitting 3 feet in front of me.

UK geo-tagger Daniel Catt – works for Flickr now helping them with their mapping strategy. Just hired by Google, he’s integrated his garnix app with GoogleEarth to track you in realtime (via an attached GPS device). Like MeHere, he’s sharing information via GeoRSS on his position.

In England, unlike the US, governmentally created mapping information is quite expensive. He shows us OpenStreetMap, a volunteer web-based effort that uses individual’s captured location information to create open-source maps, including England.

Best advice: “A map is not a good interface for adding information.”

Cheng to Catt – How do you go about choosing a map API to work with?

Catt: If you have a large team, MSN Virtual Earth is great – it lets you get down to the bones of the system – it’ll get you all the way. Google is easy to get started with – ease of use – geo-cachers like because of quickstart. Yahoo is moderate choice – neat that you can assign Flash SWF files to map points. Neat effect: “we add smoke to a point”. Very cool interactivity

Hyett – likes Google because can he can re-engineer the JavaScript – doesn’t like Yahoo API because of lack of transparency

Cheng to Hyett – How did you go about redesigning CommunityWalk?

Hyett (a big Ruby on Railsfan): Even though the first pass was raw “he always thought of CommunityWalk as something bigger”, “once you get something out there, it builds on itself”. Lucked out and got some “free” help to redesign simple front-end.

Cheng has developers of mashups stand up; asks designers to standup; he’s trying to organize a mashup of talent in realtime.

Hyett: Advice: keep it simple philosophy…we like one-click interface to adding location information…

Hyett and Couslich are having a bit of a fight to differentiate their apps – Wayfaring and CommunityWalk – each having quite a bit overlap.

Murphey to the panel: “There’s a lot of map mashup sites out there, they use a common API, do you find that the API [drives the look-n-feel] of these sites?”

Catt hints that Flickr/Yahoo will integrate political/governmental information into their mapping – precincts, census tracts, etc. This would be very handy for local activists.

Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions

Subtitled: “Why I didn’t sell out to Google?”

One of the best descriptions of the elevator pitch I’ve ever heard – retitled “the MacWorld test”. If someone stops at your MacWorld booth and asks what your product does, and you fumble about for a few minutes trying describe all your applications disparate parts, it’s time to ditch the app. Of course, I devoted a chunk of my life to developing products that can’t be described easily…

Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software on bootstrapping a company – “never make a decision that risks the company” – “your first four or five hires have to be generalists”.

Evan Williams, Odeo (a neat company built around audio recording, via phone for instance and sharing. “Simplify your ideas” in the Web-world – constantly evaluate features on whether they contribute to the overall user experience. He started his first company at 21, realized after a year he’d started 31 projects – realized needed laser focus. Best advice: “start small, think big”.

Panic’s Cabel Sasser – “”never make software that you wouldn’t use” – “if you make something you’ll use, you’ll make it awesome”.

The first session, “What’s Hot in Web Applications” is turning out to be product demos for the large captive audience. On tap Meebo, Zimbra, AdaptivePath and YackPack.YackPack – BJ Fogg brings up his app on screen dominated by prominent ads for Monster/FlowersAcrossAmerica. Product placement on their demo – quite tacky to hit us with an ad within an ad. Screw them. If you want more info on their simple web-based voicemail app, Google it 😉

Meebo – Seth Sternberg introduces their web-based IM aggregator – “trust your users” is key to their strategy. They’ve moved support responsibilities to their user-base. Their users monitor forums – detect/report network issues. Advice: “leverage OSS community to increase innovation”

Zimbra – Scott Dietzen – AJAX-based calendaring/messaging/collaboration application. Best thing? “Preventing you from having to cut-n-paste email”. Zimlets allow end-users/developers to extend Zimbra’s capabilities.

The best comment came from Sternberg who said he did better in college when he “concentrated on learning – it was more fun”. Suggests entrepreneurs concentrate “on what causes pain and fix it” instead of worrying about cranking out the highest return you can from your customer.

BJ Fogg – YackPack – “If you concentrate on a pain point you’ll find a way to monetize it”.

Hey BJ, your bragging about your AARP deal is causing me pain. How do you plan to monetize that?

I’ve reached my “pain point” with what’s fallen (again) into product pimping – on to Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions, which is at least honest in its business focus.

SxSW Interactive has been informative/interesting in an evolutionary way, not a revolutionary way (at least to-date).

Given that, day 2 is a minor upgrade to day 1 – welcome to SxSW Day 1.1.

I’ve been thinking about money all day. It started with Eric Rice’s breezy dismissal of my question on the ethics of product placement in videocast.

Sure, I expected some pimping of products, speakers, books – that’s the way of most conferences (but not all). I didn’t expect SxSW, with forums on social responsibility and the wisdom of crowds, to be so overwhelming pecuniary in intent.

SteveR pointed out that “everybody wants to make buck” but this emphasis on monetization of content is making me a bit ill.

So, to settle my stomach, and in honor of Eric, Chris Pirillo and the rest of the monetization gang, I’m suggesting we develop Tivo for the Web 2.0 generation.

The “Pirillo Pillow” will automatically smother product placement ads.

No ads, no ethical problems.

Maybe effective distribution of “the Pillow” will even reduce mammon worship next SxSW ;-)!

Next session has James Surowiecki speaking on The Wisdom of Crowds.

BTW, I caught the 2pm keynote which covered “building big things with small groups”. Their wisdom: KISS.

Title compliments of SteveR

Tapping the collective wisdom of a large group of people – “under proper conditions we can leverage the intelligence of the large group”.

Hey, I ran on the idea that we could tap the collective wisdom of Chapel Hill to solve some seemingly rather intractable problems.

JS: Google is an excellent example of the power of the collective. “Google is tapping into the intelligence of the ‘net” via page ranking to sort the most relevant links to the top.

Over the long haul, the bettors at the racetrack function, collectively, as a perfect forecaster of the future. Rather remarkable considering that the pool of bettors include “old-hands” quite knowledgable on horse-racing, folks betting their Mom’s first name, those using lucky numbers or “systems” – in general, a normalized mix of people, the common factor of which they’re interested in a positive outcome.

Of course, JS’s basic hypothesis is not too different than that posited by the Delphi Method, described further in this 1975 work The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications

Continue reading SxSW Day 1.0 – Mob Rules? →

Local Austin developer David Humphreys opens the panel by introducing Jesse James Garrett, who coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) – which describes a mix of web technologies used to provide a much more fluid web experience to the end users.

Humphreys kids that by coining the phrase, Garrett has gauranteed himself many years worth of invites to panel discussions ;-)!

Continue reading SxSW Day 1.0 – Telamonian or Locrian Ajax? →

Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places is supposed to cover all the vagaries of XML usage in the Web-world.

Finding well-formed XML on the ‘net can be quite a chore 😉

As I walk in they’re discussing XML micro-formats. The discussion shifts to namespaces and namespacing your documents.

Oops! The classic namespace boner cropped up – “namespaces are the like tm:”. For XML wonks, the confusion between a tag’s namespace prefix (the “tm:” in “tm:title”, for instance) and the namespace itself is neverending. Essentially, the prefix is malleable and can be arbitrarilly assigned while the namespace is invariant.

I jumped in to point out the difference and asked the panel if they thought the namespace should be well-defined – like with a schema. Panel split on this.

Best reccommedation on namespaces, etc. – use RDF to help tease out the structures for micro-formats, extending formats (like RSS) using namespaces.

[UPDATE: Podcast of this session.]

First up, Podcasting 2.0, a panel discussion crying out for the unconferencing talents of our local Audioactivism’s BrianR:

Chris Pirollo on podcasting “It’s not a lack of tools, it’s a lack of talent.”

One person asks – “Is there anyway you can do to make a podcast sound professional?” Pirollo – “garbage in, garbage out – without talent, without decent equipment it’ll sound like garbage”.

On video and monetizing content (how come making money drives so many of these discussions?) Eric Rice “we’ll never video something unless it’s a taste test – don’t give it for free.

Audience member – “you seem to be saying that most podcast are produced by technical people – that’s why you’re saying podcasters “need talent”.

Pirillo – NPR has raised the quality of podcasts overall. Before NPR, the poor quality of podcast was generally acceptable – NPR set the standard.

Pirillo – “Because the tools are so simple, everyone and their grandmother can podcast, and now everyone and their grandmother is…”

Rice – “That’s good” Pirillo – “No it isn’t – if you want to do a podcast for 5 people, leave a voicemail”

Laura Swisher – “let people do a podcast for 5 people” – if they’re good they’ll rise up

Once again, how do we monetize our content?

Rice talks about using product placement on his video ‘blog – I wonder if he told his consumers that he was touting a product?

So I ask Rice – What’s the ethics of product placement? He quickly ducked that question.
Back to branding,monetizing and money, money, money.

On to Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places

I’m attending SxSW Interactive in Austin this week. Interactive is a growing adjunct (attendance up %270) of SxSW (South by Southwest). Panels cover a range of topics, technical to political to social.

I thought I’d post a few comments on the sessions I’m attending/monitoring/ease-dropping on throughout the week.

Note: This is the full-text of an editorial published in today’s Daily Tar Heel. Ryan Tuck did an excellent job editting for brevity – I’m including the full-text here for completeness.

An election does not a leader make, but rather a temperament and a set of skills.

Leaders with vision will make sure their decisions are accretive, adding
one brick on another, until their visionary “cathedral” is set on sound
foundations. The more pedestrian of elected officials will forge ahead
without vision – making decisions as expediency demands. These folk may be
trusted to guide a ship along well traversed paths but they will never
bound forward to undiscovered shores.

Our Council has recently discussed two paths to social and economic
sustainability.

One path, of traditional “bricks-and-mortar”, has the overwhelming,
enthusiastic and at times giddy endorsement of our elected leadership.
The other path, which promises a much lower risk and a much higher reward
than the first, has languished in a backwater of indecisive malaise.
Continue reading Castles in the Clouds →