Dimen Designs

User-Powered Search

Batettle posted about Jatalla, a 100% human-powered search engine that works on the increasingly universal language of tagged content. Why am I interested in this?

It's an idea that my IT and Strategic Opportunity class discussed back in April 2005:

Professor [6:08:15 PM]: What about if we had wikisearch?

Professor [6:08:46 PM]: Where everyone could contribute webdata/pages to the search engine, and modify, delete, edit, and categorize

Student 1 [6:09:25 PM]: letting the public doing the classification

Student 2 [6:09:25 PM]: DG: it would be a lot more efficient to tag the web if it were done in a decentralized manner, like Wiki

Professor [6:09:38 PM]: It may be a great way to take search to the next level and dethrone Google

Not ground breaking stuff for even back in 2005 but it's nice to see how far we've come. We have social search engines that are wiki-powered, like Swicki, and now Jatalla is hoping to leverage tags and humans to create a more decentralized, user-generated search engine.

Digging a little into Jatalla, submitters use a "lexivotes," a combination of a search term and a URL, to vote their preference for a given website's optimal relevance to that search term. Voting could be potentially gamed in ways that we've seen with splogs or on Digg but the more critical element is creating incentives for people to vote.

Would their be pride-based incentives like Digg, monetary-based incentives like Netscape, or would there be the old stalwart of civic-duty-based incentives for why people voted?

The more important, perhaps million dollar question, is whether this user-generated process is scalable enough to ever extend beyond niche segments and reach critical mass?

For the present time, Google doesn't need to be scared but I think the concept of social search will gain significant traction, maybe not through either of these two companies, in the future. 

Disintegration and Aggregation in the Music Industry

There's a lot going on in the music industry right now and I don't raise this fact simply because WIRED made it the subject the cover of their September issue (which is worth reading even if those who follow the trends in music have been aware of the featured stories for some time now).

But there was one nugget from the issue that struck me as worth noting and it's because it's an idea that Lessig has and others have talked about before: voluntary collective licensing. Much like we have now have for radio, a fee of $5 would be tacked on to your monthly ISP fee to account for the music that you downloaded to cover the revenue lost by the record companies when you downloaded rather than bought music. We have this principle with radio stations and also on the purchase on blank tapes.

"Now the 18-year-old high school student heads the Association des Audionautes, an organization of 6,000 Web junkies that has made peer-to-peer file-sharing an issue in France's upcoming presidential election. Under a plan that would compensate artists through a surcharge on Internet service provider fees, the group aims to make France the first country to legalize file-sharing." (link)

  WindMill Two by 12bars photography.

This is timely because there of the industry-changing news last week that MySpace will start offering non-label bands and others the ability to sell non-DRM mp3 songs. I can't wait to read Lefsetz's response to this story.

Not only was there the MySpace news last week, but a few smaller music industry items that all contribute to the bigger picture-- the mainstream music industry is dying and the listeners/users/prosumers are becoming the driving force of recommending and picking new music for us. A little too much Web 2.0 you say, a little too much social-networking euphoria? Read this mini-case study (blatant Umair rip-off).

The New Tastemakers- NYT article on Pandora. Two choice quotes (emphasis added):

“You now have music fans that are completely enabled as editorial voices,” said Michael Nash, senior vice president for digital strategy and business development at Warner Music Group.

“The tools for programming are in the hands of consumers,” said Courtney Holt, executive vice president for digital music at MTV Networks’ Music and Logo Group... “Right now it almost feels like a fanzine culture, but it’s going to turn into mainstream culture. The consumer is looking for it.”

But if fans become their own gatekeepers, the emerging question is what sort they will be. Will they use services like Pandora to refine their choices so narrowly that they close themselves off to new surprises? Or will they use the services to seek out mass shared experiences in an increasingly atomized music world?

There are two takeaways, discrete insights here. The first is more obvious, the users are in control of programming their own music choices and recommending those choices. The second is more nuanced and leverages part of Anderson's Long Tail principals. There is disintegration in music tastes as the variety and available options become easier to search and then re-aggregate in personal music preferences.

Music is becoming more fragmented because every consumer can make their own choices now but that act of creating your own personal music preferences will become mainstream culture. Pushing down the Long Tail depends on great search and discovery tools that don't just offer us unlimited choices, but offer us ways to make sense of all those choices in ways that still give us a sense of control.

The answer is not that people will become too narrowly focused (the MSM said this about customized news/RSS feed pages too) and lose the ability of musical surprises. I discover new music precisely through these aggregating servcices, Last.fm, The Hype Machine, and of course through personal recommendations (like I did for this movie and for this music), not in spite of these services.

Second Life as Disruptive as the Internet

A few weeks back, I had the great pleasure of talking with Brad and Fred from Union Square Ventures, which was definitely the highlight of my year. These guys really get it when it comes to the web and invest in entrepreneurs that understand how to leverage web technologies to create truly new, disruptive businesses. I loved talking with them about all of the internet issues that I try to keep up with, the future of the web, new media, copyright and patents, social networking, internet governance, blogging, etc. I could have talked about this stuff for a long time because I really love it.

[ But no one can talk shop forever so we even got into the skiing vs. snowboarding debate, which, as a die-hard snowboarder (who used to be a skier waaay back in the day), I can't resist engaging people in. I always end a skier vs. snowboarder debate with the simple conclusion that nothing beats the feeling of powder on a snowboard. Fat skies can only do so much, as my friend Grant Kaye can attest to (the best damn skier that I've ever ridden with): a snowboard in powder is heaven. ]

One of the subjects that I briefly brought up was Second Life and it's potential to be a major disruptive force. I haven't used it myself but for awhile Adam Curry was praising the gospel of Second Life on every DSC podcast. Now he can get a little excited about things but I think he was being reasonable in his assessment of Second Life being the new great user interface for digital computing or social interaction in the future. Business Week covered Second Life a few months ago and although I haven't seen/read any recent stories, it seems that there's still something important going on with Second Life.

Why the sudden optimism? Mitch Kapor recently stated that

Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”

Kapor is famous in the internet world, having been on my radar for being a founder of EFF, so we should take note when he talks about truly disruptive forces.

I suppose the great question is whether we can combine the relatively hands-off governance model of Craigslist with an amazing virtual world like Second Life?

At first blush, the answer may seem obvious because of the stories about Second Life's issues with inflation and monetary policy involving Lindy dollars, but let's take some time analyzing this one. Can we combine the best of both worlds to create a new social networking platform that is self-regulating without needing the heavy hand of a bureaucratic, democratic form of governance?

Brad or Fred, any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear your insights.

Transperency vs. Disclosure in the Blogosphere

Seth Goldstein, who used to work with Fred Wilson, was on the Trust Gang podcast that I discussed yesterday, and he mentioned Fred's A VC blog as the ultimate example of transperency in the blogosphere because he lays it all out there for everyone to see, his music, family info, what he's commenting on, what he's searching, his Feedburner ads, etc. Besides sharing similar tastes in great music (I've probably gotten more leads on great new music from Fred over the last year or so than I have from any other single source) I think that it's his openness, honesty, and breadth of subject areas that have made me a faithful reader.

I mention Seth's point because the transperency/disclosure discussion drives at the core of an idea I've been struggling to formalize. I have been prematurely calling the idea the "ah-hah" moments of discovering new knowledge compliments of the internet making connections between seemingly disparate information. If we have true transperency on the internet, to a point where we can track our thoughts, click-streams (see Gillmor and Seth for more info on how they're trying to monetize on this premise), and comments, I think we can formalize the process of acquiring new knowledge, which results from making the connections between those previously disparate ideas of piece of information.

It's making these connections, creating new knowledge by combining what we know already with new building blocks, that is what makes me so excited about the internet and the future of blogging and social media. This is what keeps me energized about the internet and it's a truly defining characteristic of the internet that makes it unique among the more traditional top-down, content-push-only models of mass media like TV or radio.

Lastly, the Engadget guys draw some similarities between the recent TiVo/EchoStar court case with the Research in Motion/NTD (the great Blackberry scare earlier in the year) court case on the 8/22 podcast. What's their conclusion? The patent system needs to be overhauled.

Trusting the Gillmor Gang

The blogging has been few and far between lately so I have a ton of built-up posts ready to unleash to my legions of readers. The fact that I even need to address the dearth of recent posts is embarrassing for any blog. As Sifry or Scoble has said (one of those two I'm sure) ave pointed out, if you want to be a well-read blogger, post early and often.

Here's a preview of things To Be Posted (TBP):

1. Review of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (finally finished it, now it's back to Benkler's Wealth of Networks)-- see Anderson's recent presentation to Google on the long tail subject
2. Gillmor Gang podcast, good disucssions on the Trust Gang I and II episodes concerning micro-communities and transperency/disclosure in the blogosphere
3. "Blogging for Dollars" article in Business2.0
4. VCs investing in blogging

The last two topics are compliments of Techmeme and from the techie/Web2.0 chatter on the blogosphere, both of those last two articles are getting traction. Blogging as a business is a topic that I've been thinking about recently, especially as I decided to become more serious about my blogging by migrating to Typepad (and am now plunking down cold hard cash for a communication method/medium usually thought of as free). I'm hoping by tomorrow morning that Fred will have read the VC & blogging post and given his insight on the subject. I have a feeling on where he'll come down on this subject so I'll be interested to read his thoughts on the subject.

More than anything, from what I've read about Jason Calacanis, Ryan Block of TypePad, Rafit Ali of PaidContent.org, and others, is that blogging as your career is extremely time consuming, requiring

endless dedication to reading, studying, and posting, and yet the most rewarding experience ever. It's a very appealing lifestyle from the outside and many have tried after having only sipped the blogging Kool-Aid, not many of these professionals will actually survive on blogging alone.

Kottke, a long-time blogger (as in blogging before it was cool, perhaps before we even called it blogging) tried the experiment of working full-time as a blogger and using reader donations to support himself and it didn't work out in the end. I don't know all of Jason's results and conclusions on the subject but take a look at what he did and you realize that if he couldn't make it work, it makes the odds seem downright horrifying for the rest of us.

On a more positive note, Rafat of PaidContent (who I first discovered probably 2-3 years ago and have been subscribe too since) left Calacanis' Silicon Alley Report to make a go of blogging full-time. He described the new platform/career as more intense and longer work-days than when he was a more traditional journalist but found the rewards all the more gratifying. And it seems to be working. PaidContent is still on my radar for good content, especially the MocoNews (covering the mobile content industry) emails that I receive but don't always have time to read, consistently gets scoops and posts at Techmeme, and received a round of financing a couple of months ago.

Not that all of us want blogging to be our full-time work/joy in life but many are dreaming about it and these two recent stories show that the MS is paying attention.

Currently Playing: (songs that have been keeping me going over the last few weeks)

1. Wayne Wonder - No Letting Go (helped me write this post)
2. A Tribe Called Quest - Electric Relaxation (via the Samuel L. Jackson's celebrity play list on tunes)
3. Coldplay - Talk (Junkie XL remix)

As the Blogosphere Turns

Whether it's because I read this stuff too much or because they're actually legitimate news stories, the blogosphere (the Techmeme & Techcrunch world) is awash in drama:

1) Mick Arrington vs. Nick Carr mini-dispute on the recent Gillmor Gang podcast
2) Jason Calacanis vs. Kevin Rose battle on the question of paying your top submitters/social-bookmarkers
3) WSJ casts doubt on whether Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory is really true

Stay tuned to find out what happens next in "As the Blogosphere Turns." The latter two probably do represent stories worthy of discussion. Let's see where these go.

And in Steve Gillmor's vein ("linkng is dead"), there are no links in this post. I see no reason to hype these flames/stories, you're probably lucky if you don't know anything about this.

New Music Thanks to Mp3 Blogs

Thanks to my buddy Robbie back in Rochester and for Fred Wilson's post on the importance of mp3 blogs for music discovery, something that I said back in Dec. of 2005. (For once, I posted on a new trend before he did, no small feat given his wide ranging passions, great musical tastes, and frequency of insightful posts.)

Saying Pandora and Last.fm aren't necessarily the best way to discover music is fairly contrarian to the blogosphere and all things Web2.0. I use Last.fm on this blog and have used Pandora at times and they do serve their purposes (here's how to combine the two). But I think for pure music discovery, like we used to do when browsing music and talking to the music diehards working at good indy record stores, the mp3 blogs have the advantage.

Robbie emailed me and recommended Band of Horses, a group that I haven't heard of but could quickly preview via iTunes. Notice I said preview via iTunes but not purchase via iTunes, why buy through them when there are so many better options available. So as Fred suggests, I fired up Hype Machine to see about some mp3s from Band of Horses and saw among their rankings that Feist, who I've been in love with for awhile and saw in concert at Black Cat, was atop their popular search download rankings. So clicking on that link led me to the Feist mp3 download list and I discovered that a new Feist remix album was released.

That's the beauty of mp3 blogs, besides getting full mp3 versions of songs, you can rely on others to keep you updated on new music releases. This same function could have been achieved through a Feist fan newsletter, visiting her website, checking out Pitchfork, or maybe via a RSS feed, but this about music discovery. Well not quite because I already knew about Feist but you can understand how easily it is to start wandering down different music paths based on a mp3 blog aggregator, like Hype Machine or Elbo.ws, and discover great music that wouldn't normally hit your radar.

Check out the Postal Service remix of Feist's "Mushaboom" and then download some Band of Horses mp3s to see what I mean about great music discovery.

And since we're on a music kick tonight, two great upcoming shows for the D.C. area:
1) Editors @ 9:30 Club on July 27th- Shralp videocoast #3
2) Jurassic 5 @ 9:30 Club on Aug. 14th- if you good hip-hop, then you must know J5
3) Band of Horses @ Black Cat on Sept. 13th- Robbie said indie rock and that sounds good to me

Stakes is High

Just when I think the web is more accessible than ever and I decide to move to a more serious blogging effort, Nick Denton sums it up in the NYT:

"The barrier to entry in Internet media is low," he said. "The barrier to success is high."

Switching gears: The 4th of July here in D.C. was overcast and all I saw from my rooftop were gloriously illuminated clouds or smoke that obscured the nation's fireworks last night. Instead, I enjoyed the weekend playing dominoes with my cousins down in Richmond.

Currently Listening: Snow Patrol - Shut Your Eyes

A Concise Description of Ah-Hah Moments

I finished Battelle's book The Search, way back in January when I first came to D.C. but still never posted my comments. With little paper flags stuck in the sections that I wanted to comment on, those flags have been like middle fingers flicking me off every time I sit at my desk. The book lays there, naked without its jacket, and I keep telling myself that I need to post the three flagged sections (like the hundreds of things that I've wanted to but never posted)

Rather than hash out either my comment on the paid content-firewall issue (which I briefly covered here reviewing that Economist podcast with Dave Sifry of Technorati) or my comments on the always-on Google power of the future, here's the critical quote from this great book:

But what may well become possible in the world of perfect search is the ability to take the clickstream of that journey and turn it into an object- a narrative thread of sorts, something I can hold and keep and refer to, a prop to aid in the telling and retelling of how I came to my answer. Tracks in the dust, so to speak, that others can follow, or question to discover how I came to my conclusions. And these tracks are not just potential narratives for others to read; they can also be objects that can be spidered y a search engine, providing them with an entirely new order of intelligence about how people learn. In the aggregate, these clickstreams can provide a level...

As Bush outlined, the memex gains its potency by capturing the traces of a researcher's discovery through a corpus of knowledge, then storing those traces of intelligence so the next can learn from and build upon them.

Clickstreams are the seeds that will grow into our culture's own memex- a new ecology of potential knowledge- and search will be the spade that turns the Internet's soil." (pg. 257-258)

I've mentioned these ah-hah moments a couple of times before, but it the section quoted above that that cemented this idea concisely and eloquently. It captured an idea, sensation, experience that I've had many times since first surfing the next back in '96 or '97.

I remember and believe in these ah-hah moments they're the foundation of learning and acquiring new knowledge. And that's not me talking but it's from a academic video on the study of learning that my Dad bought my brother and I when we were in high school. Maybe he thought we weren't serious enough with our studies or maybe he just thought we'd enjoy it ( we didn't) but I do remember this one thing from the video.

We really learn and remember new information (transforming it into knowledge during this process) when we can combine old knowledge with new knowledge (which I call ah-hah moments). Building upon the past and creating new insights, that is the essence of learning. Sounds a little like Lessig or Newton's " standing on the shoulders of giants" quote doesn't it?

Currently Playing: two new albums-
1) Red Hot Chili Peppers- favorites are "Charlie," "2st Century," and "Snow (Hey Oh)"

2) Snow Patrol- favorites are "Open Your Eyes," "You Be Happy," "Set The Fire to the Third Bar," "Shut Your Eyes"

A fellow Last.fm user echoing similar sentiments about the new RHCP and Snow Patrol albums (can't speak to the new Goo Goo Dolls).        

My Blog is Now Up

I'm temporairly on Tripod but this blog will be anything but temporary. I've been meaning to do this for 2-3 years and now it's happening.

Check out the ironic skyscraper ad on CIO Magazine's website, it's an Unisys advertisment for how JetBlue uses your personal data for the customers' benefit. Uh huh, yeah right...

Screen shot #1, Screen shot #2 (both are ~100k)