everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Om

    Om

    Om Malik had a wonderful ability to balance a boy-wonder enthusiasm of new technology with an appreciation of its broader impacts to society. He was an old school blogger who distilled the daily Silicon Valley zeitgeist into posts that inspired the reader to think more expansively about how tech innovation changes the world around us.

    I’ll miss his old-man-on-the-hill perspective on the latest trend and his talent in explaining complex technology in a way we could all understand. 

    Om’s ability to recall moments from the history of technology to point out that today’s chaotic chest-thumping is just the latest shiny object hype. His pattern-recognition fu was strong. Om’s perspective gently reminded us that the complexity of new tech eventually fades into the background where it “just works” and becomes the firmament for the next round of innovations. It is in this phase-shift when the new tech becomes ubiquitous and mundane where the biggest societal impacts are felt. This is where Om wanted us to focus our attention.

    • What happens to business when bandwidth is infinate?
    • What happens to innovation when computing can fit in your pocket?
    • What happens to design when the UI is just your voice?

    These prompts embedded in Om’s essays would lead you to ponder technology’s impact on society.

    I worked for Om at Gigaom where he made a run at building an online media business on Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans axiom. The free-to-read blog was fiercely independent but was also a funnel into a monetized expert marketplace and events business. The paid sections were designed to subsidize the free so the business could minimize dependence on surveillance advertising. My time there was immensely rewarding as we punched well-above our weight, put out a great product and had a great group of people.

    Casey, Oren, Will, and Jesus

    Sadly, we got out over our skis and short term financial incentives eroded the longer term business and the Gigaom experiment ultimately came to an end.

    Looking back, over the years, Om’s posts inspired me to write as well,

    Short Term vs. Long Term Metrics
    On Ephemera

    I also saved a few quotes over the years as keepsakes,

    What will stop growing is the conversation about it. The breathless coverage of each new model announcement has a different texture than it did in 2022. The releases come faster, the benchmarks climb, but the surprise is attenuating. 2026 on AI hype cycle and what comes next

    In the not-too-distant future, these workflows leave the confines of an app wrapper and become executables where our natural language will act as a scripting language for the machines to create highly personalized services (or apps) and is offered to us as an experience. 2023 on how chat+voice UI+AI personalization which spawn a new age of computing

    The algorithm allows us to maintain more relationships with much less effort at almost no cost. 2016 on the tranformative power of tech

    Startups are the atomic unit of innovation. 2013 at the Crunchies

    If someone can become the Dolby of the web — remove the noise and give us clear sound — then they are going to make a lot of money. – 2008 on intelligent filters

    I’ll miss having Om as a reference point, waypoints for our collective future. His works would make a great training set for an AI chatbot but, without his sharp wit, appreciation of the analog, and humanity, it would ultimately be lacking.

    R.I.P.

  • The end of scale

    It’s been over a year since The Messenger closed down and the lessons are even more stark today. The meltdown precipitated from a number of out-dated expectations. Social media algorithms are shunning general news content, Google has been re-calibrated to favor original, niche content and news consumption habits have changed considerably.

    It’s kind of like running a restaurant on a busy street. If your goal is to touch as many consumers as possible (as The Messenger sought to do) the easiest way to achieve that is to make food quickly and throw it at passing cars hoping that people will 1.) have their window rolled down, 2.) will be hungry and 3.) will like what you’ve made. If your goal is to build an enduring business with a foundation of repeat customers your best bet is it invite them in, speak with them and hope they stay a while.

    Mike Donoghue on LinkedIn

    News articles are a no longer a commodity that is profitable at scale. The age of infinite personalization (via AI) is upon us. Publishers that understand Liquid Content, information that can be adapted to it’s consumer, will prevail. The new moat will be unique archives of well-formatted content, rich with meta-data stored in dynamic data structures that can re-combine on-demand to meet a specific need. Adaptability is key because in this new world it is impossible to know if your growth will come from text snippets, short-form vertical video, interactive graphical representations of data, or audio summaries translated to Chinese.

    In this world, the inverted pyramid is but one way to present what you have.

    from How to structure an article: The inverted pyramid
  • Social Media Marketing

    Social Media Marketing

    I went to a panel yesterday where online retailers spoke about the changes AI has brought to their profession. Ugly Talk: Selling in the World Run by Algorithms. While a well-structured website with lots of meta-data around your catalog have become table-stakes, success or failure can also come from unexpected data layers in your checkout pages. ​Frank Pacheco from Nearly Natural spoke about how one of his SKUs sales dropped 75% overnight because of a shipping issue which extended delivery times beyond the usual Amazon two-day. Your supply chain and logistics is just as important to agentic commerce as your descriptions and prices.

    As AI Agents and atomization of audiences into niche vertical markets will de-emphasize traditional marketing, social media still remains as an important marketing channel. As marketers try and optimize their sites to get mentioned in the AI Answer Engines, social media is one of the last resources to discover broad trends and what people are looking for in your product.

    In this sense, social media marketing has become mainstream and often you’ll see traditional advertising campaigns shot to look like low-budget social media clips to try and emulate the unfiltered and honest perspective of a viral video. It rarely works as audiences can see right through that.

    One of the first rules of social media marketing is that you should have faith in your product such that you can allow the customer to amplify your products and brand and remix and celebrate it.

    There’s a right way

    and a wrong way

    Having your CEO reveal your latest “product” before anyone else can experience it is the antitheses of social media. The bland office, the tiny, tentative bite, not even mentioning that this behemoth has THREE slices of cheese, even the sign over his shoulder that says “petty” – these are all working against him.

    That is, unless the goal is to generate mentions on reddit in which case, they win!

  • Claude’s New Ads Challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT

    Claude’s New Ads Challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT

    Anthropic, makers of AI Assistant Claude, is going after their competition with a series of ads to designed to give users pause after the Open AI’s announcement that ads would be coming to their product, Chat GPT.

    The campaign, Time and a Place, was envisioned by Mother London, extending Claude’s positioning from the Keep Thinking campaign.

    The ads launched yesterday, timed for this weekend’s Super Bowl, which will feature two of the spots as detailed by AdWeek.

    @sama has responded on X.

  • How AI Redefined Access and Ownership in 2025

    How AI Redefined Access and Ownership in 2025

    Tried something different this year, asked ChatGPT to summarize the year for me.

    One benefit of having the entire archive of this blog part of OpenAI’s learning model is that it can spit back what it’s learned, not only in substance but also in tone. It’s uncanny.

    Here’s how ChatGPT responded:

    Absolutely — based on Ian Kennedy’s actual writing on everwas.com (which covers tech policy, AI’s impact on the open web, local NYC issues, and personal essays), a hypothetical 2025 Year-in-Review blog post from him would blend thoughtful analysis of tech trends with sharp local and cultural commentary.

    Here’s how Ian Kennedy of everwas.com might write a “2025: A Year in Review” post:

    2025 felt like the year the internet finally stopped pretending it was the open playground of ideas and began behaving like what it’s actually become: a contested battleground where ownership, access, and value are constantly being negotiated — not just by corporations, but by governments, communities, and the technology itself.

    AI Changed the Web — But Not in the Way We Expected

    At the start of the year, conversations around artificial intelligence were dominated by shiny demos and sci-fi ethics. By year’s end, the conversation shifted to who owns the data and who gets paid for it.

    Policy makers, IAB task forces, and publishers around the world began framing the debate in terms of rights and compensation, not just innovation. The old model where content was indexed freely by search and repurposed by AI is now being replaced by a future where:

    • Publishers insist on licensing and metered access
    • AI crawlers are treated like commercial participants
    • Content is tokenized and monetized rather than scraped for free

    This wasn’t just theory — it became a reality for countless newsrooms and creators struggling to survive in an era where AI can answer queries without sending anyone to click a link.

    Cloud Infrastructure vs. the Power Grid

    Machine learning isn’t just a software problem. The massive energy demands of data centers pushing GPUs to their limit became a real infrastructure challenge this year. We saw:

    • Idle data centers waiting for electricity capacity to catch up
    • Experimental approaches like repurposed jet engines and space-based solar projects
    • Real worries about quality of life when computing giants annex local power grids

    The future of “compute anywhere” suddenly looks a lot more tied to where the electrons actually come from.

    New York Showed the Rest of the Country

    Living in this city means Local often becomes National. In 2025 New York city was a microcosm of the larger cultural and political shifts:

    • A mayoral election turned on cost of living and democracy reform
    • Community voice battled casino development bids on the East River
    • Neighborhood tech events and decentralized meetups flourished alongside big conference circuits

    The city didn’t just make headlines — it embodied the tension between grassroots citizen engagement and centralized power.

    Tech Week, Brand Conversations, and the (Un)Informed Public

    2025 also saw a subtle but unmistakable shift in how technology and culture engage:

    • The growing success of events such as NYC Tech Week and Tech:NYC AI Demos which felt less like corporate showcases and more like community patchwork gatherings
    • Branding in an AI-driven world became less about identity and more about trust and permission
    • Conversations about Google, Perplexity, and discovery technology moved from technologist circles into mainstream debate

    It’s hard to overstate how much that matters. When ordinary people begin arguing about the future of search and discovery, the underlying structure of the web itself has already changed.

    Personal Notes from the Year

    Beyond the geopolitical and technological, 2025 was also a year of small perspectives — hikes, travel, and moments that reveal a deeper truth about why culture still matters even when platforms shift.

    Whether it was a hike near Kamakura or a rumination on a slow waterfall (ed. this is a pretty funny interpretation of this post), these personal essays reminded readers that tech is not just code — it’s lived experience.

    Looking Ahead to 2026

    If 2025 taught us one thing, it’s this:

    • The open web is not going quietly into the night — it’s being re-defined.
    • Access now has a price tag, and that price is up for negotiation.
    • The people using the technology are just as important as the companies building it.

    The next year won’t be about whether the web changes — it’ll be about who gets to shape that change.

    Here’s to the debates, the fights, and the small stories that make it all worth caring about.

  • Publishing in an Agentic AI World

    Publishing in an Agentic AI World

    I was fortunate to be invited last week to the kick off meeting for an IAB Tech Lab task force dedicated to establishing a framework for Monetizing the Open Web in the age of AI.

    The accelerated use of tools such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT, MSN’s CoPilot and Google’s AI Overview has precipitated a re-thinking of how publishers are compensated for their work. While the conversation is only just beginning, this group outlined concrete suggestions to the challenges ahead.

    Publishers must work together to stem the flow of unlicensed content. 

    As long as information is readily available and free, there is no incentive to drive demand. Unless you limit supply, you cannot derive value. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as CloudFlare and Fastly are on the front lines as they see the majority of requests & responses across their networks. They have noted the sharp increase in AI-bot traffic and have the expertise in the blocking and tackling of the thousands of bots and spiders.

    TollBit is keeping track of the AI crawlers with their quarterly State of the Bot reports

    Publishers in the room are anticipating a world where the value of a search result on Google is less than the value of licensed access from an AI Agent. In such a world, it would be prudent to default to denying access to all crawlers in favor of direct access by verified, registered readers or licensed partners.

    Old methods such as robots.txt and user-agent/IP address blocking filters are readily ignored or spoofed by long-tail startups scrambling to serve their users. More secure methods are necessary. “Get a better lock on your door.” says Jon Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at DotDash Meredith.

    Establish a marketplace for publisher information that can scale to serve AI Agents.

    While CloudFlare’s Cost-Per-Crawl implementation redirects crawlers to a 402 HTTP error page to redirect AI developers to licensing information, TollBit and Dappier are building the first marketplaces for publisher libraries as a proof-of-concept as a bridge from the search engine results of the past to the marketplace of the future.

    A search for the past 25 years returned 10 blue links of which a human might read 1 or 2 links. This referral traffic was the currency of the old internet. This attention could be monetized any number of ways.

    Google owned this marketplace.

    Now imagine a world where a query by an AI Agent may spawn 20-50 queries of which *every* article is scanned and synthesized into a single response. Ads and subscription funnels on these pages are ignored. There needs to be a different pricing model for this traffic. Source material will not be a “page” but could be a snippet of video, a schematic blueprint, a sound bite, or a product spec. The pricing model in this “marketplace of everything” needs to recognize and support dynamically pricing requests based on who is requesting it and in what format, all in real-time.

    The programmatic advertising ecosystem which has been the engine driving the growth of online publishing for the past 25 years was subsidized by advertisers bidding for a reader’s attention on a web page. An entire tech-stack was built to serve up the right ad for the right audience at the right time, all in under 500 ms.

    With AI Agents, you have readers paying directly for content with their subscriptions (Chat GPT Pro is $200/month) and the AI Agent is acting as a proxy on their behalf. Once publishers have successfully shut off the free flow of their content, accurate, reliable, and up-to-date information will accrue value. In this world, there will be need for a real time marketplace to handle the access and metering of content and this system will need to be built to the same scale and performance of the programmatic advertising platforms of today.

    No one owns this ecosystem.

    IAB Tech Lab - Content Ingest API

    Tokenization – core components to a market

    The final step, once you have established a way to meter (cost-per-crawl, cost-per-query or some other subscription model) access to a publisher’s library, is to establish a standardized way to track and count content as it travels through the ecosystem from a publisher to the AI platform.

    Tokenization is this final step. Once an AI has asked for something, the response needs to be tokenized in such a way to properly attribute credit as well as track the usage of that content not only to the initial query but in all future derivative uses.

    ProRata has a working implementation of this tracking in their Gist Answers, distributed search widget. “If you can track it, you can charge for it.” they say as their IP is focused on the attribution of AI responses from their network of publishers.

    TollBit has one-time use tokens for access and are setting up a system where an AI Agent can query for information, inquire about pricing, and generate and receive a token to retrieve the information as needed, on demand.

    All these are approaches to the same problem and my company, SimpleFeed, aims to participate in the delivery of publisher content, whether it be tokenized, vectorized (to assist in discovery), or otherwise value-added with filtering and meta-data augmentation as we have been doing for 20+ years.

    I look forward to staying engaged with the individuals and companies that were gathered for this workshop. AI summarization is rapidly tearing down a business model that has worked for decades. Unless there is an agreed upon business model that is accessible to all players including small publishers and long-tail AI startups, we may lose the diversity of opinions and perspectives that have given us the open web we currently enjoy.

    It makes sense that IAB, an industry group that helped establish standards around online advertising, is taking the first steps to establish standards around the AI Agentic web of the future. I thank them for taking this first important step of getting all the players in the room together and publishing the first framework for publisher content monetization and brand content management for LLMs and AI agents.

    Publishers underwrite new projects based on forward-looking financials. If nothing is done to improve the economics of publishing online today, the investigative reporting of the future will not be funded and we will all be poorer for it.

  • Cloudflare’s new mission

    Cloudflare’s new mission

    Cloudflare sees about 20% of the world’s internet traffic cross its network. Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s CEO, has a pretty good handle on trending internet behavior.

    In the video below, he summarizes the impact of AI “answer engines” that summarize what they find in response to questions put into AI chatbots such as Google’s AI Overview or Open AI’s Chat GPT.

    What he concludes is that the exchange that allowed the search engines to index a site in return for referred pageviews is no longer equitable and is growing increasingly lopsided.

    The data, according to Cloudflare;

    • 10 years ago: Google crawled 2 pages per visitor
    • 6 months ago: Google 6:1, OpenAI 250:1, Anthropic 6,000:1
    • Present: Google 18:1, OpenAI 1,500:1, Anthropic 60,000:1

    No one is saying is what we all know in our hearts. No one is clicking through to the footnoted sites on an Answer Engine. The AI crawlers are taking more than they are giving back.

    It’s worth watching the entirety of Matthew’s talk in context of an announcement he references in the video. I expect it will be something related to their Bot Management suite. But I also look forward to hearing more about CloudFlare’s vision to remake the internet into one that rewards knowledge creation.

    While the introduction of AI Answer Engines is a current and immediate threat to the online publishing ecosystem as we have known it, there is a nascent opportunity to re-build the internet on a new ecosystem built around different incentives.

    imagine an internet that rewards knowledge, not attention
    Slide from a presentation on rebuilding an internet that rewards knowledge, not attention

    What if we rebuilt the internet into one that rewarded Knowledge and not Attention. The “attention economy” brought us clickbait and distraction. What if we rebuilt the internet into one that rewarded publishers that gave more than they took away? Am I naive?

    I am looking forward to learning more about CloudFlare’s plan.

    Update: I was there!

  • Perplexity’s YouTube Moment

    Perplexity’s YouTube Moment

    The recent Perplexity acquisition rumors echo the moment Google was getting ready to buy YouTube back in 2006.

    Back then, pundits were concerned Google was taking on a whole host of potential copyright-infringement lawsuits as YouTube was chock full of pirated videos. YouTube has since built a sophisticated copyright detection algorithm that does a pretty good job of detecting not only pirated videos but also when copyrighted music is used as a video soundtrack.

    In hindsight, the then ineffable purchase price of $1.65 Billion was a bargain. YouTube’s technology was transformational. As YouTube expanded, it was no longer necessary to download a QuickTime plugin or other special player software. Once YouTube’s javascript libraries became ubiquitous, online video was solved for good. YouTube TV launched in 2017 to disrupt an entrenched cable television industry and now generates more total viewing time than both cable and broadcast television, combined.

    Could the same be said for the potential acquisition of Perplexity? While all LLMs share an index made up of the common crawl and anything else they can find on the open internet, will Perplexity’s vectorized index of exclusively licensed news sources drive enough usage and value to a potential acquirer?

    While YouTube’s pre-acquisition copyright concerns ended up being nothing more than a speed bump, it eventually started a formalized conversation around formally licensing content. Could Perplexity’s fledging licensing program be the start of a more sustainable way grow the new AI ecosystem?

  • Waterfall from Hell

    A couple of years back, I was working with a publisher that complained that their site was really slow. As I opened up the site on my browser I immediately became suspicious as the fan on my MacBook kicked in and every process slowed to a crawl.

    When I finally was able to crack open and see what was going on behind the scenes, I was able to record what happened on each page refresh.