Evolving Web

Christmas and Hanukah

During the past weekend, this blog's pageviews fell by 90%.  So people are still celebrating Christmas and Hanukah.  I have the statistical evidence to prove it.

I Remember Music

I've been so busy over the last year, I've totally neglected my music.  Fortunately, Ross Bencina has not.  He has released - after many years of love labour - the 1.0 Release Candidate of Audiomulch. I've mirrored the actual Application on Soundbag.

I will post a review soon.

Web 2.0 is Charlie Brown

A few weeks ago, I posted here something about how Web 2.0 was a term no one liked.  The entire Web 2.0 working group didn't like the term.  And they continue to hate it.  As I see it, here are the reasons why:

                                       

Web 2.0 Implies		New Reality Shows
Browser Focused		Multi-platform / multi-application
Web Focused		Multiple delivery mechanisms
Major Tech Shift		Major Human Shift
New Technology		Evolution of Existing Technology
Joe Cool Killer Apps		Charlie Brown reliability

   

The name Web 2.0 focuses on a single delivery mechanism (browser) and implies a NEW set of applications.  What the reality is - is more powerful.  We actually have a lot of different ways to obtain information in new integrated and reliable ways. 

JimCast

If you wanna hear me discuss transporation technology for a half hour with some very bright people, you can listen to this podcast of the Yi-Tan conference call I hosted with Jerry and Pip a few weeks back. 

With a Little Help from your Friends

I came home tonight exhausted.  I'm in the process of negotiating three contracts simultaneously.  This involves both internal and external negotiations that, while not heated, are very detail oriented.  It is incumbent upon me to expedite these processes in order for my company to get back to its fiscal goals starting at the beginning of January.  I have two weeks - during Christmas - to make all this happen.

So I was totally drained.  I went to Whole Foods and bought myself a bunch of fresh garlic stuffed olives and some Winter Stout.  Dragged myself up the stairs.  And turned on the computer to mindlessly play Civilization IV.

Since Plazes forces open the browser I thought I'd pop in on the blog world - very briefly.  It turns out, at some point, Nancy White has blogrolled me under the heading "Cool Men".  That really made my day!

Damn it!  I blindly grabbed an olive and it was Habenero stuffed! 

Ahh, the balance of life.

Technorati tags: uh ... heck if I know.

Help? I agree with Carl Ichan?

I have long felt that Carl Ichan was a reprehensible creature.  But I find I agree with his statements as reported by Forbes.  Apparently, he is questioning whether the deal is good.  What's funny is he thinks it's not good for AOL.

Obviously, judging by my post yesterday, I don't think it's good for Google.  AOL isn't even good for AOL.  I just can't see a future in a company so restrictive of its clients.

Growing Pains in Store for Google (GoogOL)

GoogOL?

Other than maybe Ford, I can think of few companies less suited to be part of Google than AOL.  Their mindset, corporate culture, profit models, relationship with their employees, treatment of their users, extension of their APIs, and view of the role of their business seem very much at odds.

A corporate culture Clash ot the Titans.

The fact that AOL is Google's biggest customer is more of a "Wha?" than a reason for purchase.  You generally buy your suppliers, not your customers.  Buying your own AR doesn't make a lot of sense.  Loss of 11% of your revenue shouldn't be worth $1 Billion for 5% of a flailing, dieing giant.

I have been part of several companies and organizations that started to grow, started to buy things, and then nearly folded because of bad mergers or radical changes to their corporate culture.  I was part of a company once that was growing nicely, steadily - with focus.  We were a consulting engineering company.  Our owner decided he wanted a kingdom and started buying all sorts of consulting companies simply because they were profitable.  Most of them ended up whithering and dying in our company because they didn't meet our business model.

That has an incredibly negative impact on everything we had been doing right.  Cash that would have gone for bonuses - went to prop up the bad purchases.

Google, the hearalded Web 2.0 company, has gone out and purchased the company that tried to stop innovation before Web 1.0.  AOL created the largest gated community on the internet and paired that with dumbed down proprietary browsers that stymied growth and plagued customer support for many companies. 

Whether they are doing this to stop Microsoft from gaining AOL market share as some information suggests or not, at best this will end up a product that Google can purchase and kill off.  That, however, is not consistent with Google's history.  My guess is that they'll take the AOL pig, put some Google lipstick on it and try to teach it to dance.

Or, they'll say that their 5% stake in AOL is chump change, write it off as the cost of doing business and not try to save them at all.

Good luck, Google.

 

Late note:  Click on the links below or search technorati for Google AOL.  For getting people to talk about them, Google wins big time.  Everyone is talking about this...

Technorati Tags: Google AOL  AOL Google GoogOL Web 2.0

(Photo from Morguefile, Jay Malpass)

Bloglines Brain Drain?

I use Bloglines as my aggregator and I monitor my own postings in it to make sure they translate well to RSS.  I've noticed over the last few weeks that my subscribers are leaving bloglines - but they seem to be matched by an equal growth in my Feedburner feed.  This suggests to me that my subscribers aren't leaving me, but they are leaving Bloglines.

I'd think this was because there was a new killer aggregator, but Feedburner claims my subscribers are equally spread between about a dozen products.  I also really haven't heard much criticism of Bloglines - can anyone out there shed some light on this?

Unraveled Web

Aargh, Plazes just came back with this message:

An error occured.

My chat this morning with Ed was stilted because the messages wouldn't go through. Some still haven't. del.icio.us went down for a while this week. An interruption in an OC3 line took my e-mail server in Iowa off like for the better part of a day (which came complete with a million phone calls from people saying "where's my e-mail"? TypePad went down for maintenence yesterday and is still all messed up. Google even disappeared for a time. I worry that this is coming back to my original worry about hosted web apps. When something is out of your control you have limited options.

Rapid Mainstreaming of Lightnet

Ziff Davis' Jason Boog is already reporting on Lightnet, further driving home the credibility of the concept.  The Lightnet / Darknet discussion centers around the evolution of consumer assumptions about what is appropriate to do with content.  There are so many definitions out there for the terms, I won't use this space to define them.  What caught my eye is this part of Boog's article:

"In a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text," Lucas Gonze said. "Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog."

This interests me in its relation to Web 2.0 and mainstream media.  As structured blogging (site link) gains traction - traditional media companies will need to adapt in a totally new way. 

Previously, news organizations were 100% push technology.  Newspapers and TV news had strict deadlines that related to a point in time where they "went live".  Now news organizations are always live.  That was enough of a paradigm shift, but now they must give up strict control of their content.

Their content becomes source material for instant production on a distribution scale that will directly rival their own.  Before, if I quoted the Wall Street Journal in my low-circulation publication the quote would rarely come back as a direct benefit to the WSJ.  But now, it can immediately do so.  The more people that link to the WSJ article, the more likely that article is to pop up in Google News or Technorati or del.icio.us or tech memeorandum or the myriad of other tools out there to find content.

So they must encourage bloggers - who are not competition, but rather their direct readership having conversations about their content.  The mainstream media vs. blogger fight is phony.  Bloggers need mainstream media and now, mainstream media needs bloggers.

In greater numbers, people are not subscribing to papers and are not watching television news.  Why would one do so, when you can get much greater content on Google News at your leisure?  But that content you are getting is coming from those same sources.

Multimedia content is going to become more important for mainstream media.  They will need to provide video, audio, text, and supporting data.  Most importantly, they will have to do something they are loathe to do: acknowledge the rest of the universe.

They will have to start linking out to sources, they will have to acknowledge conversations happening around their content.

The Lightnet / Darknet world shows that people's assumptions and relationships with content are changing dramatically.  This is not due to people who want to steal music or other content.  This is due to meeting a latent need for people to interact directly with their world - to communicate, to discuss, and to actually be involved.