« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
Since my post about lifestreams last week I have been digging it a bit more and found there's an active community of people out there who are aggregating their bits into a single site. Rex is the latest to join the club. He also explains where this idea originated. So what's next for lifestreams? How about aggregating all of one's replies into a single site - yes, a replystream.
In about as long as it takes you to read this post, I was able to build a test replystream site again using Tumblr (you can also do this with Jaiku and many more sites). You can find my replystream at http://replies.steverubel.com. The page currently aggregates all @steverubel tweets from Twitter via Terraminds and in-bound links to this site from Technorati. Rather than syndicating the full text of a blog post, I am just rolling these up into a river of items that all link you back to the original content creator.
Here's a free idea for a smart developer/entrepreneur. We need a tool that will roll up one's lifestream and then thread the entire replystream underneath on a per-post basis. Then you can institute a smart contextual ad system that pays both the content provider and the replier. Oh and widgetize the entire product so it can go anywhere.
As content gets sliced and diced into thinner pieces that can fit anywhere, the greatest value will be created through smart aggregation. Take Dave Winer's NYTimesriver.com for example. That's what I learned during my few days playing with Tumblr. With everything living in RSS, aggregation can be pretty disruptive if you think about it. Just the ethical implications alone - yikes.
There's an old saying: "you can never have too much money or friends." But that's before social networking came along. And while the adage for money still rings true, a shift maybe under way in how we define friendship. You can thank the web and social nets for that.
The American Heritiage Dictionary defines a "friend" primarily as ...
A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement: friends of the clean air movement.
Wikipedia goes a step further. It notes that in the US and elsewhere that quality of friendships has been steadily declining.
It seems, at least to me, that how we define who is/isn't a friend has changed dramatically. The Gig blog notes that this is particularly a dilemma on Facebook. Where as on other social networks, like Twitter, I let everyone in, on Facebook I have limited my network to only those who I have corresponded with or met in person. I go by the traditional definition. This unfortunately leaves many people sitting in Facebook purgatory. I don't add them to my network, yet I don't have the guts to outright Faceslam them either.
Others take a very different view. Some people I know (I won't mention them by name) like to regularly brag about how many friends they have on Facebook. I don't blame them for saying so. I blame society. In America at least, he/she who can dies with the most friends - even if they are virtual - "wins."
It's clear from all of this that our entire concept of friendships is changing. It's becoming more about quantity and less about quality.
This can be a very good thing. I am friends with people in social networks from other countries. Technology makes that possible.
On the other hand, these same technologies enable anyone to add me as a friend, even though we've never met.
It leaves me all confused about what friendship will look like in 10 years. It seems like it's declining in quality, even as technology scales it in quantity and helps our networks spread far and wide. What's your view?
Over the last few months I have really changed how and where I create content. For a long time all of the action was here, on my blog. Today I am posting to Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter and Facebook. I also have tons of other less active accounts too - digg, Blogger, MySpace, YouTube, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, Jaiku, Pownce and on and on.
Where I will publish in a year's time is anyone's guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.
The problem here is that this has created dozens of online identities for me, a single individual. People who want to follow me need to pick their poison - this blog, Twitter, etc. I use each medium differently but what I hate about it is that I need to think about the information I want to publish and the venue that's best for both me and my audience.
I finally have honed in on what I think is a viable solution. Enter Tumblr. This simple, free service allows anyone to create a tumblelog - which is basically a bare bones blog. Gina Trapani recently explained how to set one up.
Tumblr is unique in that it can ingest any RSS feeds that you throw at it and aggregate all by date - what Dave Winer so eloquently calls a river of news. And since RSS is the common denominator that unites most communities, the end result is an online Lifestream - a place for all of your stuff. (Josh Bancroft was the first to come up with the idea.)
I have set up a tumblelog at my personal domain at www.steverubel.com. It rolls up my blog, del.icio.us links, Flickr, Facebook notes and Twitter tweets all in one place. You can subscribe to the feed here. Also, there's a mobile version. Next step: turning my lifestream into a Steve Rubel widget.
I really like that there is a single place attached to my name that rolls up all of the content that I am publishing online. I also like that in just a couple of clicks I can set up a river of news that I can share at the domain of my choosing. This can become a very powerful concept. For example, I could use either my existing tumblelog or a new one at a sub domain to roll up all of your content - such as @steverubel tweets on Twitter or in-bound inks to my various blogs.
Aggregated Lifestreams could be the next big thing on the web, particularly as community expands. I am also thinking about how this might be coupled with services like social networks, Twittergram, Spock and OpenID. What do you think of this idea?
For the last three and half years, I have called TypePad home. TypePad has hosted Micro Persuasion since it launched in April 2004. Since then I have uploaded nearly 5,000 posts and, for the most part, the Six Apart platform has handled it all with very few glitches. I even once told Six Apart founder Mena Trott that TypePad changed my life. It did.
TypePad is a terrific platform for anyone starting a blog. However, lately it has been leaving me wanting more. I want a platform that is quicker; one where I can dabble. More importantly, I have become fed up having to constantly clear this site of spam.
Wordpress has unbeatable spam fighting features, thanks to its Akismet plug in. So, in the next few days or weeks, I plan to move my blog over to Wordpress.com. I want to stay on a hosted platform for simplicity's sake. However, there in lies the dilemma. I can easily move the domain, content and comments. However, I will lose all of the permalinks.
So here are my options. I would love your opinion.
Option A: Migrate all of the content and legitimate comments (the blog is unfortunately full of spam) over to Wordpress and lose all all permalinks.
Option B: Start fresh on Wordpress. This entails just moving the micropersuasion.com domain over. Under this scenario, the archives and all of the image links will remain here in tact for posterity but at the steverubel.typepad.com/micropersuasion URL (the "masked" domain). This too breaks all of the permalinks but at least leaves things in tact.
Option C: Nuke it all and start completely from scratch on Wordpress.
Option D (why do I sound like Michael Keaton in "Mr. Mom"?): Stay here and fight the spammers.
There are other options but they are more complicated and I want to make this as simple as possible. As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts. Perhaps I am missing something.
Imagine for a moment that you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want. Once clipped, you can drop the content on your desktop, an online start page like Windows Live or Pageflakes, “the deck" of your mobile device or even “a crawl” on your Internet-connected television.
This isn’t some far off vision. It’s the near-term future. It’s the coming era of the Cut and Paste Web.
All of the building blocks of the Cut and Paste Web are in place today. They include RSS, widgets, APIs, Javascript embed codes and web services. If you use a personalized start page, you’re already believer. For a sample, check out my Netvibes page, below. You’ll notice that it not only includes news, blogs and social network streams but also images and embedded iPhone versions of Web pages that snap in perfectly.
However, for all of its benefits, the Cut and Paste Web is potentially more disruptive to big traffic sites than Web 2.0 was. If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide. It will impact anyone that wants to attract eyeballs - media companies, brand marketers and community/social networking sites.
This week in my AdAge column, I outline three strategies for thriving in the era of a decentralized web. The rest of the column follows. I have written about this before, but it won't be the last time. You will be hearing a lot more about this subject in the months ahead. Now is the time to be ready. All you need to do is remember three little words: "traffic happens elsewhere."
Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web
As Long-form Content Becomes Bite-Size, Make Everything on Your Site Embeddable
The Long Tail of content and increasing demands for our attention have created a perfect storm where traffic to brand sites may soon shrink. It's simple supply-and-demand economics at work.
Long-form online content has been usurped by all things bite-size, whether it be widgets, YouTube clips, or micro blogs powered by services such as Tumblr, Jaiku and Twittergram. This column offers three simple steps marketers should consider to thrive in a web that is increasingly becoming decentralized.
Think web services, not websites. Most innovation online today is created by an army of talented, independent web developers. Sites such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are turning themselves into platforms that can run these applications, almost like Windows did on the desktop. This has spawned hundreds of miniature online applications.
To thrive, marketers need to think about how to create similar mini experiences via web services that plug into these sites yet are consistent with the brand.
Connect people. The web is transforming into a medium where the greatest value is created when people connect via platforms of participation around a common goal -- to make money, be entertained or informed, to create, etc.
To thrive, brands need to identify these motivations and participate in these new micro-content platforms in a way that helps consumers meet their goals. For example, the Los Angeles Fire Department recognized that consumers actively use Twitter when disaster strikes. It has opened a channel on the site to provide updates at twitter.com/LAFD.
Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer's desktop. This is a big sign of things to come.
In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.
I apologize for the lighter than normal postings here this week. It's been a rather busy week for mid-August. I will resume regular postings tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a link to a piece I wrote for Wired: How to Run a Corporate Blog. In summary...
* Be passionate and add value
* Know where your bread is buttered
* Color in the lines
* Think before you post
* Have a thick skin and a sense of humor
Wikipedia is by far one of the most useful sites on the Web - at least to me. That's why I am looking forward to seeing what Jimmy Wales and crew come up with when they launch their new search engine. In the meantime, there is a new Wikipedia tool, however, that has caught my attention - Similpedia.
Similpedia takes any links and shows you related content from Wikipedia. It's extremely handy if you want to drill down into a subject. Even better, they give you a bookmarklet that makes this all a snap to use from any site. You can also add a contextual widget to your site that pulls up related content for your readers and even track results via RSS. Bigger plans are in the works - a site for news and blogs called Similario.
This is a taste of what can be done with Wikipedia's vast stores of data. I would love to see Wikimedia take this to the next level with a robust API.
A few years ago, all the buzz in the advertising community was about media consolidation. A feeling pervaded that there only a few companies basically controlled all media. It was disconcerting to advertisers and activists because they felt there was a group monopoly.
These days, you rarely ever hear about media consolidation any more. It's sort of a moot point. After all, the word "media" is really expansive. Companies produce media. Individuals create media. At a media conference I went to a discussion broke out that one day smart devices like Roomba will become media. (Note that not all media is journalism - different discussion entirely.)
Amy Gahran at Poynter has a fascinating post up about Who Owns What v2.0. The image, above, shows that in reality only a few companies - Google, Yahoo, IAC, etc - control a vast number of the Web 2.0 platforms where we create, connect and share.
That's ironic, isn't it? The web is so expansive. It's like the Universe, which seems to have no end, not Earth, which has a finite amount of space. So how is it possible that online media is consolidating? However, you can't dispute the facts presented in the graphic above. The big media companies have been steadily buying up lots of emerging sites.
Still even if you buy the argument that Web 2.0 is falling into the hands of a few players, it shouldn't rekindle any of the discussions that we had back when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and media really did consolidate. There are two key reasons.
First, the barrier to entry online has been obliterated. Anyone can come along and start a social network or publishing platform fairly cheaply and easily and knock off a big dog. Globalization is certainly helping here. Tom Friedman chronicles the technological and social changes at length in The World is Flat - which is out now in version 3.0. I highly recommend the book.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the web is extremely transient. Today's hot site is cold pizza tomorrow. Have you spent any time on TheGlobe.com or GeoCities lately? Audiences migrate. It happens.
So even if you buy that Web 2.0 is really in the hands of a few players, it's far from a monopoly in this era and nothing to be concerned about. The year 2007 is very different from 1997. (Disclaimer: Edelman works with News Corp and Microsoft, depicted above.)
Google News in the US has added a new feature that, while promising, is sure to be controversial. Google plans to roll it out globally once they iron out the kinks.
Any person mentioned in a news story that Google News indexes can email in their comments to news-comments@google.com. Those who do so will be asked to verify their identity and organizational affiliation. There's more in the Google FAQ here and here.
Once Google approves the comments, they are posted and are attached to the story as an addendum, as you can see from the image above or live on the web here. It's unclear if these comments will also roll up into Google Universal Search results.
This is certainly a boon for PR professionals who have longed for a way to respond to what is largely an automated system. Wikipedia needs a similar mechanism. Google is also fairly liberal in the sources it aggregates. It includes lots of homegrown sites and blogs. This approach, while managed manually, certainly gives companies and subjects a voice on a critical site that is increasingly a big gateway for lots of news/blog content.
Still, there are some big outstanding questions. For example: can a PR agency comment on a source's behalf (assuming they represent them) and if so how is our affiliation verified?
Beyond these questions, the move is even more significant because it turns Google News into an editorial product rather than simply an aggregator. The Google News team now makes decisions about what responses go up and what gets left behind. Think about that. What if Google somehow gets scammed with an email spoofer and posts a comment they shouldn't, for example.
Google gets points for opening up their platform to comments from sources but I would had rather have seen them make it more democratic and have this open to everyone. In being selective, the move is more fraught with risk as Google begins to make editorial decisions that might not be popular. A better way to manage this might be to have a system that lets everyone comment, yet also delineates those from official sources that are mentioned in a particular story.
Recent Comments