everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: events

  • David Weinberger on the Miscellaneous

    One of the great things about working at Yahoo is that on any given week there’s a brown bag lunch with someone interesting or provocative. Posters around campus promote these bigger draws and I subscribe to an internal mailing list which lets me know of the others. I try and make it to as many of these talks as I can or, if I’m remote, will at least try and tune in via an internal streaming server they have set up.

    For David Weinberger’s chat with Bradley Horowitz last week I made a special trip down to Sunnyvale to see him and I’m glad I did – the talk was fantastic.

    He’s on a speaking tour for his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous so if you get the opportunity to catch him speak, do try and make it. I’ve read The Cluetrain Manefesto and was deeply influenced by Small Pieces Loosly Joined which I picked up after seeing David speak at an early BloggerCon in Cambridge. I confess that I have not yet picked up a copy of but am looking forward to digging into it soon.

    David of course talked about his book, the central argument being that as we move information from a physical world (books on a shelf) to a digital realm (bits striped onto a raid drive) the very nature of how we store information is strained. Dewey’s Decimal system worked fine when there was only one place to put a book but when you need to classify data and could support multiple tags that pointed to the data, traditional hierarchical taxonomies break down. Pointing to shifts such as how people used to organize their CD collection to today when we create playlists of our digitized music on the fly and the recent hand-wringing over the question of Pluto and the qualities that make up a planet are shaking our very core understanding of knowledge.

    David gave the example of The Library of Congress, the bastion of this old world order as perfectly tuned for the world of print. 7,000 books arrive each day and are cataloged and assigned their place in the great category tree which is our modern library system. Meetings are held when anomalies occur but are quickly resolved at weekly meetings.

    Yet, this method quickly breaks down when we try and apply it to the internet. First there’s just the scale of it all. Over 100,000 blogs are created each day and Technorati’s latest stats show over 15 posts uploaded each second. Not only is it impossible to categorize something that is growing at this rate, it’s also a lost cause to try and filter it for quality. Instead of catching things on the way in as the Library of Congress is doing, in this day of cheap storage and bandwidth, it’s better just to chuck it all into the digital equivalent of a shoebox and let the algorithms sort it out later.

    As the grand index of everything we know grows larger, it’s going to be vital that we build better tools around this data to help us find what we need. In the world of photos and music we already know the importance of good metadata. Geo-tagging, date-stamps, EXIM, and BPM data are useful in helping us make sense of what we have. Social interactions with data also add valuable insight. Tagging add a layer of intelligence that a simple algo cannot.

    David also believes that your social network will also add an important filter on a generic dataset to help you locate something relevent or interesting. The news this week that Facebook is adding classifieds is important because something for sale by your Facebook friend is an order of magnitude more compelling that a generic Craigslist listing by someone you don’t know.

    Our schools are not very well equipped to deal with how we need to work in this new world. Testing in schools is still a, “face forward, solipsitic experience” which doesn’t take into account how we learn things today. A more appropriate test of your child’s understanding of Roman History would be a collaborative project. David suggested that the teacher work with the class on creating a wiki on their topic. The process of hunting, gathering, verifying, and collating information from across the web would prepare them much better than any multiple choice test could today.

    What was most interesting in David’s talk was that he also tempered what he said with warnings not to jump too far in one direction. Sometimes, especially in Silicon Valley, we get all wrapped up in the new and shiny and too quickly leave behind the tried and true. There is value in a top down taxonomy on which to hang your folksonomic tags. The examples of Amazon suggesting books on “adoption” for those searching “abortion” and the more recent Google’s autosuggest snafu kicking over “she invented” and suggesting “he invented” as a more appropriate are examples of what happens when you let the ants design the castle. A blended approach is more sensible in the long run.

    He also touched on the value of mediated experience. There is a great filtering process that takes place when a book is published. Thoughts are collected, sentences are composed. The investment in putting words to print is an important quality filter. As we move to the digital world where it becomes possible to record every waking moment of your life, it’s important to hang onto that filtering process. Despite it’s banality, Twitter is still compelling because there is ultimately someone at the other end; it is, “mediated by human meaning.” JustinTV, on the other hand is just a pure stream without edits, a capture device at best and one that requires 1:1 time and attention to extract meaning from what is captured.

    I obviously need to read his book. After I read Small Pieces, I was sufficiently inspired to quit my job at Dow Jones to join the blogging revolution at Six Apart. Lord knows what will happen after I read Miscellaneous.

    Further Reading :

    • Great review by Ethan Zuckerman
    • The entire talk is available on video on the YUI blog (where I snagged the book cover image, thanks Eric!)

  • SXSW Day Four, Tuesday

    After Bust 2.0: Ten Years Later, Where Will We Be?

    Most of the optimism on the panel came from the fact that “this time it’s different.” Bandwidth and hardware is cheaper, storage is cheaper, we know how to scale effectively, we can do more with less, we won’t get fooled again.

    Then Ted Rheingold of Dogster brought up the point that costs are rising again. While we may be saving on infrastructure accounts, traditional business costs for things such as rent, salaries, and consulting are creeping back up. This has a ripple effect on startups which need to put this into their business plan. If they need more funds to run the company, they need to raise more money in financing which requires a greater return and before you know it, you’re back in the bubble again. Almost on queue, today’s Wall Street Journal cover story (“Tech Companies in the Red Pursue IPO Gold“) talks about IPOs for non-profitable businesses.

    Dave Hornick on the consumer media business. “There are two markets to serve and any successful service needs to serve both.

    • People with more time than money.
    • People with more money than time.

    Napster failed because it only served the former and didn’t start making money until it served the later.

    Lane Becker views customer service as the next great untapped opportunity for web 2.0 optimization.

    All panalists view USA Today’s addition of digg-like voting and recommendations as turning point. Until then, there was no mainstream media company doing this and the model to emmulate was digg or slashdot. Now, with Gannett serving as a validation, others will follow.

    Will Wright Keynote

    The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown

    Nice touch, the moderator had each of the representatives of each company introduce and describe their competitor’s company. Everyone was quite complimentary of each other until the Last.fm representative described Pandora as a bunch of people in an, “ivory tower.”

    Pandora vs. Last.fm – both use collaborative filtering but Pandora uses human “experts” to classify the music in their library while Last.fm is based on algorithms with very little human intervention.

    Pandora’s editors play a key role in “jump starting” the insertion of music into their “radio stations” that make up the collective library of genres of Pandora. Many of the songs they surface would have never made it into rotation on other systems unless they were pushed there by their categorization.

    Bruce Sterling Rant

    Transcript of Bruce Sterling’s rant

  • SXSW, Day Three Monday

    It poured last night but had the good fortune to tag along with with Dan Theurer out to the Austin City Limits studio to catch Voxtrot. It was so nice to be away from the mad rush of conference posers and chill out to a some great music with people that were there for the music and not just the scene.

    It took a little while to get a cab back but I actually went to bed at a reasonable hour and woke up fairly rested.

    Getting Unstuck: Moving from 1.0 to 2.0

    Always a pleasure to hear Chris Messina talk and he did not disappoint. This session covered strategies that get you out of a rut and onto the next level in product design. Chris’ advice to put it out in the open was spot on. Ideas that stay in the dark fester and die. The process of communicating your idea to others and bouncing it around for advice not only helps you formulate the idea and how best to explain it, it also gives you an opportunity to stress test it against reality and shore up its weaknesses. “Explore the blind spots, the negative spaces.” Once you make something a conversation piece, then you know it’s strong enough to stand on its own.

    Along these lines, another panelist (sorry, I was in the back of the room and couldn’t read their names) said that one shouldn’t underestimate the power of reducing your idea into an easy to remember “sound bite” that can be internalized by your team so they can help spread the word. This is very much like Guy Kawasaki’s advice to kick off projects with a mantra and write it on a t-shirt. If you can fit your team’s rallying cry on the back of a t-shirt, you’re well on your way.

    “Listen and build what their users need, not something that fits into your companies process.” A process  is about your company, not the people or its customers. Too many companies get wrapped up in process and loose focus on their ultimate goal which is shipping products to their clients. A simple timeline with deliverables will do. The process is no more complicated than “Explore, think, create, act.”

    The Future of the Online Magazine

    A lively session that featured editors from Salon.com, Media Bistro, The Onion, and College Humor. Moderated by Rufus Griscom of Nerve.com which has a great new site for, “urban parents”

    • Media Bistro – 27 total staff, 3 full time editors, 14 bloggers
    • Salon.com – 64 total staff, 28 in editorial
    • College Humor – 40 total staff, 9 in editorial
    • The Onion – 13 writers, 20 for their entertainment section, AV Club.
    • Nerve/Babble – 25 writers

    The Onion gets 80% of its revenue from advertising. Much of it’s traffic comes via direct links to it’s stories.

    75% of traffic to Salon.com comes directly, not via links.

    Media Bistro, much of their traffic heads straight for their job boards.

    Question in the audience from editor of smithmag.net, a participatory storytelling site, about the value of turning over the creation of content to your readers. Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon.com says that the editor is important because they can smooth out the volatility of the public’s interest. If you see a story about Africa on the front page, you know that Salon is taking a hit to their traffic but (and this is my example) much like green beans, they are part of a healthy and balanced media diet.

    Salon.com on how to moderate comments and discourage trolls. They have a “red star” system which editors award red stars to comments that they like to highlight. Readers can filter out and read only comments awarded a star so the community aspires to write comments that get awarded a star.

    Salon.com pleased that their story on Walter Reed (which they broke two months ago) is finally being covered.

    Interesting (and revealing) debate over the value of letting your writers have their own blogs. Rufus of Nerve encourages it because it allows them to explore topics that he may not necessarily carry on his site. A nice side benefit is that these writers often point back to their work on his site anyway which broadens the audience (and allows his readers to find out more about the author’s interests). Laurel Touby from Media Bistro didn’t get it. She didn’t want any of her author’s output going anywhere outside her site.

    I think I’d rather write for Rufus. Smile

    Dan Rather Keynote

    It was great to see such a seasoned veteran address a room full of bloggers and share his perspective of the future. The quote of the day was, “What American journalism needs is a spine transplant,” which a quick search shows is not such a new line after all.

    Most of his talk was about dangers of journalists becoming too chummy with their sources. The old saying is a journalist is only as good as his source. In the old days, a journalist would nurture a multitude of sources but perhaps there is now too much dependence on just a handful of sources which puts pressure on the journalist to bend their stories to curry favor and maintain access.

    “Investigative journalism” a redundant phrase to Dan Rather.

    On Corporatization of news. The news operations of the large media divisions are such a small part of the overall business of the parent companies (NBC owned by GE who also makes nuclear reactors) that the CEO is too focused on profits and stockholder value to care too deeply about news operations. There is not enough competition in the major markets which waters down coverage and alternative viewpoints. It’s all too formulaic. Here’s what the governer said > here’s what his critics said > here’s the governer’s response > next story.

    On the rules of the game. There were several layers of disclosure that were well understood in his day but are increasingly ignored today.

    1. On the record – attributable and can be used
    2. On background – the source cannot be directly identified, i.e. “a Senior White House official”
    3. On deep background – you cannot even point to the source’s organization
    4. Off the record – this conversation didn’t even happen, even if it means going to jail

    People respected reporters like Dan because they took him for his word. He mentioned that there are things that he was told in the past that he would never tell anyone, even today. I really go the sense from him that he meant it.

    Dan’s talk was liveblogged by Pat McCarthy on Conversation Rater.

    When Communities Attack

    Chris Tolles of Topix.net (soon to become Topix.com) gave a great talk about how best to moderate online communities based on his experience managing the comments on the Topix site.

    1. Anonominity enables certain bad behavior.
    2. If members identify themselves, opponent fights break out and often devolve into attacks on the other’s behavoir. Moderating these types of cat fights is much like the being the playground guard.
    3. There are people that manage multiple accounts so they can use their multiple logins to give the illusion of popular support. These schemes are easily discovered because they often use the same IP address.
    4. Sometimes mob fights follow each other from site to site.

    In each case, there are three possible responses:

    • Shut the site down – you can take down a blog but you can’t take down the blogosphere.
    • Abdicate – this is kind of the MySpace approach, “hey man, it’s not our problem.” If you set out this way, it’ll be near impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
    • Moderate – encourage good behaviors and try and get the community to moderate itself.

    If you moderate, besides things such as Captcha registration, profanity and semantic filters, the recent activity log which shows per post, per user, and per IP address/domain activity is the most powerful tool you have to manage volume. Community flagging, voting, (dig/bury) are tools you can use to get the community involved.

    The Ni-chan paradox. Registration keeps out most good posters from your forums. Only the trolls have the time and energy to register. The Ni-chan forums in Japan had absolutely no registration but managed to keep its forums clean with a minimum of effort. The Ni-chan paradox is covered in detail on the topix blog and on the Shiichan BBS. More interesting perspectives from Clay Shirky in his talk, The Group is its own worst enemy.

    I would have loved to have caught Jay Allen’s talk on the Invisible Blogosphere and Justin Hall and Joi Ito on gaming but various conference calls and work things pulled me away. Joi especially is a mind-blower. In a chat we had about World of Warcraft on Saturday while waiting to checkout Dorkbot (he was wearing his guild’s logo on a t-shirt) he mentioned that he’d like to engineer it so that he could Twitter others from within the game so when he needed, say, a level 60 priest, he could put out the call to help.

  • SXSW, Day Two Sunday

    Part two in a continuing series. I was up late watching Ze Frank and his hilarious deconstruction of Airline Safety Seat Back Instructions (“So what does this mean? No interracial dating?“) and other general silliness. Compounded by the fact that 2am instantly became 3am I passed on the 10 am sessions and opted for a run by the river where I caught the Heart of Texas Regatta.

    Lonelygirl15 Case Study

    As they got into developing the concept, they realized that what they were doing was not unlike what Orsen Wells did with his War of the Worlds broadcast at the dawn of the radio age. The general public is not literate in internet video and how truth can be manipulated.

    Even after it was discovered that Lonelygirl15 was a fictional character, people still tune into the site which has become an, “internet soap opera” with a following that is comprised of 70-80% female, most in their 20’s.

    On the site, fans are encouraged to submit their own videos to add to the plotline. Fans take minor characters and expand them with their own backstory which the producers then roll into future episodes.

    How do they make money? Product placement and videos hosted on Revver. They are also investigating more integrated promotions such as inviting viewers to go to fedex.com and type in a tracking number to follow a package to delivery which will coincide with an event.

    Keynote Conversation: Limor Fried / Phil Torrone

    Photos and descriptions of various projects including:

    Bacon-cooking Alarm Clock

    Gummy Bear Chandelier

    A 225 HP Monowheel

    RFID-activated Flame-throwing trampoline

    The OpenMoko – an open source cellphone

    Plants that call you when you need to water them

    Building an Online Fan Base

    Lance Weiler walked us through the site for his movie, Head Trauma. A series of pages tell the story of the movie and at one point you are prompted to SMS a message to a number. Once you do, the site calls your cellphone and continues the narration of the site over your phone, augmenting the spooky music on the site. At one point, the voice on the phone asks you your “darkest secret” recording what you say into the receiver and then plays it back to you OVER YOUR COMPUTER SPEAKERS. It continues to loop what you said over and over again until, sufficiently chilled, you leave the site. The site monitors the clicks and knows when you leave the site so it then CALLS YOU BACK!

    At this point the entire room let out an astonished gasp of horror.

    Lance has a number of SEO tricks up his sleeve as well which he has documented for other filmmakers at his site, workbookproject.com.

    People-Powered Projects

    Jamglue.com – totally cool flash-based remixing console with social “favoriting” features thrown in to surface the best mixes.

    Despite the fact that some of the most creative material is coming out of community-based sites such as flickr and JPG Magazine, getting “published” by a big-name publisher is still a mark of validation.

  • SXSW, Day One Saturday

    It’s my first SXSW and I’ve kept off the laptop so that I can devote as much attention as possible to what’s going on in the sessions, conversations, and parties in between. I have been taking notes and for the benefit of readers (and just in case I misplace my notebook) I’ll dump them here in the next few posts.

    Online Publishers & Ad Networks

    Cody Simms (Yahoo!) points to very informative research report from Morgan Stanley. Direct Mail still a jaw-dropping 25% of the total advertising budget for the US.

    Larry Allen (Tacoda) – Advertisers consider anything with comments as “user generated content” and are wary about having their messages appearing alongside anything they cannot vet in advance.

    It bears watching how this view will impact advertising revenues alongside the recently launched USA Today redesign. Learned on the Trade Show floor that these comments are powered by the Pluck SiteLife product which has a broad agreement with the Gannett chain to power all their papers so I’m sure they are watching this closely too.

    Bridging the Online Cultural Divide

    People are using the web to either build a false persona or exaggerate an existing tendency. Like drunkards at a loud party, people take controversial things to get attention and traffic to their site. Add crude methods of monetization that are a derivative of your traffic and it only makes the problem worse.

    Arguments online are often two dimensional where as in the face-to-face world they are more nuanced. The analog to this is modern politics where democracy boils down the candidate race to a yes/no vote – there is no room for grey and that is what polarizes us, pushing out more thoughtful discussion.

    Under 18: Blogs, Wikis, and Online Social Networks for Youth

    danah boyd – everything is moving towards mobile but you need cluster effects to really get things going. There is no such thing as a concept of “net neutrality” in the mobile world and the US carriers are just standing in the way.

    The room erupted in spontaneous applause.

    Kathy Sierra Opening Remarks

    All apps have a Asperger’s Syndrome.  They cannot pick up on visual queues from their users such as when someone is angry, frustrated, or confused. If a user has these reactions to software, they quickly fall below the suck threshold.

    Successful apps quickly push someone beyond the suck threshold and up beyond the passion threshold to a zone where users realize that they enjoy using an app because it helps them do things that have an impact in the offline world.

    To prevent users from falling into the “canyon of pain” why not provide a WTF button. Allow users to tell you when they are lost and at wits end. Help and FAQs are for more reasoned times, it’s the happy tech support with the clipboard. A WTF situation is more dire, a time when you need to open with a “Don’t Panic” and speak to the user in a language they understand. Provide links to sections written in a conversational tone – user testing and feedback emails are a good source of the questions you need to answer.

    There are two levels upon which a user can enjoy a product. High and Low resolution. A wine critic enjoys the, “subtle hints of tannin” in a fine bordeaux. A low resolution user (she used an example of Robert Scoble) enjoys the one-bit choice between red and white wine.

    Web Hacks, Good or Evil

    Kent Brewster (Yahoo!) showed off a number of simple hacks with links to how it was done. Badger will take the JSON output of any Yahoo! Pipes feed and turn it into a simple linkroll which you can put on your page. In such a world where information becomes ubiquitous and readily mashable, the only thing of value is attention. It is less a world where finding the information is the problem but more a world where efficient presentation is the key.

    Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?

    The affiliate model is where the real money is made in the porn industry. The selling of subscriptions to “networks” of affiliated sites is the most advanced of these models. Mainstream media is only just now starting to catch on.  The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, MIT Technology Review are available as a “conglomerated membership” for a single price. (I would argue that services such as Factiva and Nexis have been offering this type of access for years).

    Another model is where a mother site (i.e. spookycash.com, NSFW) offers tools such as hosted galleries, pic of the day, and integrated RSS feeds so that affiliates can customize their own site and start feeding leads with a minimum of effort.

    John Halcyon Styn on value – in the pre-internet days, “porn was more valuable than gold.” Now that it is readily available, the value comes from features such as interactivity and privileged access.

    On design all panelists agreed that, for porn sites, the temptation for slick design should be suppressed.  Think of the audience. They want to find something “dirty” or “raw.” One panelist told the story of a non-profit that had their site refreshed and then saw their donations go down because their donors felt that if they had enough money for a smart looking website, they didn’t need their donations.

    Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?

    Currently, mapping applications feed simple location data to your device. In the future, they will be able to layer additional metadata to provide a rich interaction. With GPS enabled, a mapping application can set up a two-way dialog with your mobile device.

    Imagine a world where, when walking from one neighborhood to the next, the mapping application polls a crime statistics database and, upon entering a high-crime neighborhood, a heat device makes the back of your neck hotter.

     

     

  • Austin bound

    Really looking forward to going to South By Southwest Interactive this year. It’s my first time. I’ve heard great things about it and looking over the schedule of events, it’s going to be hard not to be inspired!

    I’m a big fan of Kathy Sierra and it’ll be interesting to hear what Dan Rather has to say to a room full of bloggers as well as what the folks behind Lonleygirl15 have to say about reality. Also, be sure to catch YPN’s very own Cody Simms who has brought together a panel on Ad Networks.

    I went back and read my sister’s blog post about SXSW and had a laugh at how much has changed since March 2004. Alongside her commentary of subconsciously thinking of a baby are the three latest flickr photos of their baby. It’s like her blog sidebar was wagging its finger at her documented past.

  • How to Wisdom a Crowd

    predictionmarketconfab.jpgPrediction Markets is a relatively new field of study which embraces using speculative markets to make better decisions. The idea is that if you can abstract a complex decision into a commodity which can be traded, and thus priced, the signal that you get back from the market will cut through the noise and lead you to better decision-making.

    Wednesday evening Yahoo held a confab on Prediction Markets on the main Sunnyvale campus. We heard from James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a hugely influential book for me, and Robin Hanson, infamous for his idea that a prediction market could be used to accurately determine the next terrorist attack. We also heard from folks from HP, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo who described how prediction markets are used within their companies. Finally, we heard from a couple of vendors of prediction market software including inklingmarkets which offers a hosted solution for companies interested in setting up their own prediction markets and used the event to announce their beta site, worthio, which applies digg-like voting mechanism to the US stock market.

    answersparty.jpgIn a fortunate coincidence of timing, the very same moment 200-odd people were debating the value of running markets to gleen information and the importance of making participation simple in order to get maximum participation, Yahoo Answers was hosting an event for 40-50 of their top moderators right downstairs.

    In terms of harnessing collective intelligence, Answers has been a huge success and it was fascinating to see the emotional attachment members of the service have to the site. I was lucky to catch part of the awards ceremony and saw one of the users (I didn’t catch her name or handle) actually hug one of the product managers as she came up to receive her award.

    I only wish I had the foresight to invite attendees of the prediction markets confab downstairs to see what was going on. With a basic framework, a few simple rules, and the wonderful platform known as the internet, the 60 million users of Answers had created an incredibly powerful, human-powered Oracle of Knowledge that anyone with a web browser could tap into.

    This was the power of community. The emotion and support of those at the party downstairs showed me more than any presentation, metrics report, or banner ad the power that you can tap into if you let people, not algorithms, define your product.

    “Connect people to their passions” yeah, that pretty much sums up what we do.

  • Predictive Markets Seminar at Yahoo

    Back in June I worked with a team that hacked together an interface for a simple predictive market in which Yahoo employees with trade shares in projects that would pay out when the project IPO’d by getting released to the public. The idea was that value would go towards projects that the Yahoo engineers thought had the greatest merit. With a quick glance at the top "stocks," executives could see which projects were worth allocation of resources and budget.

    The hack was a proof-of-concept and while the project has been noodled on by that hack day team, the concept of leveraging the "wisdom of crowds" to drive decision making has spread out to other areas at Yahoo.

    Most recently, Yahoo Autos has released a user-driven version of it’s feedback center that allows anyone to vote on comments. It’s like Digg for the help center and is available for any Yahoo property to adopt for their own site.

    Bix (recently acquired by Yahoo) also fits nicely into the predictive markets suite and can basically be looked at as a predictive markets engine for talent. Lip-sync karoke smackdown with user voting.

    Finally, Yahoo’s hosting a conference about Predictive Markets and to kick it off, James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, will be speaking. There will be other speakers as well during this seminar which runs from 5:30 – 8pm on December 13th here at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, CA. Admission is free so mark yourself down as attending on the upcoming.org link and come on down!

  • Web 2.0 Summit – Highlights

    Eric Schmidt

    Denied earlier rumors that funds were distributed to studios that have them “look the other way” while Google/YouTube put a licensing scheme in place.

    Would like to support the exporting of user’s search history out of Google. This is the “ultimate pressure valve” to keeping them honest.

    Positioned online (and free) word processing and spreadsheet products for “casual sharing” and not something for enterprise rollout. During this I was thinking of the product manager from the Search Appliance team who said that someone who uses Google at home is most likely to want to use Google at work. Hard to imagine this isn’t on their mind as they roll out Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

    Reminded us that 20 years ago we were a “disk-centric” culture. Most data was stored on your disks which you carried around with you everywhere. We are now in transition to a “network-centric” culture but the fact that we still fret about an offline instance of an application shows that we’re not quite there yet.

    Joi Ito

    Quick demo of World of Warcraft which was an eye-opener for most people in the crowd. I’ve read about how he has configured his world so he’s never too far removed from his guild and is alerted whenever there’s in world activity that requires his attention. Joi’s comment is that the concept of “going online” is fading away. There is no such thing as a virtual and non-virtual world when you have sms alerts, flickr streams, and IM messages piercing your offline world. For Joi, we have already reached convergence.

    Ben Trott

    Quick demo of Vox, a beautiful new blogging platform from Six Apart. Ben did a great job running through the thinking behind the product and what makes it different from other blogging platforms. At it’s core, Vox takes advantage of stores of Open Data to pull in content from other services such as Flickr and YouTube to make them “first class assets” on Vox which can be uniquely manipulated and permissioned once they are on Vox. In the meantime, everyone around me was looking at the blog import tabs (can’t find them on Vox today, must be a for a future release?) for Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, and LiveJournal and hearing a big sucking sound. Anil Dash later assured me that Vox content is fully exportable as well so the door will go both ways.

    Barry Diller

    The concept of a #1 & #2 dominating the marketplace doesn’t hold true in the media business. You can’t run a media property like GE and exit any business where you are not dominating. Markets have historically supported multiple points of view with the leadership positions changing regularly. He’s in it for the longrun. In answer to an entrepreneur’s question of how best to build equity value in his startup, Barry answered, “Equity is built by hanging on [to control].”

    Jack Ma

    User-Generated Content is vital to success. He asks that each product at Alibaba have at least 80% user-generated content. Asked about eBay he said that while eBay China is “half-dead” eBay the company is far from dead “yet.” When asked when Alibaba will “invade” the United States, he laughed and said that he has no plans to “invade” only “to help.”

    Jeff Bezos

    The most intriguing talk for me. Jeff spoke about Amazon’s Web Services initiative:

    • Amazon S3 – on-demand storage, basic “get, put, delete” used by Linden Labs to meet demand for updates to Second Life software.
    • Amazon EC2 – elastic computing cloud, flexible pricing, same price for one server/month or 700 servers for one hour
    • Fulfillment by Amazon – ship products to Amazon and have your orders filled by the Amazon fulfillment infrastructure. The center essentially becomes a huge peripheral device.
    • Amazon Mechanical Turk – distributed labor force

    Tie these together and you have a platform basically waiting for good ideas to empower it. Everyone I spoke with feel it’s important that we support Jeff’s experiment so that shareholders, worried about the short term bottom line, don’t shut down access to this valuable resource.

    My idea? Use Mechanical Turk to write a book and get it sold on Amazon. By distributing authorship across thousands of participants, you already have a large, invested readership!

    Bruce Chizen

    Adobe is clearly a company to watch in 2007 with the rollout of Apollo, a fat client that will combine the best of online browsing with the formatting controls of Adobe Reader and Flash. Not only will the experience be richer than what HTML & CSS bring us today, it will also work offline and take full advantage of client local disk & processor power. Combine this with recent news that they are bundling in the Flash interpreter into Firefox and the Firefox/Apollo combination looks like a serious contender for the browser market. While Adobe may be in Microsoft’s crosshairs, Bruce is thankful he has Google as a “heat shield”

    High Order Bits

    Cyworld – $300k in daily digital sales. Participatory, rich media advertising marketplace is called “happy click”

    Fox Interactive – 320k new profiles created on MySpace each day, that’s the population of Buffalo, NY.

    Don Tapscott – the Chinese motorcycle industry is basically an open source manufacturing community. Parts manufacturers swarm together on projects that rip off Japanese motorcycle designs.

    MSN & Ask on Google – both agree that Google is vulnerable at the edgees. As they grow to acquire new audiences, they will have to build services which will be outside the core of what they do and essentially compete with the simplicity of thier search page. The Google search page is essentially the “Model T Ford” of the internet. (you can have any color, so long as it’s white).

    Jonathan Miller

    Two things are going on at the same time. Web 2.0 startups are splitting audiences into smaller and smaller niche interests while the monetization players are consolidating into larger and larger networks. Jonathan said that the accidental release of 5 million search statements was an honest mistake by a researcher who made a “bad call.” I couldn’t help thinking that this poor guy had embraced the open collaboration of the academic world and thought it would apply to the broader internet wikipedia style. A valuable lesson for the rest of us. Rafat Ali asked an interesting question on the possibility of a major portal endorsing a presidential candidate (it wasn’t really answered).

    Ray Ozzie

    The concept of installing software off a CD, hitting setup.exe, is dead. Everything should install off the web. Ray sees unpaid users of pirated software as “prospects.”

    Lou Reed

    Some thought he was pissed at all the chatter in the back of the room but I think he was just being classic Brooklyn Lou Reed when he said, “You want me to turn it up? I can hurt you!” Highlight was seeing the Web 2.0 crowd dancing up a storm to “Gravity, Gravity, always pulling us down, pulling us down.” Bubble? What Bubble? Check out a video clip of the concert here. Thanks AOL for bringing some perspective to things!

    Youth Panel

    This year the panel was joined by their parents which some though may have restricted what the kids felt comfortable saying. On the contrary, it gave me the opportunity to see what tools the average Bay Area user uses and knows about

    Yahoo – almost everyone uses Yahoo Mail and others use services such as Horoscopes, Photos, Games. One mother said that she occaisionaly uses Yahoo Search when she enters a search by mistake in her Yahoo toolbar. Mothers identify with Yahoo as a “trusted brand,” another said that for finding people or Local listings and reviews Yahoo was a better search engine.

    Google – clearly the search engine of choice with some kids also saying that GMail has a coolness factor they like. One teenager said Google was “more like a friend.” Another mother said when she’s looking for something she “likes to use the Googles”

    Microsoft – no one knew MSFT had a search engine. When asked what they like about Microsoft, one kid said, XBox.

    AOL – the IM leader which is significant because most teenagers use IM as their primary method of one-to-one communication

    MySpace – most teenagers average 2-3 hours/day on MySpace keeping it minimized throughout the day and refreshing to see if anything new has come in. One teenager said that logging into MySpace in the morning was like going downstairs and seeing what was under the Christmas tree.