ReadWriteWeb

I love reading old books about the Web and Internet. I'm in the middle of Stewart Brand's classic book from the 80's, The Media Lab, right now. Anyway I came across this 2001 web article from devx called The Future of Web Apps and Services, on the subject of Futurist Paul Saffo's predictions for the Web. There's no exact date on it, but I believe it's from Dec 2001. OK, nearly 4 years ago doesn't count as that historical. But given that this was before RSS was popularised and before Web 2.0 was coined, plus it was right in the middle of the dot com burnout, it's an interesting read.

Saffo said this:

"Saffo sees the information evolution of the last 50 years as follows: In the 1950s, the emerging technology was television; the medium was broadcast. In the 1980s, the technology was time-sharing; the medium was e-mail. In the '90s, the technology was (and is) client-server; the medium was (and is) the Web. At the dawn of the 21st century, Saffo sees the emerging technology as peer-to-peer, with the medium in the form of applications such as Napster, Morpheus, and Grokster.

"It won't be long at all until Web services are simply automatic, done by machines - very little actually programmed by humans," he said. "You set your Napster-like app, and it will find all the music and books you like. You'll be able to let applications do your research for you. Just put your preferences in, and away you go."

Two things struck me about those predictions:

1) his usage of the term 'peer-to-peer' and talking about the hip products of that time (Napster, Morpheus, and Grokster). This is very much like us in 2005 talking about Web 2.0 and Google, Flickr, delicious.

2) the automatic web services bit - automation of course has long been a dream/goal for computing and the Internet. But what Saffo described is happening right now with RSS feeds (for books and other retail data) and tools like PubSub (future search). His "Napster-like app" is our RSS Aggregator.

Another Saffo observation:

"In the future, we won't be purchasing automobiles, we'll be subscribing to them. Because cars are becoming more software-dependent each year, with pay-by-the-month geo-positioning systems, in-dash e-mail, "smart" information systems, and such, we won't be buying a car so much as subscribing to services that will run the car for us. It's like Microsoft; you don't buy their software as much as you're subscribing to all its successive versions."

Ha, I'd never really thought as far ahead as subscribing to a car - but if you think about it, that's the evolutionary path we're on.

Sometimes it pays to look to the past to see how some things stay the same (peer-to-peer then, web 2.0 now), enlighten us about what we've achieved so far (automation with RSS) and remind us where we're headed (subscribing to cars).

I've been one of the beta testers of a brilliant new blog news service over the past 2-3 months - and today it's gone live. tech.memeorandum is the brainchild of Gabe Rivera. It basically aggregates all the latest news from blogs on one page - but it's more than that. It's an automated, constantly-updated, finger on the pulse of the tech blogosphere.

How it works: the more people that link to a blog post, the bigger the headline. The biggest and most recent headlines are at the top of the page, but move down as newer popular stories emerge to take their place. Below the original source of each story are links to other bloggers who have linked to it. But the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won't do.

All in all, it's like a hybrid of populicio.us and the New York Times!

It's almost entirely automated too, which amazed me when I found out - because the quality of the posts and stories that it uncovers is top notch. As is the connecting together of all relevant links, which Gabe has an excellent phrase for: "relate the conversation". I've been using this new version of memeorandum as my prime source of breaking blog news for the past couple of months. It's so quick to scan and find out what's hot in the tech blogosphere.

Congrats to Gabe, he's done a wonderful job building this. My bet is that mainstream news media organizations will be beating a path to Gabe's door to either invest in it or license the software.

Robert Scoble has more details, plus Gabe himself has written a few posts about his announcement. Oh and there is a politics version of the new memeorandum too.

Congrats again Gabe, this is an outstanding example of a Web 2.0 media product.

James MacAonghus from Aqute is writing a series of posts analysing BBC Online, which I highly recommend you check out. In Part 1 James wrote that BBC's online reach has been steadily growing. In Part 2 he drills down into the details. Although BBC has more than one online strategy, "a pattern is emerging" according to James. He wrote:

"The BBC is beginning to leverage, in some ways clumsily, in other ways brilliantly, the aspects of the internet that make it into a development platform, namely user-generated content, and content APIs."

I liked the way James identified different scales of online business:

"1. Leading global brand - Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.
2. Second-tier global brand - News Corp, BBC, Bertelsmann.
3. Leading national brand - Naver, Baidu, T-Online, Terra.
4. Second-tier national brand - Thus, WH Smith, Thomas Cook."

By "national", he is referring to Britain - but this categorization could easily be extended to any country.

The problem for BBC, says James, is that online "it is a second-tier global brand, which is unacceptable." The answer? Of course it's "to buy into the concept of leveraged expansion that is web 2.0."

The nub of James' excellent analysis is this:

"The BBC is opting to provide widespread access to its content as part of a platform strategy. To grow, the BBC needs radically different ways of attracting users."

But go and read the whole thing (especially Part 2) - it's well worth your time. In a follow-up post, James quotes from a speech by Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, on the importance of the Internet to the BBC.

Another thought-provoking blog post this week was Matt McAlister's A Web 2.0 business model for publishers. This is not unrelated to the BBC Online strategies that James wrote about (indeed Matt even cites BBC Backstage). Matt wrote:

"Every publisher has 2 primary assets: audience and content. The more valuable of the two is the audience, so you have to be more careful with that piece. But the content is something you can exploit in this new world in some interesting ways that shouldn't be too scary."

Matt works at Yahoo, which is my pick for the most interesting 'new media' company in the world today (I think BBC is right up there too, as you might've surmised). Of course I'm biased towards Web companies, but hey even Rupert Murdoch likes the Web these days.

Interesting podcast conversation today between Steve Gillmor and Rafat Ali (of paidcontent.org). Steve labelled paidcontent.org "an emerging force in the new media" and this theme was explored during the podcast. My ears pricked up when Steve talked about blogs like Om Malik's, John Battelle's and Engadget becoming media properties in their own rights. No mention of MacManus' Youngbloods this time, but I'll let it slide ;-) Rafat said he thought Om Malik's weblog "has become the hub of Silicon Valley".

Rafat went on to say that some bloggers are media companies because they cover the niches that mainstream media (MSM) aren't looking at. PaidContent.org is a good example - its beat is digital media and it does a better job than most MSM of reporting it. But the thing I found most intriguing is that it doesn't stop there. The PaidContent.org's of this world are in turn getting trumped, by what Rafat calls "Super Niches". For example, a blogger that focuses on one particular part of digital media (because digital media is in itself a fairly broad topic, as Rafat admitted). Or a blogger that takes a single gadget as their niche and drills down much further than Engadget is able to do. Another example increasingly common: bloggers that focus on a single company.

Steve has a concept called a "new newspaper" (if I heard it correctly), by which I think he means that a person can select a variety of super niche bloggers to cover all of the topics they're interested in reading on a daily basis. As Steve pointed out, what we as readers look for is authoritative voices that give us unique perspectives (or views) of general news and information that flows into the system.

Bloggers drive trends, MSM ratifies them - as Steve said. Rafat seconded that by saying that MSM journalists nowadays tend to get their leads from blogs.

I want to finish by saying that none of this is meant as an attack or slight on MSM. Look at the work the BBC has been doing over the past year in using the Web as a platform for news media - they're ahead of the curve. And to take up Rafat's earlier point - the little dogs may be eating some of the big dogs lunch, but there are even smaller dogs yapping at the heels of the little dogs. No doubt Super-Super Niche Bloggers will soon become popular too - e.g. blogging about a specific division within a single company (I'm sure this is happening already).

The main takeaway I took from this thought-provoking podcast is that anyone can be a media company these days. I myself have done pretty well by focusing on 'Web 2.0'. One thing I do urge people to do though is that if you're going to focus on a niche, build value on top of it. Analyse, contribute ideas, drill down, drive trends. Be a hub, be your own media brand.

And of course MSM media should leverage all of these niche hubs. They're already doing it in a way, by hunting news and opinions from bloggers. Some like the BBC are doing it by inviting the public in to remix and develop media based on their content. Some are also hiring bloggers. Everybody wins.

I do love the Web.

This from Sir Robert Scoble:

"Watch for more business deals and from places you wouldn't expect them. I'm hearing from several of my friends, for instance, that AOL is looking for media properties blogging networks."

Interesting... I wonder if AOL read my Network of Niches post - I know some MSN folks did ;-) That post, and the one before it, caught the attention of a few Blog Network owners who pinged me afterwards. I won't lie to you - I'm hoping one of them signs me up, pronto.

You see, I finish at my day job on 24 August and I'm fishing for some blog writing work. I want to do some paid blogging to complement the analysis/research work I'm already doing.

If you'd like to hire a smart, focused, analytical Web 2.0/RSS/Social Media dude for your blog network - send me an email.

This offer won't last - someone is sure to snap me up very soon in this blog network bubble ;-)

IBM's new 'SoulPad' is a virtual computer on a small portable storage device, like a USB key or an MP3 Player. According to IBM, SoulPad "enables a paradigm of mobile computing where a user can suspend his computing environment on one PC and resume it on another PC that he may have never seen before."

New Scientist takes the slightly creepy soul metaphor even further:

"The virtual computer's "soul" - as the researchers dub it - can then be uploaded to a new PC simply by plugging the portable device in. This host machine needs no special software or even a network connection to take on an entirely new personality."

My take: SoulWeb not far off

I can easily envisage a time in the future when we will not require a physical device to store one's computer "soul". I suggest that before long, you will be able to store all of your personal data on the Web. The IBM SoulPad is just an intermediary step towards a SoulWeb. Because why would we need a small mobile device when we can store everything on the Web?

I've been having a very interesting, sci-fi powered, email discussion with someone on this theme (before I heard about the SoulPad). My correspondent contends that we'll always need a physical device to store what he terms the "trust wall" of our data. My contention is that in future there will be no logical reason why even very personal data can't be stored on the Web, provided security and privacy implications have been solved by that point (admittedly that's a 'big if' looking at it with 2005 eyes).

Any fellow SF-minded Webheads out there with an opinion on this?

A Network of Niches is a group of niche bloggers, each with their own unique look n' feel but collectively part of a branded network of like minds. This could be the way forward for a big company like Yahoo or AOL to roll out their blog networks, at the same time giving hope to niche bloggers who write original and compelling content.

Following on from my post entitled Gettin' Paid: A Future for Content Creators? Redux, I noticed (via Darren Rowse) that Yahoo already has a beta blog service running. Yahoo's Health Expert Blogs is not disimilar to what weblogsinc and Gawker do - blog about a certain topic under a business brand. Indeed there are signs that Yahoo is about to launch a Technology blog network.

However it's not at the level of what I had in mind in my Gettin' Paid post. I am envisaging a network of independent experts, each with their own unique brand. This may be a pipe dream of mine, but I still hold out hope that Yahoo or perhaps AOL (with Feedster's help) will implement what I dream of. btw Yahoo and AOL, I'm available for consulting work to help you do that! ;-)

Yahoo's Health Expert Blogs are certainly one step ahead of Microsoft's Filter network. The fact that Yahoo names its bloggers, and indeed centers each blog around the expert that writes it, is fantastic. e.g. Rodney Yee's Yoga blog has some great writing in it. All it needs though is some unique branding and design to bring out Rodney's personality even more. The design of the Yahoo Health blogs is bland and doesn't do justice to the 'voice' of the blogger. That's why I'm pushing a vision of independently branded bloggers, yet still identifiable as part of a network of bloggers who write about a defined topic.

A note about the terms I'm using: each topic has a number of niches. There is 1 blogger per niche but, for example, 10 bloggers per topic. So there is real potential for a Yahoo or an AOL to collect together groups of like minds ("experts") and get the best of both worlds - independence and network effects.

Yahoo or AOL (or another bigco) should let the bloggers keep the unique brands they've built up, but fold groups of them under their wing as blog networks - and pay them! The bigco's benefit by gathering experts into networks and promoting them on their homepages. And they get great content :-)

If I had to come up with a term for this - it'd be a Network of Niches. Which I define as: a group of niche bloggers, each with their own unique look n' feel but collectively part of a branded network of like minds.

Remember my post last year entitled Gettin' Paid: A Future for Content Creators?. In it I passionately made the case that there is a future for niche writers to make a living on the Web. Well there are signs that it may yet happen...

Microsoft has just started a network of blogs called Filter. The blogs in Filter are fairly bland and the writers are not revealed. Indeed it makes a big noise about the content being largely generated by the readers and the "bloggers" job is to filter it: "...our team of bloggers will filter the best stories, photographs, links and other interesting tidbits that you've sent in, as well as items that they've dug up."

Before you ask, NO the Microsoft Filter network is not my idea of content creators gettin' paid for their writing. Read on...

Interestingly, Jason Calacanis has put a positive spin on this 'blog network' competition from Microsoft. Jason wrote:

"Now, Iím thrilled MSN is in the game because at some point soon Iím sure they will make these Filter sites and/or Start.com the default homepage for tens of millions of MSN/IE users. [...] Having these big players move blogs to the top level will be huge for blogging."

I'm pleased Jason is being optimistic about it. I am too. Jason asked his readers for their opinions on which one of the big four will put blogs on the front page first: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Microsoft, or AOL?

I can tell you who it definitely *won't* be - Google.

My money's on Yahoo and AOL. Indeed I have hopes that both of them will fulfil my dreams of getting paid for my writing, by opening up and inviting truly independent content creators into their fold.

Microsoft's Filter network is a pretty bland, nameless lot of bloggers. Weblogs inc and Gawker are kind of inbetween Microsoft and where I want Yahoo and AOL to be. The personality of Jason's and Nick's bloggers shine through, but they do their thing under the weblogs inc and gawker umbrellas - instead of being their own unique Brands. Which is what I'm trying to be here at Read/Write Web ;-)

Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with Jason's or any of these approaches - just that I'm hoping one of the big players decides to truly open up their network to small unique brands.

Interestingly, new Yahoo hire Matt McAlister (ex-IDG) has been writing some thought-provoking posts along these lines. He wrote recently:

"I wish somebody would launch a media brand that covered the Internet business for people in the Internet business. I've bet my career on this industry, and it would be really nice if there was a brand that stood independently in the middle of it, reported on it with intelligence and depth and integrity, and helped facilitate dialog amongst us all."

I'm still trying to grok where Matt is coming from - but I bet you it has something to do with this current discussion of network blogs and what Yahoo has planned in that regard. In a follow-up post Matt wrote:

"What's missing is that independent voice, the insightful mind with a view from outside who can identify the right people to listen to and the right trends to pay attention to and the right companies to learn from."

Well, there's no shortage of independent and insightful voices out in the blogosphere! Whether Yahoo hires them, or brings them under their wing in a 'blog network', or some other approach - remains to be seen.

Could this be the rise of small, niche content creators gettin' paid for what we love doing? I sure hope so!

Now that I'm part of the new Silicon Valley Watcher network, reporting on RSS, I've got to thinking about how I fit into this new world of blog-journalism. Here's the beginnings of my theory on this...

Back in the 70's Tom Wolfe coined a style of news writing called New Journalism, which was very influential for me growing up. Although I never did formally train to be a journalist, I always identified with Wolfe as a writer. The title of this post, btw, is a result of combining the name of Tom Wolfe's manifesto and the title of Michael Lewis' classic 90's Internet non-fiction book: The New New Thing. Witty huh? :-) Lewis is another of my favourite authors, btw.

So I've been reading a lot of great stuff on the Web about how journalists are adapting to the New Media world of the Web, in particular how they are adjusting to bloggers and blogging technologies. This post I'm writing, off-the-cuff, approaches the topic from the other side: a blogger adapting to the world of journalism. I'm just a blogger, yet I'm now doing reporting on Silicon Valley Watcher with my new colleagues who are 'real journalists' (my phrase).

Here's the piece of insight I was searching for, in pondering this post: Specialization will come via niche, not skill. Terry Heaton wrote that in the comments section of Jay Rosen's blog - note that both come from the world of journalism.

Terry's practical point was that journalists need to be "multimedia skilled" these days. I imagine in the same way that so-called 'Generation M' (or 'C') are "media multitaskers", to quote a recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The main point though is that being a Specialist in the 21st century is increasingly about focusing on a niche - moreso than having specialist skills, such as (for example) reporting and editing. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying specialist skills aren't still important. Obviously they are. But I do think that specialist skills will no longer be the key differentiators in 21st century journalism.

What will make quality journalism stand out in this century is the specialist knowledge that the reporter/writer brings to it - which includes being close to the news source (ideally being what we in the IT industry call a 'user') and being able to drill deeper than someone outside that niche can do.

Of course being multi-skilled means to be skilled in reporting and editing - as well. But it's no longer enough *just* to have those skills. Those people who focus on a niche will be able to build up a deeper, and hence potentially more valuable, store of knowledge than those who skim across dozens of niches.

Having said that, Michael Lewis (the author I mentioned above) is a great example of someone who is able to insert him or herself into a niche topic for a period of time and come out with a compelling story. So there is still room for a highly skilled reporter/writer to inject themselves into a variety of niche situations and report on them as well as - or better than - people already in those niches. I can't imagine anyone else writing a better and more insightful story about baseball than what Micheal Lewis did in 2003.

So in some cases specialist skills (reporting and writing in Lewis' case) are more important than specializing in a niche. I wonder whether that will be the norm in this century though, as it was in the last? I don't think it will.

This is all forward-looking for blogs and journalism in the 21st century. Sometimes though it pays to look back to the Good Old Days. When thinking about what makes a good journalist, I like this traditional (romantic?) definition:

Well apart from reveling in corruption, crime and gore - that describes me, on my Web 2.0 and RSS beat. Perhaps I will get to revel in gore when the next phase of the RSS Format Wars hits. :-)

I suspect this is just the start of an ongoing series of posts on this topic, by this reporter. I haven't finished my train of thought and I will probably change my mind later... but in the new new tradition of blogging, I'll post what I have now and see who continues the conversation.

NB: Just discovered some author has already used the term "The New New Journalism". Oh well, nothing is ever new in this world... ;-)

If Information Flow can be likened to a river, then lately I've only had time to occasionally splash water on my face as refreshment. Which is to say, I've been dipping in and out of the Information Flow that is my Bloglines account.

This is the reason why the daily Web 2.0 News feature I started last week has since escaped my grasp and quietly floated away downstream... my current workload prevents me from scooping up enough Web 2.0 water to deposit daily into my main blog bucket, to quench the thirst of my readers. But don't worry, the tap that is my del.icio.us account continues to have glorious Web 2.0 H2O pumped into it, so that it may be used for my weekly Web 2.0 Wrap-Up splash-around. And I may start squirting items of Web 2.0 news at you, as stand-alone posts (if I can restrain myself from babbling on, like I'm doing now).

You might surmise from all this that I haven't had time to go for any decent swims in the Blog River? While that's true, I have been paddling around in two large eddies of memes. One was the latest speech by Associated Press CEO Tom Curley, in which he expounded on his brilliant 'containers' theory. The other is a series of posts by Seth Goldstein - about Internet alchemy, algorithms, APIs and automata.

(ok, enough with the river / water metaphor)

AP and The Future of News

I'm still absorbing the Curley speech, but here are some highlights:

...and he follows up by saying nobody is in control now, except for the users. I have much more to write about Curley's speech, but I'll save it for another post(s).

The Future of Internet Content

Seth Goldstein's series of posts about "Media Futures" is stunning. Here are some tasty extracts:

From Automata: "When you aggregate all of these individual reading and writing agents, it looks more like a landscape of cellular automata than a tradition publishing model."

--> his point being that next-generation Internet content will be much like cellular automata - "dynamic, member-generated, and excitable".

From Alchemy: "...how we describe something is in itself an act of creation, beyond simply representing some external object."

Goldstein goes on to identify some Internet alchemists and "alchemical moments in the history of the World Wide Web". He riffs beautifully on Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us, Marc Andreesen's web browser, Yang and Filo's Yahoo, Bezos' Amazon, Omidyar's eBay, and Page and Brin's "simple search box".

Summary

If you have any interest in the future of the Web - and I presume that you do if you read my blog ;-) - then go check out Curley's latest speech and Goldstein's inspired writing. I'll follow-up with some thoughts of my own, when I get a chance to dive back into the river and have a decent swim ;-)