broadstuff

Two related posts on Techmeme today about how people consume all that wonderful online media - one from Louis Gray, one from A VC (Fred Wilson).

Louis Gray first:

1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed....unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers.

5) Additional activity

Then Fred:

I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

However, Fred notes the same concerns I would, which is that this is not how most people behave online:

But once again, what I do doesn't map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

My view is simpler than all this - We don't actually need all these new aggregators. Between the Old Aggregators (email and RSS reader) I got everything I required story-wise - the new ones are by and large just adding complexity without really solving my main problem, which is filtering the firehose of stuff coming at me every day into smething manageable. (Clarification - by this I don't mean that they are not fun, diverting, interesting - just that they dont really add value if you already are set up on RSS, email etc, they merely re-arrange where you get the same old same old stuff from). In fact I find it fascinating that services that are just by and large glorified RSS readers are getting funding left, right and centre, whereas something I actually found useful - BlogFriends - could not. Ahead of its time, or just suffering from being UK based I wonder?

After playing with various new services, I have come to the conclusion that having to go down multiple aggregation rat-holes is just a waste of my (limited) time. In fact over the last 4 months or so I find Techmeme and Twitter are turning into the best personal filter/aggregator, simply because on Techmeme I can see the "big issues" and on Twitter I can see what the sort of stuff people I follow are reading, giving some form of "Serendipity infill" (Twitter has changed usage since about December to be far less drivel based in my observation).

Now, I play with all these new things just to see how they work, but my colleagues at Broadsight think that most of it is a total waste of time for "real world use", they're waiting for some form of market leading service to emerge - and these guys are geeks rather than Social Media people, so if they are fairly underwhelmed I can't imagine what the rank and file is like.

In fact, the one thing I really, really want now is a "Reverse Aggregator" - that combines everything occurring in multiple aggregators that is relevant to me, and re-sorts it back into a format and place where I want to see it - comments onto my blog, posts into me email or RSS reader etc.

Sme time ago a certain 24/7 Media wrote about blog and social media valuations somewhat optimistically, with CPM's in the $10-$30 range. We of course were somewhat surprised, continually opining that this was probably overestimated in today's marketplace to one, if not two orders of magnitude - now some more real evidence emerges of real CPM's from Facebook applications:

current Facebook app developers on what they’re making on a CPM/eCPM basis from ad networks serving the Facebook Platform:

tspree15 is making $0.60 CPM with Social Media
cbovis is making $1.50 CPM with VideoEgg, but they can’t cover all his inventory (the rest runs on RockYou)
sweetsteve is making $0.27 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43 earlier this month
ejono is seeing a $0.40 CPM with Cubics
cory is making a $4.78 eCPM with Social Media (???)
mzeitler is making a $0.50 CPM each with AdSense, FB Exchange, Social Media, and RockYou (and by combining 2 units on a page is making $1.00 CPM)
saintseiya is making $0.125 CPM with Lookery ($0.25 with 2 ads above the fold)
markdoub is seeing $0.10 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43
ersingencturk is seeing $0.04 CPM with AdSense

We opined that it was hard to believe Facebook was worth $15bn on a $1 CPM, its even harder on this evidence.

Clay Shirky has written an article essentially arguing that TV - the late 20th century opiate of the masses - is no longer having the deadening impact, and we humans are increasingly turning to social media and using our brains.

The article is a twist on the "Economics of Attention" discussion which has run for several years now in the Web-O-Sphere, pointing out that when we start to interact with New Media we start to use our brain cycles again. (In counterpoint of course, there is an argument in the Sunday Times today by Dr Susan Greenfield that computer games and social media are turning this generation into zombies)

The interesting bit of this article to me though, was the discussion around us not understanding how to re-structure our sociaty in the early days to best use the new social capital on offer, and draws parallels to the Industrial Revolution. In essence he argues the thesis put forward that the societal change of the revolution was lubricated by Gin is akin to our TV Opiate...

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of the boozy bits the way, all the sources I have say that Gin use was declining by the late 1700's when the Revolution was starting off, and the Temperance movement only really kicked in at the latter end of the 19th century. Anyway the discussion re: not having the social institutions to deal with the New Order then being similar to today is valid in my view, thus the argument that we don't know quite what to do yet with everyone weaning themself off TV:

Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first - hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I think this is directionally correct, even if all those hours watching TV are not directly convertible - if you look at history, every time there is a major shift in technology - especially communication technology - there is a subsequent shift in society that plays out over 2 or 3 generations. Shirky notes:

Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I could quibble about whether the Netheads watch an average amount of TV, but the point is made - this is a material world change with a fairly small shift

(Addendum - Even if you take into account the 1:9:90 ratio of creators / interactors/ consumers in Social Media, or point made so well on Slashdot:

I don't think that stopping the practice of watching long hours of re-ran Seinfeld episodes, so that you can spend even more hours writing and following links to various discussions and trivia about Seinfeld episodes and looking for places to download bootlegs of the same is an indication that, finally, all of that brainpower is getting put back to productive use

Its clear that it there is some room for growth - unless everyone gets seduced by the TV back catalogues that is )

And its a fascinating area to think about, and an interesting question is other what models of the past shall we use to do so? For what its worth, the one book I found fascinating was The Victorian Internet (about the impact of the Telegraph on society).

(Written while listening to a concert on TV )

Is Hugh MacLeod an early play on bypassing yet another piece of Olde Media, the Art Market? He is moving from drawing cartoons on a business card to large pictures on canvas.

The Art market. like (nearly?) all creative markets, follows very strong power laws such as Zipf's Law. Another way of describing this is that a very small number of people at the top take a totally disproportioante amount of the loot in the game.

But who gets to define who those people at the top are?

The Art world is not a mass market, so the definition of what is "Great Art" tends to be controlled by a small coterie (For example in the UK, a large ticket buyer- Charles Saatchi - pretty much defined who would be in the 90's Brit Art group by his large purchases.)

So what is Hugh doing differently?

Well, in essence he has already established a brand before moving into the Art arena, so - in theory - he can reach an audience without the current market establishment giving him its approbation.

This should come as no surprise to media watches or members of the print, music or video media, and in fact we wrote about the coming shock to the Art market c 18 months ago over here in The Art of Web 2.0 Part 1 - but methinks the Art world, which is somewhat self referential, may not yet be aware of what is coming.

(Not saying that Hugh per se will succeed - though I wish him luck - but this is a clear sign of a trend)

Is Hugh MacLeod an early play on bypassing yet another piece of Olde Media, the Art Market? He is moving from drawing cartoons on a business card to large pictures on canvas.

The Art market. like (nearly?) all creative markets, follows very strong power laws such as Zipf's Law. Another way of describing this is that a very small number of people at the top take a totally disproportioante amount of the loot in the game.

But who gets to define who those people at the top are?

The Art world is not a mass market, so the definition of what is "Great Art" tends to be controlled by a small coterie (For example in the UK, a large ticket buyer- Charles Saatchi - pretty much defined who would be in the 90's Brit Art group by his large purchases.)

So what is Hugh doing differently?

Well, in essence he has already established a brand before moving into the Art arena, so - in theory - he can reach an audience without the current market establishment giving him its approbation.

This should come as no surprise to media watches or members of the print, music or video media, and in fact we wrote about the coming shock to the Art market c 18 months ago over here in The Art of Web 2.0 Part 1 - but methinks the Art world, which is somewhat self referential, may not yet be aware of what is coming.

(Not saying that Hugh per se will succeed - though I wish him luck - but this is a clear sign of a trend)

If its Friday, its time for a Louis Gray post . Like Louis, I love doing little bits of analysis of social network dynamics.

This latest is an interesting one, on the ratio of posts to followers by various people Louis follows over 3 months (Actually, looking at who he follows is interesting in itself).

He believes that its a way of thinking about signal-to-noise ratios:

One of the informal guidelines I've used since opening my Twitter account a little over three months ago was to maintain an updates/followers ratio of less than one. I feel if I "tweet" too often, those following will opt out or gain in annoyance. As of today, my ratio is at 0.49, with 318 updates for 644 followers, putting me on the quiet side in comparison to the others I looked at.

Its a great piece and a start in an emerging area of metrics (as Will McInness et al are also kicking off with MeasurementCamp) , but I'm not sure it measures signal to noise per se as it has no time basis inbuilt, and looks at relatives output rather than the relative input I experience - for example, although some bloggers have a low relative post/follower rate, I experience it as a huge volume compared to someone who posts less often but has far fewer followers. Conversely, there is a very chatty London scene - most people are sub-Dunbar in followings, but the chit-chat through the day is continual, and because everyone knows everyone its more relevant - that "ambient intimacy" that Leisa Reichelt (another Londoner) talks about.

I also feel there are two other aspects to the ratio (hah - geek pun ) of Twitter S/N, which are:

- the level of "interesting content" vs "drivel" from any one person. Just how one measures this I'm not clear though, but I have turned off quite a few A listers because they don't say very much of interest.

- The level of interaction they are prepared to have with me (the "Broadcasting Index"). I won't name names but some of the people on that list of Louis' are much more interactive than others, I tend to eventually drop the ones who won't converse.

Fake Steve Jobs is an inspiration to any Corporate Drone who wants to avoid a life of quiet desperation:

He explained that as he saw traditional media organizations getting their lunch eaten by bloggers, he wanted somehow to join the new generation of media players.

So he said that he asked Forbes.com, the Web venue of his employer, Forbes magazine, if he could start a blog. They said no, he reported.

Instead, he began his own blog, and began--with impersonating Steve Jobs as if he was really saying what he felt instead of being little more than a PR voice like many corporate bloggers--being Fake Steve Jobs.

And did so well his own company wanted to hire him before they found out he already worked for them - he should have kept shtum and taken the 2 salaries

Best thing I've seen come out of the Web 2.0 Expo so far.

TechCrunch on the gradual failure of Old Search:

As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns

TechCrunch also quotes Nova Spivack, Radar Networks CEO who believes semantic search is the answer.....:

Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.

...and then asks:

So how do we get beyond keyword search and Google’s PageRank? There are many approaches being tried: social search, tagging, guided search, natural-language search, statistical methods, open search, semantic search, and (way out there) artificial intelligence. They all have their problems.

How Indeed ?

The issue increasingly is not finding - as anyone who is using aggregators like FriendFeed will know, you wind up with a firehose - the issue is filtering to get the needles you want.

We too are building new search systems, we believe we have learned quite a lot since building a specific type of search system to a BBC requirement last year.

This is going to be a fascinating space over the next few years.

From ReadWriteWeb, reporting on the Web 2.0 Expo (aka PlebWeb ) on the sudden popularity of Platforms:

The most interesting replies to the question - "what comes next after APIs become ubiquitous?" can be summarized as follows:

Business models
Filtering for information overload
Standards and interoperability
Outsourcing API services
Backlash

They go on to talk about all these areas, and desire some user feedback in the comments - but this is a meaty area and deserves a blog post on its own. (RWW paragraph is indented quote below, our response is normal format)

Business models

Perhaps inspired by a touch of cynicism, many of the people we talked to said that finding business models was the next frontier for an API enabled web.

Nick Gonzales of ad network Social Media said that the early rush to build apps on the Facebook platform should be considered the exception more than the rule. He says it was remarkably easy to build apps on that platform but that hasn't helped developers make money outside of Facebook

One of the issues being that to re-engineer something built on Facebook API's for general web usage is non-trivial. But the overall business model point is well made, especially in the light of Google essentially offsetting costs for SoHo companies on its newly announced platform (using Ad sales to pay for it) which creates major barriers to entry for new players. In essence does this mean that a low-end platform is only really affordable by people who have some form of offset going, via VC funding or other revenue buckets?


Filtering for information overload

It's one thing to smash together different streams of data, but making sure the results are user friendly is another matter. Many people we talked to said they wanted APIs and platforms to increase their capacity for determining relevance.

We think this really is one of the key areas - the "River of Data" so beloved of Web 2.0 pundits is usually a Sewer of Crap in practice, and sifting out the signal from the noises off - the repeats, me-toos, irrelevancies etc - is in our view one of the major requirement on the Information Superhighway now.


Standards and Interoperability

The most obvious answer to this question as far as we're concerned is that the next step is to make ubiquitous APIs standards-based and able to work together.....

.....Florida venture capitalist Dan Rua puts it this way: "after ubiquitous APIs comes category subsystems/adapters, allowing for write once, run with any similar service type abstraction."

Sadly the optimal game theory for any major player is to "defect" and try to establish its approach as the De facto standard - but of course if they all do that, the game is a stalemate and everyone loses. There also seems to be a similar gig with "Voluntary bodies", in that there seems to be more than one competing standards body (or at least overlapping ones) in quite a few standards spaces as well.


Outsourcing API services

We hear whispers about a number of beyond-stealth startups, too, that are aimed at solving the scalability problems faced by some of the most popular APIs on the web. That's not at all a dry matter - commoditization of solutions to the biggest technical bottlenecks in making APIs work would open up a whole new world of possibilities.

Now this is an interesting area, and brings up the impact of the Interspersed Web - where applications are split into much smaller applets, widgets and whatever - and the network becomes the platform, binding them together with a layer of Transcation Messaging. We have done quite a bit of client work on this area recently, and look forward to seeing some interesting new approaches emerge from the shadows.

And to say this is fertile soil for m2m is putting it mildly......


Backlash

We heard this from some people we really didn't expect it from. David Janes, creator of a sophisticated lifestreaming app for groups called Onaswarm summarized his feelings thusly: "How about a return to using well-known protocols (as opposed to APIs) for doing well-understood tasks, i.e. publishing and posting data. E.g. RSS/MetaweblogAPI or Atom/APP...It's insane...I've had more than my fill of working with these APIs." When I pinged him to confirm those lines - he said that it would more accurately explain how he felt about the APIs he's been working with if there were some obscenities sprinkled into his quote. That from a man who has put his hand into the dragon's mouth. If you will.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Len Kirby, engineering director at Flock. Flock is a social browser that brings together a large number of social data streams and functionality from all around the web. None the less, Kirby is no fanboy of the latest wave of APIs and platforms.

He told us that he thinks the next step in fact may be going back to predictability based on finished standards; as opposed to the half-baked protocols of industry luminaries that didn't finish developing proposed standards. Tempering his vitriol just a touch, this manager at a company built on Mozilla technology also shared some sympathy. "Just like any visionaries there's only so much time to make things real and [for example, coming out of] Mozila and RDF there's been a lot of very good things - but time to market rules." Kirby made sure to affirm as well that Flock really does love Mozilla.

This just goes back to the point we made above re standards - too many sub-standard approaches to creating standards are messing things up for standardising standards.


Problem - what Problem?

That said, you won't likely hear any of those voices blogging here at ReadWriteWeb! We think that today's crush of APIs and platforms is just the beginning, that we're at a turning point of innovation. We love it and intend to chronicle the next steps as best we can.

So which quadrant does this put RWW in, in the Broadsight BlogTone 2x2

This is brilliant!



Tip of wing to Media Influencer for pointer to it. Wait for the Q&A.....