broadstuff

Day One of the Future of Web Applications conference in London, at the reception afterwards I was
interviewed by Italian videoblogger Nicola Mattina and he asked me why I came.

Why indeed?

I had a few seconds to think about it, and the off the cuff answer was my original reason - that it was an opportunity to hear from some of the US kingpin 2.0's like Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and Kevin Rose (Digg) in person, plus see some kimono lifting from AOL, Amazon, Yahoo and Google, and meet them too. And network with other like minded people, of course. And it has been that, in spades.

But as I was saying all that, a second comment came out, a sort of subconscious reason surfaced - I said that the other thing we were really interested in was testing the economic assumptions of these Web 2.0 plays. The reason this came out then was, I think, a reaction to some of the hype (or more accurately "buzz") of the day - of which more anon.

First, a quick summary of my big takeaways - aka stuff I either hadn't heard before or really got me thinking. There is not a lot of point in giving a blow by blow account of each talk, the number of people furiously tapping into their laptops in the sessions means those will be coming thick and fast, I'm sure - here for example - I preferred to watch the wetware on the stage, however - see the whites of their eyes (or red for some of the US people....) as it were.

( though it seems that the WiFi may not have been working - boy did I feel smug with my 3G laptop datacard

First up to bat was Michael Arrington, talking about the things that drove startup success - all the usual stuff about entrepreneurs staying mean and hungry, having a great idea, flawless execution etc etc - and then the interesting one - he asked what came first, the Great Idea or the Business Plan, and noted that what would really succeed was a Good Idea, well executed, and avoidance of unnecessary costs. YouTube and Flickr were examples of companies that wound up being very different from what they started off as.

And then came the first Buzz thingy of the day - if the buzz isn't happening, rethink the product. More on this buzz stuff anon....

(Postscript - he also made some interesting comments on the next hot areas, but that is for another post...)

Next up was AOL's Edwin Aoki, who - praise be to him - pointed out that most of Web 2.0 was not new, email was still the biggest single web destination, users had been looking for (long) tail since the inception of the 'Net. He noted that even though much of the new technology is very disruptive to existing trust models, most users don't understand the security / privacy and social effects, or don't care. The really interesting thing (to me) that he noted was the default behaviour by the provider must be to Do The Right Thing....he quoted Spiderman - With great power comes great responsibility.

No Buzz here then, just good solid Business

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency came swinging up next, and gave us a lot of good stuff about building online communities - to be honest, most of it is familiar to us already, but she does it so well...and she did have a few oft-forgotten nuggets like using your own product, ensuring you understand the benefit of your social network to the user, and making sure your users can access your service via as many on-ramps as possible. The thing I had not heard before was the theory of Startup Success via the Compelling Founder Story - doing something newsworthy was where it was at......getting that "buzz" was Very Important.

Buzz 2, Biz 1

Next came a talk about ducks - I mean the commoditisation of IT - from Simon Wardley of Fotango. First British Accent of the day. In essence he believes that all IT things start off as competitive advantages and end up as costs of doing business - I agree. Very entertaining presentation (You had to be there to get the ducks and kittens with guns stuff.....)

After that another Brit, VC Ben Holmes of Index Ventures - giving an excellent rundown of VC economics and what a VC wants from its victims - I mean clients . There aws a lot of sizzle about Stardoll and other success stories, but the takeaway from me this year is that the emphasis was on the Great Team and its ability to execute - a retreat, I am sure, from the Great Product requirement of a few years ago, clearly competition is hotting up - though they have not yet fallen back to the Great Idea of Mr Arrington yet....). I had just met the real Fred Destin, (whose blog I like) and here is his take on this talk.

Getting into the groove next were Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia from Last.fm, who gave a good run through of last.fm's heady rise, and a lot of good stuff on the analytics they are using - we've seen this sort of stuff used by Yahoogle and the really sharp customer analytics companies, so its interesting to see it rolling out to social net users. The real takeaway was the allusion to a Pandora gambit though...they will be giving Last.fm fewer barriers to entry, making it quicker to get up and running. (It is our view that in a more competitive future, a social net that cannot get its users up and running fast will lose out to ones that can)

TJ Kang of ThinkFree suffered from the standard problem of anyone giving a live demo - the connection died, so it was very hard to work out exactly what it did that was different. Been there
Takeaway here is NEVER do a live demo without a Plan B. Ever.

Next was Werner Vogels, going through Amazon's amazing S3 and EC2 projects......a very, very thoughtful presentation, and I am an S3 / EC2 fan. But, when all is said and done, its basically Web Hosting 2.0 - which has basically all the same rationales as Web Hosting 1.0* - I think I may have some of the same presentations from 1999 still - except the billing is now by the drink, not the bottle. But that's not the takeaway - what you really need to know is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper now than Web 1.0 was, and probably works better!

Then Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, quite a lot I'd seen before on Flickr - new stuff for me was a run through of "Interestingness" (I have grumbled about it's very broad patent here before), some thoughts about metadata clustering and some notes about use of Pipes. Big takeaway - Yahoo will be applying API's to some of their Web 1.0 social media assets, like Yahoo Groups.

Steve Stokols of BT took a quick canter through latest release BT Contact, and made some observations that chime with our work on Telco 2.0, viz:
- Traditional Telco product lines are being blurred
- P2P technology is not something Telcos can avoid, and must embrace it
- Advertising will be a viable business model in the Telco space
- 1:1 voice is not enough, its many:many

There were two product pitches, SooCial and Quotations book, but both were very new and short, but lots of buzz

Last up, Kevin Rose of Digg - lots of asides on digg, diggers, digging and diggerati. He announced that they would support Open ID "soon", and that they would start to release APIs and fragment the front page into various niches as it is now too wide in its coverage, with techies burying sleb stories and sleb groupies doing vice versa. Takeaway here for me was, like Last.fm, another social network site is getting seriously jiggy with its user generated data, not just its content.

Now, that bit about The Economics...here's what got to me

First the Buzz - there was muted drone through the day about Getting Buzz, a sort of subtext that This Really, Really Mattered. Why worry though? - simply because this is how Bubble 1.0 started - people started to let go of basic economics, and started to believe in a self referential business model.

Second the Analytics - I can best state this as juxtaposing the Ed Aoki's view that with great power comes great responsibility, and exposition during the day about analysis. User Generated Content was clearly NOT what the Future of Web Applications will be about - its going to be about User Generated Data, and there is a risk that it will not necessarily be with any Spidey Sense involved.

And while any Metric System is good, I think breaking user trust will be very, very dangerous for any service that is seen to do so in future.

* Web Hosting is basically an outsourcing model, you focus on your business, we worry about scalable infrastructure.

On the weekend was idly eyeing the library of "classics" from Web 1.0 - "100 Best Internet Stocks to own" of 2000 is especially entertaining.....and while thinking back on last weeks' talk on Wobble 2.0 and flipping through a few of the books, something clicked.

Look at:

- Skype - $ 2.x billion + for (at the time) about $60m revenues tops and (allegedly) an uncomfortable rate
- YouTube - $1.6 billion for not a lot of revenue, a big burn and a posse of aggrieved content owners on its trail.

So, it seemed that, as part of the Conversation, it was time from a Daily Reading from the Old Testimony, a Word of Blog if you like

So, Lesson One, from the Book of Netscape:

"At the close of day 1, Netscape's stock stood at $58 1/4, a value of $2.2bn. Not bad for a company effectively selling a free product that Microsoft was known to be building a competitor to, and hoping to monetise itself with a still unproven business model......

Now ask yourself - who made money here?

Here endeth the first lesson, over the next days we plan to grab more quotes from the Tomes of Old for your delight.

During my lunchtime blog-crawl. hit this on Vecosys leading to this on Stowe Boyd re Conversation indices:

And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs -- ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start -- shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks - posts/(comments+trackbacks) - was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation -- as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers -- than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index, just to put a handle on it.

Absolutely agree re Conversation, we of course as a newish blog are a lowly CI = 149/123 = (shuffle) - excluding the 500 or so spam ones we have deleted - but it is rising, most of the comments are in more recent posts (aka when people found us....marketing budget to date has been measured in cups of tea)

Our feeble excuse is it would be higher but for some reason our captcha system has not been perfect - and we didn't even know 'cos no-one could tell us

However, not all bloggers agree on the CI - I have had a good discussion on this with UK Uberblogger Hugh MacLeod and feisty alien* blogger Jackie Danicki on said subject, and even upped our own CI here on it...

(An aside - as y'all know I am underwhelmed with Snapstuff, but Jackie puts it even better on a later post:

Don’t take control of my blog and tell me that the onus is on me to put it back to the state I had it in before you started f*cking around with it without my permission or knowledge.

...told you re feisty)

No, a blog is part of a conversation, and you can't have a two way conversation via linking only, thats broadcasting - besides, we had Web 1.0 sites that did that linking stuff in the 1990's - its so last century !! (btw feel free to link, Technorati loves it....)

This raises some issues as a number of "A List" blogs do not allow comments...are they really blogs, or just Web 1.0 sites masquerading as blogs to get extra buzz from a smaller pond - "blogcasters"?

In the interests of conversation index rampup, what do you, revered reader, think?

Oh...and we turned on the karma system this weekend as another way of conversing...well, what can one say except the first hits were by people who stormed through hitting -2 on every post....there is something to be said for raising the entry level on Conversations. The most hated post is the one on Wii Mii's 4 posts below, the most loved on Opening the Mobile Web 2.0.)

* In the US, all foreigners are called aliens, on or offworld .

Joost is now Mac-able - the email I got on Friday notes that:

Today we have good news, and we have great news. In addition to the 0.8 release
which includes new CoreAVC Video decoder, which significantly improves the
quality of the video, we also have an Intel Mac beta version.

We don't use Mac's - they are just fashion accessories after all , but be interested in any comparison studies

Skype announced a 10 person Audioconferencing on the 8 Feb - great idea for diverse SME's (like us)...

Today, we announced that Skype supports 10-way conference calling on PC-s with new Intel processors. Specifically, this means Intel Centrino® Duo mobile technology-based laptop PCs, and desktop PCs based on Intel® Pentium® D processors, Pentium Extreme Edition processors and the recently introduced Intel Viiv™ technology. And 10-way conference calling means you can have up to 10 people in the call, instead of up to 5 as was the case up to now.

.......but I can't make it work yet - anyone else got it to work? Also a bit grumpy about Intel only....I think there are a lot of AMD chips out there.

On the subject of disruptive internet Media, some have said there will be blood everywhere - but not literally. Maybe they were wrong, this is Jazz with Violin(ce)....

Playing wth Yahoo Pipes to see what it was all about, built a simple Meme-o-graph - and here was the result:




(Its very simple - just piped the RSS feed from Broadstuff into a Pipe Comparator routine, it hunts down pictures from Flickr, and Bob's your Auntie). This is originally a picture from Susan Blackmore's (memetic guru) site.

This is the Program below.

Last night's meeting of the London Social Media Club* threw up a number of threads, but a recurring one was around how can social media assist "green" projects (global warming and so on and so forth)

But why stop at social media - the question surely is what can the 'Net do about Green issues overall?

Quite a lot, methinks. But it isn't doing much now. Take commuting for example - generates huge amounts of carbon and heat, forces infrastructure to be designed at many times greater than its average load, and wastes a huge amount of time.

Many years ago (about 15 - before email even took hold en masse) I co-wrote an article in Management Today, hypothesizing that as electronic connections got better, people would start to commute electronically rather than physically, given all the time / cost / etc benefits.

Boy, were we wrong !

Car and plane journeys have rocketed in that time, despite email, IM, VoIP, Webcams, mobile and broadband and all the rest enabling a level of comms we could barely conceptualise even in 1990. Yes, there is more homeworking now, but it seems to have had very little impact on the commuting classes.

Why is this?

Is it that people just love to commute - I don't think so. Is it that companies are still insisting on "face time"? Or is it that most of the recent broadband Net Benefits - aka "Web 2.0" - are totally consumer focused and haven't allowed real benefits to be gained by those chained to a desktop.

Also, it seems the social web hasn't really allowed all those home web workers to congregate socially around their electronic cafe's - you've all no doubt seen the Sad Picture of rows of lonely latte lovers in coffee shops all looking at their PC's and not talking to each other.

Perhaps its just that culture changes far more slowly then technology - or is it that going Bedouin doesn't work, and you actually do need real world company infrastructure. (We've been a virtual company by design for two years now, and we don't think so - but maybe a small knowledge worker business is not the best example)

At this point I have no real answers - but it seems like a good project for the London Social Media Club to work on!

(It would also be good if the social web could act as a rallying point to inform / educate people about Going Green, and help stop all these Green Scams (some windfarm projects really take the biscuit) that are more about making profits on a wave of Green Guilt rather than doing much helpful stuff).

We also had a very good discussion about "peer to peer privacy" - two strands to this really, one is about privacy and trust, the other about harnessing peer to peer networks as tools for social media users rather than tools to slurp pirate content. Lots of interesting thoughts, especially about the interplay of the "onion theory" (layers of intimacy) vs the "set theory" (different groupings of intimacy parameters depending on person). Common thread though was for real trust, the data should be owned by you, not The Man.

* tres amusant - The Economist (disclosure - I am a subscriber and think its a wonderful mag ) seems to have put together a blue sky team, and about 6 of them trooped into the meeting and a half an hour later they all left again for their team building dinner - clearly N people x 1/2 hour each is better at hoovering up the memes - and the beers!! - on the table than 1 person staying for an evening . All good stuff anyway, we've worked on a few of these sort of projects with companies in the past, be interesting to see what this team comes up with.......

Once upon a time it was simple...you got onto a websystem, set up you profile or avatar or whatever, and there it stays until you come back. No more..the Wii system's Mii's (aka avatars) can roam around the network and appear in other people's games

"To put it simply, Mii Parade is a system that uses the network to allow Mii characters created by many people to mix and mingle," said Mr. Nogami. "You can line up Mii characters in the 'Mii Plaza', but at the start the only Mii characters you will find are those you have created yourself. Over time, however, using the WiiConnect24 system, other users' Mii characters can come and visit. In the same way, your Mii can make an appearance on someone else's Wii, although this won't happen unless the user has authorized it. The user can choose whether or not to allow their Mii to come and go on the network, so the only Mii characters that will appear on someone else's Wii are those where the user has permitted it."

It's possible for Mii Channel characters to interact with other characters from around the globe. "Your Mii can pop up anywhere," said Nogami, adding, "I should point out, though, that your Mii will never go missing from your own Wii."

Maybe now that Second Life is going open source, I'll find my Avatar has gone off to World of Warcraft for its holidays?

At the moment you can't spectate through their eyes, but no doubt that will come too. Coupled with Google's PC snooping on the sound coming out of your TV 24 x 7, it won 't be big brother watching you, it'll be anyone's brother or sister watching you.

(I saw Lynette Webb's post on FutureLabs and then went to the original source)

Ian Delaney has tagged Broadstuff with a "meme" about “Naming five reasons why you do (or do not) respond to memes”

Yes, of course - it means someone else recognises ME!

And anyway, anyone who says they do not respond to memes is fooling themselves!

To explain this point, it might be worth going back to what a meme is - Richard Dawkins (he of the Selfish Gene) postulated that ideas colonised mindspace in a Darwinian way - and thus mental genes - memes - were discovered...to quote Wikipedia:

The term "meme"..... refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.

Proponents of memes suggest that memes evolve via natural selection — in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution — on the premise that variation, mutation, competition, and "inheritance" influence their replicative success. For example, while one idea may become extinct, other ideas will survive, spread and mutate — for better or for worse — through modification.

The study of memes is called Memetics, and in the 80's and 90's the Memetics meme itself was quite popular, though it seems to be less so today. Its a pity, as the study of memes is closely connected to Social Networks, and things like "Tipping Points" are just expressions of meme reproductive success, a phenomenon well covered in the body of maths that has formed around Memetics*.

As in nature, there are different types of memes with different reproductive strategies - pop culture memes are like weeds, they grow, flower and die rapidly. Great Idea memes are like trees, taking a long time to take root and grow but being extremely sturdy once mature. Some memes are parasitic, attaching and detaching themselves to greater memes.

These blogosphere memes - sort of a tagmeme - are in a way a Meme's Progress made visible (a memeotype?) and do illustrate how a meme migrates (find 5 people in your social network), mutates (we all put a different spin on it) and (eventually) dies when either everyone has been infected, or (more likely) it reaches the limits of the population willing to pass it on.

Anyway, back to this tagmeme - “Name five reasons why you do (or do not) respond to memes”. It is impossible not to respond to memes because, according to memetic theory:

1. You come pre-loaded with memes - your culture is putting memes in your head as soon as you are sentient.

2. The media is the meme - like viruses, memes are in the ether - what memes do is colonise the mindspace, much as species colonise the meatspace. Your mind (not mine, its pre coffee this am is already chock-full of memes all struggling to gain evolutionary advantage in your head, and to replicate themselves in other minds, while many more are trying to get in to your head via the radio, tv, spoken word, sight etc etc.

3. Awareness is not enough - Memes have evolved over the millenia and are very sophisticated at slipping into your mind past your defences, and the memes in your mind have evolved ways of not being dislodged - so you are responding, like it or not as incumbent memes battle with new entrant emems. A lot of time and effort has gone into understanding religious memeplexes as these have been able to control a large number of minds for a very long time. (To me the most interesting religious memeplexes are the ones that want total abstinence of all members, because by definition the memeplex's meatplex must die out after one (or at most a few) generations - e.g New England's Shakers)

4. We are social creatures, linked in our social networks, so unless we cut ourselves off totally, there is a continuous supply of memes flitting (twittering?) up and down the strands of our social nets. Blogs are just another type of social network, with the interesting charactristic of being recordable - digg, wtf on technorati et al are just meme-ometers, recording the rise and fall of the blog memes.

5. Not responding to memes (especially the basic memes like personal hygiene) is bad for your own genetic success (aka getting enough....) and espousing the "wrong" memes can easily make you socially unpopular, or worse (most people in history have been killed because of the memes in their - or at least their leaders - heads) . Pop culture memes are just that - popular.

And, having also been infected with both the meme about the curses of the ancients visiting if one doesn't pass it on, and by Ian's meme about passing it on to blogs that we have only recently started reading, we shall pass it on to similar:

Global Voices - monitor blogs globally, translating many into English - a fascinating memesource - it has multiple authors, I met two at a recent social Media Club event, hopefully one will pick this up and list their thoughts about the multicultural memes they monitor

Adriana Lukas - a fairly recent blog discovery, though I met her (once) awhile ago - thoughtful stuff,.lets see what she does with memetics

Deirdre Molloy - has just started her own blog, and has a talent for spotting emerging memes in the 'netspace

Meg Pickard - AOL Social Network fundi - ( I did read her blog once ages ago, but only came back to it recently). Get meme-ing, Meg

Lynette Webb - writes for the FutureLab blog - used to work with Lynette aeons ago, only recently found her blog-side.

*(Disclosure - we are involved in the BBC Innovations project where we will be using some of these Memetic Algorithms)

For the romantically inclined:

On this Most Romantic of days, it may interest most Social Meedja types to know that even today, in our interlinked, big bandwidth, twittering blogworld, most of the "Conversation" is still about getting it on, online. When I was part of the ISP/ Web Hosting Biz the stats were something like 2/3 of all traffic was spam, 2/3 of that was secks related*, and 2/3 of the "proper traffic" was porn.

Pawn has driven the media explosion since there was media, and long before Edison invented the Pornograph. In fact, even the earliest online "Social Media" sites were not so much aimed at social intercourse, they were far more basic.

Now, is this antisocial media, or just a reflection of the human need to find Lurve?

Well, the origins of Valentine's day give a clue -

pre Christianity, the Romans engaged in an annual young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men; thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged.

Try running that as a Social Network wannabe MySpace today (Web 2.0 name Loopercs or somesuch?) and see what happens.....anyway:

Determined to put an end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a "lovers" saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.

And for the romantically disinclined:

AOL Social Meedja fundi Meg Pickard also runs a line in Not Valentine's Day cards over here. Pick one of your choice for your chosen sweetheart - but be warned, you may have to return to the above sites for your jollies if you do

* in fact, if anything spam has moved more to money, punting penny stocks and loans. I guess now that Viagra is on sale at the local Boots, the need for the hard sell has softened.

Postscript - I forgot about Mobile Lurve, but GigaOm did not....

Picked up from The Kids discussing The Music on The Radio

"Radio stations are so boring, they just play the same stuff over and over again"
"yeah - why don't they just play more stuff - or ask people to send them ideas of songs to play if they can't think of any?"

What about the Ads, I ask?

"Oh, the ads are ok if they any are good"
" But why does the DJ have to talk so much?"
"No - one talks on Pandora*, thats good"
"And it plays lots of different songs...."

Message to Broadcasters - to compete with "Web 2.0 Meedja", like Pandora and Last.fm, is simple - just play more different stuff, stop gabbling and keep the ads funny. And maybe even let them request stuff - by txt even?

* Pandora seems to have resonated more than Last.fm, as it just requires you to list what you like and you are up and running, rather than go through all that social mediation