broadstuff

From The Register...couldn't resist it;

"I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

Who needs a Ferrari anyways

This thought struck me after replying to a post on Danah Boyd's website re Walled Gardens. She wrote a longer piece, but the crux I was responding to was this:

I mean, if you're producing content into a context, do you really want to transfer it wholesale? I certainly don't want my MySpace profile displayed on LinkedIn (even if there are no nude photos there).

For all of this rambling, perhaps i should just summarize into three points:


- If walls have value in meatspace, why are they inherently bad in mediated environments? I would argue that walls provide context and allow us to have some control over the distribution of our expressions. Walls should be appreciated, even if they are near impossible to construct.
- If robots can run around grabbing the content of supposed walled gardens, are they really walled? It seems to me that the tizzy around walled gardens fails to recognize that those most interested in caching the data (::cough:: Google) can do precisely that. And those most interested does not seem to include the content producers.
- If the walls come crashing down, what are we actually losing? Walls provide context, context is critical for individuals to properly express themselves in a socially appropriate way. I fear that our loss of walls is resulting in a very confused public space with far more visibility than anyone can actually handle.

Basically, i don't think that walled gardens are all that bad. I think that they actually provide a certain level of protection for those toiling in the mud. The problem is that i think that we've torn down the walls of the supposed walled gardens and replaced them with chain links or glass. Maybe even one-way glass. And i'm not sure that this is such a good thing. ::sigh::

So, what am i missing? What don't i understand about walled gardens?

My reply is there, but reproduced here for the click lazy...

There are walls and walls......the Olde AOL and Mobile Co's today try to create impregnable web walls, where none shall pass without paying significant tolls - the "Berlin Wall" model.

MySpace et al have different sort of walls...egress and entrance is fairly easy, but the core profile stays in situ. Thats the rule of playing there. Upsets some, many don't give a monkeys.

Is there a value to web walls? Sure - privacy and security - and the original concept of Paradise is a walled pleasure garden, the controlled environment within allows more delicate flowers to bloom (read this allegorically....).

And I think the case for walls is getting stronger - I have blogged before that I think 2007 is the year that Privacy and Trust (sides of a coin) will become major issues in Social Media, mainly because they are being ridden over roughshod right now by every vested and invested interest you can think of.

If we go back to "meatspace", in the many Dark Ages when barbarians were at the gates people didn't wait for the legions, they threw up walls around the towns pdq.

Except for Sparta of course - they gave every male that become a citizen a spear and shield and told him he was part of the Bronze Wall until he died.

I suspect, with all the abuse of privacy and trust now happening in online social media, the idea of walled gardens will start to become much more attractive over the next few years.

Or, should we be like Sparta and require every netizen to carry their own armour and be part of the web's bronze walls?

As always, after you hit "Go", the real aha hits you, and this is it - the purpose of web walls is changing now.

The new walls will not be built to keep you in...but increasingly to keep uninvited others out.

And they will be user generated walls - the rise of the Digital Lifestyle Disaggregator is nigh

Postscript...just saw this article this pm, about social media sites opening up for 3rd party developers - those walls are getting thinner all the time

Is this the highest value blog I have written? UK cybergal Deirdre Molloy (She Who Knows Everyone) has put pen to blog in a superhuman effort recently, and a huge backlog (backblog?) of her notes on many talks, interviews and events is now on her recently renamed blog, Innovation Eye.

Deirdre is usually organising events, but her commentary is very incisive, she clearly groks* this stuff.

A lot of the development in this space is very recent and fast moving, so the only place you will find it written in digestible form is in considered precis pieces like these vignettes.

Take a coffee break there - hell, take a day off there - lots to read!

* Hey...I've actually read the book you know...

An article in the New York Times yesterday essentially arguing that that "geography trumps personality" when it comes to technological development, Silicon Valley etc etc. Jared Diamond meets Michael Porter....to quote:

Google’s astonishing rise and Apple’s reinvention are reminders that, when it comes to great ideas, location is crucial. “Face-to-face is still very important for exchange of ideas, and nowhere is this exchange more valuable than in Silicon Valley,” says Paul M. Romer, a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford who is known for studying the economics of ideas.

In short, “geography matters,” Professor Romer said. Give birth to an information-technology idea in Silicon Valley and the chances of success seem vastly higher than when it is done in another ZIP code.

So, for Innovation, is Geography Destiny? Is it time for all us non-SV players to roll over dead?...Au contraire, I think the latest tech incarnation - the broadband 'Net - is a bigger threat to SV than any before, because it takes away some of the geographic advantages the SV crowd have.

Is this article in fact a setpiece for a bit of pride goeth before the fall hubris?. There are some good comments on the subject over at GigaOm on the subject, a fairly contrarian view by Ross Mayfield here

The issue - in my opinion - is not innovation - in my experience techies around the world think of the same things at roughly the same time - sure, SV has 2 great universities but there are other places with that. In the past it, has been the ability in SV (and the US overall) to get a well funded company into a large market faster than anyone else that has really made the difference.

The US had a number of advantages in technology development, mainly:

- a large homogenous market to roll the products out into, making many business cases fly
- US technical talent was often spinning out of existing market leading companies so had a better "story"
- better access to Ad-venture capital (as opposed to the EU's venture capital which tends to lend to things at a later stage)
- better access to buzz (the Tech Print Media are very US - and especially SV - centric)

I would also argue that some company and financial rules (eg capitalising R&D), an occasionally interesting interpretation of the word "Free" in "Free Trade", and sheer cultural dominance all played a part in the past, but I think the broadband 'Net is starting to impact these advantages now as penetration rises elsewhere - connectivity means customers, publicity and talent somewhere else have a more equal shot because:

- The homogenous market is now the global customer base for a particular service
- The US story is still good, but there is just so much more talent out there not sipping lattes in SV
- Everyone has access to buzz now - TIOTI, Joost and Babelgum for example are all non US WebTV plays picked up in TechCrunch

Ad-venture (ie Risk) Capital access is imho still the one main area where SV still has a major advantage, but there is so much liquidity around today that even this will (must?) be eroded. There are a lot of smart people not in SV, at some point that must count. And even "dumb money" in Quantity has a Quality all of its own.....mind you, its not always a bed of roses in the US either

But all things do eventually erode.....the NY Times quotes Sir Peter Hall:

“What makes a particular city, at a particular time, suddenly become immensely creative, exceptionally innovative? Why should this spirit flower for a few years, generally a decade or two at most, and then disappear as suddenly as it came?”


He is not the first to ask this...Byzantine Constantinople, the Italian Renaissance, the dark satanic mills of Industrial England - they have come and gone - how do they start, and what makes Things Fall Apart?

The how they start bit is quite hard to answer, but the "why do they fade bit (to me) seems quite straightforward in most cases - increasing competition, or at least a reduction in competitive advantage (or in Constantinople's case, a reduction of its great walls by the new tech invention of cannon).

As for SV....is the bloom fading? Not yet - but the competition is definitely increasing. Fading is a fairly slow process, the rot sets in long before the final ending, but some pointers:

- It is a far less pleasant place to live than even 10 years ago (or so some longer time SV denizens tell me*),
- Every tech country is trying to replicate or counter the model in some way.
- Labour costs are high compared to other capable areas - at some point all the mashups, barcamps and so on cannot help

So...where are the hot new new centres...answers on a postcard please, I want to know first

Postscripts - a point about the weakening of the benefit of centralism is here, and a note that SV is systemic even while the technologies change is here , and someone thought of the same heading here

* Or maybe after you've been there awhile it palls somewhat, or its a lifestage thing maybe, or there is always a past golden age?

Postscript - a good discussion is occurring on this subject now over at Vecosys

The twists and turns in the Web TV business are becoming soap operatic......

Some time ago, when the GooTube deal was done, we noted that all the music studios except EMI had got in on Google's acquisition, but the TV and Film studios hadn't. We wrote at the time that:

NBC and CBS, who had negotiated earlier, did not get stakes. Shows the advantages of being early movers I guess.

EMI has still to reach a settlement with YouTube, as do most of the TV studios. I'll bet they are delighted with this news.....I wonder if there are seats ready with their names on?

Well, its been interesting to see how said TV studios have been ensuring they get their seats at the Round Table.

- CBS did a deal with GooTube before seats were handed out, but has now apparently pulled away from long term deals that were expected to be announced at CES

- Now NBC has put their weight behind Viacom's takedown notices, demanding removal of their content.

On a similar vein, an article in the Economist this week notes that Joost is being radical by not following any Web 2.0 models, and is instead serving lean back TV with Ads (though less per hour outside of the US - we are apparently less tolerant of Ads than Americans)

The crux of the article (after the page long paean to Joost and hardly a mention of any competitors like Babelgum etc - darn their PR is good) is that WebTV is splitting service delivery from network ownership (and we would argue it is also splitting aggregation from network ownership).

What this implies, is that WebTV will grow far faster than IPTV over the next few years, according to the article, quoting research from iSuppli (I have seen similar from elsewhere, and the gist - rather than exact numbers - concurs with our estimates)

While talking about the Economist, there is also a useful article about Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Music" - or more accurately, thoughts on DRM.

More food for thought for those yet-to-market IPTV plays............

....although there is an on again off again story that Google thinks the Web will not be able to handle all this TV n

A bit of news on just some of what's kept us busy these last few weeks.

We’re delighted to be working with STL and the GSMA on two linked events covering the Telco’s role in Entertainment & Advertising.

The work combines our work in Interactive, Online Advertising and Media, and STL's research program for the GSMA, a short blog on this is over at STL's site here

There will be a European-focused workshop in London on 29th March (part of the Telco 2.0 Industry Brainstorm) and a N.American-focused event in New York City (The Mobile Entertainment & Advertising Summit) on 30th March.

Agenda for London here, and for NYC can be found on teh STL site linked above.

Interesting news about 3D game producer Three Rings (who run the popular Puzzle Pirates Game) possibly setting up to compete with Second Life. It will be interesting to see how Second Life responds - I blogged awhile ago that in my view Second Life is probably too complicated for mass market usage, and for the commercial purposes Web 3.D will probably be used for.

At the time I couldn't see where the competition would come from, but nature clear abhors a vacuum, even a virtual one. This Virtual Universe is just playing out an old game, that of real competition. Management guru Michael Porter's 5 Force model notes that:

Four forces -- bargaining power of customers, the bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of new entrants, and the threat of substitute products -- combine with other variables to influence a fifth force, the level of competition in an industry.

What is interesting in Virtual Worlds - and quite a lot of User Generated Content plays - is that the customer and supplier are one, and to an extent they control the build of the substitute product. Interesting.

This is the hot thing in the kiddosphere right now....



...the only reason I put it here is because of the deep parallels with life, the universe and meditations about Californian Cults of Web 2.0 (see previous posts)

And its funny. In an ironic way of course.

(Was also having a go at the embedded media capability of Serendipity)

Afterthought...needs a soundtrack - William Tell Overture?

Last night I went to the Chinwag event discussing whether Web 2.0 was a bubble or not. Chairing the event was Mike Butcher (who gave us a quick resume of Bubble 1.0 - though he missed out Jellyworks, my all time favourite 1.0 scam). A brief and irreverent review of the panel follows:

Firstly, Zopa system's Dave Nicholson didn't talk about Bubble 2.0 really, he talked about Zopa - in essence the message from Zopa was neither a borrower nor a lender be, being the middleman is much more profitable as you take 0.5% from both sides of the transaction (recurring in the case of the borrower). Apparently the Banks can't compete because they have ludicrous rules about things like, oh, staying solvent and other people can't compete easily because Zopa has built a "community" around their proposition (although expansion into the US is still to happen....line one on the SWOT analysis there I think).

As an aside, I wonder when the financial regulators will start to look at these various emerging "non-banks" as otherwise whats the point of having regulations, regulators etc etc - probably after the first one fails and the founders abscond to Gibraltar with little old ladies' savings if past history is anything to go by.....

Next up to not talk about Bubble 2.0 was Skinkers' (I thought it was a chocolate bar initially....) Matteo Berlucchi. In essence they build peer-to-peer backend software for desktops that focusses on speed, not volume. This is valued by media companies and people who need to see news as it occurs. To be fair to Matteo, he did eventually note that Bubble 2.0 was still M&A event driven and seemed more like the mid 1990's, ie a few companies being bought at completely ludicrous prices but most selling far more reasonably.

However, if the last two talks were anything to go by - ie fervent pitches about their companies despite the context of the event - it felt just like the heady days of Bubble 1.0

Ryan Carson of Carson Systems (et al) actually talked about Bubble 2.0 from the start. His view is that there was no bubble right now, mainly because its an M&A market rather than an IPO market (give it time, Ryan, give it time...). Ryan noted that the cost of building Web 2.0 apps is much lower than Web 1.0, it can be done under private ownership, so you need not be not beholden to investors, financiers, money lenders etc. He then nearly diverted into a product his company was building, but reverted back on track by pointing out that their Web 2.0 product build was still a sideline - in essence, "don't give up your day job" (which in Carson System's case is talking about Web 2.0 - still far more lucrative clearly .

Finally, Andrew Orlowski of that gloriously irreverent Web 1.0 journal, The Register. His view of Web 2.0 was that it promised an alternative utopia where World 1.0's problems could be happily solved, and it was more akin to a Californian New Age Cult - makes enough sense to get past your analytical faculties, is all embracing and unspecific enough for loads of people's dreams, fantasies and so on to be projected into it (and fantasies projected out of it, judging by YouTube et al), and is actually just a buzzword generator for the next wave of Californian Cult Maharish...sorry, Management Consultant Gurus

(Thought...is Om Malik the Om in Ommmmmmmmmm)

Was it a bubble - not financial, but definitely rhetorical (or as us Web 2.0 consultants might say, memetic...) in a way not seen since the heady days of AI. Essentially Web 2.0 does not solve any major problems - its basically presentation layer people trying to solve infrastructure layer problems. Spam will kill Web 2.0 as it cannot (or will not) solve it.

(On that matter I saw that some guy on Carson System's Ad conference flyer is saying advertising over RSS is the Next Big Thing - now here's a hint - first Ad I see on RSS, your feed is dead. )

Andrew's own view was that the major waves coming were (i) more deep in the infrastructure - RFID + near field economics, and (ii) sorting out the whole Compensation for Creation of IP (usually Media) arena - amen to that!. He noted that France very nearly voted for flat fee licence for media last year

Then it was Question Time...I can recall a few real nuggets.

- Mobile Web 2.0 - its an Oxymoron, the morons have to open up the mobile system before it happens and then the value floods out of their ecosystems. Carriers know this, and want to make future money from transactions, not transport, so won't open up until that is sorted. No bubble here.

- Internet Penetration - nearly stagnant in OECD for 5 years, its just the bandwidth that is going up. Large parts of the population have no 'Net access.

- Microsoft - spend $4bn on R&D annually, very little to show. Have started to licence out some of their technology to companies for a stake (Disclosure - we have done very similar work for other R&D outfits to help spin out some of their ventures). I think before people take a pop at R&D shops, what they often don't get is the hard yards that have to be put in between proving something conceptually, building a proof of concept, and proving something commercially.

- Brands - don't like Web 2.0 because it allows consumers to see past the b.s. that they have built their empires on (etc etc). Big Advertisers are dipping toes slowly in the waters, the real revolution is from SMEs using search ads because you can actually see what works. And its often the mundane, not the hifalutin' - is this the Death of the Creative Ad Agency?

- Social Media - everyone is now jumping on the bandwagon, but it has to actually add value, not just Ads (we blogged on this here)

- Advertising - there is a finite limit to the amount of money in Advertising, it cannot fund everyone's plans. More interesting is the view that as Webvertising is more efficient, spend on Ads overall will go down as it goes nline.

Of course, half the fun of these events is the networking afterwards, lots of interesting conversations including B2B marketing in Web 2.0, metadata requirements for Web 2.0 video search, and a long, irreverent and wide ranging discussion with Andrew on a host of subjects, ending with the good old "what are the VC's doing now".

Take aways for us..well, why be Consultants if we can be a Californian New Age Cult?. Problem is that London doesn't really have the weather, but still...I shall have to meditate on this further.

Postscript - Found some other posts on the event - Ian Delaney here and Seamus McCauley here

A very good article on GigaOm over here. (or better still here) that also pointed to this Harris Poll. The ones that interested me most were:

The shift to online video is probably overstated - despite roughly the same number of people claiming they do watch TV and YouTube (c 42%), 2/3 say they hardly spend much time watching YouTube at all.

The apparent resistance to pre-roll ads - to quote:

- would visit YouTube a lot less - 31%
- I would visit YouTube a little less - 42%