Sunday, February 16, 2003

Google Pyramaniacs Pry Open Enterprise Sales. Ooops! Does Phil have it right? Did Google buy Blogger to tackle the knowledge management space inside the enterprise? Dang! Why did Google buy Pyra Labs? "Klogging". Watch for their Google Search Appliance to come bundled with a version of the Blogger Pro server. Search, or the lack of it, holds back intranet blogging. When everyone uses Google to search the universe, you expect blogs inside the firewall to show up too. But they don't. Unless your Google Appliance crawls them. This is the Lotus Notes killer. A harsh stab at the next Microsoft Office's collaboration tools. When everyone is writing in to their blog, and content is immediately available, why do you need this other stuff? What's left to complete the picture? Two things: RSS push to the Google search crawler. A converged microcontent client. Who's going to buy? The military and security complexes. Big business, especially those who with a human capital self image. Civil government: cities, states, public service agencies, larger not-for-profits. Why buy Pyra? Klogging creates searchable, linked content, and that sells appliances. Further reading: Anil Dash's microcontent client: searching, aggregation, and authoring. Blogging things besides text: From .blog to converged client: support many types of microcontent. Multi-payload klogging: a world of content. What is Mediablog literacy? Gonzo Marketing in my own words, after a few drinks. Where the intranet bleeds to the extranet. Management concerns: Are klogs and klognets adhocracy enablers? Project Management as Journalism: intranet blogging for project collaboration. Does blogging get you laid? Judging social effects. Where klogging meets moblogging - Part 1, Part 2. [Phil Wolff: klogs] 11:45:10 PM

Uh, did someone hear something about Google... Once again, Ernie the Attorney offers an interesting point... the mainstream media won't pick up on this story soon, if ever. Yet, for all of us already in the blogosphere, we'll remember this event as a critical turning point. It just hit me how well documented this space is, but in a completely different form. Uh, did someone hear something about Google buying Blogger? - My News Aggregator physically came over and started tugging my shirt. I have read the various stories, starting with Dan Gillmor's, but this is one of those stories that defines the world that you live in. If this story interests you then you have already been assimilated; but if you don't know what I'm talking about, then you probably get most of your news from the mainstream sources and don't have enough of the story background to care. Bottom line: something big just happened, and the mainstream news sources will most assuredly continue to maintain radio silence. [Ernie the Attorney] BTW, apparently, Ernie and I have a mutual friend in David Lithblau... I should try to get an introduction sometime :-) 11:35:59 PM

Music Industry Fights Workplace Piracy How soon before we read stories of the IT "police" visiting your work cubical to turn off your music sharing site? Actually, it already happened to a friend of mine last year :-) The music and film industries are expanding their crusade against file-swapping from college campuses to corporate cubicles. See this RIAA press release, dated February 13. As part of their effort, they are distributing a publication titled, A Corporate Policy Guide to Copyright Use and Security on the Internet (PDF) to Fortune 1000 companies. [beSpacific] 11:30:32 PM

Blogs vs. Newsgroups & Mailing Lists I find it fascinating that the law field has gone gaga for weblogs. Document- and case-management are still hot technology issues for the legal field, and now weblogs promise to further complicate the modernization of a stodgy service market. "What blogs have over newsgroups and listserv discussion groups is that every blog has a 'star' reporter in the blog proprietor, who goes the extra mile to find good stuff to share--because blogs have their own special form of publish or perish pressing the proprietor to feed it every day--and, as important, the proprietor puts in lots and lots of TLC to the editorial work, treating the item much more like a column with a byline in a newspaper than a note posted to a listserv (like Network-Lawyers) or a newsgroup. This too because of the pride of the proprietor in the ownership of the blog." -- From the insightful John Debruyn, founder of the very active Network-Lawyers discussion group, posted here with permission. [net.law.tools] 11:28:56 PM

Google/Pyra: Winners and Losers There is going to be lots of interesting commentary this week regarding the Google purchase of Pyra. Here's one that considers the winners and losers. I think he's got it right. Everyone is writing blogging software, and there will be some shakeout, but there is still so much room left to improve the desktop aggregator experience. Technorati never really did it for me, and blogdex was an academic experiment. Google's purchase of Pyra/Blogger is guaranteed to do one thing: Reignite the inane discussion whether it's "blogging" or "weblogging". For what it's worth, my vote is for weblogging for the same reason I don't like pronouncing the word "meme"... I don't much like words like sound like your mumbling when you're actually speaking English. All those who are in the weblog space are likely to get carefully scrutinized now that a major player has actually come out with an aggressive weblog move. Please note, I did not say strategy because it's completely unclear what Google is going to do in this space although someone whose name I've already forgotten mentioned that Google "lives on fresh links". If you're looking for link freshness, weblog networks are one way to go. So, who are the winners and the losers because of this move? Here's the list off the top of my head: OBVIOUS BIG WINNER: Pyra. A small team suddenly gets access to Google's significant resources. What are they going to do with it? Who cares - there are lots of resources there and it's Google, so even fuck ups are going to have people talking. (Note: at the time of this writing, repeated attempts to get to blogger.com have failed -- looks like they need the infrastructure) ANOTHER BIG WINNER: Google. There has been a growing discontent with Google primarily because they're the only gig in town and folks love ripping on the King. This move temporarily gives Google the appearance of "caring about content democracy" which can't hurt. TANGENTIAL BIG WINNERS: Anyone who is currently producing credible weblog software/service. I would list Movabletype, Livejournal, Bloxsom, Greymatter, and Radio Userland only because those are the ones I regularly hear about. Winners here are sure to be getting all sorts of calls from potential suitors and I would suggest that they listen. The weblog software competitive landscape looks a whole lot like the early days of browsers... EVERYONE IS WRITING ONE. History would suggest that we're entering the BIG CONSOLIDATION PHASE and 90% of the players are likely to be dead, absorbed, or vanished in the next five years. PSEUDO BIG WINNERS: Anyone who is running a weblog. I wonder if the term weblog or blog is on the front page of the San Jose Mercury tomorrow... I wonder if my Mom or Dad is going to give me a call and ask, "Hey, don't YOU run a weblog?" This false sense of importance will rapidly vanish as a function of number of new folks who suddenly GOTTA WEBLOG BABY. (Update: The Mercury buried the story halfway through the front section of Sunday's edition) BIG LOSERS: Anyone running weblog aggregator sites. Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, and others. While weblog software/service providers have a chance to parlay their work into a sustainable business, weblog aggregators are screwed. Why? What's the one thing Google does very well? Crawl the web and gather the data. Look for Google to go after this space first and look for the little guys to vanish. Sorry. You knew it was coming. While I'm happy to see Google give weblogs a vote of confidence, I'm also a bit disappointed. Even as a relative late-comer to the weblog-scene, it still felt like 500 people and me chatting with each other about nothing in particular in the tranquil calm of the wilderness. Suddenly, someone plops in the Transamerica building right in the middle of your sunset. Sure, you're amazed someone could pull that off, but, hey, it's still a flippin' skyscraper. [Rands in Repose] 11:24:16 PM

Always-On.com Tony Perkins has started a new site... Always-On.com. But AlwaysOn’s business model is even more significant than its approach to technology and business content. Perkins started the site with nothing more than a $150 blogging software package called pMachine, and put only about $50,000 into the site’s development, he says. He has a tiny staff—only three full-time and three part-time employees. But from day one, he claims, his costs have been more than covered by his four paying sponsors—Accenture, KPMG, technology-oriented law firm Gray Cary, and the Silicon Valley Bank. And here’s the most revolutionary thing about AlwaysOn: Perkins has put his entire member database into the customer management service of Salesforce.com. When somebody signs up, their info—including, at a minimum, name, title, company, zip code, and favorite URL—goes directly into Salesforce. Most people voluntarily include significantly more. Then Perkins gives his advertisers and sponsors real-time (perhaps we should call it "always-on") access to his membership database by giving them Salesforce.com accounts. That allows them not only to see who’s getting their marketing messages but also gives them the ability to e-mail people in carefully sliced and diced segments—for example, all members who went to Stanford who live in Manhattan. One obvious risk: unwelcome spam could turn off members and sully the site’s reputation. Perkins says he will work to insure sponsors don’t abuse the privilege. Only time will tell if this works, but he has innovatively attempted to solve one of the most vexing problems faced by media companies up to now—they don’t really know who is looking at their stuff. That makes the task of selling advertising infinitely harder. 11:18:42 PM

The industrial Erector Set This one is for Steve 12:27:20 PM

Toilet UI Where would you aim? Be honest now... 12:14:26 PM

Gbloogle: what it all (may) mean Did Google buy Blogger because this is the year of the blog, or is this now official the year of the blog because Google bought Blogger? Here's a very nice summary of trials and tribulations of Blogger, and the power and influence of Google, and how the two will transform the web as we know it. The Google buyout of Blogger is the big news in the blogosphere this morning. Dan Gillmor did a brilliant thing last night when he posted his column about this a day early and scooped the universe on the story. But the story is very light on details -- presumably, this is because no one at Gbloogle wants to dish on the stuff we all want to know: * How much? * Will the Pyra-team all have jobs at Google? *What does integration with Google really mean for Blogger, and, especially, for non-Blogger blogs? The Blogger story is an interesting parable for Internet business. They shipped (very) early, with a technology that did very, very little. They saw this tiny little need: an easy means of handling putting little blobs of text in order and managing archives of the old blobs, and then they filled it. The need was little, the demand was enormous. Blogger ballooned to fantastic size, in such short order that it far outstripped the technology's ability to keep up, hence the plague of Blogger outages that provoked howls of outrage from the blog-using public. And there were security issues, multiple break-ins in which lots of passwords and other personal data were compromised (though never as much as the blogosphere fervrently avowed must have been leaked). It was fast. It was loose. It wasn't planned carefully and executed with precision, it was hammered together as quickly as possible and patched on the fly -- and it held together well enough to handle more than 90,000,000 posts. Blogger's financial woes and internecine struggles were a soap-opera that the whole blogosphere watched avidly, often meanspiritedly. Its finances were always a source of axe-grinding, since they were so visible: disgruntled laid-off employees kvetched about missing their back-pay, the BlogSpot hosting service was first overwhelmed by banners and then slipped into homogeniety as the number of banner-buyers contracted to a very few (a phenomenon that afflicted the whole Internet, of course). Not that it made the service any less popular. In fact, it continued to grow -- which, ironically, made it less reliable and more expensive to run. And it didn't matter. Problems with reliability, security breaches, financial woes -- none of them could detract from the service's popularity. Blogger's small successes -- a cash infusion from Trellix, a deal to provide blogs through a Brazilian media-portal -- were cheered throughout the blogosphere with glee that nearly matched the nastiness that greeted its problems. Blogger's been treading water. It has a million blogs tied around its ankle, users who require constant care and feeding (I'm one of them!), who occupy a large fraction of its cycles. New users flow in every day, and the competition is sniffing around its heels, adding features (better RSS, trackback, more flexible APIs, RSS aggregation) that often require less scalability than they would in Blogger's context (this is especially true of Movable Type, which, given its distributed nature, doesn't need to ensure that a new feature can be used by a million blogs simultaneously). There's a lot of technology research and development going on in blog-mining, from Blogdex to Technorati to Meg and Nick's seekrit new tool, which sounds very exciting indeed. The metadata that can be extracted from blogs -- trackbacks, blogrolls, interlinks, RSS -- provide a very rich field for researchers. Sociologists, marketers, journalists, publishers and anthropoligists are all thrilled to have this ready-to-hand source of quantifiable data about how information propagates, and what it all means. Google's made a business out of this sort of research. Its PageRank algorithm is the best idea-diffusion-miner we've got right now, and in hindsight, Google's move into blogs seems inevitable. Google's done very good work with some of the other companies they've acquired, like DejaNews, which is a thousand times the service that it ever was pre-Google. Google's got a whole lot of genuine grown-ups running its show, seasoned entrepreneurs and brilliant engineers whose approach is anything but fast-and-loose. Indeed, after the Deja acquisition, there was a seemingly infinite interregnum when all of that Usenet history was offline, while Google engineered-up a world-beating back-end for it and then carefully decanted all of Usenet into it. Presumably, Blogger can't go dark while Ev, Steve, Rudy and the gang confab with Google's engineers and distil all the lessons of Blogger's 90,000,000 posts, its outages and rollouts, its complaints and praise, and figure out how to design the next generation of Blogger. We do know that the BlogSpot hosting will migrate to Google's server-farm, but I'm willing to bet that that's not an instant turn-around. Google's server-farm is a core asset and an essential piece of the Internet's infrastructure, and they can't afford to pour BlogSpot into their racks and see what happens. But it's that usage-volume at Google that makes this deal so exciting. Like Amazon, Google has so much traffic that it can afford to roll out small-scale trials -- Remember the thumbnails of search-results? The limited trial of Folding@Home in the GoogleBar? -- and get instant results about how well a new feature performs. Google's core expertise is making sense of data gathered from the Internet, so it's eminently capable of making sense of the results of these trials. What this means is that once Google actually does integrate Blogger proper into its service, we can expect very rapid and very solid innovation. Gbloogle will be able to sneak features in for a day or two, extract the data, and make some sense of the data, decide whether its worth keeping the feature, and engineer something Google-grade to put on the back-end. But Blogger's success isn't only about what Blogger does. Services like the Weblogs.com list of recently updated weblogs, open protocols like TrackBack, and other technologies developed by rival blogging companies are the reason we have a vibrant, enormous Blogosphere, and not an anemic, partisan Bloggersphere. If Google is able to index every Blogger post (and, one presumes, every message-board post, once the feature is integrated), that's great news for Blogger users, but it won't be as powerful as the other blogmining tools until and unless it can do the same for anyone who publishes something that is self-identified as a "blog." This will be a real challenge. The real challenge. If Google pulls it off successfully, it will be able to generate tons of great, new, brilliant features, use its data-mining to refine them and build secondary services atop them, and that innovation will flow out to the other blogging tools. And vice-versa. Blogger is a success because of the work that Meg and Ev and Steve and Rudy and Jason and the rest did, but it's also a success because it borrowed ideas from other entrepreneurs and inventors, not seeking competitive advantage in locking out interoperability. If the new Gbloogle of a year or two from now is able to treat all blogs as first-class citizens, this is the best news ever for blogdom. I've spent the past two hours going through every single blog-mention of Google's buyout of Blogger, and by far the best speculation about the future of Gbloogle I've seen comes from Matt Webb: GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX. They've got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they've realised - like Ted Nelson - that the fundamental unit of the web isn't the link, but the trail. And the only place that's online is... weblogs. There are two levels to the trail: 1 - what you see 2 - what you do ("And what you feel on another track" -- what song is that?) And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step. LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing] 11:51:04 AM

"Live from the Blogosphere" instant-replay Dangit! I've missed another historic blogging event. The next one, I MUST GO! Right in the middle of the panel discussion, Ev gets a call on his cellphone and announces live for the first time in public -- in person, and by way of his blog -- that Google bought Blogger (specifically, Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger). Also for the first time publicly, during the panel discussion Ev and Noah Glass demo Audblog, a new service that allows you to "call in" a post to your weblog via mobile phone. Your speech, or the ambient sounds around you, are recorded and transmitted to your blog by way of your cellphone. Like magic, the demo is delightfully simple and actually works. A couple hundred or so geeks, writers, and webloggers from near and far show up, wearing "Hello My Blog's Name is:" stickers, and blogging throughout the event via hiptops and WiFi-enabled laptops. Lots of bloggers who'd only known each others' work online met each other in person for the first time. This is extremely cool, and really fun to witness. The crowd overflows out of the packed gallery, into Chung King Road; attendees outside who are standing too far away from the gallery doors to hear the panelists clearly just whip out their laptops and crank up the live Shoutcast audio stream. This is insane. And somehow, it works. Doc Searls, Heather Havrilesky, Mark Frauenfelder, Tony Pierce , Susannah Breslin, and Ev roll up their sleeves and deconstruct the blogosphere with the overflow crowd. They disagree on plenty, but agree that this is the year that weblogs will hit the mainstream. For-profit blogs and commercial blogging services start now. How this will transform what we know as egalitarian, anarchic, grassroots blogging culture -- and mainstream media -- remains to be seen. At the end of an historic day when millions of people worldwide took free speech to the streets, it seems particularly fitting to be exploring the power and impact of cheap, instant, easy online publishing. Somehow, SOCALWUG's wireless LAN, the audio stream, and the video stream all work. Archived streams of audio and video will be available soon, and I'll post links here as soon as they are. [via Boing Boing] 11:35:42 AM

Google loves metadata Which is technically superior: RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0? I'll probably piss off both camps by saying this, but by now they are nearly indistinguishable. But which one is more widely deployed? It is clear that UserLand leads the way. Suppose there is other metadata that Google would like to standardize so that everyone can benefit. What's the path to making such a standard a reality? Compelling apps are not enough: one needs to be able to ensure that there is plenty of content. Does this necessarily mean that I'll host my weblog on Google's servers? No. Does this necessarily mean that I'll use Google's software? No. But, does this mean that I'll support widely adopted standards for metadata? Absolutely. I can't wait. [Sam Ruby ] Me too! Google is going to create digital stigmergy thru metadata... 11:28:44 AM

Google + Blogger = Stigmergy Stigmergy is interaction thru the environment. Think ant trails. What kinds of trails do human cut across the web, and how do we interact via those trails? Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then: this trail is highly followed do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went? here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie! this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value Or, more succinctly, sti[g]mergy. [Sam Ruby ] Here's the summary of the BitWorking article on Stigmergy. The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it's ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmeric communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmeric communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy. The web is new. In the context of written human history is barely a blink of an eye. Yet as new as the web is, it is already showing it's ability to support complex human interactions that mimic natural systems use of stigmergy. And were just getting started... Interesting that this article apparently predates the Google-Blogger announcement of last night. Google obviously thinks that Joe Gregorio is right! (BTW, Sam Ruby spells it stimergy, not sure if he was deriving a new term from stigmergy!) 11:27:12 AM