I've been reading up on Yahoo!'s decision to add RSS feeds to the mix of content they provide on the My Yahoo! portal. The decision for them is all about enhancing their strategy for users to put all their Web content "in one place" - their place. It's the same old Portal strategy that was so popular on the Web in the mid-90's, but which very few companies actually got right. Yahoo! was one of those that did get it right - in fact they were the standard-bearer.
The portal strategy still drives Yahoo!'s business model, even though they were leapfrogged a few years ago by Google's minimalist interface centered around search. But while Google has been reaping all the goodwill (and now money), Yahoo! has stuck to their guns, trying to be the One Place where mainstream Web users go for all their content needs. And Yahoo! has continued to be successful with that strategy - they have a very large user base and incredibly high brand recognition.
So the main reason why Yahoo!'s addition of RSS features is big news? Simply put, it's that Yahoo! is now pushing RSS as a key source of content for them and their many mainstream users.
From a user (and content creator) perspective, Yahoo!'s embrace of RSS is a leap forward in acceptance of RSS as a mainstream source of content. Jeremy Zawodny, a Yahoo! developer, pointed out that RSS feeds on Yahoo! will "Just Work". Put another way, Yahoo! will make RSS "almost completely invisible". It will be easy-peasy lemon-squeezy for users to subscribe to RSS feeds on their My Yahoo! homepages.
To underline the importance of making RSS user-friendly to mainstream people, I'd like to share with you a little story from the trenches. I'm a Web Producer at a medium-sized company and recently I tried to pursuade some of my business colleagues to add an RSS feed to our corporate website, for press releases. This was in response to their initial request for email notifications. Some other people in my IT team also know about RSS, so I decided it was time for me to try and sell the business folks on it. The conversation went along these lines (note: I've edited it so that no personalities except for me can be identified):
Me: [long email stating my case for adding an RSS feed to our corporate website. I include a link to the NY Times RSS webpage, as an example.]
Business User: I tried to click through on the RSS feed buttons on the NY Times link and got a page of web code - should these links work?
Me: Ah, unfortunately you've hit on the reason why RSS feeds aren't yet mainstream. When you click on an RSS feed, you do get a page of XML code. The way to subscribe is to copy the link into what's called an RSS Reader (or News Reader or RSS Aggregator).
[I then proceed to explain about Bloglines and other RSS Aggregators. I get a bit carried away and probably overstate my case.]
Business User: I'd be inclined not to use software that requires a would-be recipient of this service to download additional software. It's too much for normal web users. However, if it becomes simpler, we should definitely move to use it.
Me: [mildly panicing now - have I blown it?] I'd still like to include an RSS feed. Heh, I admit RSS is a passion of mine. Can we still have the RSS link along with a short explanation, but push email notifications as the number 1 option?
Business: As long as there is a simple option. The primary option must have a direct signup with no additional downloads.
Me: Whew! [a small victory for RSS]
Of course the moral here is that the business user is 100% correct - it's not up to me (a technologist) to push my geeky hobbies onto users. It's up to me to provide the "direct signup" that the business requires. For me to sell RSS to the business, I have to provide a solution that will hide the XML code - and the terminology associated with it - from the users. It has to be Easy As Email™ (to coin a trademark).
And that is precisely where Yahoo! comes in (not necessarily for my company's website users, but generally speaking...).
Yahoo!'s core service is to provide a homepage in a browser, where users can sign up to receive content. Simple. And now RSS is Content too, according to Yahoo! Great! It means users don't need to go elsewhere on the Web or know about XML to sign up to these "RSS feeds" (whatever they are).
It bears repeating: what RSS is to Yahoo! users is a new source of CONTENT. Yahoo! hides all the geekery behind the content.
Because a huge number of normal folks already use Yahoo!, there's an equally huge customer base just waiting to join the RSS revolution. Yahoo! users will experience the revolution on their same old My Yahoo! homepage - and does that matter? Not a jot. Content Creators will be pleased, because they'll have a whole new audience. And users will be pleased, because they'll have a whole new range of content to read.
Of course, once even bigger woolly mammoths join the party (e.g. Microsoft) - things will get even more interesting in the RSS space. Hmmm, well what's your take on that? Has Yahoo! gained a jump on Microsoft and even Google when it comes to Content?
Slashdot pointed to a new Tim Berners-Lee interview about the Semantic Web. While on face value it's YASWI by Sir Tim (Yet Another Semantic Web Interview), there are some great quotes in this one. e.g.
When asked if the Semantic Web is just a way to automate things that a human would do, Sir Tim replied:
"This is more like giving you a program which can do all the things which your MIS department could write programs to do but doesnít have time to. But it is still a program. Just as the World Wide Web is still a document."
(emphasis mine)
That's an important point - just as Amazon can be said to be more a virtual agent than a website nowadays, the Semantic Web is a dynamic program not a static document. The generation of the Web we're in now is almost a living one - it's about movement and application of information. If not quite living, certainly information on the Web is much more social than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It's being used by people to connect with each other on a grander scale than even Ted Nelson ever dreamed.
Sir Tim goes on to say:
"Bit by bit, link by link, the data becomes connected, interwoven. The exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way."
Again, it's the usage of information that is key to Sir Tim's vision of the Semantic Web.
The next bit that caught my eye is something that will make Marc Canter fall off his chair with joy. Sir Tim mentioned FOAF as an example of a Semantic Web application:
"If you want to play with the Semantic Web, you can make a friend-of-a-friend file. In a FOAF file [the data component of a personal home page, formatted in a standardized way], you can publish stuff about yourself, your organization, your publication, places, or photographs."
Sir Tim says that FOAF "shows the power of the reuse of information".
And to wrap up, take this quote:
"The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can."
(emphasis mine)
That's something my friends in the Web Design community will appreciate. Nowadays it's not just about designing a beautiful website, it's about designing for re-use of information. In a way, that's what people are already doing with RSS - designing with data.
Douglas Coupland returns to form big-time with
this sensitive and soulful book, Hey
Nostradamus!. Before I get to the review, I'll go over my
background as a long-time Coupland fan - because it's especially relevant to my
thoughts on Hey Nostradamus!. I discovered him during the 90's and he was one of
the quintessential writers of that milieu, mostly due to his first novel
Generation X (1991). That book set the scene for the popular (but clichéd)
slacker culture
that developed in the 90's. My favourite Coupland book is Microserfs (1995).
I felt I had a connection to
the Microserfs characters that wasn't possible with the slackers in Generation
X. Perhaps that's because I'm a nerd, like the Microserfs characters. His
next book,
Girlfriend in a Coma (1997), is another favourite of mine. Microserfs
and Girlfriend in a Coma both have an undercurrent of melancholy, but the
essential likeability of the
characters make the books deeply affecting.
I haven't read all of Coupland's work, but I had a go at both of the novels that preceded Hey Nostradamus! - All Families Are Psychotic (2001) and Miss Wyoming (1999). I have to say that both were very disappointing and I finished neither. I don't think I even got past the first few chapters. I just couldn't connect with those books. The characters were not very likeable and there seemed to be a lack of soul in the worlds presented - although I recognize this was deliberate on Coupland's part. Don't get me wrong - the writing itself is top drawer, as you'd expect. But the characters and settings of those two books were deliberately superficial. Unfortunately that made the books hard to connect with and so I wasn't compelled to finish them.
So we come to 2003's Hey Nostradamus!. Let me say right here and now that this book ranks up with Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, possibly surpassing them. The book is in 4 parts and each part is narrated, in the first person, by a different character. Not only that, but the 4 parts span 15 years, from 1988 to 2003. Coupland successfully gets inside the skin of each of the 4 narrators. Each narrator is very different from the others, but they also have shared experiences on a personal and humanistic sense that helps to bring the book together into a unified whole.
The story starts with a Columbine-like school massacre, where 3 disaffected youths go on a shooting rampage in a school cafeteria. One of the victims is a 17-year old girl named Cheryl, who is the narrator of part 1 (from the after-life!). Cheryl was a sweet-tempered but otherwise ordinary girl who secretly got married to her school sweetheart Jason just weeks before the shooting. In fact, that was the most exciting aspect of her life to date - a life fatefully cut short. Just before she was shot, Cheryl had scribbled into her binder: "GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE". Those words would later immortalise her memory, along with her cherubic yearbook photo. But at the time she wrote them: "...all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still".
The next section is narrated by Jason, Cheryl's high school sweetheart. Jason wasn't present in the cafeteria at the time of the tragedy, however he arrived just as it was nearing its conclusion and he managed to kill one of the gunmen - but too late to save Cheryl. It's 11 years later when he writes his narrative. Incidentally Coupland is at pains to make sure each character physically writes down their narrative - in Jason's case on pink bank note slips. At first I found this to be a rather hokey novelistic device. But on reflection, I believe it did add to the authenticity of each narrative - each character was in a sense purging themself of their story and making it immortal, by writing it down.
But back to Jason's narrative - it's 11 years after Cheryl's tragic murder and Jason has struggled to accept it and get on with his life. He is a bachelor who lives a rather squalid life filled with part-time jobs, booze, and some hazy dealings with seedy gangsters. The most significant part of Jason's narrative is his description of his relationship with his father, a very strict religious man with a seemingly heartless lack of tact. I thought there were some plot twists in Jason's narrative that struggled to keep my disbelief suspended, but it was how those plot devices provided depth of meaning to the characters that held it all together.
The third part is narrated by Heather, who meets Jason and becomes his partner. They share an imaginary world together, filled with make-believe creatures and childlike stories. Heather is a courtroom transcriber and much of her narrative is written while she is at work - instead of transcribing a boring courtroom trial, she writes about her experiences with Jason! I better not ruin the plot, but I will say that Heather ends up being just as sympathetic a character as Jason and for similar reasons.
The fourth and final narrative is from Reg, Jason's father. Reg was portrayed as a narrow-minded and heartless man by Jason and this is well supported by anecdotes of the things Reg did in the name of orthodox religion - for example, immediately after the school shootings in 1988 he didn't support Jason but instead morally condemned him for killing one of the gunmen in the cafeteria. In his narrative, written in 2003, Reg has softened his strict religious stance by this stage and is somewhat contrite for the way he treated people in the past. His section is short, but concludes the book with a note of redemption.
It's hard to adequately convey the depth of feeling present in this book - you have to read it yourself to experience it. All I can say is that the book held me spellbound during the time I read it. For example when I was reading it on the train, I sometimes got a bit misty-eyed and occasionally I paused to stare out of the train window with a soulful expression on my face. I probably looked like a right berk.
This is a superb effort by Douglas Coupland and ranks with his very best work.
My rating: 9/10
I've mentioned that September is Month of Mobility at Read/Write Web, but I haven't posted about it as much as I wanted to. Why? It's because the mobile world is mostly new to me, which means I've had to batch process a whole bunch of information about it over the past few weeks.
Frankly I've been so absorbed in the PC Web over the years, that I haven't taken much notice of the Mobile Web. But it's sneaking up on everyone! The point when the Mobile Web came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and cleared its throat, was just after I got a new WAP-enabled phone. That was at the end of August and I've been playing with my new phone since then. At the same time I started to explore the world of the Mobile Internet. Also during this time I've been writing content for my eBook Culture blog - and it won't surprise you that in my last 3 posts over there, I've been exploring the connections between eBooks and the Web. There is some crossover - for me anyway - in the worlds of Web, mobile phones, PDA's, and eBooks.
So, I haven't yet got to the synthesis stage of my information processing on the Mobile Internet - let alone the analysis. But I thought it'd be useful to do a brain dump now.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee did an interview with internetnews.com last week. While most of it covered the usual ground (Semantic Web, Web Services), at the end he spoke about what he calls the "Mobile Web". He was asked what emerging technology excited him and he replied:
"...one area to watch is the mobile Web. I'm seeing a lot of initiatives and energy in this space. The same energy you see here at this [SpeechTek] conference with the voice sector, you'll see that energy replicated in the mobile space. This will be a big area. Over the next six months, you should watch this space for some exciting things."
My ears really pricked up when he said that "a strong mobile Web is about device independence". This is a theme that the eBook industry is struggling with right now. I won't bore you with the details, but basically eBooks come in many many formats - and most of them only work on specific devices and/or are crippled with DRM "functionality". If there was a scale measuring device independence, then eBooks would be near the bottom of that scale.
What Sir Tim wants is a Web that can be extended into the mobile space, not one that breaks off into it's own unique version of the Web. The Mobile Web must be interoperable with the PC Web as we know it today (HTML pages principally), which in practical terms means it has to use the same standards and formats. Sir Tim wants a "unified Web", one that enables users to "browse the Web from any phone and from any device without limitations."
I'll follow up with a post later about the W3C efforts to obtain device independence.
When you're talking mobile phones and the Internet, one blogger stands out from the crowd - Russell Beattie, who wrote recently:
"It's not just about the ability of the phones, but about their ubiquity. Remember back in the mid 90s when everyone was going nutso about the economies of scale provided by the Web? Well, they haven't seen nothing. Right now the industry is on track to sell 650 million new phones in 2004."
There's no doubt that statistically, mobile phones are the big untamed market of the Internet. I recently wrote about the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and their report entitled The Portable Internet [btw all these different terms are pretty much interchangeable: Mobile Internet, Mobile Web, Portable Internet]. The ITU said that in October 2003 the Asia Pacific region passed 1 billion telecommunications users. They predict that before 2010, there will be an extra billion users there and "the majority of them will be connected using radiocommunications".
Russell Beattie and Sir Tim seem to be on the same wavelength in terms of timeframes. Russell gives it 6 months to a year for the mobile internet scene to explode. He says:
"...there's going to be a time, very soon, when more people are accessing the internet via their mobile devices rather than PCs. I think what's going to surprise a lot of people is how quickly that's going to happen."
Russell is one to watch in this space and it looks like he's already working on a new mobile internet business. He encourages others to join the fray:
"What interests me is the other data services - the communication, collaboration, coordination and information services that have yet to be taken advantage of. There are lots of opportunity out there for mobile apps that tap into these markets."
One of the key factors in uptake of the Mobile Internet is data speed. And although subscriber and developer-wise we're getting closer to Mobile Internet Nirvana, the fact is a lot of us are still on pre-3G mobile networks. Roland Tanglao recently called it "the GPRS version of the mobile internet" and we in New Zealand are in the same boat. NZ has GPRS and CDMA mobile networks, but we've been promised 3G for years. Our neighbour Australia is a bit ahead of us in the mobile world, as Hutchison already has a 3G network - using the brandname 3.
Apart from speed, the user-friendliness of the mobile internet and its applications is another hurdle. As of this date, it's still a pain for people to use a pokey little keypad and screen for mobile internet. The mobile jigsaw (fitting all the pieces together) I wrote about earlier is also an issue.
On the positive side, the handsets available these days are much easier to use and have more functionality than even a couple of years ago - and they will get even better before the year is out. Plus with people like Russell developing new services and apps, there's a lot of developer enthusiasm around (don't forget it wasn't that long ago that WAP in particular was ridiculed by developers). So mobile apps and services are getting increasingly user-friendly.
As Russell expanded upon, it's a new form of media. Just as eBooks shouldn't just duplicate paper books, the Mobile Web shouldn't be about replicating PC Websites and apps onto a mobile platform. And as Sir Tim says, it's all about extending the Web so the Mobile Web complements and interoperates with the PC Web.
It's going to be an interesting ride over the next 6 months!
I've been mucking around with my CSS over the past few days. Gone are the vertical grey lines and greeny colour scheme. I've kept the pacific green colour in the site title though, as a keepsake of the old style. Plus that colour is sort of identified with me now and my favicon uses it.
It's all about the whitespace and I've tried to make that more prominent. The homepage has been modified along those lines - I now use excerpts so people can easily scan the content. That's allowed me to include more links to previous posts on the homepage. I've cut back on the content in the menu too - the blogroll and references now have their own pages.
I've reverted to traditional link colours in the body text, as a nod to the oldstyle Web. The only exception is the linkblog content on the right-hand side of the homepage, which needed to blend in more so I used underlined black text.
Regarding the vertical lines, I think I originally had those mainly to show off my table-less CSS design ;-) Well, that and there were (and still are) 3 distinct columns in my design. But now I've gotten rid of the vertical lines, I think because I wanted to free myself from the box-like constrictions they conveyed. A subtle and psychological change, and my reason for it is a bit artsy-fartsy, but hey it works for me.
There are some other minor mods and I will probably do some more tinkering, but then that's the beauty of style sheets. All it takes to change the design of a whole website is some spanner work on the CSS.
Update: I've gone to a centered layout (boooring!). This new design is All About The Whitespace, so it works better if it's centered. I think I'm done now... maybe a bit more tinkering with the header.
Today I had a meeting with a large multinational content and document management vendor (who shall remain nameless). I was struck by how many times they used the word "collaboration" to describe their current software. Collaboration is also a trendy word in the world of social software. But the difference is that social software folks use collaboration in the bottom-up sense - using weblogs, wikis and other new web technologies to empower the users.
Multinational CMS vendors are tacking hard in the other direction - they use the word collaboration (and its derivatives) in a strictly top-down sense. Their push is to target their software to CEO's, Corporate honchos and Legal bigwigs. Collaboration is seen as something to be driven by management - a software solution to roll out to the users.
"OK everybody, here are the tools. Now, er, collaborate! What are you waiting for?" [pokes a user with a stick]
It's no coincidence that the phrase "lockdown" was deployed more than once in today's discussion - referring to IT's ability to force people to use the software. Lockdown is something that IT departments all over the world love, because it gives them as much control as possible over users.
But people hate being controlled...
My own preference is for bottom-up information management software, using weblogs and other pieces in the social software jigsaw. It gives control back to the people who have to use the tools. However I don't blame multinational CMS vendors for targeting the management layer of corporations and organizations. After all, that's where the money is handed out.
It's up to corporations and organizations to trust their staff to make decisions and create content. Unfortunately the kind of top-down Content and Document Management tools hawked by multinational vendors mirrors the management style at a lot of companies. How collaborative is that? Not very.
Excellent response to my light-hearted Friday post Suggested baby names for bloggers. The comments are still open if you want to add your suggestions. As for me, I have the following names lined up should I need them:
Foaf Http 201 Alist MacManus (if it's a boy)
Note: I think 'Foaf' could be the new 'Frank'... and his school mates could nickname him 'The Foafster'!
Blogatha Validate Post MacManus (if it's a girl)
Hmmm, actually thank goodness my daughter was born before I started blogging! :-)
Warning: This post is frivolous and NOT topic-focused! May the blogosphere have mercy on me. So here are those baby names...
Girls:
Bloggia
Blerta
Post
Ping (could work as a boys name too)
Dot
Blogatha
Rebecca
Aggie
Boys:
Blogbert
Atom
Alist
Zeldman
Pilgrim
Blog-Blog (i.e. like Jon-Jon)
Permalink
Dave
Any other suggestions?
There's an interesting meme doing the rounds about using pens as a metaphor for weblogs. Of course I can't resist adding my 2 cents when it comes to that topic :-) Lilia began with a post that explored the 'weblog as a pen' metaphor in relation to how weblogs serve many purposes - like pens do. This was as a reaction to the 'weblog as genre' discussion going on elsewhere. She ended up concluding that a weblog is not like a pen, "but blogging software is." That is, a pen is a tool - just like blogging software. Dina picked up on that theme and took the following path:
'weblog as a pen' ---> pen as a genre ---> pen as the creative potential in relationships ---> pen as a metaphor ---> (metaphors in general) ---> the future of the pen with Gen Y.
My contribution to this meme, like Dina's, takes a detour from Lilia's main point (but then that is what's fun about the social aspect of blogging - people pick up a post from someone else and use it as a springboard for their own ideas). So here's my riff on the 'pen as metaphor' theme.
I have an image in the top-left of my homepage, borrowed from a photo of a John Baldessari artwork called Read/Write/Think/Dream - in which he transformed the facade and interior foyer of the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego, into a colourful and interactive work of art. (nb: I wrote about it a month and a half ago). The whole artwork resonated deeply with me, but that sliver of an image you see in the top-left of your screen (you have to get out of your RSS Reader to see it!) seemed to 'fit' with the themes of my weblog. I hadn't really analysed why, until today.
It's a photo-mural of pens and pencils and it's just one part of the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork. The image shows two people looking at the pencils and pens - one has stopped to look, the other is about to walk past it. Those people (and the ones who will follow) are just as much a part of the artwork as the pencils/pens.
Baldessari said about the work: "The whole concept of the piece deals with the obvious: students are central to the university." To relate this to how I used that one image on my weblog: my readers (people) are just as much a part of my blog as my writing. To extend that even further: people are central to the blogosphere.
What's not immediately obvious in the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork is that the pens and pencils are ordered according to the color spectrum of the rainbow. Here is one explanation of this:
"On one interior side wall is a photo-mural of pens and pencils in a neat row, each a different color, aligned according to their sequence in the color spectrum. These tools, neatly ordered, and the students, gathered in a row like carefully collected types, reflect Baldessari's deep-seated interest in sorting and systems of organization." (emphasis mine)
Once again, I can apply this meaning to my blog. These days I style myself as an Analyst, which is my way of saying that in this weblog I strive to examine and organize information - and from that create new ideas.
Baldessari also said that "the pens and pencils represent the tools of the students' trade". This gives me an opportunity to return to Lilia's original point that pens - and weblog authoring systems - are just tools. We can use them how we like, but it comes back to the sum of: Person + Tool = Self-Expression OR Creativity OR Knowledge OR Blogosphere OR Etc.
My point here is: we need both people and tools in the equation. And thankfully, I think this is where the current Knowledge Management theories are heading. As Mike Gotta put it - "Knowledge Management: It Was Always About People".
The problem with KM during the 90's was that everyone thought of Knowledge Management as being Technology-driven. Companies tried to implement Knowledge Management systems and tools. Well actually that theory wasn't total nonsense, because the reality is KM is about both People and Tools. If you look at Dave Pollard's principles of KM (which I found very inspirational), you'll see that it's a mix of tools and people-oriented principles that he advocates.
I have a new catchphrase to express this: People are Central, but Tools are Crucial.
So that's my take on the 'pen as metaphor' meme. Heh, I took a big segue! but I think I learned something along the way ;-) However I didn't get to address Dina's point about "the future of the pen with Gen Y" - which is a fascinating question. I'll think about that some more and address it in a later post.
The ITU (International Telecommunication Union) has just released a report entitled The Portable Internet. From the press release:
"A new set of advanced wireless technologies now promises to bring affordable, high-speed Internet connectivity to the masses. This set of technologies, and the market opportunity they create, has been termed the "Portable Internet", and is the subject of a new ITU report."
From the free summaries posted on the ITU website, I extracted these highlights:
- Portable Internet in this report means "a platform for high-speed data access using Internet Protocol (IP)"... it includes "advanced wireless technologies" such as Wi-Fi.
- Since 2000, Internet penetration has grown at a slower rate than mobile (blamed on the dot.com crash).
- Internet users often "face a trade-off between higher connection speeds and mobility" --> fixed-line technologies generally = higher speeds but low mobility; 3G mobile networks = greater mobility but at lower speeds.
- Here's a table (from ITU) of Portable Internet technologies:
A lot of those acronyms aren't mainstream yet, but within 5-10 years they may well be!
The Asia/Pacific region seems to be a particular area of growth for mobile technologies. I've just started reading a book called The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook, which I hope will provide some insights into this trend towards the mobile internet. The ITU press release has this to say about it:
"The Asia-Pacific region passed the symbolic mark of one billion telecommunication users, mobile phones and fixed lines combined in October 2003. Until now, those users that wanted to have high-speed access to the Internet had to have a fixed-line connection. Before the end of this decade, another billion users of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are likely to be added to the region's networks, but the majority of them will be connected using radiocommunications."
In a separate press release, ITU reported that Asia-Pacific has overtaken North America in both Mobile subscriber numbers and Internet users. Largely due to China, where the huge population makes them a key country for the mobile internet.
Maybe I'm in the right part of the world after all ;-)
All of this augers well for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, which I'm willing to wager will be the 'Portable Internet Games' - or whatever the catchphrase for mobile internet will be by then!
