everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Identity Management , it’s a public service

    I met Jeremiah Owyang last night and he sent me a link to a post he did a couple weeks ago on the future of Facebook. It’s an excellent post which maps out a future that may very well come to pass. To sum it up, he predicts that the current Facebook platform will eventually open up and offer itself up as an authentication service.

    Facebook will launch an Identity widget that I can embed on my blog. This allows only those who have registered to Facebook to leave a comment, many high profile blogs will do this, to avoid nasty anonymous comments, thus reducing the incident of Kathy Sierra type events.

    If this happened, Facebook’s authentication service would start down the long, bumpy road that others are travelling (Microsoft Passport, Six Apart’s TypeKey, OpenID). Extending Facebook’s authentication as a service is the next logical thing for them to do once they have established their platform. Authentication is a basic building block for anyone that calls themselves a platform so if you wish to extend the influence of your "social graph," then you need to distribute your authentication methods as well.

    Whichever service steps forward to take on the mantle of distributed identity management will also take on a responsibility to remain open, extensible, and free. The issue is, anyone with the scale to support such a broad and distributed service is most likely going to be a business which will need to turn a profit. The trick is how to remain impartial while also extracting revenues to satisfy your investors. Think iTunes/iPod lock-in or the whole net neutrality them my pipes debate.

    It may be possible for Facebook to crack this nut and figure how to remain profitable and open at the same time. The real trick is to do it not just for a few years but over the long term. Will Facebook continue to be open if they get acquired? If they get a new CEO?

    The debate is not unlike the tension between advertising and editorial in a media company. Above all, running a media business requires absolute editorial independence. It’s a public service. Reuters used to have something called a "Golden Share" and Wall Street Journal had the Bancroft family. Both held the public trust above all else and were protected by short term, profit-motivated demands. Thompson recently bought Reuters and it looks like Fox may buy Dow Jones.

    Like a moth to a flame, internet platforms are drawn to management of a global identity.  But just as the tycoons of the last age stepped up to publish a newspapers, you need to realize what you’re getting into and do it to give something back to society, not for the money.

    — 

    PS. I’m committing a big no-no because I’m posting something just as I step out the door for a few days of camping. I’ll get to any comment or other feedback when I return so don’t take my silence as a snub! 

  • MyBlogLog: DNS for People

    Many moons ago I took a job managing the Sun Sparc workstations on the Fixed Income trading floor at the Tokyo branch of Lehman Brothers. It was a time when a 486 Compaq computer cost $5,000 (just the CPU!) and a 28.8 Supra modem would run you a couple hundred bucks. With these economics in mind, you’ll understand why a job with an investment bank that gave me access to dual T1 lines was attractive. When things were quiet on the help desk, I would spend time browsing through newsgroups and playing around with first generation browsers like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. The web was a small place back then. Yahoo lived on akebono.stanford.edu and my little guide to Tokyo was awarded the “Cool Site of the Day” sunglasses.

    The excitement around social networks today reminds me of the early web. Closed networks such as Facebook carve out a small slice of the internet and make it familiar. Bumping into names we recognize, the wilds of the internet take on the feel of a small town or village. We mediate our experience through the lens of these virtual hamlets, relying on our friends to point out things to see, our “mini-feed” tells us who is doing what, we trust their judgement.

    In the past, broadcast models were sufficient. The portals were the first phase. Crafted by editors, they delighted us by shining a spotlight on items of interest (those sunglasses again). Search engines took over as interests splintered and people sought out something unique, outside of the generic categories of the portals. Social bookmarks and blogs took over from email as a way to share knowledge but each blog had to rely on it’s ability to draw an audience. RSS feeds were a way to channel influence but the flow has since grown weaker as more a more blogs compete for attention, watering down the signal to what is now a broad river of random chatter.

    Social Networks came on the scene as a way to channel the signal back into a strong and meaningful flow. The latest updates from our friends and contacts are a way to filter what we read and where to focus our attention. If we pick our friends carefully, we can again surface something of value. There are now social networks for Anglers, Bakers, and even Dead People.

    So where do we go from here? I predict (as others) there will be another swing of the pendulum. As we splinter into smaller and smaller communities we’ll come to the realization that we’re missing something. Joining multiple networks will not help. Managing multiple identities across multiple social networks creates confusion and stress. How many networks can you manage? How many accounts and friends lists can you keep in your head. Want to share a link? Post a thought? Which network is appropriate? Do you post an update to Vox, Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, or all four? The demand to consolidate will poke holes into the walls of social networks. Right now you can push things into Facebook but into that black hole there is no escape. Where’s the RSS out? Consumers will force the walls to come down.

    When these walls crumble, we’re going to be back out in the wild again. All of us are going to be holding onto our various masks. Which one to use? My LinkedIn profile? My ClaimID? My Yahoo Answers profile? Shards of our identity will exist across multiple systems and without a service to bring it all together, it will be impossible to interact with people in any meaningful way.

    History serves us well here. Attempts to centralize have failed in the past. Remember Microsoft Passport? No one wanted to throw their lot in with a single vendor, especially when it was Microsoft. I predict the same will happen should anyone else try to solve this problem with brute force, not Yahoo, not Google, not even the iPhone. No one wants to put all their eggs into one basket. What we need is a pointer to all the pages that make up your collective, virtual, self.

    The solution is in a distributed service. The distributed model the internet uses to locate nodes is instructive. When you type “yahoo.com” into your browser, your computer translates that into and IP address. Somewhere along the way that IP address, say, 209.109.112.135, is sent to a Domain Name Server (DNS) which has a lookup table that will determine the best way to route your packet to that IP address which is also known as yahoo.com. You don’t need to know the IP address or the best way to get there, the DNS servers and routing tables handle that. They exist at a level below the hostnames that we use.

    Some companies recognize this opportuntiy and are building solutions to meet the need. Spock is a people search engine but it’s approach to brute force indexing is no different than the Yahoo Directory of old – a top down, editorial approach that will ultimately not scale. Freebase is slightly better as it can accept updates but again, this is not much different from a modern search engine, an index of dynamic content with a single, shared view for everyone.

    The trick of DNS is that it adapts itself and can be edited to meet the needs of the community it serves. Routing tables are updated dynamically to seek out the most efficient route from point A to point B. The combination of a dynamic routing table and an “editorialized” DNS table can build a view of the world that is optimized for the individuals that use it. In this same way, a modern solution for locating people, discovering what they are about, and tracking their interests is through a loose combination of lookup tables and community-based profiles. People are not fixed objects, their interests change from day-to-day, they have schedules, they produce metadata that has a half-life.

    On to the shameless plug portion of this post; a vision for what we’re trying to build at MyBlogLog. What you see today are the beginnings of a service that not only helps you learn about people reading a site and learn more about them, it also directs you to sites these people publish and communites that they belong to. The recent addition of tags to MyBlogLog, which can be applied by any MyBlogLog member on any person or site profile, further defines what you’re looking at. It’s a little messy but there is structure underneath it all which ties it together. The community is helping build out the structure, tag clusters are giving form to communities and relationships where before none existed.

    One of the most interesting aspects of the service is the “Hot in My Communities” module which surfaces the posts that are most interesting to readers of sites that you follow. Imagine it as a virtual version of Amazon’s Best Sellers in your zip code. It’s likely that you’ll recognize some of the links there but if there’s something in there that you don’t, chances are good that you’ll find it of value because others like you also found it compelling.

    The web is a collection of digital artifacts. Text, photos, sound files are by-products that are digitized and indexed. We use search engines to locate these artifacts but no one has built a way to tie all these artifacts back to their owner. Until you tie the collective digital artifacts of a person together in a unified way and follow it over time, you don’t really know that person. We want to build a platform which allows you to get to know someone through what they produce and share, collectively, across all networks and the internet. Only then can connections made online approach the fidelity and meaning of a face-to-face meeting. That is what we hope to accomplish with MyBlogLog, that is what keeps us thinking of better ways of doing things.

    Further Reading:

    It’s time to open up networking, again : Dave Winer on the coming explosion of social networks

    Beyond Silos : Doc Searls outlines the shortcomings of categories of organization

    Dave on open social networking : Dave Weinberger suggests the need for metadata miscellany

    Open Labeling of Social Network Relationships : Marc Canter riffs on elements of Winer’s post

    BBC, The Tech Lab : Bradley Horowitz talks about DNS for objects

    MyBlogLog Personal Gestalt : Lord Matt, a MyBlogLog member, ponders the concept of a collection of personal actions as a definition of self

  • The Power of Suggestion

    Now that we’ve got shiny new servers we can start to tick things off the list that have been queued up while folks have been busy stringing cables and spinning up new disks. Earlier this week we re-worked the universal footer on the site and launched the MyBlogLog Suggestion Board.

    The Suggestion Board was born out of one of Yahoo’s internal hack days where the folks over in Yahoo Autos wanted a quick and easy way for their users to tell them which new features they thought were the most important. Combining simple forum features with a simple thumbs up, thumbs down voting mechanism (all the rage these days) the team polished up their hack and now provide it as a platform service for any Yahoo property.

    Suggestion Boards have been popping up all over the place and we’re pleased to have one for our community as well. Robyn’s got a great write up on how it works. If you’re a MyBlogLog user (if you’re not, sign up!) and have an idea for a new feature or just want to poke around and see what others have suggested and add your vote to their ideas, jump on in. The team loves to get feedback.

  • Now working at MyBlogLog

    Some of you already know but to bring the far flung readers up to date, as of a few weeks ago, I transferred to a new team at Yahoo. I’ve been holding off on writing about my job with MyBlogLog (they’re an acquisition we made back in January) as I’ve been taking it all in, getting settled, and getting a sense of how things work. Check out the “Recent Readers” box in the sidebar of this blog and sign up. It’s a pretty cool service (and is going to get even better!)
    Now a few weeks in and I’m happy to say that this is the right place for me. The team here is amazing and they’re working on things right in line with my interests, a people-centric view of the web. So what is the team behind this people-driven service like?

    Eric & Todd have known each other since 5th grade and work together as you would imagine two longtime friends would. Mostly a lot of good-natured ribbing with an occasional heated debate but in the end, a shared passion for turning out something amazing. Hanging out with them each day makes me wonder what my old friends from Essex, Connecticut are up to these days.

    John & Steve have been working together for many years as well and because they sit back to back they piratically complete each other’s sentences when they’re collaborating over something. They built the latest tags release from conception to release in something like a week. Friggin’ rockstars.

    Robyn was brought on as the community manager and has that rare talent for striking the right balance that helps the community thrive. Read her latest post on the MyBlogLog blog and you’ll see what I mean. She’s from Georgia so her accent immediately puts you at ease.

    Chris just joined the team but has already re-jiggered our memcache and drafted an API which is looking real solid. If it’s fast, Chris is happy. He’s already made an impact and I can see he’s going to be a huge help as we scale and optimize.

    We’re actively hiring kick-ass engineers who want to see their work used and recognized by millions. If you’d like to work with this crew and think you’re up to it, drop me a line in the comments.

  • Bebo’s “Invite Your Friends” a tad aggressive

    bebo.png
    As competing social networks vie for my attention, I notice that the email outreach campaigns have kicked into gear. Maybe they want to catch the kids before they head out for Summer vacation but it seems like all the services I signed up for back when I was doing some research are reaching out for some love.

    I just received Issue 1 of Bebo’s email newsletter, Spotlight. Among a couple other new features including a Facebook Status clone, they also are promoting an “invite your friends” feature. I’ve seen this on a number of services including LinkedIn and it is often included in the sign up flow as a way to quickly bring along all your friends (and so on, and so on, just like the old shampoo commercial).

    Basically the service uses your Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or GMail address book and compares it to their membership database to see if they’ve got a match and prompts you to connect with people you already may know. Bebo takes this one step further by then listing up all of the friends of people in your address book.

    In my mind this is going a little bit too far. I don’t really want to know about all the people I *might* want to connect to because they happen to be friends with people that happen to be in my online address book. It’s a bit shocking to see who some of these second degree characters are and I feel like I’m taking a quick peek and rifling through someone’s black book.

    I know, you could get at this information anyway by browsing their profile and checking out their friends but it somehow doesn’t seem as bad if you’re browsing around. When it’s one huge data dump with a “check all” box, it just feels wrong.

  • 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!)

  • Online Advertising in an IP-Enabled World

    With word out about Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media I want to publish a post that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for a good couple of weeks. Think about where online advertising is going and how the internet is expanding and what that means and why an open ad exchange makes the best sense for getting the right message to the right person at the right time.

    First the internet. In the past we had IPSs (AOL, Earthlink, Comcast) and portals (Yahoo, MSN) serving as the on-ramp to the internet. The concept was that you would “log-on” to the internet and have the portal act as your guide. Microsoft had a marketing slogan that asked, “Where do you want to go today?” as if the internet was another world which required a guide.

    In the past few years search engines, notably Google, have taken over the role of guide and have become the most popular starting point, serving as an index for the internet. People became more savvy and a few well-placed keywords are all you need to drill deep into a site, by-passing front doors, jumping directly to the page with the information you seek. With always-on broadband and multiple computers in each home, search engines have became touchpoints that people would turn to many times each day to vector out and ferret out a specific piece of information.

    Cell phones are the next frontier and there’s already pressure on the cellphone carriers to breakdown their walled garden directories and search engines are re-engineering their sites to adopt themselves to the mobile context.

    On the bleeding edge we’re seeing the internet experience fade away as a separate experience as more and more objects around us are connected to “the cloud” and are “internet-enabled.” Much has been written about Second Life and other alternate reality environments that are infiltrating our everyday experience of the world around us. But the cloud is seeping into our First World life and data and experience on the internet is more and more inter-mingled into the real world.

    • The SanDisk music player is wifi-enabled and will pull the latest music down based on your listening profile for your drive to work.
    • The Nokia N800 wifi-tablet has media player software so you can stream your music collection anywhere. It’ll run Skype so you can save on your cellphone minutes and with GPS software, it’ll keep track of where you go or give you directions.
    • Smart Signs Media has technology which enables a billboard to pick up the FM radio signal of passing cars and flash messages customized to the demographic of the radio station to which
    • you’re listening.

    I even joked to colleagues about a scenario where internet-enabled signs on the bathroom wall would replace the sports pages tacked up in front of the men’s room urinals at your local sports bar. The content on the page would be swapped out based on behavioral cookies left on your cellphone browser which it would pick up via Bluetooth. At a recent Stirr Mixer, a version of this was starring me in the face!

    To me this says that there is no longer an separate experience called the internet. It is becoming an integral part of the world around us. On the one hand we struggle to apply relevance to Web 2.0 and what that means for the average Joe but on the other hand, we see bits and pieces of this new web popping up all around us everyday infecting everyday objects with connected intelligence.

    How will advertising work in this new world of IP-enabled objects? The current landscape of online advertising consists of a myriad of networks and business models that are experimenting with different ways of getting your attention. We have text ads, banner ads, flash animations, affiliate networks, CPM, CPC, CPA, Branded MySpace profiles, microsites, in-game advertising, the list goes on. Each method talks to its own collection of partner sites where content is blended with messages to varied degrees of context and integration. If you were to compare this landscape to financial markets, it would look like disparate stock exchanges without a currency market to normalize and determine value.

    Right Media is unique because it normalizes monetization across multiple ad networks. A single line of javascript on your site can now optimize across multiple ad networks in realtime so that the best offer is served up, dynamically, to your audience.

    To me, an open and transparent ad exchange is to the online advertising market as the global currency markets are to the global economy. By allowing markets to compete with each other on an open exchange, advertisers and publishers can optimize their sites against the maximum opportunity and let their audiences determine which messages resonate the best and adjust accordingly. An exchange is best able to integrate new publishing platforms (including toilet billboards!), new advertising units, and optimization mechanisms.

    An open market trumps a closed exchange everytime so I give a big ol’ high-five welcome to the folks at Right Media. If you run ads on your site, check out Direct Media Exchange for a glimpse of the future. They’ve integrated delicious, youtube, and flickr as learning tools and have a vibrant community around their product. They even held a recent hack day which shows that their heart is in the right place for innovation. Congratulations and welcome to Yahoo!

    UPDATE : Charline Li at Forrester has a great post on the Right Media ad exchange model and the benefits for Advertisers and Publishers.

  • All Things Digital launches

    allthingsd.jpg

    Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher have joined up with my favorite headline writer, John Paczkowski from Good Morning Silicon Valley on a new site run by Dow Jones. All Things Digital is a place where Walt and Kara can stretch out a bit and write in a way that the column inches in The Wall Street Journal would constrain.

    All of Mossberg’s reviews from the past two years are now out from behind the subscription wall in an experiment to see if they monetize better out in the open but they’re going to need to tune the Ad Sense placement a bit better because I don’t think people are going to be interested in the “Mossberg on eBay” links they point to right now. House ads for other Dow Jones properties are running tonight but I’m sure you’ll see others ads rotate in as things get rolling.

    Each writer has a lengthy ethics statement which is as much a primer on their individual style as it is a full frontal of any potential conflicts of interest.

    I don’t own a single share of stock in any of the companies whose products I cover, or any shares in technology-oriented mutual funds. Because of this, I completely missed the giant run-up in tech stocks a few years back, and looked like an idiot. However, when the tech stocks crashed, I looked like a genius. Neither was true.

    – Walt Mossberg

    So, if Yahoo makes a smarter move than Google, or if I agree with Microsoft’s position on some issue, rather than Google’s, you’ll read it here whether Megan (her spouse) agrees with it or not. If Ask.com buys a small, smart company that Google was also pursuing or declined to buy, I will report it and praise such a deal, even if Megan was involved on the Google side. This may result in some arguments at home, but it won’t affect the coverage here.

    – Kara Swisher

    I should disclose right at the start that seven years ago, at my request, a former employee of Digiscents procured for me an “iSmell” t-shirt which I wore to the gym for a number of years.

    – John Paczkowski

    As far as I can tell, the whole thing is running on WordPress. Great job folks! Subscribed!

  • What will Web 2.0 do for my neighbor Ron?

    One of the coolest things I brought back from the recent Web 2.0 Expo was this t-shirt that said “Web 2.0 is – – – ” with a big blank box for you to write in the definition of your choice. People at the show got into the spirit of the occasion and used Sharpies to fill in their own definitions. I spotted Ross Mayfield on stage wearing his t-shirt with the “made of people” scrawled in bright red.

    I chose to leave my t-shirt blank so I could ask people around town what they thought as I ran errands around town. The responses have been enlightening. To be blunt, no one really gives a damn.

    I think about all the whiz-bang tools that are being released on a weekly basis, the latest additions to the scene jumping up and down for our attention. How are these sites going to improve the lifestyle of my neighbor and his beloved rose garden? Sure, he’s got always-on broadband (his wifi Linksys router blinks at me each evening) though he doesn’t really need it. Broadband just happens to be the best deal in town and it allows him to be online while his wife is on the phone. Yeah, it’s nice to be able to comment on the latest blog postings about his favorite ball team but he would rather debate stats face to face with his mates at work, it’s a richer experience. He likes to keep in touch with his kids via email but has no need to IM them or (god forbid) get their latest Twitter updates. The acceleration of the news cycle has done little to improve his quality of life.

    The popular media has attempted to bring meaning to this flurry of activity but they can only do so through an old familiar lens which paints the Web 2.0 revolution in terms of teenage millionaires and insider techno-babble. Most people dismiss Web 2.0 as another self-important bubble of exclusive back-slapping.

    The bigger challenge we need to tackle is how to transform all the great work being done today as something that has an impact on the broader world. The stage is set – all the foundations are in place – everyone who is interested in web-enabled this or community-powered that are already wired up and connected to each other. The trick is bringing all this connectedness to bear on greater issues in the world around us.

    I think it was Kevin Lynch of Adobe who said at one of the “high order bits” at Web 2.0 Expo that the first phase of computing was driven by the need to make individuals more productive and produced applications such as Word & Excel. In the Web 2.0 phase we’re now making groups more productive in their collaboration via community-driven applications such as wikis, social news sites, and socially driven television shows such as American Idol which is basically a crowd-sourced hit machine. The more difficult but ultimately more rewarding challenge will be bringing the benefits of participation to the masses in a way that is intuitive and baked into the way the rest of the world lives their daily life.

    History is instructive here. The introduction of a free press must have felt just as liberating back then as it does today to anyone who has interacted with a blog or social networking site. The power to reach and influence a broader audience is a thrill. When, for better or worse, the press evolved into the fourth estate, the rules around participation were codified and now most people do not enjoy ready access to the media. Today we all benefit from the (relatively) open exchange of ideas that the free press has given us. When Ron gets his daily paper delivered to him, he gets a snapshot of the best of what this ages old platform has to deliver.

    The next great opportunity is to package up and deliver to the Rons of the world the best of what Web 2.0 community has to offer in a format that is as integrated and easy to consume as his daily Chronicle. We’re seeing bits and pieces of this poke through the topsoil. I’m looking for a radio station that features the best podcasts of the day, a terrestrial TV station that streams the most popular clips on YouTube, a version of Upcoming embedded on my refrigerator door.

    Everyone that attended the Web 2.0 Expo is a member of the creator class – we enjoy the ability to interact and control the world around us. But most people would rather come together around someone they trust to deliver the world to them. They’ll vote with their attention and get strength and conviction from their chosen community. No matter how cool and shiny we paint this our ever-customizable Web 2.0 nirvana, we cannot ask them to change their habits and join us in our medum – we need to meet them using tools they understand.

    Where’s the Web 2.0 universal remote?

    UPDATE : Daniela Barbosa points to a flickr thread where people are posting photos of their Web 2.0 t-shirts. Add yours to the cloud!