Sun honcho Jonathan Schwartz condemns the practice of charging for online media as outdated:
Last week, I did a panel with Charlie Rose, which like the article I just wrote for Harvard Business Review, will not be available on the web without a payment. How 20th Century. How Web 1.0.
The implication is that the 21st century, Web 2.0 approach would be to offer said article free of charge while plastering it with ads. Well, I simply don’t believe that the entire publishing industry can be financed by advertising, nor do I think this is desirable. The fact that Harvard Business Review offers pay-per-download is actually quite rare and progressive (though the practice is spreading), a prescient provision for the day when offline publications will no longer be capable of subsidizing their online counterparts. Rags that force me to subscribe just to read a single article are the anachronisms. That said, the $6 price tag is outrageous for a two page article. Considering that an entire back issue goes for $17, I couldn’t see paying more than $2-3 and even that seems a bit rich.
While I’m at it, I totally agree with Jonathan that “the dot in dot com” was a fantastic marketing campaign. But the dot in Web 2.0? Am I pronouncing it wrong? Shouldn’t that be the point in Web 2.0? That way, it even has a nice double meaning. Come to think of it, maybe we should market AllPeers as the “oh!” in Web 2.0.
I don’t usually post naked lists of links, but these bookmarks have been languishing in my browser tabs for ages:
More hope for a DRM-free future, it seems.
Update: Oops, here’s another one:
The folks at Mozilla Update are getting stricter about quality control, which explains the delay in getting the new version of Scrumptious up there. If you’re like me, your heart sinks any time you receive a (non-spam) email entitled “Approval Denied”, so the process was somewhat traumatic. First I got rejected because I had included my own update URL, which is no longer allowed (they deal with updates themselves). Deleting a line from a text file is not that arduous, of course, so I immediately resubmitted.
A few days later I got another rejection letter, this time because of the “phantom” sidebar that remains when you uninstall Scrumptious then quit Firefox with the sidebar still open. Judging by a couple of stinging reviews on Mozilla Update, this isn’t such a rare occurrence, but I hadn’t done anything about it since a) it’s due to a Firefox bug that’s fixed in the 1.5 version and b) why would anyone want to uninstall my lovely extension anyway?
No matter, I bit the bullet and investigated the problem more closely. Luckily I found this post by Daryl (couldn’t find his last name) full of juicy source code for addressing precisely this issue. After some minor adaptation to eliminate the use of the RDFDS library (totally unnecessary in my view), the sidebar problem was fixed, and I resubmitted. I then went onto the Mozilla Update channel on IRC to see if I couldn’t track down the reviewer (Pontus Freyhult) and vent about how I had spent two hours fixing a problem that wasn’t even my fault. I ended up having a really nice chat with him, and through the wonders of real-time communication fixed another minor detail or two and got Scrumptious approved. I also suggested that they institute a hierarchical review process, so that a first pass could be performed by a larger pool of reviewers (I could see volunteering for this personally) before the current set of reviewers (who would become “superreviewers”) provide their final imprimatur. I dare say they’ll put something like this into place eventually.
Anyway, bottom line is that I bumped up the Scrumptious version to 1.1 and it’s now available here and on Mozilla Update. Once again, if you’re using it and liking it, please give it a good rating and review. My ego will be most appreciative.
Does Google have an “artificial intelligence agenda”? According to this ZDNet article, that was the conclusion arrived at by George Dyson during a visit to the Googleplex:
“‘We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,’ explained one of my hosts after my talk. ‘We are scanning them to be read by an AI,’” Dyson wrote in a posting on Edge.org following a visit to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer.
The problem with the term artificial intelligence is that it alternately conjures up images of scores of failed research projects from the 1950s onward, or the popular vision of marauding machines decimating humanity. Either way, it’s hard to fault Google for “side-stepping” the issue.
My definition of artificial intelligence is anything that serves as a effort-saving replacement for some cognitive activity. This gives us a basis for discussion while we wait for “true” machine intelligence (as defined by the Turing Test thought experiment). Seen in this light, Google is the first example of a major commercial success driven by AI technologies. The most fruitful AI projects to date have been based on statistical techniques, of which PageRank is a perfect example. The same type of approach helps Google to target advertisements, as well as enabling computers to detect credit card fraud, play excellent backgammon and so forth.
So artificial intelligence has snuck up on us without us even noticing. I’m sure that Dyson’s quote is accurate, but “read by an AI” doesn’t mean C3PO curled up on the couch in front of a roaring fireplace with a good e-book. It means that the scanned texts will be used to feed the statistical model of a future text analysis engine. What does this mean for end users? Probably much more accurate search, as well as non-laughable machine translation from one human language to another.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we won’t be decimated by marauding machines eventually, but at least in the meantime we can look forward to better and better internet search.
Paul Graham has been on an essay-writing rampage lately, with a couple of recent venture capital-related posts that I’ve been planning to comment on (and will do so soon). His latest piece, however, is on a different (and highly topical) subject: whether there is any substance to the term “Web 2.0”.
Let me say first of all that Paul is spot on in lamenting the dearth of geeks at the Web 2.0 conference in October. I entitled my talk there “Transforming Firefox into a Web 2.0 Development Platform” with the expectation that the conference would be a teeming nerdfest, but a large proportion of the audience seemed baffled. Note to self: next time, lighter on the TLAs, heavier on the big fonts and purtee colors.
Paul then proceeds to eviscerate his own contention that “Web 2.0″ might be meaningless by laying out one of the clearest and most thorough definitions I’ve seen. (That’s a compliment, by the way. I’m sick of being told that my Peer Pressure persona comes across as a crotchety old man. I’m a crotchety young man, dammit!) His conclusion: Web 2.0 has substance because it’s a web that works. But he regrets that we feel the need for a special term just to point out that something isn’t broken anymore.
But isn’t that a proud tradition in the tech industry? Actually, the cliche is that nothing ever works until the third version. So not only do I still like “Web 2.0″ as a coinage, I think we should be on the lookout for Web 3.0. In fact, I’d like to think that a lot of the ideas we are developing at AllPeers are targeting a future generation of web applications, where users have a proper identity and the borders blur between client and server. The web’s still a baby, after all. Okay, at ten years old it’s maybe more of an obnoxious pre-adolescent. You get my point.
It’s a truism of technological change that well-established approaches are unseated only when something new arrives that offers not incremental progress, but a tsunami of advantages that together outweigh the incumbent’s inertia. One great example is the CD: it’s more durable than an LP, it’s far more portable, you can easily skip to or shuffle tracks without juggling a fiddly needle, and (in most cases) it sounds better. The original Napster is another archetypical illustration of this phenomenon: unlike CDs, you could obtain individual tracks (as opposed to full albums), you could choose from a far larger selection than any bricks-and-mortar store… and, of course, it catered to our hitherto unrecognized desire to shop from home in our underwear. (And it was free, though I’ve always argued that the impact of this particular point has been exaggerated.)
We’re now seeing the same factors at work in the TV realm. Direct download of TV shows obviously frees us from the constraints of broadcast schedules. It holds the promise of access to a much wider selection of content; rather than see Federer massacre another hapless opponent in next year’s Wimbledon final, maybe I’d prefer to watch McEnroe and Borg duke it out again in their classic 1980 match up. But there’s much more to do it than that, as this excellent article on the Lost Remote blog points out.
Direct download opens the door to a wealth of new business models beyond hackneyed advertising-supported broadcast. The central premise of advertising-funded TV is that successful shows have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which explains why HBO (financed by subscribers) probably produces more quality content than all the major broadcast networks together. I’m not as blown away by Arrested Development as some, but the fact that an innovative program with a fiercely loyal audience numbered in the millions is being cancelled for economic reasons is a perfect illustration of the inefficiencies inherent in the current system. I believe firmly that more flexible and transparent mechanisms will lead ultimately to much better television.
(I may have to rename this the “Death Blog”, so often am I predicting the demise of one thing or another. But then the media space, in particular, is riven by radical change right now, so perhaps obituaries are on the ordre du jour.)
I hereby officially predict the eventual disappearance of annoyingly restrictive client-side DRM for media content. Some evidence:
Hmmm, what did I forget?
Oh yeah, Sony. Didn’t I read somewhere that they too are experiencing a DRM-related backlash? This, more than anything, reminds of the bad old days of destructive software copy protection, a parallel that I fleshed out in great detail in my open source/open media essay. Believe it or not, companies used to “protect” their software by hacking floppy disk drivers and the like on a very low level. Horror stories of broken hardware and lost data abounded, and eventually vendors abandoned these practices.
And this despite the fact that it’s a lot easier to lock down software, since it never has to pass through an analog phase. It make take a while, but I believe the media companies will eventually give up.
Update: Just noticed that David Berlind put up another anti-DRM diatribe yesterday.
Me: your homework is to sign up for Bloglines
Me: believe me, you won’t look back
Her: i am
Her: signed up
Her: but I like reading text in its context
Her: so to speak
Me: welcome to the 21st century, honey
Me: I suppose you’d prefer if it were carved into stone tablets?
Her: no, I would prefer if bloglines captured the look and feel of the surroundings
Her: rather than made everything generic looking
Me: ok, have it your way
Me but I assure you, you’re not wasting nearly as much time reading blogs as you could
Me: with more efficient tools
AttentionTrust is one of those things that provoked a hearty “wuh?” on my part when I first heard about it. Perhaps the initial message wasn’t articulated clearly by its promoters, or maybe I just wasn’t paying, ehm, attention. I finally got it when I saw their presentation at Web 2.0 and immediately realized that their vision is not that far from our own. The elevator pitch is that information about your web surfing patterns is currently stored and managed in a multitude of data silos, mainly large e-commerce sites that use clickstream data to target product offerings and advertising based on user-specific information. If you spent an inordinate amount of time lingering over the Superbitchbag, for example, you might be in the market for other firearm-themed accoutrements. But why donate isolated bits of your surfing profile to third parties when you could capture the whole lot in your browser and use it for your own ends?
A powerful idea, but though it has a number of high-profile backers, it has yet to get any real-world traction. Hence the suggestion by Alex Barnett to retrofit OPML, which has spread like wildfire as a format for representing collections of RSS feed subscriptions, so that it can hold attention data as well. Nick Bradbury agrees with the principle but sees RSS as a better choice because of its <dripping irony>fantastic namespace support</dripping irony>.
I don’t get it. An XML format has value only inasmuch as it represents a contract between multiple parties as to what the specific XML tags actually mean. Experience has shown that establishing this kind of consensus, even for fairly trivial formats, is pretty darn arduous. So newcomers like OPML should be welcomed with open arms: it ain’t rocket science, but it’s a good format for transporting lists of feeds between newsreaders, and for whatever reason it’s achieved widespread adoption. But jamming in a bunch of additional tags, in a foreign namespace, achieves exactly nothing. Folks still have to agree what those tags mean, so we’re right back where we started… except that we’ve taken two distinct XML vocabularies (OPML and attention.xml) and needlessly intertwined them.
Better to stick to attention.xml and address the real issue: why aren’t people adopting it? The answer is that there aren’t yet any compelling applications that would encourage us to do so. The barrier to attention.xml adoption is much higher than for OPML, since it has to be made by every individual user, instead of a handful of feedreader developers. So there had better be some serious mushroom-cloud-layin’ killer apps to motivate us to make the effort. What kinds of apps might fit the bill? The mind boggles. Let’s start with a Memeorandum-like aggregator that chooses which articles to show me based not on lowest common demoninator rankings but on my own surfing patterns; which sites I’ve visited, how long I spent there, whether I left comments and so forth. That’s a better way to drive adoption than to sprinkling on a few more buzzwords.
My first experiences with computing were on a VT100 terminal connected via a 300 baud modem to a DEC VAX at the local university. So I’ve probably followed the whole thick client/thin client seesaw for as long as most, fatting it up on a Windows machine with (gasp!) no connectivity in the early 90’s, then migrating more and more of my applications onto the network in the late 90’s and early 00’s (pronounced “naughties”, I believe).
The debate hasn’t gotten any clearer over the past couple of decades. David Berlind makes a compelling case for paying “less or nothing at all for someone else to worry about guaranteed headaches such as software upgrades, data backup and recovery, and system maintenance.” Jonathan Schwartz explains (albeit somewhat self-servingly) why it would be better to store all our data on a Sun grid while running our applications locally. And Joshua Porter provides a great illustration of why some data is better stored locally, even if the apps are remote. So what’s the deal… do I need to go Atkins on my PC or not?
The problem here is that there are two conflicting trends. On the one hand, bandwidth and storage are getting closer and closer to free, which favors remote storage and execution. On the other hand, processing power and, ehm, storage are getting closer and closer to free, so it’s just as cheap to have a supercomputer on your desk as a dumb terminal.
I think that, at the end of the day, the answer doesn’t lie so much in a finding a definitive Right Place for data and code to reside. Instead, it has to do with gaining the flexibility to make sure that stuff can migrate to the most optimal location depending on the precise factors at play, possibly in real time. For code, this means a combination of technologies like AJAX, Firefox extensions and Flash (and their future incarnations). For data, it means richer data schemas to replace the genericity of RSS and OPML so that we know what’s what, chunking data down so it can be easily transferred and replicated, and (most important of all) unique identifiers so we can keep track of what is where.
Oh dear, have I become an RDF convert?
That’s right kids, Scrumptious 1.0 is here, just in time for the Christmas shopping season! The main improvement is that it’s now compatible with Firefox 1.5. I also fixed a couple of bugs and added autocomplete, courtesy of John Resig, whose code I stole with permission. I just couldn’t stand the thought of the Scrumptious user base having to wait on upgrading to the new version of Firefox. Well, actually I installed FF 1.5 on my notebook the other day and was already missing Scrumptious.
So enjoy! I ask only one thing in return: if you’re using and liking it, please take the time to say so on the Scrumptious page over at Mozilla Update. Lately, the only comments seem to be from unhappy folks who had problems with uninstall (which I claim was a bug in the old version of Firefox), who clicked on the Options button (which I admit shouldn’t have been there) or who wanted it to do something totally different than what it is intended to do. Call me oversensitive, but one star!? That hurts…
Update: I should mention that the new version is not yet online at Mozilla Update. I’m waiting for approval. So download the new version from here for now.
Update: Unfortunately, there still seem to be some usability issues with autocomplete, so I’ve removed it for now. I’ll try to take a look and figure it out sooner, rather than later.
Cory Doctorow has a great mini-rant over at Boing Boing about the oppressive, and frankly obnoxious, tactics used by the movie industry to squelch all possibility of viewers photographing or filming their precious wares. And here I was postulating that cinemas would be okay in the digital media future because they offer a unique “event” experience. If the event in question involves body cavity searches, however, folks may prefer to stay home and crowd around the 80-inch plasma with a DVD, or even a BitTorrent download if the powers-that-be won’t let us get new releases legally. Cory goes on to blast every braindead anti-consumer tactic employed by the entertainment industry to avoid the reality that it is they, not their customers, who need to adapt to fast-evolving world of digital media. Amen to that.
In fact, traditional media companies have a lot to be afraid of, as Chris Anderson points out on the Long Tail blog. Revenues are declining year-on-year for every category of maintream media. So what’s a media mogul to do? Well, they could do worse than follow Jeff Bezos’s example. Selling books by the page is a great idea that creates brand new revenue streams by embracing new technologies instead of trying to subdue them. Less strikingly, but equally positively, CBS and NBC are following ABC’s example by offering on-demand TV shows. It’s easy to get gloomy when your comfortable gravy train runs out of steam, but there are huge opportunities for those smart and bold enough to grasp them.
Update: Om Malik has a good point: the CBS/NBC announcement isn’t really as significant as it might seem at first blush since they aren’t providing shows for download. They’re just offering a sort of hosted DVR service.
So Google is paying people to add Firefox referrals to their sites. This puts an interesting new spin on the question of whether Firefox adoption has plateaued. Certainly the trend is still upward, but is there really a chance to challenge Internet Explorer’s dominance?
The Mozilla community is doing a lot of the right things to drive further adoption. I have a few ideas, some or all of which may already be happening, but perhaps not as widely as we would like:
- Preload Firefox on new PCs. Not a new idea but it’s huge. Microsoft has leveraged its Windows monopoly to gain a real lock on the virgin desktop that you see when you boot up your new PC. That said, if Mozilla makes a strong push in this direction, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft fighting back too hard considering its past legal woes. Has anyone already bought a Windows box with Firefox preinstalled?
- Encourage the creation of businesses whose focus is to sell value-added installations of Firefox (e.g. with a custom set of extensions included) and support, a la Red Hat in the Linux world. This would eliminate a lot of the pain of hunting down and installing all the cool extensions that transform Firefox into a must-have browser. Maybe this is what Mozilla Corporation is planning to do?
- Add
viralityvirulence to Firefox. (Irrelevant note: “virality” gets 20,000 hits on Google despite the fact that it isn’t a word.) One of the problems with Firefox is that there aren’t network effects to encourage propagation (unlike Skype, for example). Hopefully we’re taking a step in the right direction here at AllPeers by adding media sharing features.
Naturally, even if all this comes to pass, it’s hard to imagine a world where software developers wouldn’t have to support multiple browsers in order to attract a large user base. This is where XulRunner comes in: it’s basically a framework that lets you run Firefox extensions as standalone applications. I’m thinking it might make it possible to build a plugin that turns IE into Firefox, for all intents and purposes. That way, developers can create Firefox applications with the confidence that they will run more or less everywhere. Embrace and extend, indeed.
I’m starting to see Microsoft blogging surpremo Robert Scoble as the Paris Hilton of the blogosphere: famous for being famous. He’s not an alpha geek, a deep thinker or a software design guru, but he towers above all in terms of links and attention. He also shares Miss Hilton’s talent for stirring up controversy, as witnessed by the reaction to his recent post on the competitive challenge that Google represents for Microsoft and Yahoo.
Scoble’s epiphany frays a bit on the edges. Google is building an advertising platform? The shift from the desktop to the web is disruptive for Microsoft? Go figure. A much stronger insight stems from his visit to Silicon Valley startup Zvents, on venture capital haven Sand Hill Road (which is in Menlo Park, by the way, not Palo Alto). He points out that Google is locking in customers with its dominant ad syndication technology and using this as leverage to sign them up for its other web services. A good and non-obvious point.
His solution, to “clone the Google API”, falls a bit flat, however. Yes, Microsoft is facing a disruptive force, but it’s a fundamental technological shift that would be a major challenge with or without Google. If anything, Google’s headlong expansion into a dizzying array of services seems a bit aimless, and it is getting uncomfortably dependent on fickle ad revenue to finance its increasingly expansive offer. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other ways to make money on the web; Amazon and eBay, for example, seem to be rolling in it. Creative thinking and originality, combined with a still formidable market presence, might well unearth other online gold mines waiting to be tapped. This, not mindless imitation, is the way to flourish in the face of a major paradigm shift and a smart, aggressive competitor.
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Some local publicity for AllPeers in the Prague Post. The journalist, Katya Zapletnyuk, did a great job of distilling my goobledy-gook into something comprehensible to the Prague expat crowd. I was a bit disappointed to learn that I don’t look idealistic, however… next time I’m interviewed I’m going to wear a tie dye.
I can’t remember in what context I compared our MediaCenter to “Google for your media files.” I’m sure it made sense at the time. Someone should set up a website (Die Hard on a Boat.com?) that generates pithy content-free similes automatically, so we CTO types can spend our precious time coding.
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