ReadWriteWeb

Listened to the latest Gillmor Gang Show, with Jonathan Schwartz as guest. Sun's Schwartz is one very smart cookie and a very effective speaker. The following quote in particular stood out for me:

He goes on to talk about "lots of added value" on the network, citing telecommunications carriers / network operators who give away mobile phones in order to sell services. He used the phrase "cost compression" several times near the end to emphasize that businesses (like Sun and Microsoft) need to find new business models on the network.

A lot of what Schwartz said (especially that last point) complements the ideas that came out of my interview with Tim O'Reilly. Web services business models is a fascinating subject, but rather than focusing on the bigco's I prefer to look at how the little companies are creating new opportunities in this Web 2.0 world. Companies like Bloglines, Flickr, Feedburner, The Robot Co-op.

And by the way (as Jonathan might say), an eBook Reader is one device begging to be attached to the network. One problem is that there's no iPod-equivalent for eBook Readers. There are many reasons for that, which I won't go into right now. My point for this post is that there are many potential business opportunities for new companies to create network services around eBooks, should the right platform ever be put in place (in the same sense that the iPod is a platform for music services).

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching that none of my favourite authors had their most recent books available in eBook format. Well as luck would have it, Tom Wolfe just released his new novel I am Charlotte Simmons and it is available as an eBook!

I went to 3 sources to check out the prices: Fictionwise had it for US$15 (but with a 50% rebate added to your account), eReader.com for US$13.50 and Amazon for US$10.20. Although Amazon was the cheapest, I decided to buy it from Fictionwise because a) they're an eBook specialist and I like their services, b) Fictionwise had a full explanation of the formats available and what hardware you need, whereas Amazon offered no help or assurances in that regard, and c) the 50% rebate convinced me it was worth bypassing the cheapest deal (Amazon) on this occasion.

The download process was fairly painless and it was mainly my over-cautious approach that slowed things down (I double-checked the format and hardware specs, looked over Fictionwise's policies, etc). The download was offered in two "secure" formats: eReader and Microsoft Reader. I chose eReader, simply because I already have the software installed on my Palm T2 PDA.

The Fictionwise download process was very smooth and to unlock the eBook, I just had to enter my name and Visa card number. So all in all, everything went well. Experienced eBook readers will be going "Duh!" at that statement, but when it's your first purchase of an eBook you worry about things like whether the installation/unlocking will be successful and what will happen if the format is incompatible etc. So I commend Fictionwise on a user-friendly and intuitive download process, particularly for the extensive help webpages and explanations of eBook formats and hardware requirements (as I mentioned, that was missing from Amazon).

Regarding pricing, I still think eBooks need to come down in price some more in order to attract new customers. Amazon are offering the hardcover book for US$17.37, which is only a couple of dollars more than I paid for the electronic version at Fictionwise. However I would've had to pay some hefty delivery charges to buy the hardcover at Amazon (one drawback of living on the other side of the world), so the zero delivery cost of eBooks is a big plus for me.

The other factor was the immediate delivery of the book via Internet download. Being in New Zealand, typically I have to wait 3-4 weeks for Amazon deliveries. New Zealand book retailers as far as I know don't stock this book yet (and even if they did, book prices are generally significantly higher in NZ stores than on Amazon - even factoring in delivery). So eBook format is probably the only way I'd get to read Wolfe's new book before Christmas.

All up, NZ$20 isn't a bad price to pay for a brand new book I can't wait to read - so I'm happy. I'll let you know how the reading experience goes in a later post.

This is a copy of a suggestion I've just sent to Bloglines Support. It was inspired by a Feedburner Forums thread I started a few days ago, regarding whether Feedburner was counting all of my RSS feeds in their statistics. Turned out they weren't and there was indeed an issue "with online aggregators when you have multiple aliases to a single feed". Feedburner was already working on it at the time I started the Forum thread. Happily, it's now been solved and so it got me to thinking: Bloglines has the same issue with their subscriber stats, so can't they solve it too? I've emailed them before about it and blogged it here. Here's my follow-up which I sent to them today:

Hi, I am writing regarding your Subscriber stats functionality in Bloglines. There is one major problem with it. If a blog has multiple RSS feeds, then for each user the Bloglines subscriber count only displays the stats related to the feed subscribed to. That is, Bloglines *does not* aggregate the stats for all of a blog's feeds and display a total count of subscribers. I call this a feed-centered stats service, whereas what most people want is a blog-centered one. More on that here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002350.php

It's very common these days to have multiple feeds for a single blog - a typical blog could have feeds for RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom, and now Feedburner. I've emailed you before about this issue, but I'd like to point you to a recent Feedburner Forums thread in which Feedburner has solved it: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=273

As an example, I now have 3 RSS feeds for my blog Read/Write Web - including a Feedburner one which I started (ironically perhaps) to get better stats. So my blog's subscribers are spread over those 3 feeds, which Feedburner now correctly tracks as one (after they fixed the issue with aliases).

A more prominant example is Boing Boing, which has a new Feedburner feed and they're using it as their main feed now. I subscribed to the new Feedburner-powered one and it currently displays in Bloglines as having 36 subscribers. Of course their old feed has well over 12,000 Bloglines subscribers. It may not be a big deal, but in the interests of accuracy wouldn't it be a whole lot better if Bloglines counted *all* of Boing Boing's feeds in your Subcriber count for them that you display?

(nb: Boing Boing illustrates some other issues with blog stats - e.g. there are "lite" versions of their feed available elsewhere and it's possible to create category and filtered feeds for Boing Boing. But one thing at a time, let's solve the issue with aliases first :-)

So, in summary I'd like to once again request that Bloglines takes the number of subscribers on the RSS feed a user subscribes to and combines that with the number of subscribers on alias versions of that same feed. Thus giving a blog-centered subscriber count.

It shouldn't be that hard to do, because you already know which feeds belong to a single blog. e.g. when you click on "Add" and enter a blog's homepage URL into the subscribe field, Bloglines then presents the user with a list of that blog's feeds to select from. So you already have the grouping of feeds for a single blog done.

I realise you have more important things to develop, but it'd be great if you could solve this one issue with your Subscriber stats functionality. Feedburner has solved it now, so perhaps you two innovative Web 2.0 up-and-coming companies (both of which I'm a big fan of) can swap emails about it?

Well here I am blogging in my pyjamas. Not literally, but metaphorically. Chillin'. Taking stock. Thinking about goals for next year. I've also been thinking about my Design for Data theory and while I've been doing that, a few posts elsewhere have attracted my attention...

First a "in a nutshell" re-cap of what Design for Data means to me:

- Living Data; content is alive!
- Momentum: it's about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides
- it's about the user being in control of their webfeeds
- DYI websites for the users
- the application of weblike design to data
- Information Flow
- Rip, Mix n' Burn; Re-using content

That's not a complete picture, but I'm getting there.

Branding and Web Experiences

Digital Web Magazine published an article last week entitled The End of Usability Culture, Redux. It argues that web design is about creating effective "web experiences" and one way to do this is to focus on branding more so than usability guidelines (especially from the much-maligned Jakob Nielsen). The author, Dirk Knemeyer, cites Starbucks as "the perfect model" for what he's talking about:

The role of the web designer then would be to create this compelling user experience. As Dirk puts it: "design is about creating for people."

While it's an excellent article, it seems to me that Web Designers are still fixated on the idea of website as 'container' for the content. Branding to a Web Designer is still largely a visual exercise. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, because the Web as a 'place' won't be disappearing anytime soon. 

However I also think RSS flow is creating a need for the data itself to be 'designed', not into HTML containers but into chunks of branded microcontent that will probably be XML. What I mean is: the data may not end up as HTML, so we have to figure out how to "brand" our data.

Associated Press & Atomized Content

Another excellent article recently was a speech by Tom Curley, head honcho of AP (Associated Press). There were a lot of great insights in this speech and one of the main ones was this:

He talks about unlocking content from those containers and "consumption on demand" will drive this - in other words, the user is in control. Words such as "disintermediate" and "reaggregate" are thrown into the mix. This is what he says about branding:

Curley doesn't actually say how we're supposed to brand what he calls "atomized content", but he does say that RSS and search are two of the main ingredients.

Gillmor Gang & eBay

I also listened to an interesting edition of The Gillmor Gang (a regular podcast from the likes of Steve Gillmor, Jon Udell and Doc Searls). They interviewed my namesake Jeffrey McManus, who is a technical evangelist at eBay. Steve Gillmor was giving Jeffrey a grilling about RSS and "disintermediation" and so forth, and in response Jeffrey noted this about the eBay website:

In other words, the website is still the place where users go for the eBay "experience". 

Steve continued to press the matter, asking "what can't be done via api's [meaning off-site]". The object of the question being to find out if the eBay website was really necessary for users to do business with eBay. To which Jeffrey replied: sign-up, registration; bidding can't be done off-site [nb: I took rough notes only, so the quotes may be slightly off].

And Jeffrey later said: "It's our job to make eBay a compelling place to buy and sell stuff".

So what do I take from all that? Well it seems one of Web 2.0's leading companies still regards "place" (ie their website) as a critical part of their business model. That will please the web designers. Whether that will be the case in 5-10 years time is another matter...

Whither Design for Data?

I'll leave you with an Eric Rice post from today where he notes that his RSS traffic just passed his HTML views. My comment on that is: I don't think the RSS model is going to replace the HTML one. RSS and HTML do two different jobs. Currently it's true that branding via HTML is still the way to do business on the Web. Mainly because nobody has figured out how to effectively brand via RSS yet. And that's a business opportunity for Web 2.0. 

One company to watch in this space is FeedBurner. I think they're onto something important with their RSS feed services (such as splicing and stats).

For now, as one of Eric's commenters notes, branding is still largely visual:

OK, but mark my words: soon there will be ways to brand yourself in RSS. It's being invented right now by smart companies like Feedburner.

Postscript

Oh man, so much for blogging in my pyjamas! That was a bit full-on. If it's any consolation, it's now way past my bedtime :-) Almost time for me to get up in fact!

To wrap up what has been a busy week, yesterday I finally got some momentum going in the blogosphere with the O'Reilly interview. Thanks to Jason Kottke, Robert Scoble, Phil Pearson (btw welcome back Phil!), Lucas Gonze and all the others who kindly linked to it.

What happened was, I published Part 1 of the interview first thing Monday morning (US time). But it was slow to take off and by mid-week I was a bit concerned that no web connectors would notice it. So I launched a Band Aid-like appeal for links and eventually some blog stars kindly donated their attention.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a regular "Blog Aid" thing, where A-Listers devoted say 1 day a month to feed link-hungry C-Listers? It's the least they could do.

I'm joking!

Next week I will take it easy and blog in my pyjamas, as per Robert's suggestion :-) Just as well I'm not a videoblogger.

In this final instalment of my interview with Tim O'Reilly (see also: Part 1 & Part 2), we discuss eBooks, social networking, collaboration and Remix culture. This is probably my favourite segment of the interview, because we explored some interesting new ideas here about Web publishing.

Books and Social Networking

Richard: eBooks are a current interest of mine. One theory I like is that eBooks should be a social activity carried out on the network, rather than a physical thing you hold in your hands. Cory Doctorow has said something similar: eBooks are a practice, not an object. Do you see books going the same way as weblogs and enabling a social networking experience? 

For example: say a user could bookmark extracts of an eBook, perhaps mixing it with extracts from other eBooks, and then quote it all on the Web interspersed with their own comments. That sort of thing could be a basis for social networking amongst like-minded people, just like blogs and wikis currently. Do you think that's a likely scenario for books, that they become more of a social read/write experience? 

Tim: You know....no, I don't see that. Take Cory's books, he puts them up online and he's doing all kinds of experimentation - and that's the book. But he also does a blog, like Boing Boing. It's kind of like going back to this analogy of plays and movies, you have new forms evolve out of old ones. And you also have products that are seen as very different that do the same job, you have products that are seen as the same that do a different job, and you have to kind of parse the whole thing. 

So I would say yes there are examples of books that are processes and practices, but we don't call them books anymore. An online multiplayer game, a classic collaborative book - if you like. But we don't call it a book anymore. Similarly Wikipedia - classic collaborative reference book, but we don't call it a book anymore. I know I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here. Earlier I said that we could call EverQuest a book, but now I'm saying that a collaborative blog or a Wiki is not a book. I suppose it depends what point you're trying to make. 

Richard: Although the Wikipedia is being made into a book, I hear... 

Tim: Yes those things are possible, but it depends on how you define 'book'. Look at our Hacks series, that's a book series that grew out of collective web content. We'd often start things online and write things on the O'Reilly Network and then we'd say "Well let's assemble this into a book". We'd start with what we already had, put an author on collecting other cool stuff off the net, and finding people to write pieces to fill it out. So in that sense, yes. But in the sense of people sort of morphing books, with the 'rip, mix, burn' kind of thing - (like we have with say The Grey Album, which mixed The Black Album and The White Album), I don't really see it. Other than in the sense that people are always creating new works out of old works in the book space. 

For example, think of a book on politics or a book on history. It's quoting from other books. Also a book on literary criticism. A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books. And I certainly see ways where the Internet can be used to enhance that, but I don't think for example: "Oh, we'll have some collaboratively created novel and that will be the new form". 

Richard: I wasn't really thinking of that. I was more thinking of say Cory putting his new novel online, maybe it gets mixed with other content, and then people using that as a base for conversations and other social activities. 

Tim: Right, but does that really change the book per se? I mean right now there's conversations about books going on all the time. We've always taken reader input into our books. Every new edition is the result of conversations with our audience. And that was one of O'Reilly's early innovations, because we were Internet connected. 

Think back to a book I did in the late 80's on UUCP - I did it originally as an 80-page pamphlet and I did 10 editions over the next five years, about every 6 months there was a new edition and they were almost entirely driven by user-submitted content. People would say "Oh you didn't cover this-and-this device, and here's how it works" and they'd give me 3-4 paragraphs which I'd just drop right into the book. And I think we have a lot more of that 'book as output of connected conversations' now, where people are engaged in dialogue. But again I don't see that as fundamentally different than the kind of dialogues that a scholar would go through before - it's just accelerated and enables people to reach out to people who they might not otherwise have worked with.  So I think that the form of the book, per se, will persist and the job of the book will be re-discovered in a lot of new forms. 

Remix Culture and Collaboration

On second thought, there are probably other areas where some of what you're talking about is happening. I'm thinking, for example, of all the mashups that people are doing with video - really creative works that re-use content in ways the original authors never intended - like the Bush-Blair singing lip-synch video that Larry Lessig showed at Web 2.0. This whole "Remix" idea is actually the theme of our Emerging Technology Conference this year (that's being held in San Diego in March). 

But at the end of the day, there's almost always a guiding spirit, an author or editor who puts out a framework that guides a collective work. Even in an area like Fanfic, where people write new stories online based on the Harry Potter series, or Star Trek, or whatever - you still have authors who are putting out their idiosyncratic vision. Spock and Kirk as a gay couple is apparently a major sub-genre of Fanfic. But somebody came up with the idea and wrote the first story. Others then piled on. [Ed: the writers, that is... :-)] 

But you do raise a good point: can we build systems that are designed better for letting people remix content? One way we're doing that is with our SafariU product. Looking at our content, which is primarily tutorial and reference content, people often want to learn things in a different order - they want to put together teaching or reference material for a specific task. 

In Safari U, what we have is a framework where we have a database of 3000 books in XML. Here's an interface that lets you pick and choose what you want, re-assemble it, mix it with your own material into specific custom purposes. We're targeting right now at two markets. One is the academic and training market, where people want to put together custom training materials - that's been a request we've had for a long time. I think similarly we're seeing it in a corporate context, where a company says: I support these technologies and I want to put together a custom library. We're not really seeing it at the user level, which I think was your question. 

That being said, one of the key ideas from the Creative Commons that I really embrace is the idea that all creativity is rooted in re-use. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration. The smartest thing that any publisher can do is to make sure that we allow our customers to surprise us with ways that they have remixed our ideas and our material with their own.

Summary

Well that wraps up what was a hugely rewarding interview for me, in terms of what I learned and also having the opportunity to talk to the CEO of a major technology company. If you've read this interview, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below. And of course, I encourage you to link to it on your blogs and pass it onto blog connectors. Tim took a risk giving an interview to a C-List blogger, so I'd love to repay that faith and get this interview linked around the blogosphere.

Previous: Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 1: Web 2.0 | Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 2: Business Models & RSS

I recently did a dump of content from my PDA to my linkblog - things I'd been reading offline and not yet recorded in my 'Ideas Database' (aka my linkblog). One batch of links is from a single person, Bill Ives. So I thought I'd dump them into one R/WW post - more for my benefit than anything else.

All these links are from his Trends: KM/Portals category, which I read specifically for the posts on KM storytelling:

a) From Stories and Organizational Learning:

b) On KM success:

c) From History of KM Part 6: Digital Age Offers Scalability with New Possibilities for Dialogue. Bill finishes his excellent "History of KM" series (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading) with this sentence:

What an excellent way to conclude a history of KM - it's saying that we're in the middle of making history right now, with blogging.

d) Another series of posts I enjoyed was "Storytelling and Knowledge Management" - another 6-parter. In Part 4, Documenting and Sharing Organizational Knowledge, Bill says:

Which again, is where blogs come in according to Bill.

e) In Part 5, Enhancing Learning, Bill explains the benefits of stories as a learning device:

f) In a later series called "KM Stories", Bill writes about specific case studies. In Part Two he says:

g) In his postscript to that series, Bill lists the factors for successful KM projects. I won't re-list them all here, but suffice to say (for me) that the first two are people-related factors:

I suspect that's why KM projects are so wont to fail. When you require the support of lots of different people and a strong leader, well that's Politics - not technology. And we all know how contentious politics can be!

Thanks to Bill Ives for writing so much valuable content on the subject of KM and storytelling. I hope to read more soon.

This is the second in a 3-part interview with O'Reilly Media CEO, Tim O'Reilly. In part 2, we discuss business models for Web 2.0 and the future of RSS.

Business Models for Web Content

Richard: There's been a bit of discussion amongst bloggers recently about monetizing weblogs - making money off one's Web content. This of course has long been a dream for Website producers - content is king, but how to make money from it? Most commercial publishing businesses have used subscription models to do that, including your company (e.g. Safari Bookshelf). But with bloggers and other independent content creators, perhaps advertising and sponsorships are better avenues for them to explore. Where do you see the future of Web 2.0 for content creators, in terms of making money from their content? 

Tim: Back in 1995, in the early days of the Web, I wrote an article called Publishing Models for Internet Commerce. It was based on the idea that publishing can give us a lot of insight into how the Internet is going to play out. The lesson I drew from publishing is there's not a single business model. There are countless, overlapping business models - from marginal to very successful - in a really rich ecosystem. Take for example, in the US your kids may come home from school with this thing: "Hey, buy magazine subscriptions and you will support our school". There's some company that uses school children to market magazine subscriptions! And there's something else called Publishers Clearinghouse that has contests and giveaways to get magazine subscriptions. So there are these funny business models.

We have subscriptions, and direct sales to consumers and mediated retail sales, and advertising, and combinations of all of the above. We have people who make their money providing infrastructure or assistance in these models - ad agencies, printers, rack jobbers, distributors, retailers. It's a rich and complex environment.

After we sold GNN [Global Network Navigator] to AOL in 1995, I remember talking to Ted Leonisis about this idea - and he said: "Oh, I get it - you're saying where is the Publishers Clearinghouse for the Web?!"

In the early days, a publisher had to do everything, from generating the content to hosting and caching it, to acquiring customers, to selling advertising...and now there are lots of cooperating players, making the job a lot easier. What we're seeing as the Web develops is that we're building a richer ecology of options. So subscription is becoming a valid option. So is downloadable paid content. So is advertising - in fact there are new forms of advertising. You know, we used to think that it was only banner ads - and they got bigger and bigger and more intrusive. Then Overture and Google introduced this concept of context-sensitive text ads and that stuff really enabled what Chris Anderson is calling The Long Tail. But the story's not over - we're going to see more and more kinds of paid content. 

What's its Job?

The other thing you really have to think about with all this is - we often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does. With eBooks, a lot of people got all hung up on the idea that an eBook was something that you put on a computer or a handheld device that allowed you to read a book. As opposed to thinking of an eBook as the answer to a whole set of different questions - OK, well what job does a book do?

So for example a fantasy novel does the job of entertainment. Using that analogy, I'd say an MMORPG like Everquest is an eBook. It's a very clear successor to Lord of the Rings - an exploration of how you would do a better fantasy novel on a computer. Just like movies grew out of stage plays. Originally they used to point a camera at the stage, then they realized they could move the camera and do all kinds of different things.

A lot of the publishing that I do really has two jobs: one is teaching and the other is reference. Safari is chiefly an online reference tool, so we're exploring new ways of putting our information in a reference context. For example we built a web services API so that Safari could be built into, say, a developer tool and become a help system. We're looking at it like this: what are we trying to accomplish here? Similarly, if you've looked at the O'Reilly Learning Lab, we've recently done online training - because, again, that's one of the things we do. We teach people.

So there's not a single business model, and there's not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them. 

Take music - the music industry was so focused on selling songs that they completely missed the ringtone business. What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done. 

There's a great talk that I heard Clayton Christensen give (he's the author of The Innovator's Dilemma). He was the one who I first heard using the "job" analogy. He talked about a study that Harvard Business School did for McDonalds, about milkshakes. They are apparently McDonalds' most profitable product, but the company wanted to figure out how could they make it even more profitable. What the Harvard researchers did was they went and watched people at McDonalds - and asked what job was the milkshake doing? And they discovered that the milkshake drinkers fell into two large groups. The bulk of the sales were in the morning and in the late afternoon. And they figured out that in the morning milkshakes were bought by a solitary commuter and the job was to while away the commute. And in the evening the milkshake was bought by the single parent coming back with a crowd of kids from a soccer game or whatever - and the job of the milkshake was to be a reward to the kids and the parent was always saying - hurry up and finish your milkshake! So in the morning the milkshake needed to be thicker, to last longer, and in the evening it needed to be thinner so it'd get drunk faster. So it was doing a different job at each of those times. 

And I think we have to apply that kind of thinking to electronic content - what are we trying to accomplish?

RSS and Web 2.0

Richard: A number of bloggers have noted that RSS was a common theme throughout the Web 2.0 conference. Russell Beattie said that "RSS was always mentioned [at Web 2.0 conference] in the context of Web Services in general". Where do you see RSS and other syndication technologies fitting into the "Internet as Platform" framework? 

Tim: RSS is clearly, far and away the most successful web service to date. And it kind of demonstrates something that happens a lot in technology, which is that something simple and easy-to-use gets overloaded (in the sense that object oriented programming uses the term). 

I mean it's the classic example of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma. When HTML came out everybody said "Hey this is so crude, you can't build rich interfaces like you can on a PC - it'll never work". Well it did something that people wanted, it kind of grew more and more popular, became more and more powerful, people figured out ways to extend it. Yes a lot of those extensions were kludges, but HTML really took over the world. And I think RSS is very much on the same track. It started out doing a fairly simple job, people found more and more creative things to do with it, and hack by hack it has become more powerful, more useful, more important. And I don't think the story is over yet.  

The fundamental idea of syndication and the ability to redistribute content via web services, is a very powerful idea and we're going to see more. There was this whole fascination with Push back in the late 90's with companies like Marimba and Pointcast - and they tried too hard to make that work and to build a business around it. (Although Marimba eventually did make a nice business in the enterprise, with software updates.) It was too early and too freighted with stuff that was good for the companies but not for the customers. As is often the case, it came back from the wilds as something not sponsored by companies with business models but by independent developers who were just trying to make stuff that worked for their own needs. As happened with the web, the business models come later. 

But this whole idea of people subscribing to content that they care about I think is fairly fundamental. We're basically dealing with a world of information overload and being able to tailor your personal portal is a pretty powerful idea. And I think we're going to see it increasingly used. 

In a recent post I floated the theory that Content Creators need Media Companies to help them attract mass eyeballs to read their carefully-crafted content. It would be a symbiotic relationship - the Media Co's get compelling content and the Content Creator gets mass readership. It's win-win and I think this is one way round the A-List or Power Law issue with the blogosphere.

My previous post is a classic case in point. It's an interview with the CEO of the top computer book seller in the world and a leading Web visionary. The content of the interview is very compelling (IMHO), if you're at all interested in web technology. Yet so far, about 36 hours after I published it, no big blogosphere 'connectors' have linked to it. I haven't really pimped it round the sphere, other than submitting it to Slashdot (no go, this time) and Boing Boing (obviously not quirky enough). I suppose I could email the link to the connectors in the web tech blogging world - Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, et al. But frankly I hate doing that kind of stuff... it makes me feel like I'm a court jester begging for the King's attention. (I haven't even linked to said people, such is my shame in even mentioning it).

So what to do? Obviously I want people to read my interview with Tim O'Reilly, not to mention the other things I put so much effort into writing. Maybe I need a "Blog Agent" to whip up some public relations, flick the link around to all the connectors, syndicate it on media websites - and all the other things that you need to do to get read around here. That's not self-pity speaking either - it's ambition...of a Content Creator who is not very good at this PR game.

Of course, it all comes back to that word 'momentum' (one of my fave words currently). Once even 1 connector links to you, the ball starts rolling and the meme spreads - sometimes like wildfire. That's happened to me a number of times before - e.g. my interview with Lucas Gonze got Slashdotted and it was all go after that. The challenge for the vast majority of bloggers is to get that first connector to link to you...

Welcome to the second in my series of Web 2.0 interviews, in which I interview people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 - i.e. the Web as Platform. And who better to talk to than the person who organized the hugely successful Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco in October 2004, Tim O'Reilly.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, one of the most successful computer book and online media publishers in the world. I won't regurgitate Tim's official bio, but let me put this interview into a personal perspective. As an English Lit major from the early 90's and a passionate Webhead now, my niche is at the intersection of Publishing and the Web. Tim was one of the people who invented that intersection, so it was a thrill to talk to Tim and I thank him for granting an interview to an unknown blogger from New Zealand.

This interview will be published here on Read/Write Web in 3 instalments. The first instalment is focused on Web 2.0 and web technology. In Part 2 we explore business models for Web content - including discussion of RSS. Part 3 is about books and publishing in particular, but also covers social software and Remix culture.

If you'd like to be notified when Parts 2 and 3 are published, I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed (right-click and copy to your favourite RSS Aggregator). Here is Part 1 for you now:

Web 2.0 Conference Review   

Richard: Before the Web 2.0 conference, in your article Ask Jeff Bezos, Adam Bosworth..., you talked about wanting to gather insights into the success (and future) of Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple. Now that the conference is over, what were the key insights about Web 2.0 that you personally got from the conference - which you didn't know beforehand? 

Tim: When you work on putting together the program, you know what's in it, so I wasn't surprised terribly much by anything. There were a few things that stood out, though. For example, Mark Cuban's insistence that HD [High Definition] makes movies safer from the MPAA's online piracy fears is an interesting application of an idea that I've been aware of for some time - namely that storage is getting cheaper faster than bandwidth [is getting cheaper]. And of course, we were all waiting to see who Mark would skewer! 

I was also blown away by the lineup of Mitch Kapor, Cory Doctorow, and Larry Lessig. I've heard all of them speak before - each of them has been at my conferences many times - but I thought that together they made a really rousing combination, raising awareness of the profound political and legal dimensions of Web 2.0. As Larry has often said, we can't let the past use legal means to prevent the future from happening! 

There were also a couple of things that came up at the last minute. For instance, we had a High Order Bit by an old friend of mine, Andrew Singer, about reconfigurable computing and the performance and low power possibilities there. It came out because I sent him an invite to the conference and he said: "Oh I'd like to present something I'm doing". That was a surprise thing, because John and I hadn't planned for it in the program until the very last minute. This is the kind of technology out of left field that could really change the rules. I've been following FPGAs and other forms of reconfigurable computing, but I hadn't realized that it could lower the power consumption so much - which could have real implications for portable devices. 

Apple and Web 2.0

Richard: In the blog coverage of Web 2.0 I heard a lot about Amazon, Google and Yahoo!, but I didn't hear a lot about Apple... 

Tim: Apple is in a position they've been in a lot of times before. They're like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there. In a lot of my talks I use iTunes as an example of what Dave Stutz calls "software above the level of a single device." Here is this application designed from the get-go to span the handheld to the server, with the PC a way station. And that's a paradigm for the future. But because Apple ends up with a closed platform, they don't necessarily take that out to the industry. Someone else adopts the ideas and takes them further. I think we're seeing that the wave of innovation that Mac OS X represented has really inspired a lot of people.

And even as far as their participation in the conference goes, it was a bit of a disappointment. They had promised to send Eddy Cue, who runs the iTunes business, but at the last minute he dropped out and sent a substitute. That's a sign that Apple doesn't take reaching out to this tech audience as seriously as they should. 

Microsoft and Web 2.0

Richard: A key part of the Web 2.0 theory is "the commoditization of software" - how the value is now in the services enabled by that software. It seems though that the elephant in the room is still Microsoft, who remain committed to locking users in with their software - e.g. Longhorn is the next generation of that strategy. Do you think the success of Web 2.0 is dependent on Microsoft's software-focused strategy failing? Or can Web 2.0 and Longhorn co-exist and both succeed? 

Tim: First of all I think that there's never a clear succession. You know, IBM didn't go away when the PC took over as the center of the computing landscape. But they had to change. And I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.  

And I don't think that Longhorn will change the dynamics all that significantly. There's some pretty wonderful technology in Longhorn. But if you look at the release cycle, you're talking 5-6 years - and now they're saying, well maybe we better accelerate and take some pieces and put Avalon into Windows XP rather than waiting for the full Longhorn. But they can't just keep up with the pace of a Web-based offering where you can roll out new products to all your users without even asking, and update products dynamically. I just think that [Web-based] software services have a better model. So I think that Microsoft will continue to dominate on the PC, but the PC is going to be a smaller and smaller part of the entire business.  

Similarly I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak. This is very similar to what happened to IBM - they had to shed hundreds of thousands of workers, they went from being an industry goliath to simply being an industry giant! I think that's exactly what will happen to Microsoft. They will lose their pre-eminent position, but they will still be an extremely powerful and successful company. 

Network Effects and Service Levels

Richard: Talking a bit more about how Web 2.0 is about services rather than software... you argue that once a Web 2.0 company reaches a certain level of users and "the network effect" kicks in - it becomes hard for new entrants to break into that market. Is there a danger that service levels at the dominant companies (like EBay and Amazon) will eventually slip and they get away with it, in much the same way that Microsoft has let the quality of Internet Explorer slip? That is, the users will persist with the service because it is "good enough"? 

Tim: Yes I think there's absolutely truth in that observation. I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is. There are great companies that continue to hold the dominant position for hundreds of years - think Proctor & Gamble for example - by continuing to innovate. And I would say that some of these companies will survive and continue to be innovative companies. Others will struggle.  

And again you can also see companies that coast on their laurels for a while and then wake up - Yahoo!'s a good example right now. Yahoo! started out as an Internet darling and ended up becoming a bit of a stodgy media company in the model of AOL. But they're really waking up now and they're inventing a lot of cool new stuff. The competition with Google has made them realize they've got to get their act together and I think they're responding.  

So I think we'll see a lot of ebb and flow and back and forth, and yes - there will be companies that get lazy because they think they've got it all sewn up. But that's sort of a natural thing that happens in business, I don't think there's anything unique to Web 2.0 about it.

Data Ownership and Lock-in

Richard: From a user perspective rather than a developer perspective, a lot of what Web 2.0 is about is users producing content and not just consuming it. An example you've used in the past to illustrate this is the "user added value" on Amazon, compared to say its online competitor Barnes & Noble. The other side of that coin though is the "data lock-in" of users, where users may not necessarily have control over their content. Is this something for users to be concerned about, given that people are used to having relative control over the data on their desktop? 

Tim: Absolutely. I actually ran a couple of panels on this at our Open Source convention, a year and a half or two years ago - called 'Open Data - Do We Need a Bill of Rights for Web Services?'. We had people from Amazon, EBay and others trying to answer that question: what does it mean when we're investing our online data in these sites? Will we end up with something like the Open Source movement because the companies have ended up locking in their users? And we see this right now - for example the Danger Hiptop. They basically tried to lock-in their users. So there are companies that are trying to use data lock-in as a competitive tool - and there will eventually be a recognition that this is a problem.  

But the actual data ownership is maybe less important, in some areas, than people think. When we talk about user-contributed data, we're not just talking about my data proper (as in having your mail stored on Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or whatever.) We're also talking about a kind of content that users are contributing to a collective work. So for example, Amazon Reviews - people don't really care about that in the same way. They're not saying "Oh I created that review and I want to be able to export it to Barnes & Noble as well". They're creating it in a particular context of that community.  

And when you think about ownership, it really gets portrayed as black and white - when in fact it's grey. It's kind of like valance electrons, where data has a center of attraction but it also is free to move. So when I write an Amazon review, it is mine in some sense - and you'll find that when people submit reviews to Amazon, they may also submit them to somewhere else because they have a copy of it. And nobody particularly cares. It's that data mobility zone that actually creates a lot of the free-flow ideas on the Net.  

In some ways, we're re-defining what fair use means. Sometimes people send round entire stories, sometimes people get sent a New York Times article and they post it to a mailing list. Is that 'fair use' - maybe not, but maybe we're re-defining fair use. And I think there's just a lot of experimentation, a lot of understanding of what this new medium means - that we have to come to grips with. One of Lessig's key points is that we don't know how these things are going to work out, and we need to give them time to develop before we legislate about them. 

But anyway, back to your point. Despite what I've said about redefining the boundaries of fair use, and the free flow of data in collective works, data lock-in absolutely should be a concern. I believe that data lock-in of various kinds is going to be one of the key tools of business advantage in the internet era. I think that as companies realize this, they will figure out how to be evil - so to speak (to use Google's terminology) - and I predict that we will in fact have some major battles in that area. 

To be continued in Parts 2 and 3...