ReadWriteWeb

On my ZDNet blog I've just published the first of a two-part interview with digg founder Kevin Rose. In the interview we discuss digg's popularity, its battle with spammers, the recent issues with GroupThink and digg's upcoming personalization features.

As you know, I've been somewhat critical of digg recently - in particular regarding recent signs of GroupThink in the system. So I hope this interview addresses some of those issues. Here's a taste:

"We plan to add the ability to mark stories as false or inaccurate, so that other users can see they've been marked inaccurate. There's such a mass of stories coming in at a very fast rate — it's nice to know that as quickly as digg can break stories, they can also break follow-up stories that might contain additional information or a follow-up to the original story."

Full interview on ZDNet...

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

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. 

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...

Welcome to the first in a very special series of Web 2.0 interviews I'm conducting on Read/Write Web. My goal is to interview at least half a dozen people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 - i.e. the Web as Platform.

My first guest is Lucas Gonze, creator of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web application Webjay. Lucas was an early developer of P2P applications and back in 2000 he created a peer-to-peer start-up called World OS. Although it subsequently "morphed into a dot-bomb" (in his own words!), it sowed the seeds for his current project Webjay - a P2P music-sharing website that has had plenty of coverage in The New York Times and other media publications. 

It was an absolute pleasure to conduct this email interview with Lucas - I learned a lot about P2P and the "decentralization of taste". So in the immortal words of The Velvet Underground: settle back, pull up your cushions (whatever else you have with you). Here we go...

About World OS

Richard: The World OS website is no longer on the air, but from what I could gather on the Wayback Machine archive of it, you were developing a P2P and decentralized network product called Goa. Can you give me an overview of what you were attempting to build and why - in semi-layman's terms if possible ;-)

Lucas: WorldOS was the company, Goa was the product. WorldOS was similar enough in both goals and technology to Jxta, which it preceded by about a year, that I'd leave the details to documentation on Jxta. In brief this was infrastructure for P2P applications.

Richard: What kind of "P2P applications" was World OS aiming for - music? business files? any and everything? What were the main types of files being distributed (or you wanted to distribute) via World OS and who was your target user?

Lucas: Business files. The idea was that this was a P2P toolkit in the shape of a J2EE component. It was in Java, the interface was almost exactly like a servlet, there was authentication, things like that.

Internet as Platform

Richard: There has been a lot of talk recently about the "Internet as Platform", meaning decentralized web services and the "network effects" that come of that. The lock-in strategy to gain users is based on data and content services, rather than software or operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows. Google, Amazon and Flickr are some notable examples of this theory. Was World OS trying to do a similar thing? I'm interested in why you chose the name "WorldOS"...

Lucas: Google, Amazon and Flickr are only elements of a larger thing with a coherent identity if you zoom way out. At that scale, the internet should, assuming the viewpoint is correct, exist within something like the Gaia hypothesis. The internet OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for the internet. 

The world OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for all information processing entities, not just computers. For example, traffic conditions probably have an impact on internet weather, and so I prefer a view of information ecology that incorporates real world systems like rush hour traffic. 

The operating environment at internet scale is a different kind of animal than an operating system. You don't build it, you observe it, and you don't write to an API, you try to take advantage of your observations. So my software was not ever intended to build an internet OS but rather to work well in the context of the existing internet OS.

Richard: How did World OS fit into this Gaia system?

Lucas: Goa was intended to be radically flexible and lightweight, which seemed to me to be the defining characteristics of successful software in that environment.

How Goa Worked

Richard: Napster was a centralized database P2P service. I admit I have a scratchy knowledge of P2P systems, but didn't decentralized file lists such as Gnutella win out in the end? BitTorrent is the P2P system that I hear most about these days (given I don't specifically follow P2P technologies). Where did World OS fit into all this?

Lucas: WorldOS routed via flooding, which is like Gnutella. However it used preferential flooding, meaning that it used reputation to learn the most likely paths over time.

Richard: Can you give me an example of how this worked in practice?

Lucas: I only have a hypothetical example, since we never managed to sell the software. 

Let's say you have a hundred people in an office and one of them, Michael, wants to get a spreadsheet that his group is working on. The first time he does this his query is sent by flooding. He has two co-workers, Jesse and Brian. Jesse's desktop has a lot of spare capacity, Brian's laptop does not, so during the first flood it is Jesse's machine that returns the query. The next time Michael wants to get a file, Jesse's machine will be tried first, so that the extra cost of sending a message to Brian's machine will be saved.

How Webjay Works

Richard: This question leads on from the previous... You've said on the Webjay website that you don't consider Webjay to be a file sharing network. It seems like a very grey area. I guess I think of it as a link-sharing network that just happens to have media files on the end of each link. But then every time I click on a Webjay link, the media files - mostly songs - are automatically downloaded to my computer (to the 'My Music' folder on my Windows PC). So essentially I'm downloading files, whether I mean to or not. So I'm confused :-) Where does WebJay fit into the 'P2P system ecosystem', in your opinion?

Lucas: Webjay decentralizes taste. This seemed to me to be the next frontier after decentralized network connectivity was fully colonized by the filesharing people, because the decentralization of network connectivity created more centralization of taste, not less. 

The first reason is that you traverse filesharing networks by search -- search-driven navigation relies on memorable identifiers to search for, for an identifier to become memorable requires marketing, and marketing is a tool only available to large centralized entities like major labels. The second reason is that, when demand drives supply as it does on filesharing networks, being known is a condition of becoming more known. The expense to break into this system is currently covered by marketing dollars. 

To decentralize taste I needed to break that cycle. I chose to stick strictly to above ground networks because unauthorized material is cleaned out by DMCA requests and lack of bandwidth for consumer ISP accounts. The more marketing dollars are going into an artist, the more DMCA takedowns are issued and the more downloads there are to blow through upload bandwidth. If a rights holder has a problem with a URL, I don't want the URL, so it's convenient that such rights holders will knock down those URLs for me. Everything I do is out in the open because open networks are, for now, naturally inhospitable to centralized taste.

Development path from World OS to Webjay

Richard: In the Wayback archives, you describe how the World OS project began and how eventually you stopped development on Goa and moved into P2P consulting instead:

"Writing now six months later, while the P2P hype balloon has been growing, the dot-com hype balloon has been shrinking. In that time we grew to eight people, released a steady stream of updates, worked an unbelievable number of hours and talked to more investors than I can count. We had serious deals on the table, but never one with plausible terms.

[...]

We are dropping development of the Goa product and moving full time into P2P consulting."

That's from January 2001. Looking at it now, 3.5 years later, is Webjay a natural progression for you from World OS - i.e. is it on the same developmental path you started down with World OS, a path which has thrown up legal and money obstacles for everyone?

Lucas: At the time the legal issues made a big difference because they scared away investors and customers. My colleagues in other companies doing P2P for business will tell you the same thing -- the RIAA successfully irradiated that turf, at least for a few years.

So what's the developmental path from WorldOS to Webjay?

WorldOS' budget was ridiculous. Webjay is ultra lean -- one guy, me, plus a lot of help from my friends. All it takes for Webjay to exist is a server and my rent money.

WorldOS was all vegetables and no dessert. Webjay has very little delayed gratification, it gets straight to dessert without stopping for dinner. The concept is that, where you normally have to download and listen to songs one by one, with Webjay you do it all with one click. It's about saving clicks.

What about the legal issues that Webjay is designed to finesse? Honestly, if I wanted to go for unauthorized music it would be no problem as long as I was willing to live in an underground style. Put the server in Russia, get a PO Box in Jenin, you're all set. But that's not the point -- authorized (but freely downloadable) music has compelling advantages.

Some P2P History and Decentralization Theory

Lucas: But let's go back a bit, change the question a little, ask things differently, because I have better stories than these to tell. Specifically I want to say how it is that the idea of decentralization is now so common.

It's New Years, 2000. I'm running a little web consulting company and we're doing well. I've got the money to do something else for a while, so I let the main contract lapse without renewal, let the subcontractors go off to fend for themselves, and sit down to do my thing. I'm just fooling around on the code that's going to be Goa, though it's not that well defined. In early March Gnutella appears. I get interested in it as a solution to the problem of ad-hoc discovery. I start working on a clone, in Java, which gets incorporated into the rest of my code. The Napster/Gnutella/Seti@home thing starts to break big. On June 2 I posted an announcement of a pre-alpha Goa release, along with a tarball of source:

"WorldOS is a framework for distributed applications similar to Freenet or Gnutella. The recent announcement of a portal based on Gnutella, Infrasearch, shows that there are a number of useful tools that can be created using this new technology. This framework enables the creation of many more such tools."

I get invited to talk about my related work at an academic conference called Twist 2000, which is at UC Irvine. The UC Irvine guys are mainly W3C affiliates; WebDAV and REST (the thesis, not necessarily the concept) are from there. This is July 2000. About ten days before the conference the P2P term took off via a column by Lee Gomes in the WSJ, so there is now a word.

There's a colloquium on what this new stuff is about. Now, back in those days we were calling this new stuff distributed computing, not decentralized. The question came up: what's the difference between this new thing and DNS? Somebody, I don't remember who, suggested that this new thing was decentralized.

I came home from the conference. To follow up on the conversations there I founded a mailing list called "decentralization" on eGroups, the topic of which was this new stuff. The list became a community center for people interested in peer to peer. It took off with the punditocracy and pretty soon that word become the conventional wisdom as to the value of P2P:

"All this was envisioned by our common teacher, Tim Berners-Lee, who was willing to design a system built on links that can break. This is the key philosophy to decentralization, a lovely term brought to us by Lucas Gonze. Don't wait for the chaos to end, embrace it, move on and do it again. The world will take care of itself."

On the Legal Hassles of P2P

Richard: With Webjay (and I think with World OS too?) you've been careful to avoid any of the legal trouble that plagued the likes of Napster and Kazaa. On the Webjay website you say that Webjay is "specifically crafted for both legality and common courtesy in a crazy environment" and you are at pains to encourage your users to "stick to authorized music". Is this strictly a business decision for you, in that you don't want lawyers to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Or were there other factors in the 'play it safe' strategy? e.g. a moral duty??

Lucas: It's true that I can't afford to go to court. Webjay will be history the instant somebody sues, no matter how stupid and wrong the suit is. Obviously. 

But it's more important that the music I want to promote is music that I can share (whether through a URL or a direct copy). Webjay is ultimately a promotional tool -- it fills the same kind of role as the radio. I don't want to promote unauthorized music because it forces me to choose between the golden rule and the law. I don't listen to unauthorized music, so I need Webjay to find stuff to listen to. 

I don't believe there is a moral duty to stick to authorized music. I do believe that politeness is the only path to a political solution. If somebody wants me to stand on my head while listening to their music, I will either stand on my head or find other music. If somebody wants me to listen to their music, they will have to make it available under terms that I can accept. 

Politeness is a winner tactic. It forces the crappy businessmen in the recording industry to stop hiding behind piracy. It makes the good guys smell serious. It's a dignified way of living. It helps musicians who respect listeners get popular at the expense of musicians who don't. The sole problem with politeness is that the technology and culture to filter up the best music libre is still immature.

The Future of Webjay

Richard: Lastly, what's the future of Webjay do you think? Given your experience with World OS and the lessons you learned from that, where would you like to go with Webjay in the next 2-3 years?

Lucas: Webjay will probably take on new features via spinoff projects, so that I don't break the existing community. The site does need a major makeover for usability and attractiveness; I don't know yet whether I'll call that new version Webjay or something else.

This web app is a beautiful machine. Over the next 2-3 years I will try to make more beautiful machines. I'd really like to make a better living, but that's secondary.

Last week I wrote about some examples of topic-focused blogs, all of which had technology-focused content. Josh Katinger left a comment pointing to his blog about motor racing, called Fast Machines. It didn't look like spam, so I clicked through and discovered that Josh runs a very good topic-focused blog. And guess what - it isn't a techy one! It's geared towards normal people - the phrase I'm using with alarming frequency to mean non-geeks. So I fired off an email to Josh, asking him if he'd answer some questions I had about Fast Machines. He agreed and I'm blogging his response with his permission.

I think Fast Machines is a great example of a topic-focused blog aimed at mainstream people who may not necessarily know what RSS or weblogs are. That's not meant to be condescending, it simply means that blogging is in the very early stages of public adoption. So I was curious how successful Fast Machines has been so far with its target audience and what lessons could be applied by future mainstream content blogs.

Here is a transcript of the email conversation I had with Josh (edited slightly for readibility). My thanks to Josh for taking the time to answer my questions.

Richard: Firstly, congratulations on the design! When did you come up with the idea for this website and did you immediately decide on a weblog format (with RSS feeds, comments, date archives, google ads, etc)?

Josh: Thanks. I worked pretty hard on the design and layout, so flattery will get you everywhere when it comes to that! :) I actually bought the URL FastMachines.com way back in 1999 and was going to put together a news site with a friend of mine. We had a front end design and a custom coded Cold Fusion CMS back end built, but it never really took off. I don't think either of us was really prepared for the amount of work it took to fill the site with content. So, we let the hosting account lapse but I kept the URLs for the heck of it.

Then in early 2003 I started to get into reading a few blogs and really started to understand the power of the blog format and blogging in general. I started a blog on my personal web site (katinger.com) but quickly realized I didn't have a ton of opinions or concerns about anything other than auto racing (sad...I know). So I decided to try a blog that was focused strictly on the topic of auto racing, and focused even further on just a few of the most popular series - in our case NASCAR, F1, IRL, Champ Car, NHRA, and various forms of Sports Car racing.

It was (and is) still a bear to fill all those content buckets with fresh postings and inevitably some of them are neglected. However, the reason this incarnation of the site has been going pretty strong for over a year is probably due to the MovableType blogging software we use to run it. The system was more or less free and makes posting and site management so very easy. The security and ease of use of MT allowed me to enlist the help of other bloggers - including my father, who has been a fantastic source of conversation-rousing entries. I've been working hard to try and get other folks involved and keep the content as lively and fresh as possible. However it is tough when the budget is tight.

As for all of the standard blog features that you mentioned (RSS feeds, comments, date archives, Google ads), I wanted to keep with the standard blog format, for the most part, so that it was still recognizable as a "blog" per-se, but be a little more flexible with the design and layout so that other features can be included in the future (we are planning on a forum, chat room, links directory, newsletter, etc). The one issue I have come up against lately is one that has been plaguing most bloggers and that is content spam. I've used a great plug-in called MT-Blacklist to combat this and it has made dealing with the problem a lot easier.

Richard: As you know, weblogs are still a minority activity. Are you finding that "normal" people (ie people who aren't geeks like me) are signing up to the RSS feeds? The reason I ask is that the so-called "A-List" in the blogosphere are either tech blogs or political blogs. At this point in time, it seems most normal people don't use RSS Aggregators. So I'm curious how successful you've been getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed. I know it's hard to quantify RSS subscribers, but do you have any anecdotal feedback from people on this?

Josh: I don't really have any anecdotal feedback on my RSS feeds. About all I can tell you is that my feeds are featured on the home page of two web sites (that I know of) and that my main feed received 11,577 "views" last month. I think one of the things that has, and will continue to contribute to the growth of people using RSS feeds is the inclusion of RSS Reader functionality in Yahoo!'s My Yahoo service. I experimented with several readers for my own RSS viewing pleasure, but now that it is part of My Yahoo! - a service I already utilized heavily - I have no need to go anywhere else.

The real killer component for site owners is the link you can provide readers that automatically adds your feed to their My Yahoo! interface (see the top of the FastMachines home page, or the footer of any page - there is an "Add to My Yahoo" button). This makes it incredibly easy for anyone with a My Yahoo account to get started with viewing RSS feeds. Once the Windows operating system includes a similar feature there will be no stopping RSS.

Richard: This may be a sensitive question and I certainly don't expect you to give me any figures, but are you making much money from your blog? You've got Google ads, Amazon links, and quite a few other sponsored links. Is it meeting your expectations?

Josh: This is a great question...and certainly one that I would love to ask of many other blog owners. Right now my best source of revenue for the site has come from customized feeds and sponsorships. Google strictly prohibits Adsense users from sharing information about the revenue they receive via the program, but I will tell you that any revenue from something like Google Adsense or affiliate programs has been quite minimal and considered "icing on the cake." The only way I've made money is through providing a service via the site, like a customized feed for a specific e-commerce site that wants some content in conjunction with their product offering.

However, it is important to note that any money I have "made" on the site has been reinvested back into content. The site is not "making" any money month-to-month because I am trying to grow it and revenue is not the goal at this point in time. It costs me money each month. I want to continue growing our readership and the path to achieving that goal (along with grassroots promotion) is to provide something interesting for people to read. Despite some people's assumptions, that does cost money.

This is an article I've submitted to Computerworld NZ. I interviewed Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit for this. Note that the target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry's experiences in E-Government I decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT. So here it is:

<start of article>

RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online publishing - The New York Times and Reuters are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS "feeds". The New Zealand Government began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July 2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit released a document entitled "A standard for the publication of government news summaries", which outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed the document's author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand E-Government Unit.

Publish/Subscribe Component

The document by Hendrikx proposed a 3-part RSS "component" for e-government, made up of:

- RSS news feeds
- News Aggregation
- A Syndication/Subscribe service

This is known as 'publish/subscribe' on the Web and it is one component of the New Zealand E-Government strategy. 

The E-Government Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the Internet should be "the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes" by June 2004. Hendrikx views the publish/subscribe model as "one of a number of ways of making information available" and confirms it is "one of our key goals". As to whether RSS is being used by the Government to distribute information both to the public and internally, Hendrikx asserts that "this model is equally useful for making information available for both public and internal consumption."

A Short History of RSS

The history of RSS comprises a number of competing and at times conflicting versions. It's also a matter of contention as to who invented RSS. Netscape were the first to release something called RSS - which at that time stood for "RDF Site Summary" and was designed for use in portals. It was labelled RSS 0.9 and came to light in March 1999. Netscape went on to release RSS 0.91 in July that same year, re-christening it "Rich Site Summary". This version included features from Dave Winer's <scriptingNews> format.

In December 2000, RSS 1.0 was released by an independent group of developers - it used RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax and focused on modularity and extensibility. It had more in common with RSS 0.90 than RSS 0.91, which was one of the reasons the RSS world forked off into two different directions. Soon after Dave Winer released RSS 0.92, which was a simpler version of RSS that built on RSS 0.91. The most popular version of RSS today is RSS 2.0, which was released by Dave Winer's company Userland in September 2002.

E-Government selects RSS 1.0

When the New Zealand E-Government Unit came around to selecting which RSS format they would use at the end of 2002, they opted for RSS 1.0. Hendrikx explains how they came to that decision:

"We started researching news syndication in late 2002. It was clear to us that we needed an extensible way to add new information to our RSS feeds. The early RSS standards (0.9x) were not extensible. RSS 1.0 was chosen mostly because of its standards based approach and the use of XML namespaces. The fit of RSS 1.0 with DC (Dublin Core) also helped our decision."

In their implementation, the New Zealand E-Government Unit added the Dublin Core-based New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) metadata component, for government specific information. The NZGLS metadata standard is the official New Zealand Government standard for metadata. For example one of the NZGLS tags, <nzgls:type.agency>, specifies the Government agency for each item in the RSS feed.

Currently the New Zealand E-Government has about 20 agencies generating RSS feeds. These are collected and aggregated into two public RSS feeds, which can be found at http://news.portal.govt.nz/. Hendrikx says that "these two feeds differ only by the geographic cover of the content: one contains only country wide news, the other contains all news including regional."

Aggregation and Syndication

The document published in July 2003 focused on the first part of the e-government RSS component, RSS feeds. The next parts, aggregation and syndication, are actually in deployment already says Hendrikx.

"An aggregator was successfully prototyped last year. A production version is now running and produces the two RSS feeds mentioned previously. The output from the aggregator also drives the news content on the Govt.NZ portal (http://www.govt.nz/)."

Hendrikx says that details of the aggregation and syndication features will be published on the E-government site "at an appropriate time to link with upgrades to the portal".

Bringing RSS to The People

In the commercial world, RSS and syndication technologies are familiar to only a small percentage of people. Mainstream IT people have yet to buy into the Publish/Subscribe vision, so there is a need to educate people and evangalise the benefits of publishing in RSS. Hendrikx says that this is true of government agencies too.

"The concept and its benefits are not always immediately obvious and so we've spent time talking to agencies. Some agencies with the in-house technical capability were quick to adopt the system. Other agencies have joined up on a gradual basis as they developed an understanding of the benefits. One agency produced a forms-based client for us to help the smaller agencies generate their RSS content. In the longer term we may roll out a push based technology that allows interested agencies to push their RSS content to our server rather than having to publish RSS on their websites."

The E-Government is one of the early adopters of RSS in New Zealand. Non-government organisations are now starting to consider implementing RSS and syndication technologies too. Hendrikx advises "the advantage of RSS is that it makes content widely available. RSS is fairly easy to implement, as there are plenty of tools available to help you."

Commercial companies might not need the metadata rich feeds that RSS 1.0 enables. It's even easier to use RSS 2.0 to publish news and other regularly updated information. Companies may even want to consider engaging their customers in conversations, by publishing weblogs with RSS feeds. But whichever form of RSS you use, one thing's for sure - the world of RSS and syndication is re-defining how information is published and read on the Web.

Read/Write Web is pleased to bring you this special feature, an interview with software pioneer Marc Canter. Marc is one of the founding fathers of multimedia, having created tools and content in the medium since the late 70's and early 80's. He formed a company called MacroMind in 1984 and released products such as VideoWorks and Director. In 1991 MacroMind merged with 2 other companies to form Macromedia. Marc then left Macromedia to pursue his own interests and during the 90's he launched a series of innovative ventures such as an interactive music video performing ensemble, a cyber theme restaurant called 'MediaBar', and a tv pilot and website called 'The Marc Canter Show'. His current project is a company called Broadband Mechanics, which among other things is developing a 'Digital Lifestyle Aggregator' based on open standards.

This interview was conducted over the course of a week, at first by email and then by phone.

Richard: Marc your education and early years were devoted to music, ranging from opera to blues to electronic music. Then in 1984 you started a software company called MacroMind, which intriguingly you labeled a "software rock and roll band". Can you explain what you meant by that phrase? Were you performing music as well as creating software? How did the two activities mix - performing and software development?

Marc: This statement implied that making software is an art and that we were focused on being the creators of the process. We had hired the Wm. Morris agency to be our agents. The idea was that software companies were publishers and that they needed the talent - which was us. That was the essence.

Now mix in black leather jackets, plenty of great energy, a band concept (of each of us doing a particular role) and a very hot market - which grew into the leading market in the world - and you've got the equivalent of the Beatles in Hamburg in 1962.

Another angle on this is that we were doing creativity tools - which became known as multimedia. We believed (and still do) that it's just as wrong to be an artist as a musician. Those are arbitrary titles, based upon archaic technology - such as violins and paintbrushes. We foresaw multimedia as a new art form to merge the medias together - so you could paint with the violin and make music with the paintbrush.

Richard: I love the analogy of the Beatles circa 1962 - The Silver Beatles! I remember reading about how The Beatles played gigs in Hamburg before they got famous and the crowd was pretty hostile - John would get into fights on stage etc! I'm sure it wasn't that wild for you, but tell us what you got up to in the 80's as "software rock n' rollers".

Marc: Well folks would crowd stand by the side of the stage and wait for me to come down after a speech - but that was about it. We were visual thinking guys. We believed that you had to SEE multimedia to understand it. We once brought this 10,000 lumens Hughes light valve projector into the booth (which required a forklift to get it there!). We'd blast it out so that people could see the best video projection they'd ever seen in their lives! Basically we invented the business of multimedia presentations. We bootstrapped our company by doing kiosks, training disks, rolling loops, production demos. You have to understand that this was all before Powerpoint. We were taking video game technology and applying it to business.

Our tradeshow booths were one of the first booths that people would crowd around and clog up the hallways to see. This is common nowadays, but back then it was a new phenomenon.

But the key thing we did instead of spending our money on glossy ads and playing traditional marketing games, was to throw parties! I stayed out on the road on the trade show and conference circuit and at every show or conference I'd throw a party. These would not start till about 10pm, so it would be the last party after all the other parties. From 6-9pm there'd be the traditional, stuffy reception parties. Then there was our party - beer in the bathtub, chips and candy, smoke filled suite, blaring music, no bartenders! And at our parties we made sure people would see our products working - because they were multimedia products and this very often was the first time people got to see multimedia.

So we took an upbeat partying approach to things. We used to rent cadillacs and go off to other peoples parties in them. We wouldn't allow any marketing scum. We were creative software folks, at a time where there were a lot of staid boring people in the business. We were always the upbeat folks. 

Richard: How many other people were in your circle at this time?

Marc: The industry was a lot smaller then. Probably 1/100th the size. So we focused on the inner cognoscenti. The press, the analysts, the influencers. We'd often talk about dropping a pebble in a pond - to start a Tsunami.

There was a small group of multimedia developers by 1988-89. At conferences, I was on panels with word processor guys, printer utility people, dial-up modem software vendors, Microsoft and Apple folks, and so on - but we were the only graphics people. We saw software as an art form, not a science. At the time, the business press were talking about technical stuff - like the move from the 286 chip to the 386 chip. But I'd be talking about graphics, audio, multimedia, cd-roms, the future - they really dug me.

Richard: I'm interested in the mix of Art and Technology that was a defining feature of your early career. The products you developed, such as SoundVision and VideoWorks, enabled ordinary people to create "art" using computer software programs. It seems like that kind of artistic bent in software products is just coming back into fashion - products like Apple's GarageBand which enables people to record music and Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker which enables people to create home movies. Do you see those sorts of products as being direct descendents of the Art-enabling software that you created 20 years ago? Do these new products live up to what you envisioned?

Marc: Yes, but we've got along way to go. For a number of reasons.

I actually like GarageBand as there's plenty there to steal. Apple has been stealing from us, from Xerox - from anybody they could expropriate from - since their beginning. All of their research into the digital lifestyle world will be used by all of us - moving forward.

And let's not forget that Microsoft is building all this stuff into Longhorn - with people, groups, media and messages all being built-in constructs in the system. Both Apple's iLife and .Mac platforms and Microsoft's Longhorn will bring 'digital lifestyle aggregation' into the mainstream. That's what we'll all be building on top of - five years from now. But nowadays end-users are hopelessly overwhelmed with complex networks to maintain, obscure docs and panel UIs - and in general cannot easily connect all the dots together.

So figuring out the elegant, simple way to do complex things (like author music, videos and slide shows) is what it's all about. And yes - I do claim partial credit for that. But there were lots of us doing it, back in the 80's.

What's been missing, and still is, is a way for average lay people to control and author multimedia. With digital cameras exceeding the sale of analog/optical cameras and with the rise of cam phones, there's only one way to go with all this - and it's FORWARD!

As we move down the pyramid of target customers, these tools will merge with the web page, portal and web services and become what I call "the new paradigm of tools". These new kind of tools will be designed for groups of people, take advantage of many web-based technologies and services, and achieve much of what we've been dreaming about for over 20 years.

Richard: We live in a consumer culture - television, movie stars, MTV, etc. But in the early 21st century there are signs that, thanks to computer technology, we're about to break through into a more creative culture where everyday people produce media as well as consume it. Weblogs are a good example of this new culture, because they allow normal people to publish to the Web. But this creative culture is something you've been pushing for a long time, since before the Web and maybe even before PC's! I'm interested to know what it was like trying to convince people in the 70's and 80's to use technology to create as well as consume. How far have we come in regards to enabling normal people (i.e. non-geeks) to create their own art, music, writing, etc?

Marc: The phrase that Seb Paquet uses is "personal publishing", which is the best way to describe it. Jonathan Peterson has a column in Corante called Amateur -which also focuses in on this phenomenon.

What can I say - it's my life's goal. Or at least one of them! I was raised thinking of computers as something that could turn 100 synthesizer knobs at the same time. Artists and musicians have embraced digital technology since its inception. All we did at MacroMind was tap into the untold wealth of creativity and excitement that people find when they mouse their way through pixels and dive into sound bytes.

It was a bitch [in the 70's and 80's]. Most people thought I was nuts. They couldn't complain about the long-term goal, but the question was: how do we get there?

Well Macromedia was the first step, Broadband Mechanics the second. I suspect that I'll be doing The Marc Canter Show - once I'm 'done' with Broadband Mechanics - and archiving that until my death.

I remember sitting on panels trying to describe the future to a room of IT people or Japanese hardware engineers. It was hilarious sometimes. But no matter what, there'd ALWAYS be at least 3 or 5 people who would grok it and come up to me after - totally jazzed. I met some of those people again during the 90's. They often came up to me and said something like: "I remember seeing you speak at a panel in 1985 - it changed my life." THAT's what it's all about! I can't do it by myself, so early on I learned the power of being able to proselytize. I learned from Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki - but I wasn't pushing some limited vendor's vision. I emphasized that everyone out there will grok this in their own way - contribute as they may. That's at the essence of all this.

Richard: You mentioned [on the phone to me] that people nowadays are able to assume that multimedia is part of their lives - computers, mobile phone pics, i-pod, etc. Can you give me an example from the 80's of how people couldn't assume that technology was part of their lives back then, of how alien this type of software was to 'normal' people.

Marc: When we gave a demo, we would rate the level of the demo by how many trips out to the car it took - because no one had any equipment. So if I wanted to show someone a demo of our software, I had to usually have at least two trips out to the car - monitor and power cables in a box in one trip; the computer hard drive and some more boxes of stuff in the second trip. If you had anything fancy, like a scanner or studio things, then it would be 3-4 trips out to the car! No one had a Mac II then. Nowadays you just use a browser, or pop a CD-ROM into a PC - but back then it wasn't that easy just to attach a hard drive, so most of the time we had to bring a computer with the hard drive.

Richard: Can you tell me some stories of what it was like in the software business in the 80's, before the Internet and the Web took off in the 90's?

Marc: We did some interactive adverts for Microsoft around 1985. Picture this: a bicycle rider scrolling across your screen and he's pulling a Microsoft Works spanner - really crude, low resolution art work. We achieved this cheap Disney effect of the bike going in one direction and the street scrolling in another direction. We only had 128k memory to play with, but we were using techniques from the video game industry. These adverts played in a "rolling kiosk" from 1985. Because Microsoft was competing with Apple, our advert got played in every single Macintosh store around the world. This all shipped on a 400k floppy disk - the whole thing, including the player and all the graphics. We actually made more money doing demos than selling the software!

Every Macintosh from 1986 shipped with our code on it - it was like a training disk, that showed you how to use the Macintosh. We're the guys who helped invent animated tutorials, animated multimedia presentations - and that's how we bootstrapped the company. That was completely new - all these ad agencies and designer types then got in the business of doing these demos. When VideoWorks came along, there was a whole new world of people being able to create animated presentations and training disks - which led to the so-called multimedia content market. Every time I'd go do a demo or a speech somewhere, I'd bring a couple of cases of software and I'd sell it at the back of the room. This was when mail order was a minority activity. 

Richard: Was this in Silicon Valley?

Marc: I was traveling all over the world. I'll paint you a picture of what it was like then. During the 80's there was a debate going on about the merits of GUI's (graphical user interfaces) vs command line interfaces. Even up to the release of Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, there were still people arguing about it. In 1985-86, GUI's were considered a complete joke. In 1987-88 people started to consider GUI's more seriously, with the release of the Mac II and Microsoft announcing Windows. In 1989 the tide had turned and by 1990-91 it was exactly the opposite - by then those who argued for command line interfaces were considered weirdoes! So throughout that era I was giving speeches completely representing the GUI side of the argument. Not only was I winning the multimedia argument, I was winning the GUI argument - and a lot of it came to fruition, came to pass, by the end of the 80's.

Richard: You're famous for inventing tools for creating interactive content. Yet content has always been as important to you, if not more so, than the tools. I've read that one of the reasons you left Macromedia in 1991 was because Macromedia showed no interest in entering the content market. They just wanted to make the tools. Fast forward now to 2004 and "aggregation" tools and services seem to be all the rage - the obvious example is RSS Aggregators, but if you think about it companies like Google and Yahoo are essentially content aggregators. One could also extend the analogy to social software - e.g. Orkut could be viewed as a "people aggregator". Was content aggregation the type of thing you wanted Macromedia to tackle back in the early 90's? Did they miss the boat in regards to content?

Marc: Macromedia misses the boat on so much - it's pathetic. But that's what happens when you have caretakers who take over a company. There's no innovation going on there and that's what hurting them the most.

It's funny - do you know/realize that we have an open source product called the PeopleAggregator.com or did you just dream up that line? [Richard: I did just dream up the line, as I'd forgotten Marc had a product called PeopleAggregator. But maybe it was in my subconscious!]

Two ways to answer this..........

a) The evolution of tools has brought us to the point where the entire business models are changing and the essence of what tools are has shifted from something a professional uses, to something everyone will need to know how to use. A key part of that is the amateur stuff we alluded to earlier. Everyone takes photos, corresponds, has vacation videos, baby pictures and albums - the list goes on and on. So the content in our lives will get treated like content from Hollywood, World news, sports, etc. Disseminating this, making it easy to author and store, indexing it, applying knowledge management techniques to humans - is all part of it. New kinds of tools.

b) The other way to answer this is to state the three underlying principles which I use moving forward - when designing 'digital lifestyle aggregators', which is what my company intends on being a leader of:

Integration, Aggregation and Customization.

It's these three components, approaches, tenets, attitudes that will govern us - moving forward - when designing DLA's.

There's also a metaphor I used in the early to mid 90's = "San Luis Obispo". Hollywood and Silicon Valley represent the #1 and #2 biggest exports the U.S. has. Major, major, major revenues and means of influence. It's modern day imperialism - own their minds and their pocketbooks will follow. Both industries talk a lot of shit about convergence and the future, but in fact spend little time actually trying to understand each other. The proof is in the pudding. Ever wonder why they both keep fucking up so bad? 

The guy in charge of strategic technology in Hollywood is some lawyer who wrote the convergent business plan, has a laptop and an AOL account. He's the techy, the nerdy Hollywood exec. In Silicon Valley they wouldn't know quality content if you hit them over the head with it. They use their brother-in-law for jingles, creative issues and 'content'. The C word is what they allude to up here.

So both those worlds are full of shit. They know doodley about anything besides their own business. So I say they both need to get off their high horses and head to San Luis Obispo - approximately halfway between the two. They're both wrong, let's get on with it. But it's new - it's not Silicon Valley OR Hollywood.

Richard: In the software world, there's always a trade-off between what content or functionality people would like and actually having the infrastructure or tools to make it reality. Interactive TV is perhaps the classic example, where we dream of being able to personalize television and interact with it. In your experience, do you feel we're getting closer to fulfilling the dream of interactive multimedia (not just TV), or are the infrastructure challenges just as hard now as they were in the 80's and early 90's?

Marc: They're certainly just as hard - but infrastructure isn't the only challenge we face! We gotta change our attitude towards how we foist new technology on people!

We still think that each new generation of technology will somehow magically solve people's problems. But as we know - new behavior patterns are adopted ONLY when the technology proves itself - so there's a vicious catch-22 going on. American Idol taught Americans what SMS is all about. And Janet Jackson's tits that got folks grokking TiVO! 

And it's about people. The smart ones retire when they get rich, because it's a hell of a business to try and stay in. So I find we're constantly having to educate execs as to what's up - so that they can make the right decisions.

But I'd be really cynical to say we haven't made progress. You learn from your past mistakes - and I certainly have - so I've learnt how to pitch this stuff better nowadays. How to round up the right group of folks - who can play that old school game, suck up to those execs and still achieve progress!

This has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with white males. As the infrastructure and technology becomes more and more of a commodity and the vested interests of these white males line up with the needs and goals of Interactive media (read: greed) - then it'll happen. It has to happen.

It'll be decentralized - but made up of hybrid, meta networks - that still rely upon centralized servers. It'll be open source and new, yet it will always have some degree of proprietary-ness - how else does someone make a buck? It'll be a model where amateur stuff (like Hot or Not and VoyeurWeb) can sit along side Hollywood stuff.

But MOST importantly it's something that enterprise and government/education adopts, because that's the only way we'll achieve REAL critical mass and lower the costs of the infrastructure - so that EVERYONE has broadband and that huge mega terabyte servers are in everyone's homes.

Richard: Your current main project is a company called Broadband Mechanics, which I understand is built on open standards. I've read you discussing various products - WebOutliner, Digital Lifestyle Aggregator, Sweet Suite, Hubbie. Can you tell us which one specific product you're most excited about and when it will be released to the public?

Marc: I've been working for both my company and the open source world to help establish open standards like FOAF, and new standards for OpenReviews, OpenEvents and ThreadsML. You could even imagine standards called OpenRecipes, OpenResumes and a People's DNS. 

The current memes are: 

- PeopleAggregator.com - open source social network built upon FOAF
- WebOutliner.com - still working out the kinks. It's an open source online outliner.
- Digital Lifestyle Aggregator = the future
- Activity based computing - the future after that
- New kinds of tools

Ziff-Davis will be releasing a DLA I designed for them, under the name 1Up.com, around E3 time - May 2004. It'll be the first example of what the hell it is I've been talking about. If you'd have asked me in the past about this, I would have told you that if we didn't launch one of these things by 'Dec. '99 it was all over. But here we are spring '04 and we've barely begun.

Oh and let's not forget scalable content, multimedia personalization and rich media platforms. Laszlo Systems has the rich media platform.

Richard: In this era of software design, there are so many very smart developers out on the Web. Look at the number of things that people have developed off their own bat - e.g. Phil Pearson's Topic Exchange, Paolo and Matt's K-Collector, Kimbro Straken's Syncato, Dave Sifry's Technorati - the list goes on and I haven't even mentioned all the Mozilla projects being developed! But I often wonder if what the Web needs more of are people who can produce and manage all these new software projects. People who can bring together a group of individuals, provide a vision, and lead and co-ordinate them to create something out-of-this-world. You seem to be one of the few people who have managed to do this over the years (Mitch Kapor is another one who comes to mind). What advice can you give to Web people who may not be programmers, but want to help create visionary new software? What sort of attributes does the next Marc Canter or the next Mitch Kapor need to develop successful Web products and services?

Marc: Thank-you. I agree that there's an incredible lack of leadership and vision, when it comes to leaders in the open source world. It seems like many are afraid to step up because they may come off looking like idiots, savants, greedy capitalists or some other weird form of "marketing guy". Both Mitch and I had cred before this era - so it's easy for us to morph.

To help establish open standards: I blog, give speeches, mouth off in public and in general try to fill in some of the vacuum surrounding open source leadership. I'm fortunate to have sponsors/clients like Tribe.net, Laszlo Systems and the AlwaysOn Network to help keep me and my family alive while we build the next big thing. I'm someone who has been blessed with being able to help make the world a better place. And I'm not done yet.

As far as where the new ones are coming from or what they have to do, I'd say "believe in the mesh" - the matrix (not the Ashcroft version of the matrix or the movie.) A world of inter-locking components, modules, and standalone platforms that utilize open standards and formats to deliver compelling experiences to end-users.

Face it, most end-users are not nerds - and there's no way in hell these folks are going to get everything working together. But as long as software people only produce small, isolated modules, features of standalone whatever-the-hells - we'll never get there.

So it's ALL about inter-connecting, integrating, aggregating and providing appropriate levels of customization.

Richard: Thanks Marc for your time, I really appreciate it!

This interview was conducted by Richard MacManus, between 21-29 March 2004.