In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

Posted by ben at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

Posted by ben at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

When I was a teenager I was lucky enough to own a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, with a 300 baud modem. It allowed me to program in BASIC, compose documents in a Wordstar-compatible text editor, and even access CompuServe (sorry about those hourly rates Dad!). It started instantly exactly where I left off, no need to save at all (until you had to change the batteries, then it was time to break out the cassette tape recorder drive). It's eight-line by 40 character LCD screen used little power, so I could use it for 30 hours or so on one set of batteries. I doubt anyone has ever looked so completely scary nerd while believing that they were the hottest shit as I did with that thing. I wish there was something like it now, something smaller, lighter, and simpler of course. I would just like to be able to write wherever I am, without carrying or pulling out a laptop, and I would like not to worry about saving, battery life, weight, expensive equipment, etc. Something like the Flip for words.

Specifications 2GB RAM (enough for 8000 pages of text or about 5 million words, surely enough for anyone), full keyboard, non-backlit LCD display, low-power Bluetooth transceiver (file access only), 1 mini-USB port for data transfer and charging. 22 hours of use per charge. RTF/HTML format text editor. 8 x 8 x 0.3 inches, 1 pound.

Update: Rob Mcartney points me to the Alphasmart, a little bulky but maybe just the right thing! Ordered one... thanks Rob.

Posted by ben at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Posted by ben at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The use of A-B testing and bucket testing for optimizing tasks can provide a clean, programatic way to make many design decisions. It's an invaluable technique for comparing two similar but incompatible choices, and the results are impossible to have much debate about. Because of the urge to move fast, some groups have been tempted to use A-B testing to create artificial certainty about qualitative questions, however:

Testing can't give insight into what the product package should be; it will never tell you why the results are what they are. Trying to test features individually and then assemble them into a coherent package will not give insight into the success or failure of the entire package, nor provide a sense of what the right product is. At best, it results in a sort of "drunken sailor's walk," as each new incremental test takes the product in a different direction.

Testing won't tell you which product will be more successful; direct comparison is seldom the way that people decide what to buy (Pepsi beats Coke in taste tests year after year, yet Coke has 44% of the market and Pepsi is stuck at 32%). In fact, attempting to compare a new products to each other this way can result in audiences simply choosing what's familiar. This can be seen in the heavily AB test driven designs of the search results pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, which are all very similar.

A great deal of research has been done into the product choices people make, and it consistently points to the formation of a "story" around a product being the most important factor in whether it succeeds or fails (the most eloquent person on this topic is Seth Godin, ex-Yahoo! employee). This is not the marketing at all, but how the actual product makes overall sense to people who use it, surprises them with something new and better, or disappoints for some reason. There is no way to create a story out of a list of features or parts, instead it's the combination that either works, or it doesn't.

Posted by ben at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

technorati tags:facebook, f8, social, network, applications

Posted by ben at 3:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In a meeting last week, I said I wanted to try to involve some other designers in a project, but just got a blank look and the question "what can design do?" — designers can't really help with the actual making of the product, they meant. Ugh. It's true: Silicon Valley-type engineers and other very smart people have put designers to shame by creating products and services that no one imagined but that many can't live without, and for which design is just not critical.

Rather than working within people's needs and expectations (the traditional approach of practical-minded designers), the work of engineers has changed people's habits, thinking, and behavior. Designers are relegated to optimizing a use-case, working out the complexities, or putting a nice shiny coat of varnish on top (and rounding the corners). This approach, and the "undesigned" look of Google, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. has led people to talk about design more as marketing (and to be avoided) than as part of the product. The real work is in the engineering, and invention happens there first.

I've tried the fancy idea of using "design thinking" as a way of making product decisions, to be more strategic (and less production-oriented). It works for IDEO, but not so well for me — it feels more like business development than inventing. Heroically, Bruce Nussbaum has tried to save us all by equating design and innovation, as the secret sauce that will enable the West to compete with China, etc., but I don't think it's gonna stick.

Ok, I'm starting to finally get it: this may be a time when the myriad possibilties of creating new-to-the-planet things means engineering. But I am not ready to give up all the fun to those folks! I would rather undergo some wrenching adjustments to what it means to "design" and be relevant again. I want to be able to say that 'design creates new things to make people happy,' not 'design makes it look pretty or more usable.'

Like an architect would, I am going to have to know a lot more of what an engineer does, and be able to work directly with a good part of the code if I really want to play in the deep end of the pool. I am going to start designing in code, maybe bullshit, arty code, but code nonetheless. This is a little rough and later in life than I would have liked, but what the fuck, bring it on!

technorati tags:design, designers, engineers, web

Posted by ben at 3:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

It was impossible for me not to know about the iPhone as soon as it happened, I am a sucker for anything Apple. But I don't actually want one, which is weird to me, as usually I would want one of each from the entire Apple Store. I don't love my Treo at all, but the main value in it for me is as an Internet device; for that the damn keyboard is the affordance that makes it workable and useful. I really do hope that the touch screen is a great text entry thingy, but having used many, I can't really see how it will be.

But I do like the phone for the way that the interface is implemented. It is nicely visually polished, and the interaction design is ok, but what really makes it sparkle I think is the cinematic way that all interactions have smooth transitions from one state to the next. Looking at the demo of retrieving a voice mail, all the steps flow smoothly into one another, and when I close an item it zooms back into the place where it came from.

It's profoundly relaxing to see, and makes me realize how much brain overhead it takes on a daily basis to look at my phone and interpret what is happening, what just happened, and what I can do next; these things take very very tiny bits of attention, but it really adds up. It's like a tracking shot in a movie; where rather than cutting from shot to shot to show someone doing something the camera simply moves to follow them continuously ( I think of the opening sequence in Nashville and Boogie Nights — it works to introduce the characters because it's obvious whose story it is from the shot, instead of asking you to interpret artful framing or a sequence of different emphases into a whole).

Web design could use some of this continuous quality. The fanciest Ajaxified sites are still mostly a deck of flash cards, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I now own one, of course. My skepticism lasted only until the price drop :)

Posted by ben at 4:58 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I'm not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn't notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures, and I've disabled my ShoZu account so it won't happen again. See update, below.

But: what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don't just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior. The photos are below.

Posted by ben at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

A few people get together and create a new product or service, in secrecy. The product or service gets a ambiguous name like Jiffr or Remebo, is then previewed with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs, and is launched, sold to a large company, or (most often) fails.

The most valuable products are those utilitarian ideas that almost anyone would need and are engineered to be able to serve millions of people without too much added cost (and thus are very profitable if successful). Throughout this process, the bulk of the product design is done by the engineers or business owners, who mostly trust their own instincts about what the right experience is. Sometimes a design firm or designer is brought in to add some visual polish or create a logo.

So what's so great about this model? It hasn't produced any truly new products in a long time (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft were created publicly at schools, MySpace, Flickr and Blogger were created right out in the open as businesses). Despite the extremely hot focus on start-ups and the possible wealth to be had from a successful one, as ways of creating new ideas they are functioning pretty badly. Each new product is somewhat interesting, but after a pretty solid year of trying a lot of these, there isn't a single one that I still use (in particular, I am still wishing for a good Web-based RSS reader).

I think Om Malik may be right about what "Web 2.0" really is: a collection of exciting new enhancements for Web sites that will be integrated into the offerings of big companies like Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo!, rather than a hothouse for new companies. This would be fine if we had mature Web products that just needed refinement, but none of the major pieces of the Web work too well yet (search is "5% solved," Linux is a ten-year old, social networks are in their very awkward pre-teen days, email is choking, Windows has chronic illnesses, even my iPod crashes a lot).

What's the answer? Stay in school. Don't read eHub. Assume that your ideas have occurred to other people. Don't take the venture capital money for the first idea. Don't be secretive about ideas. Think past the semantic Web, Web 2.0, social media, etc., the implications of which are pretty clear to everyone, already being executed on and will be fairly played out in five years. What will come after that?

Posted by ben at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

At my job (and in Silicon Valley in general I think), Agile development is supposed to be the best way to do things. Specifically, the Scrum method encourages an evolutionary approach, where an entire team works together in short cycles and creates a product iteratively (first a barely-functional demo, then a rough prototype, then a more finished version, etc.), without an overall plan.

Scrum works very well for implementation, since it empowers a team to do its own planning, breaks a large project down into brief chunks and reduces the amount of churn and decision-making that can cause delays and rework. It is an approach with an evolutionary philosophy: no one can know at the outset what the right solution is, so let's just start working and refine as we go.

Coming from the perspective of design, there are some built-in tensions to this approach, however. Design as a discipline has as an article of faith that people can sit down and create a drawing or visualization of an idea that will make things better, and that this idea can help push the expansion of what's currently possible to engineer (this is not to say that only designers can do design, just defining the activity, everyone does design all the time).

Scrum allows no time for the messy task of conceptualization (other than beforehand), and divides up all the aspects of a project into small, unintegrated tasks, making it hard to see the 'big picture.' The team-focused environment encourages strong collaboration, but does not ensure that the value of a product is realized by itself (and the proponents of the method don't claim it does, either). In fact, the method ensures that engineers, designers, and product people spend less time thinking about whether the product is the right product overall.

What's needed is less of a focus on methodology, and more of a focus on ideas and people's talents. Scrum is a fine method to do work, but doesn't actually solve the problem of making good products. Rather than talking about intelligent design vs. evolution and assuming that one way of doing things explains the entire world, we should be valuing time spent on hard thinking and idea generation just as much as we value the time spent implementing things. There are certainly limits to emphasizing creativity, but there is a sameness to Web products these days I think. We need more really new ideas.

Update

People are fundamentally spiritual beings, with big needs for meaning and a sense of themselves in relation to the world (whether they believe in God or not). Scientific thinking is always needed and important. But what we most need now is that messy old-time religion: creative thinking, design thinking, the faith that we can know the right thing to do, to make the world better.

Posted by ben at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Most people have a tremendous longing for something, a place in the past they wish they could have again, regret about a bad thing they've done, a wish for something that seems out of reach. You keep going ahead with your life in some way, but you have a "hungry backward look" (Phillip Roth's phrase) towards when you were younger, or to someone beautiful, graceful, smart, etc. It's a strong desire that feels necessary to ourselves, part of who we are, and at the same time probably impossible.

(Also, although I imagine this longing is universal and basic to being human, most people won't admit this; they will tell you their sexual tastes and family problems first. That wish might seem greedy, or grandiose, inappropriate, or just plain ridiculous.)

The truth about these desires (I think everyone knows on some level), is that no matter what they are, they would not transform your life fundamentally -- you would still be the person you are today, the person whose life has brought you to this point. What you actually want (I believe), is some way to re-experience a memory exactly as it was, or live the small vision you had in your head, the way you can play a CD or video again and again. But memories are mushy and indistinct, and fade (unevenly). Watching my daughter grow is breathtaking, not just because she's so fabulously big now but also because realizing how fast she's changing makes me a little panicky -- the sweet baby part of her life is slipping away so quickly. The way that memory erodes is just like mediated experience: first comes the movie, then the spin-off sequel, then the TV series, each one less connected from the story and emotions that made it powerful at first. And the more you try to recapture the feeling, the more it gets away from you.

The cure for this is similar to when you are wrestling with any hard thing: write down some something, make lists, get whatever it is into a place where you are not just wrestling with your own thoughts and hearing them rattle around in your head. The cure, in fact, is for people to make more authentic, public media (photos, journals, podcasts, shoutouts, posts, tags, avatars, etc.); not imitations of professional media, not stagy fake material or imitations of other people's stuff, but the small-scale, awkward, unselfconscious storytelling that comes naturally when you are talking to a friend. This kind of authentic media is in very short supply -- in fact, most bloggers are doing the exact opposite, wanting attention and aspiring to manage some slick bullshit public persona.

The tools are available to reify and make public all the small, modest pieces of life, and cheaply. What you are doing when you do this is ultimately getting all the thoughts and memories out of your head and into a place where you can have some sort of perspective on them. If memories, and the memories and experiences of others, were out there and always available, they would for us what Portnoy's Complaint and other books probably did for Roth: put him at peace with the sometimes conflicted, embarrassing, messy, but ultimately good person that he is.

Posted by ben at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

When I do a Web search, Yahoo!, Google, and a couple other companies do an amazingly sophisticated job of showing me a page that has a finely tuned blend of information — matching on words, ranking based on inbound and outbound links, social filtering, and many small adjustments for the corpus I'm looking within. That is, they produce a page with a great deal of relevance. Over and over again, this generates an expectation that when I need some information, a Web search is a good way to go. It's hard to remember, but just a few years ago that wasn't true. We had the Web, and all the fancy ideas, but nothing nearly as good for general usefulness as Web search has become.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Web was left behind. The general information sites, the catalog sites, the entertainment sites, the message-boards, instant messaging, even email services have not benefited from the algorithmic approach to making pages. They remain stuck in old, unsatisfying and primitive ghettos. John Battelle, in his book The Search outlined one or two scenarios that would take networked services into the same kinds of mechanisms that Web search provides, but there doesn't seem to be much talk about increasing the amount of relevance for the ordinary mass of sites out there.

Part of this I am sure is because doing Web search requires a massive amount of horsepower, and no one can justify spending ten-times what everyone else spends on hardware and software to sell products. But part of it I think is just that most of the more pedestrian sites out there are direct translations of offline resources, whereas with search, there is no equivalent that is a directly analogous experience, and there are no existing expectations to get past.

But of course there is a big opportunity there. In general, I don't mind shopping among just major brands, or reading a mass of feeds from the more popular sites, or trying a few different popular albums to see if there is one I like. But, as has been flogged to death, the biggest opportunity is in giving me access to the “long tail” of smaller other products, publishers, and artists work, the few things in the world I'm sure to love. Amazon has been doing very interesting things with services and infrastructure pieces that are not core to it's main business (A9, Alexa, Local Maps, S3, etc.) but are directly comparable to the kinds of work that Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are doing. RSS, Atom, and other standards are enabling huge amounts of ideas, products, people, and work to be addressed via a simple format. Aspects of social networking are making their way into the bulk of the sites and services that people use.

My guess is that before too long, that magical relevance, the wonderful confidence that what I want will just appear, won't just be in search results pages, it will be everywhere.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, long tail, relevance, search, technology

Posted by ben at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

What could be more uselessly meta than blogging about the reasons for blogging? Whatever. Here we go:

The Good

People blog for attention, or in the expectation of getting more attention. Since blogging originated with geeks, "attention" paid to blogs has been turned into a set of equations (trackbacks, comments, etc.). In this realm, blogging is about promoting oneself in a marketplace of ideas. The more traffic you can drive, the more important you are, and the more influential you are. By enlisting your friends, commenting on other more prominent blogs, or just plain pimping your content to others, you can try to get people to visit your site and track your status. It's a more efficient version of the ways people have always spread ideas, influenced people, and measured their impact. It's open to almost everyone, it promotes the free flow of information, and it provides a real alternative to existing media outlets for more immediate, more opinionated, deeper dives into topics.

For all the good, blogging has big limitations, however, in the gap between the technical solution and the genuine human need (and, as I am a blogger with just slightly above zero traffic and just trying to impress his wife, I think I'm perfectly positioned for the discussion).

The Not So Good

First, people in general don't have a getting media attention problem, they most likely have an experience-deficit problem. That is, the fundamental drive to be social and belong does not get solved by blogging, or any mediated experience. You can see this in online romances (the torrid email exchange is followed by an awkward meeting), or telecommuting (people on the conference call or email thread are second-class citizens). The simulation doesn't satisfy. Bloggers don't think this way, however; for them, everything important is on the Web, and the first impulse after having an experience is to blog about it.

Second, bloggers are mobs, or latent mobs (and a weird kind of mob, where no one in the mob knows they're a mob). All relationships in blogs are individual-to-individual (or even hand-to-hand). Where conflict happens there's a lot of amplified passion and strife that flares up and dies down, without much understanding or knowledge being created (and the winners will often be the people who shouted the loudest). People say things to each other on blogs that they would never say in real life. When there's an argument between bloggers, small fires turn into big ones quickly and often and the results are boring and stupid.

The distorting effect of the technological solution also causes "blogger-voice," people speaking with the same high-pitched self-consciousness you hear in loud cell phone conversations, bad acting, or people caught lying. Since the stakes for bloggers are high ('love me'), the audience goes on the same emotional roller-coaster with the blogger, and that investment exaggerates their reaction (either it 'sux' or it 'rulez'). Doing the public voice gracefully is an art. The people whose writing does stay with me are all journalists or writers (unrepresentative samples: Danah Boyd, Steven Johnson, Mickey Kaus, Paul Ford, etc.). This suggests to me that people who have experience with writing and thinking in the real world are more valuable than those who live in only in the electronic one.

So...

To me, all this doesn't mean that blogging is bad, I hope that there are more bloggers so all these issues can sort themselves out. It means that blogging doesn't really change what people's actual needs are that much. In the end, blogs are just slow motion phone calls, speeded up postcards, tiny threads of communication between two people, with the goal of understanding and intimacy. The public quality is real, but ancillary. The self-consciousness that the public display engenders is something to get over, a test of the blogger's ability to keep their personal perspective and identity. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blogs, media, mobs, motives, psyche, social, technology

Posted by ben at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I work at Yahoo!, but I have a small role and no influence on or knowledge of corporate decisions or policies about China, or any contact (beyond a couple of meetings of fellow employees at a conference) with Yahoo!'s Chinese business partners. This post is personal opinion only.

The way that Yahoo! has handled the jailing of four Chinese dissidents (based on personal information handed over by Yahoo! to the Chinese government) has so far been to say that it is powerless to change the political reality and laws in China, and this is surely true. In hearings about the issue at the U.S. Congress, Yahoo! has focused on sort of asking the U.S. government to pass laws (like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as Bill Gates pointed out) that would give companies like Yahoo! guidance on what business practices were acceptable in countries outside the U.S. (so that, presumably, it would have some cover in negotiations with the Chinese government over its practices in China).

It's clear from the legalistic language that Yahoo!'s public representatives use that the company is in a real bind: if they withhold information from the Chinese government, they are likely to lose the ability to do business in China and inflict major damage on their business. People in China are better off overall if companies like Yahoo! are investing there; they get jobs, investment in other supporting local businesses, and a lot of knowledge transfer from American experts (every Chinese citizen I've talked to believes that U.S. companies should stay in China, though of course the people I've talked with have been mostly the beneficiaries of investment). But that benefit doesn't excuse any actions that contribute to putting political prisoners in jail; that goes beyond being a business decision. Yahoo! can't change its public position without consequences from the arbitrary Chinese government, but groups like Reporters Without Borders will continue to effectively publicize the consequences of Yahoo!'s compliance with Chinese law. For the people who have to make these difficult decisions, it is surely a no-win situation.

I believe that there should immediately be some quiet modification of the way that U.S. companies gather personal information on their Chinese sites (that is, gather as little as possible and keep almost nothing), without waiting for U.S. laws to be passed (from what I can tell, there will be bills introduced that U.S. companies will have to follow like the FCPA, most likely next year). Despite all the equivocating, the enabling of Chinese repression can't continue and will change, if without publicity (companies and governments don't like to make difficult decisions publicly unless they have to). But with no company willing to be a leader on the issue, improvement will be hard to come by and will take longer and will be more complex than anyone will be happy with.

Technorati Tags: china, politics, technology

Posted by ben at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In my art history classes in graduate school there was a generalization made by a famous historian, Erwin Panofsky:

When a society is out of balance and disorganized, art tends toward the abstract. When the society is balanced and stable, art tends toward naturalism." -- Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art

The sense of longing for technical solutions to spiritual problems reaches an intense level in one of the more tortured reflection of technological capitalism: social networking Web sites like MySpace. Here, the lack of offline connectedness creates a new online connectedness (this time, it's not hidden from parents or adults however, and thus the same dangers and brutality that have always come with young people hanging out together are there for everyone to see and be shocked by). The Web sites, the cell phones, the messaging services reflect the trouble that a large society and culture has in providing for the spiritual needs of people: they are a reflection of our collective frustrated desires, not the cause of them.

In the times that Panofsky was talking about (5c-16c Europe), the changes happened slowly. The Dark Ages lasted a long, long time, and whatever took their place lasted awhile too. Now, the world changes very fast and the cycles overlap, and there is no single relationship that pervades an entire society or culture. In this world, there are two basic choices: more connections (the Western vision of technology-fueled markets) or more ideology (the chosen group, the fundamentalists, the belief in burning ideas). We have to hope that ideology loses for all our sakes, but connectedness in its current form isn't satisfying very well.

Technorati Tags: art, desire, social, technology

Posted by ben at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Web needs tagging or some other bottom up and scalable system for managing the tons of information that everyone is creating. Librarians and specialists will not be able to keep up with classifying the tsunami of information, and we'll all lose out if we don't find some way of capturing the patterns of behavior that people sharing information create: there are business needs for sure, but mostly there is a lot of general improvement to people's lives that can be had (e.g. if I subscribe to popular links for a tag on del.icio.us, I know most everything that people are thinking about a topic on a real time basis, and I am included and benefit from thousands of small intentions and thoughts).

So the goal is a good goal. Tagging has become sort of popular, but some problems have started to crop up. Many people still are unable to see the value of the practice, and for those that do tag there are limitations built into the standard model (it works much better as a tool for collaborating than for personal organization, and you spend a lot of time reinventing the classification wheel). In response, some geeks have started talking about extending the model to include relationships between terms or normalization, or ranking through collaborative filtering. That's natural (in fact, it has a precedent; in the 50s there was a single-term, non- hierarchical classification system for libraries called UniTerm, but it was not generally accepted and instead we have the hierarchical Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems). Time Tags and Zone Tags are interesting ways of adding layers of social meaning to tags.

This direction feels wrong to me though. Tagging has had success because it is lightweight enough metadata to be easy, and it's non-hierarchical nature lends itself to social applications (like quick aggregation of photo themes on flickr). I think a better approach will be to build tags into the interaction model of applications, turn the actions and intentions of users into inferred or implied tags, then surface that information as a basis for explicit meta-tagging action later (instead of putting so much of a burden on the user).

Right now, for example, a searcher types in one or two words as a query to a search engine, then they might pick one or two Web pages to visit. Essentially, they have tagged those pages with the query term, but that metadata is currently lost to the searcher. Instead we ask the searcher to take explicit action to save a Web page, then tag it with terms that may have nothing to do with their original query; the relationship between the two metadata linked to the same entity could be very valuable to both the user and the system. I think this kind of explicit/implicit tagging could add a lot of relevance and richness to a lot of sites and applications.

Posted by ben at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Large numbers of people joined the companies and culture that participated in the venture-capital-fueled dot-bomb, which was believed to be created by the vast potential that the Internet had to change many aspects of human interaction, business, and culture. For many, this personal involvement in discovery was the rationale for their participation. It turned out that the Internet does alter a great deal, but much more modestly and incrementally than was supposed then. The end of the boom created a large group of people, versed in technology, who no longer had a transformational, exciting focus in their work. The rebirth of the boom most recently has led to some of the same feelings, artifacts and parties, but this time instead of some illusion that there is nowhere to go but up there is the assumption that at some point the party will end, but still the enterprise is somehow one involved in 'changing the world.'

Many have looked for a similar transformational experience in creating technology to help developing nations (as seen at the TED conference in 2002 with Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway device, demonstrating a water purification device). Others have joined politics (as documented in the _New York Times Magazine_ in "The Dean Connection," in which many people have traded their devotion to creating new interactive software for electing Howard Dean). An older, but similar group of ex-liberals called the "neoconservatives" created a set of thinking about American power that informed much of the drive to invade Iraq; George Soros points out in _The Atlantic Magazine_ that this has the qualities of a "bubble" of American political power that was based on false precepts, and has now collapsed.

The drive to be involved in an enterprise that is personally meaningful and connected to helping others is a strong, and undoubtedly good, one. Working long hours and pouring oneself wholeheartedly into a community of others that share your passion for a single goal is powerful stuff. But despite the appeal of transformational events and communities, the larger world is often ignorant of the desires of a few people or the beauty of their dreams. In the case of faith in technology in general, a desire to solve the problems of the Middle East with American power, and especially in a project to defeat George Bush, those who wish for success need to combine their elaborate plans with more rigorous checking-in with those that are not part of the special group, or else they will suffer the same broken hearts as the dot-com boomers and many, many others before them.

Posted by ben at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ()