Quote of the week

Seth Goldstein:

Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.

Right or wrong, it's an interesting characterization.

Plus, it implies myriad opportunities around each point -- browsing, organization, search and social community. Users can benefit through a richness of applications that solve problems in each of those areas. Clearly, the social area is the hot one right now.

Deadliest Catch Media Distribution

The traditional approach to content distribution has been "if you build it they will come." Distribute quality content in one place, buying the shelf space for that place, then market it to drive users/viewers to that place. TV, cable, movies, etc.

But in chatting about this with Robert, and in recounting the Discovery tv series, Deadliest Catch, we realized that, as with all thoughtful forms of media, that show proposes a much better method of distribution that is consistent with the decentralized nature of media platforms today.

The old media world: you KNOW there are crabs (audiences) in a specific place and you camp out in that place alone, and go in with GREAT bait (marketing).

The Deadliest Catch approach: you lay baskets all over the ocean, and gather the crabs. You ensure their are crabs by going EVERYWHERE.

The crabs are in many places in the ocean. The strategy that places content all over the place will gather the most.

Who Participates in Social Media

Fascinating chart from Business Week showing what people are doing online:



They don't describe the chart as "social media" - but looking at the online actions listed (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) seem to be a decent representation of activities associated with new Internet media/content, and of course all media is becoming social media.

The most interesting aspect of this data is not that it confirms conventional wisdom (that kids/youth are driving the user generated content trend), but that the distribution of participants in social media also contains a fairly large percentage of "older " (22-26, 27-50) also participate actively in contributing to online media.

For example. almost 30% of the 27-40 age group have joined social networking sites; similarly, almost 20% of 41-50 year olds have commented on blogs and posted ratings/reviews. Suggesting, quite naturally, that maybe the user-content shift is deeper, and wider, than had previously been thought.

POTS -- Plain Old Text (sites, services)

Atif Rafiq, in an essay called "In Defense of the Text Web, writes that:

"[I]t’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content. Yes, the same news story can be transformed into news video. But the relevance of one over the other is a function of user needs."

Atif is right. Lost in the shuffle of innovation (and hype) related to video, photos, and music are the myriad of services arising to take on the challenge of plain old text in an online world. Such as digitizing it. Organizing it (here too). Contextualizing it.

Faster, cheaper bandwidth has allowed the promise of streaming media to be finally realized, which has provided numerous wonderful services to proliferate. It has also allowed new, just as impressive, products and ways of thinking about text data to be developed.

Educational tides

"Surely this is exactly what an education institution should want – collaborative learning. They’re always banging on about the collaborative environment of a school, college or university, so why not accelerate this using the very technology that the students use anyway. The tide of web 2.0 use has flooded over the campus walls an it’s too late to stop it, so embrace it. There comes a point where bottom up becomes so compelling that it becomes the new top-down." Donald Clark

(via Edson)

The search war is over, Google has won, and I couldn't be happier

It's being widely reported that Google's share of the U.S. search market has climbed yet again.

This data is consistent with two points I've recently found. On the quantitative side, 6 weeks into the initial launch of Carmun, we' see that about 60% of the initial traffic has come from search engines, and of that search traffic close to 95% was delivered from Google search. On the qualitative side, prior to March we conducted numerous formal and informal focus groups at NYU, Tufts and Columbia. Overwhelmingly the students told us that Google was their starting point for Internet discovery. And by overwhelmingly I mean over 95% of these kids used Google exclusively for discovery.

I therefore declare the U.S. search war to be over. Google has won and it is becoming the sole starting point for the delivery of web content and services. It won because it works really well for users and and incremental advances will not matter to users -- those doing to searching.

I'm totally thrilled with this development. This makes it that much easier to develop and deliver interesting web services. Google does an amazing job of searching through the raw data that is the web (the web as the database). However it is they do it, they are the best ever at providing relevance to search.

But Google does not provide context to search. And that is a vast, huge opportunity, because I believe the next stage of search innovation is about providing context on top of and utilizing Google's dominance relevance. Kind of like adding an application layer called Context on top of Google.

For example, in searching for a hotel in Puerto Rico, one of the top results is from tripadvisor, which delivers ratings, reviews, deals and related information to that search. In other words, it provides a layer of context on top of the original Google search.

Similarly, searching for Mud Coffee in New York (the best coffee there is), brings me results from yelp, 23 reviews, maps and a community. Again, context.

Finally, someone interested in Arthurian legends who searches for a summary of Lancelot and Guinevere might find their way to this project list on Carmun, where a user has put together their own compendium of 38 works related to this subject, with ratings, reviews, groups and a way to locate a work at a university library.

These three examples of context on top of Google results are powerful because they demonstrate the richness and variety that web applications can add to raw indexed data. Having one provider who excels at indexing that data and making it searchable, and having that provider deliver the vast majority of searches, actually makes it easier and more efficient for us service providers to add innovation -- context -- on top of the search.

For that reason I am thrilled that Google has won the search war.

Open Data 2007

The Open Data 2007 session yesterday at Reuters, organized in part by Seth Goldstein, was interesting, as others have reported.

And while much of the debate centered around what exactly were the implications of open data in the web world, I was surprised that there was indeed alot of surprise about the extent to which our behaviors and actions are being tracked and the data therefrom being manipulated and analyzed, for example to provide targeted advertising or to track "buzz data" (people from Tacoda, Right Media, AggregateKnowledge and BuzzMetrics all participated in this event).

In my naivety perhaps I believed it was common knowledge that most people building or involved in web applications knew the magnitude to which these actions are being analyzed. Indeed, with the rise of web services, I would have thought the availability of such services to ingest the stream of data individuals are producing and then output that stream in new ways was not in question. And, that the extent of the use of cookies in online advertising was surely not new news.

My assumptions were proven wrong at the Open Data sessions. Which raises a more fundamental question about our data that was not answered. At a certain level I subscribe to the Jerry Garcia theorem of open data - when Garcia was asked many times how the Grateful Dead could allow the open taping and trading of tapes of their shows, he replied:

"Once we're done with it, you can have it"

Once he produced the music, it could freely be had. The corollary here being that once information is produced in this digital medium it can be utilized by others. The original value to the producer comes with that initial act of producing. Then our interconnected mashed up world takes over. (Of course, Garcia was not referring to others profiting from his downstream music, so maybe this theory falls apart here).

Nevertheless, I think I am in the minority in subscribing to this view. But maybe it's important to consider nonetheless. For example, Roger Ehrenberg's Monitor110 is doing fascinating things monitoring a breadth of content across the web, and then applying analysis and a presentation layer to create actionable value from this information to the investment community. If, for example, I am writing alot about advertising and education, and somehow Roger's engine picks that up and correlates it with other info he then sells to hedge funds interested in private innovation in those segments, what's his obligation to me? To let me know? To compensate me? To allow me to opt out from his collecting activities? And if there is some obligation he has, will that then stifle innovation? Do we even care about that as an outcome? The issues not only relate to rights ($$), but perhaps more important ones such as notice and consent. And, of course, privacy.

And this same type of example applies with respect to the services BuzzMetrics provides, or the data AggregateKnowledge collects.

Ultimately I think in this example he (or any other similar provider) has no obligation to me based on the Garcia Theorem listed above. The social compact, if you will, is that my interest in the content is in the act of producing it, and not down stream from there. It's a cost, if you will, of living and producing digitally. And if someone can utilize that data for new services, maybe the greater good is served.

Or maybe not.

Outside In Services

In reading the recent Piper Jaffray Internet Advertising report, I was struck by what the report lists as trend number three in the "Media World Order:"

Indeed, I think the implications of this concept are greater than as relates to a strict definition of the media world.

Maybe we should start to call these things "Outside In Services" -- those services that begin their conception of value creation from outside the confines of what is traditionally considered areas where value, control and distribution lie. Services which create new ways of looking at data and people and content, using the actors (or customers, or users) involved with the data and content as the focal point, and not necessarily the distributor or publisher or even service provider. Such actors have generally been considered, at least by publishers, as passive recipients. Audiences, if you will. Similarly, value has traditionally been considered to lie with the content or services delivered to those actors.

By viewing actors as being the locus of activity enables radically new ways of creating businesses to serve those actors/customers/users. These services are Outside In because, while they serve a user base, their functionality and utility derive from the actors, not from the content. Thus, they create value from outside the system (starting with the users), pointing in (towards the content or publisher or service provider). The actors to these services do not necessarily have to be generating the content themselves (and so this applies to a much broader base than "user generated content"), although that is an easy starting point and a radical evolution in and of itself. Outside In Services start with a premise (philosophical, almost, and different, definitely) of where and how services can/should be delivered. Then they use that thinking to create new ways of doing business.

Outside.in is a good example and not just because their name applies specifically to this concept. This business starts with the proposition that, when it comes to information about neighborhoods, or localities, there is indeed no good center or publisher to work with. Thus, value here can best come from (and amplified and be promoted) the outside, from distributed postings, content, comments and listings. In a way, Outside.in is remaking itself as a new kind of center. This has lots of implications, take politics as an example. It's also been noted that maybe the inside-out, opposite approach to this market is too hard to scale and grow. More interesting commentary from some investors in this service.

Aggregate Knowledge is another good case study -- helping drive ecommerce, for example, not using products as the center, but again by considering users' interactions with products to drive data, sales and relevancy. The actors at the center of retail is how I think about this one.

Interestingly, Dapper looks at the issue by considering the content, or the data associated with a website, to be the actor itself, and then they provide services to push that data, those actions, form the inside to the outside, where they can then be utilized for even more services.

I'm also lucky to be involved in two other companies that are taking outside in approaches to business. Lotame is spinning the advertising and analytics business on its head by looking at that industry from the perspective of content users, viewers and audiences. Lotame looks at these actors and their actions and interests in digesting web content as the basis for providing value-added marketing services to publishers. Thus, for Lotame what's less relevant is web content qua content, and what matters MUCH more is what people are doing to that content and what they exhibit as interests.

Finally, Carmun is attempting to redefine educational or learning value by allowing learners and students to create connections and insights themselves outside of a school or other institution, and then use those connections or insights in old or new ways.

There are many more examples of Outside In Services and thinking. For example, take a look at Jay Gould's framework for creating an online business and see how many of his criteria are focused on criteria outside the content or service (all of them).