Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.

Saad: I think that there is certainly an opportunity for new types of data capture through these sorts of plugins - and if transformed into something useful like APML it can certainly be used for personalizing all sorts of things, including ads. The difference in this iteration of the web, however, is that the user will and must be in control. They will have visibility and utility from the resulting data acquisition.

RWW responds: Saad can't disclose too many specifics here and perhaps it's not in the company's interests to disclose any at all. APML seems like a non-starter at this point, but we'd like to see things like recommendations, pattern detection, benchmarks and time-based analysis of conversation around content.

RWW:How does your engagement with JS-Kit jive with your work on data portability? Isn't off-site discussion hosting the opposite of user (in this case publisher) control over data?

Saad: JS-Kit is unique in that it does not have a destination site so it does not host discussion off site. In fact, the commenting widget specifically syncs all comments back to the base CMS platform so that the publisher can uninstall at any time and not lose any of their comment data.

Also JS-Kit's social plug-ins make it possible for all sites to become social, making 'social networking' a feature of any application a user visits. The question now is how do these sites and applications, as well as other technologies, inter-operate for a web-wide data portability enabled social network?

RWW: How is that different from the recently acquired IntenseDebate or Disqus?

Saad: Both are great companies doing great things; the question is scale, pace and sustainability. The sustainability piece is important too - the fact that JS-Kit is nailing big commercial accounts is very important. Evite, Worldnow, Jetblue, Sun etc.

JS-kit has 550,000 sites, 20 people and has revenue (and now lots more capital). Don't forget breadth of product line also - JS-kit does comments AND ratings and Polls etc. It's well known that ratings are used 5x more than comments on sites.

RWW:One of the biggest critiques the data portability has faced is around "usability," clarity of value proposition and ease of implementation. JS-Kit seems fabulously usable, but we haven't seen much of the deeper possibilities emerge from it yet. What do you think the data portability community can teach the publishing community and what do you think JS-Kit in particular can demonstrate to other vendors?

Saad: I think that proprietary forms of data portability such as Facebook's app platform have been very usable (if not lacking utility). The trick is to achieve the same easy user experience on a web-side platform. As you rightly point out, JS-Kit's widgets are very usable - look for deeper possibilities emerging in the coming months. I think that JS-Kit has a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate data portability principles to publishers and other widget vendors as well. With the scale of JS-Kit we are no longer talking about starting from zero.

RWW: We're excited to see what all the vendors in this space can do. We hope to see developments coming from a data-driven strategy that places a premium on innovation and data portability. The first player in this sector that cries uncle and turns into nothing but an ad network will deserve some derision. These days things are looking good for JS-Kit, though.

Photo Credit: Brian Solis

Digg is partnering with CNN's iReport on this. Diggers will be able to either submit their questions in writing through the Dialogg page or they can upload a video to iReport. According to Digg, they will ask the top rated questions, but given the often rowdy nature of Digg, it will be interesting to see if the questions will be censored in any way and how the Digg users would react if that happened.

As Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced last week, Digg will have a substantial presence at the Democratic and the Republican conventions. Giving Digg's users at least some influence over the reporting from there falls right in place with Digg's overall style.

Not New - But Still a Good Thing

Overall, there is, of course, little that is new about this style of doing interviews, which is quite similar to the YouTube debates. Even Slashdot, Digg's virtual grandfather, often uses it to decide on interview question. At the same time though, anything to get young people interested in politics is a good thing in our opinion and Digg definitely has the ability to reach a lot of folks who would otherwise not be interested in the political process. Also, given that Digg, at its core, is still a technology site, its users are likely to ask a lot of tech oriented questions that a lot of the politicians probably never thought about much.

Looking at the top rated questions so far, net neutrality is ranking high above legalizing marijuana and repealing the Patriot Act.

His story is an inspiration and it is our pleasure to connect you with Mike Dunn on ReadWriteWeb.

What is your background?

I'm an emerging media technologist. I've spent the latter half of my career as a chief technology officer for companies in media or technology.

I've always been an early adopter. I enjoy finding ways to adapt emerging media, trends, methodologies and technologies into a company. I've been attracted to change agent roles and opportunities.

I like the complexity of environments in the midst of change, where the need to implement innovation is necessary to grow or turn around anything from an entire company to an individual product opportunity.

I tend to be responsible for the technical assessment of Venture and M&A opportunities. I'm asked to manage strategic partnerships with technology companies, service providers and academic institutions.

I'm a director for a bank and an online ecommerce site, an advisor to a media marketplace startup, a b2b operating company, a major technology trade publication and an insurance industry information portal startup.

My portal glemak.com contains pointers to my bio and online activities.

You've been CTO of Dell Online, Time Warner and now Hearst. How did you evolve through these experiences?

My roles in each have been very different. My Dell role occurred just as ecommerce was striving for adoption, Time Warner occurred right in the middle of the bubble, and Hearst is occurring while the web is dynamically changing as it moves to massive online communities and the long tail of media.

Dell Online was an internal start-up championed by Michael Dell to lead the way for the entire enterprise, not only to build the online capability, but also to spread its adoption and utilization. We pointed the way for transitioning a company via ecommerce.

I was part of an excellent team tasked with designing and building a high availability transactional environment, and one which did it all with nascent ecommerce development tools.

I spent a great deal of time briefing customers and partners on the value of our approach to building the infrastructure and platform that represented the revolutionary change to selling securely via the web. This was early days of ecommerce and prior to the 'all-in, spare no expense' bubble. Employees and customers needed to be convinced Dell's online efforts were safe and provided value.

When Time Warner approached me to become the CTO, I accepted since the reason I was hired at Dell had been satisfied. The site and team were built and stable, and the ecommerce transition had started to happen.

At Dell I learned how to plan and build for scale, how to partner with diverse technology units driven by multiple motivating factors, how to lead via influence, and how to educate and socialize the value of a complex paradigm shifting technological change for a company.

Time Warner was a huge role and opportunity. I'd spent time earlier working in technology management for Hanna-Barbera and Turner. Both became Time Warner properties after I'd left Turner in the early '90s.

My role involved overseeing corporate technology assets and services such as the global WAN connecting diverse businesses, our messaging environment and corporate applications. I managed an IT team responsible for these functions, but that was only 20% of my job. The other 80% was strategic, seeking opportunities to leverage traditional and emerging technology initiatives across over 660 businesses.

I relied on virtual teams, groups of diverse experts loaned part-time from individual units so that Time Warner could leverage internal resources and expertise. We used consultants of course, but our SMEs were the leaders and guides.

Mid tenure the AOL acquisition occurred, causing us to realign our initiatives to deal with this massive merger event.

I learned a lot about strategic guidance via influence. It is better to spend time convincing folks about something you'd like to see change so that they adopt the idea as their own.

A valuable lesson I learned at Time Warner was never to get overwhelmed with the scope of responsibility an initiative or role entails.

My current role with Hearst is also about leading via influence. As emerging media technologist, I advise and work directly with the various divisions. I also oversee relationships with technology partners and academic institutes.

I provide technical due diligence for our enterprise level investments and acquisitions, and I provide guidance and oversight for our portfolio companies, and am responsible for the technology aspects of wholly owned entities.

At Hearst I've had to evolve my methods to align with a larger entity changing to meet a rapidly shifting media landscape.

How has the media landscape changed in the past 5 years?

Dramatically. I started at Hearst 5 years ago, so I've seen the changes inside my company and from the media landscape at large.

Five years ago blogging, social media / networking, user-generated content and ubiquitous online consumption of rich media were not pervasive, and were not leveraged in any substantial way by the traditional media industry.

Yes there were those of us blogging, utilizing RSS and generating media online who were both inside and outside the traditional media industry. These will continue to grow dramatically.

Today most media entities are exploring or immersed in emerging media capabilities, especially publishing online and direct community engagement. The connected aspect of the communities has been a constant evolution. Instead of talking 'at' their audience, they need to become an active peer participant in the conversation.

The desire to access media has changed dramatically. Traditional methods of producing and distributing media have been extended in dramatic ways via technologies such as flash video, mobile access and Podcasting.

What are the economics of the print v. online world for media companies?

Traditional and online media production and distribution are of equal importance in today's rapidly changing media landscape. It's all about transitional focus.

I'd broaden the question to: What are the economics of all forms of traditional media v. online?

Today the same product that is produced for traditional distribution needs also to be leveraged in as many other media as possible, and as many times as possible. For example, the concept for an article is published traditionally, yet there are numerous ways to extend the reach and life of that content online: by publishing an extended version to the web, syndicating it to other sites, maybe posting a Podcast of the original interviews. The original article can now be leveraged for a longer time and in many more venues.

What tangible revenue models do you see for online media today and on the horizon?

The revenue models for online are much the same as those available via traditional means: (e)commerce, affiliation, subscription, advertising, sponsorship (donation), pay to play, and product placement.

The biggest difference is in scale. Traditional media is larger yet narrower and today provides a greater percentage of revenue than the smaller yet much broader online revenue landscape. The barriers to entry into traditional media are costly and complex, while online they are much less expensive and simpler for new entrants.

Tangible revenue models being focused on today are advertising via CPM and PPC, with some seeing success via PPL and PPS.

What strategic changes are you implementing at Hearst to prepare for the future?

We're pursuing strategic investments and acquisitions in emerging and innovative media, and we're aggressively scaling or creating integrated digital media groups inside our business units.

On the enterprise technology side my group has been implementing program management and enterprise governance processes. Both are important structural changes.

On the strategic relationship side, I'm coordinating our relationship with the MIT Media Lab. The MIT sponsorship is a key research and development mechanism, from a 'what will media look like 3 to 10 years out' perspective.

You've been writing about technical due diligence on your blog. What are the top 5 things that must be in place?

1) The primary things I look for are a thorough understanding of a company's current technology state and a roadmap of their future. I then fill in the building blocks to paint a picture of the company and its structure via the next 4 areas.

2) Staffing: The company should have a proper ratio of dedicated to outsourced staff. The focus for in-house staff should be on owning and extending the company's value-add. The focus of the outsourced staff / service should be on areas where technology is available at a reasonable price.

3) Infrastructure and Architectural: I look for alignment between the infrastructure in place and their roadmap. I try to understand their architecture, i.e., have they designed something that will be stable, yet scale and grow as their business requires? Have they over or under built, are their investments proper for current state and extensible as their growth requires?

4) Workflow and Processes: This is usually the hardest part of my interviews with startups because while most have ways they do things, they often aren't comfortable expressing them. They also aren't normally done in a way that's repeatable to the point where they could be called a workflow. This is OK. As they mature, standardized workflows and processes will be established, normally out of a necessity to ensure they're providing a stable environment that doesn't get negatively affected as they introduce change.

5) Costs: This is the spreadsheet part of the conversations. What has been spent to get them to the point they're at, what do they need to spend near term, possibly with funding from my company, and what do they envision they'll need to spend? I look for a grounded approach to spending.

What is your secret for balancing personal and business life?

You work to live, not live to work. I've always had a passion for my career, but I've also made sure I spend priority time with my family. We spend time together snowboarding each winter in Vermont, and mountain biking the other months, along with our dogs.

Both my boys are athletes, so I make as many of their games as possible. I work hard and travel a lot, but I'm home for important family events.

What is one insight, business or technical that you want to share with our readers?

Try and develop the art of listening. Too often folks spend so much time trying to think about and express their own opinions that they miss the details of the conversation occurring around them.

Most of the successful folks I've been around in my career are excellent listeners.

What is the meaning of life according to Mike Dunn?

My geek answer is the same as Brad Feld's meaning of life = 42. But the serious one is that life is all about learning.

If you can learn something useful at every stage of your life and use that knowledge to improve your life as well as to teach it to others, whether its your kids or someone you mentor, then your life should be rewarding.

Free Music

I elbowed in between elder bloggers Tim O'Reilly and Dan Farber in the interview to ask what Young thought of Trent Reznor's giving away free music and RadioHead's saying they aren't going to do so anymore. At first I thought he wasn't going to give me anything good, saying: "The recording business is going somewhere but I don't care about that, I try to remove myself from the business part. The artistic part of me tries to. The world will work it out."

He went on though to point out that his project Living With War always was and still is fully listenable for free on his website. It delivered a message he wanted to get out, he said. His thoughts about the content included in his giant life collection? Blu-ray may be riddled with DRM but Young doesn't think that will be an issue.

"Ten Blu-ray disks doesn't lend itself to P2P," he pointed out. "They [the fans] are going to do that anyway - people are going to copy all this music. We don't have to deal with that. All we're doing is supplying the mother-lode, trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as far as you want, we just don't want our name on it."

More than just indifference, Young was downright enthusiastic. "It's up to the masses to distribute it however they want," he said. "The laws don't matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio." Go Neil!

MP3s Sound Like Shit

Wonder how Young feels about the ongoing debate over the impact of the MP3 format on sound quality? He's pretty clear on it.

[When it first came out] "digital music sounded like shit," he said in the interview. "It was no fun to listen to turned up. Instead of water poured on you it was like being attacked with ice picks. [His recordings on Blu-ray] are like snowflakes."

"I don't listen to music, it's in my head. Putting on headphones is like hell for me. I can hear an mp3 from a half mile away because the air has a chance to make it sound natural."

Young said that MP3 was convenient - but that it's like a vision of paradise that's only inches deep and slams you in the face when you try to walk into it. "I'm a music guy, a sound guy - I went through hell in the 80's," he said. "Now we're coming close, climbing up the quality wall. I make all my music analog, when a new format comes along I will dump all my music to it." Would he advise other musicians to do the same? He said that wasn't realistic. "I'm too rich and elitist, most people can't afford the machines [for analog recording] and the people to take care of them." Young says he's been hoarding tape for a long time, sometimes recording over content that didn't work out.

Finding Freaky Scientists on the Internet

Young spent much of the interview talking about his work building an electric car that users don't have to plug-in to a wall. The end of roadside refueling is his ultimate goal. He and Tim O'Reilly discussed the plans in some length and it was fun to listen to. Nothing else Young talked about is nearly as important. It's also not very relevant to RWW, except for his thoughts on how the web has assisted his work on the car.

"The internet is a fantastic place to find science experiments," he said. "That's my favorite thing about the internet. People who are kooks in their garages - the tools are here for us to look to the edge of the scientific world. You can seek them out and tell them if you think their ideas will work. You can tell them you'd like to connect them with other scientists in other parts of the world and if the work succeeds or fails you'll put them in a movie about the project."

That's not a perspective I've heard about the web before, and I like it.

Neil Young was a personable, intelligent and well spoken interview subject. I'll remember getting the chance to interview him fondly for the rest of my life.

If you enjoyed this post, please click here to digg it!

Disclosure: Sun is a client of my personal consultancy and paid my travel expenses to JavaOne.

How would you describe Socialthing! in simple terms?

Socialthing!'s goal is to be what we call a "digital life manager". It's a place that you will see the things that you and your friends are doing, interact with them (while those interactions publish to the originator of the content) and also be able to create content from the interface while it publishes to all the networks you might be a part of)

Many people see FriendFeed and Socialthing! as serving a very similar purpose. Do you think Socialthing! is in competition with FriendFeed or do you feel that they are two separate audiences and the services can coexist? If so, how do you see each being used simultaneously? If not why or how do you think Socialthing! is better than FriendFeed or Ping.fm?

I think that Socialthing! and FriendFeed are two very different things. Socialthing! is a digital life manager, a single place that you will go to manage the networks that you're a part of elsewhere. FriendFeed is a place that you go to create meaningful conversation around content. The aggregation of the content means that everything that's in there can be conversed around. The conversation stays inside of FriendFeed for good reason, because elsewhere, it may be out of context.

Socialthing! isn't necessarily better or worse than FriendFeed, just different. They're two very different value propositions, and it just depends on how you want to interact with your networks, and whether or not you think adding another network into the confusion is a good/bad thing. As for distinctions with Ping.fm, they are just simply a publisher of status, much like Profilactic's 155+ isn't only because of our lack of the time that we've been on the market, and us being in private beta. It's because the services do very different things with those services. One is that we don't just aggregate a feed, but rather, aggregate your feed, all of your friends, and all of the things that they've been doing on those services. This is an incredible amount of more work. This means that there has to be a solid UI to support it, especially considering information overload. It also means that there has to be a scalable way to be able to fetch so many friends at once. One thing that's also very different about our infrastructure is that we do live calls to the sites when the user comes to our site, so that for certain services that make more sense to have it, the information is fresh, rather than 20+ minutes old. For sites like Twitter, this is of utmost importance.

Now, going forward we do intend on adding services at a very rapid pace, but we are also letting our community vote on these services. Since helping manage peoples' digital lives is our game, we need to make sure we have all of the most important services implemented, so we're including a Digg-like voting mechanism soon that will take care of this and let us know which services are most important to our users.

We're also planning on going far beyond just doing basic social services that have explicit content being generated, but we'll be elaborating more on this later.

As for the profile page, we'll be implementing this soon, and we'll have more details on it also when it's released.

When I wrote my review of the two services, the reason that I chose Socialthing! over FriendFeed was because Socialthing! sends all user activity out to the external sites whereas FriendFeed keeps everything internal as FriendFeed comments. This essentially makes FriendFeed a social network of social networks while Socialthing! is (currently) an aggregator for social networks. In fact, I feel that FriendFeed is adding to my information overload whereas Socialthing! currently helps me receive a lot of information and deal with it efficiently. Do you see that changing and Socialthing! becoming a network of sorts or was that an intentional decision?

I don't see us changing in that manner. We don't want to be a social network on our own. One distinction between us and all of our "competitors" is that there is actually no concept of "friend" on our site. If you're friends with somewhere on the social web, then you're friends on our site. The idea behind this was that there's just simply too much "friending" that exists on the web right now, and going and searching for your friends with every single new service that pops up is annoying and repetitive, so not requiring the user to do that was of utmost importance.

As for the commenting and things like that, it's likely that in the future, FriendFeed will do whatever they can to push those comments outside of the FriendFeed architecture, but it's also going to be difficult. Currently they don't work with any APIs, and even when they do, pushing back comments is not exactly the easiest thing to do, especially with the context that they're providing. But they're smart, and they'll get it done. The question for the consumer at that point is whether they want to have another place to have a conversation or something to simply sift through all of the unmanageable streams of activities.

Is there a plan to release a public API, embeddable widgets, or other ways to export the aggregated data out of Socialthing!?

We have a very solid API roadmap currently in the plans. The API will allow most all of the functionality of the existing website to be put elsewhere. Our thought is that people will build desktop apps, mobile apps and other mashups so that the information that we're aggregating/displaying can be consumed in interesting ways.

We will provide a few of our own things, however, things like Javascript widgets and the like. But at the same time, we've seen an incredible success by companies building things like desktop applications built on Twitter that Twitter didn't have to spend any time on at all. We like this and will likely be hoping for a similar result.

How do you think you are improving or plan to improve or innovate the concept of lifestreaming? And finally, what do you think is Socialthing!'s killer app? What is the one feature that will set it apart from the competition and hopefully help it gain greater market share?

The concept of Lifestreaming is very new, and I guarantee you that if you were to ask the average Facebook user what a Lifestream is they would have absolutely no idea. But they know what their NewsFeed is for sure. So that's what we want to innovate on. Bringing Lifestreaming to the masses with a very simple, easy to use interface where there is hardly any onboarding process required.

As for our killer app? I think it's simply just being able to see what all of your friends on all of your networks are doing without ever having to add them, and then being able to communicate with them, all without ever leaving the same site. Imagine Meebo, or Trillian for social networks.

We've embedded the demo video below because the product is likely to be one of historic proportions and we thought our readers would appreciate the opportunity to see it.

The video below gets into the action with live screens of the Telescope about 25% of the way through. A basic discussion of the technical requirements, with engineer David Fay, starts about 80% of the way through (sorry, the FC video player is awful so now time stamps are available). Full screen view, in the bottom right, is pretty good.

It's an important conversation and a good introduction to what the semantic web is. Also notable is the way that Berners-Lee sees Semantics and Data Portability as very related. Some highlights are excerpted below.

In the interview with Miller, however, Berners-Lee emphasized that it's not just about web pages. He told Miller that that the core pieces are in place today for developers to build robust Semantic Web applications;

“I think… we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything… [Y]ou should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.”

On the topic of challenges still faced, Berners-Lee said:

“There’s an awful lot of data out there. And I think, one of the huge misunderstandings about the Semantic Web is, ‘oh, the Semantic Web is going to involve us all going to our HTML pages and marking them up to put semantics in them.’ Now, there’s an important thread there, but to my mind, it’s actually a very minor part of it. Because I’m not going to hold my breath while other people put semantics in by hand… So, where is the data going to come from? It’s already there. It’s in databases…”

Other topics of the interview include whether leading social networks are likely to implement semantic web technologies, how semweb engagement benefits companies and what users can do to move the technology forward.

We've cover the Semantic Web extensively here at RWW. See below for a list of posts on the topic.

On the next version of Firefox

John Lilly: Firefox 3 is the killer browser. And I think I’ve been using the Beta since Beta 1 and Beta 2 is even better. Even in the Beta, we’ve surpassed the quality of Firefox 2. So I already encouraged my mom and my grandmother to update their Firefox 3 Beta 2. I thinks it’s a killer product. It holds up in a lot of new areas.

On Data Portability

Sean Ammirati: The Weave project is interesting. And it’s something that we’ve covered a lot at Read/Write Web or a couple of times at least. How does that relate in your mind to the DataPortability.org stuff?

John Lilly: Oh yes, that’s a good question. Yes we’ve talked about that this week. So I suspect that we’ll start to participate in DataPortability.org.They’ve got to start doing something sooner or later. So like doing the actual work there is going to be the key. Of course OAUTH and that kind of stuff we’ve starting to experiments with. That stuff will be very important for Weave. So I suspect we will start to participate in dataportability.org, but we haven’t yet.

Listen to their conversation, read the transcript and find relevant links at tonight's installation of ReadWriteTalk.