Media Web 2.0

So Dave Winer got fed up with not getting enough tech product news and built his own memetracker, Tech Newsjunk. Sez Dave:

I created the site because I wasn't getting enough news about products. It's that simple. I'm interested in the other stuff too, the finance, trends, parties, puppets -- but that's adequately covered on TechMeme. What wasn't getting through is the stuff I, as a product developer, care the most about -- news about products. And the interesting new products I'd find wouldn't make it onto the bus. If it got bought by Google or Microsoft, that would likely show up on TM, or if a VC invested a lot of money in it. But I like to find out when things are small, before other people invest.

So off to the site we trots, and lo an behold, there on page 1 is news of another memetracker, PolyMeme's launch on Read Write Web:

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

And there, buried under the New Media heading, is a page of news that would not look amiss on TechMeme where I got the Dave Winer story from.

Ah, the (re)curse of memetics.....

From the BBC:

The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.

The market for namesitting will be somewhat negatively impacted we suspect, and as for Web 2.0 - its a bummr, but its ovr - no more silly spellings anymore, no Flickr, Dopplr etc, unless done for "ironic" post - post modern reasons

Downside is that early days it won't be cheap, no doubt names like IBM etc will be auctioned off at high prices:

However, the cost of setting up a domain - at least initially - will be an expensive business.

"We expect that the fee will be in the low six figure dollar amounts," said Dr Twomey.

Need to pay to be a playr......

Last night there was a debate on the BBC's role in fostering UK New Media startups, initially proposed by Techcrunch UK's Mike Butcher (here is his liveblog of the event). On the panel were:

Tom Loosemore, Ofcom and former ‘head of Web 2.0_ at the BBC
Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s first dedicated new media director
Azeem Azahar, startups angel investor, ex-BBC, original proposer of the BBC Public License
Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet
James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive
Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, BBC new media
Chair: Steve Bowbrick, entrepreneur, Blogger on BBC policy

Mike has done a good job of summarising the speakers' talks and (will no doubt do as good a job later with) the Q&A session, so there is no point in going through that all - I thought I'd comment on some themes that came up recurrently.

Firstly, on the startup side - do your frigging homework! There is stunning naivete in some areas, and this is frankly unacceptable for a new media business that wants to succeed and work with any large companies - these areas came out last night:

Very Few people seem to understand the Rights Issue

Its actually very simple in one way - the BBC doesn't own a lot of the content rights, as that would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, the original content producers have the bulk of those rights. Its very complex in another way, as that means for any piece of media there are a horde of rightsholders to sort out - and over 50-odd years of content making thats a huge task

Materiality is not irrelevant

Based on some of the questions last night, I have to wonder about the financial acumen of some startups. This was really brought home to me with one questioner claiming that since all the TV audiences would soon go away, the BBC was dramatically underspending on its online world. The truth of course is the opposite - New Media is still a fairly small, albeit rapidly growing part of the overall media pie.

The BBC is not a charity

There were complaints that there was "no-one to talk to" at the BBC about various requirements. Sorry guys and gals, but in the world of business that's a general truth, not just the BBC. By and large the person selling the stuff has to find and seduce the buyer, not the other way round. The role of the BBC is not to dole out cash to people in startups just because they pay TV licence fees.

Do you guys "get" how big the BBC operation is? Wise up!

There was whingeing about some BBC technology being old, some being inflexible etc. We consult to media companies and Telcos and ISPs large and small, and in our view the BBC is no worse than any other player who has been going for 10 years at that scale. Of course there is legacy technology - but what startups have to realise is you (i) can't just pull a production system out because its a bit past its sell by date, and (ii) even if you do, it doesn't have to be your cherished new technology they use - in a large scale 5x9 environment there is a benefit in "tried and tested", and the "hot tech" du jour will be just another layer of sediment in the infrastructure in 2 years time anyway.

If I hear the "The BBC is ruining Commercial Startups by being Free" once more I'll thcream and thcream

Someone's got to be the 800lb Gorilla, this is a fairly benign one (look at the 25% - 50% spend on UK companies mandated in the BBC operations rules). Google and Microsoft don't do that. Google and Microsoft also effectively do their New Media work as a giveaway and make money elsewhere. Also, how many of the UK's New Media mavens got their leg up at the BBC, and have continued to use their networks to get BBC money?

However, the BBC needs to sort out its act in some key areas too:

A simple process for understanding rights options

A point well made by TIOTI's Paul Cleghorn was that he wanted a clear view of the rights T&Cs because potential funders wanted to understand and quantify the risks, and without that it's very hard to get funding. Another person noted he had the rights cleared from 5 other public broadcasters in the time it had taken to not get to a conclusion with the BBC.

I would also argue that the BBC pays too much attention to rights holders compared to other commercial entities. In a way this is due to its public service legacy and funding - if anything goes wrong there are questions in the house, wails in the newspapers etc. Nonetheless it coul probably be more robust with "small cap" rights holders to content


Get the data you do have out as easily as possible
Background data, Metadata, BT owned content, R&D research - all these things can be used to create value added services, make it easy to access them

Define a strategy for rights going forward that does not perpetuate the historic mess

There are two pieces to this:

(i) A simpler way of handling the horde of non material rights so that they cannot hold up content re-use and are cheap to settle

(ii) It may not be possible for TV rights, but for digital rights ensure that usage rules going forward are more flexible. This is non trivial, as rights law in general is not really fit for digital purpose (The argument that otherwise everybody will just pirate the stuff anyway is always an interesting one

Make it easier to find out who does what

It is a large organisation, but many similar sized commercial companies are better these days at their customer / supplier etc facing processes.

Very good discussion, handled in a good spirit, kudos to all involved. Will add links/ comments as others post up their blogs.

The really interesting bit though was the starting of the debate about "what should the BBC be in Digital Media going forward" and I want to a address that in a later post after a spot of reflection.

On Friday I attended the MediaFutures Conference, put on just before Mashed08 up at Alexandra Palace this weekend. It was interesting on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the layout of the room - to the right and centre looking from the stage were round tables and chairs, on the left a whole load of sofas with extension cords. The new meedja bloggeurs mostly went to couches with their laptops, the old stream media mostly sat at the tables.

Secondly, the wifi worked perfectly. This is most unusual at any form of New Media conference in my experience.

Thirdly, the presenters and topics were (by design I'm sure) quite provocative to all parties there, this was quite refreshing as I find pure "New Media" or pure "Old Media" conferences tend to wax too much on the side of their preferred beliefs.

Anyway - a brief precis of the day (all the speakers bios are on the website linked above, so go there for details - also presentations will be added over time):

First up - Dr Brian Winston, who talked about "Unknown Unknowns", ie trying to put some structure around thinking about those things we cannot predict about how and where the media will evolve. Here are some nuggets that resonated with me:

- Rogers' original technology adoption curve (Moore's Chasm is based on this) was based on a group of Iowa farmers adoption of new seeds in the late 1940's. Extrapolating to modern Geek tech is risky

- "The Law of the Suppression of Radical Potential" - New Technology is introduced into the mass market insofar as it doesn't upset anybody, tends to be clocked for a long time if it does.

- The reason why university education will never go online is students' need for sex. (Except for IT of course)

There was quite a long debate between Peter Day and Brian Winston, and various members of the audience, who, instead of asking questions, rambled on about their own hobby horses. I really reckon we need a sort of 1 minute question rule for the audience. We were getting restive on the couches and the Twitter backstream started up. The observation was made that at one point the people on stage and doing the "questioning" were all more mature people wearing chinos and grumbling about modern technology, and the term Chino Crisis was coined by your correspondent ( who else ;0 ) - and it is spreading .

Anyway, next up were a series of presentations of research of what actual users are doing:

Alex McKie showed us some research that showed the mass of user behaviours and motivations has not changed that much at all, much of the supposed behaviour shift that is blogged about incessantly is really only still done by a tiny proportion of people. Takeaways I noted were:

- when people who have downloaded all heir stuff from iTunes find they can't move the media on to other devices, thats when the kickback really kicks in - she thinks Apple is storing up trouble there.

- most people find it easier to believe in magic that understand how a lot of modern technology works (the A C Clarke law)

- put your money on the technologies that allow people to gossip.

An outfit called Plot then asked us to think about how our usage of media had changed in the last 10 years and played some interviews of people's views. My biggest shift has been the near ubiquity of my laptop...it now allows me to have a "packet" based timestream - I was listening to the speakers and was active online. I do find in conferences the actual speaking is sometimes far slower than my mind works so being able to fill in is useful - and this was one of those times. Maybe its "continual partial attention" but I don't think so - if I know the subject or where is going I can do something else for a few moments.

Then a debate about what the media is for today. They had Andrew Keen (author and arch sceptic of New Media), Charlie Beckett of Polis (a Think Tank), Andrew Calcutt of UEL, chaired by Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas. I'd like to say that this session was a sharp exchange and rebuttal of ideas, but it seemed to me that the protagonists were mostly talking past each other and banging their own drums. Even though they were using the same (buzz)words, meaning were often different/vague so it was hard to work out what they meant. Judging by the Twitterstream I wasn't the only one with this impression. The only thought that was new to me was this re Citizen Media

- if there was any real power in it, no one in media would invite the citizens in! Inclusiveness is tool to get exclusives

Andrew Keen does have a way with words to rile up the Geeknoscenti, these were a few goodies:

- he noted that the Social Media bubble is bursting, and his view of "Web 3.0" is that it will be when the professionals seize back the New Media.

- "Web2.0 - the technology is more advanced than Web1.0, but the conversation is more backward"

Lunch, and the session split into 3 breakouts - "Skills in the Innovation Process", "OpenNess and Innovation", and I was giving a talk on the "Myths of FreeConomics" in the "Provocations / Show and Tells" stream. I'm afraid I wasn't really concentrating on the Show and Tells as my laptop had chosen that moment to misbehave so I was busy getting it back up, so my apologies to those people. In my session, other Agents Provocateurs were Milverton Wallace who talked about the "Browserisation" of the TV experience (we will expect the TV to look / work more like an interactive browsable menu) and seasoned observer Martin Huckerby whose main issue was the incredibly poor standard of factual reporting in the Tech Blogosphere / Journosphere, noting that hype springs eternal.

I missed most of the next session as I had a few other things to attend to, but got back in time for the last session, where Rory Cellan Jones chaired, and Norman Lewis, Sean Phelan (who founded Multimap) and Prof Patrick Barwise (LBS) talked about models of Innovation and Development.

Norman has done a lot of work about kids' behaviour in Social Networks, and noted that a lot of the growth is because our society is risk averse so that they go out far less than in previous generations, and so use social nets to talk to each other. (This was echoed in an earlier session with a comment that Bebo is more about anticipation and talking about something that may happen (eg something like a sleepover that older people took for granted in their youth). Norman did not tell us why there is such risk aversion though, which to me surely is the big question? The rest of the session was a panel discussion, here are some notes I took:

- Microfinance in Africa - lenders increasingly only lend to women as men just spend it on themselves, mobile phones and beer

- Patents are becoming an increasingly devalued currency, in R&D, R is dropping and D is rising - short term good, long term bad

- in 25 years time, most 40 yr olds (todays 15 year olds) will have the same long commutes, mortgages, kids, will watch c 25 hrs of TV a week, and it still wont be UGC

- Children are not naturally good with the technology, its just that they have no preconceived structure or fear to impede them

The last session of the day was the bar - my favourite sort of Liquid Conversation (I have remarked before on the roles of Alcohol in Social Networks and this was great fun - lots of fascinating people to talk to, ideas to bat around etc.)

I'd say it was an "interesting" conference, in that it was quite "edgy" as there was a lot more poking of sticks at comfortable sacred cows than conferences which are more themed and tend to preach to the faithful, and Nico MacDonald and the organisers are to be credited for that in my view. I thought the Web 2.0 scene took quite a few well deserved pokes, and my overall view of the "median" MSM folks is that there is probably still far too much of a remembrance of a media past. The risk of such a conference is that believers go away grumpy after a dose of heresy, so reading the other blogs should be interesting (see here for eg).

Jemima Kiss on the Grauniad reports that the Huffington Post is going local:

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in "dozens of US cities". The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.

"We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news, not just the political blogging the way we began," said Huffington, speaking at Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism conference.

This is in my view one of those "what do you do when you have grown to your limits as a national level blog" strategic things. You either diversify content genres or diversify content locales. It tells me more about where they think their current market is topping out than anything else.

But doing local online news is no easy matter, with a number of failures to date. Its also far less scalable even if it does succeed in any one place. And it is going to hit competition from Craigslist.

Good luck....they'll need it!

This will no doubt make make me very unpopular, but I do think all the Yahoo doom and gloom is a bit overblown in the scheme of things. Consider these heretical thoughts:

- Yes, Yahoo walked away from a deal with Microsoft, but that would have eviscerated its strategic options going forward. Sure, those who wished to cash in on the trade are upset, as is Microsoft, but c'est la vie

- Yes, some top talent is jumping ship, but you know what - there are a lot of talented execs out there who could do these jobs, they are not rocket science. And every ego going out into the dark blue yonder lightens the ship and helps unglue the peanut butter.

- So Yahoo is outsourcing its search to Google - for a healthy revenue stream. Staying alive this year to fight next year is always a better strategy than falling on your sword, as is keeping your enemies close.

I sometimes wonder if people recall what Yahoo is, so to refresh memories (from Yahoo Finance, still a very useful site), in $bn:

YHOO - Revenue (ttm): 7.12B, Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): 1.06B, Total Cash (mrq): 2.61B

GOOG - Revenue (ttm): 18.12B, Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): 4.51B, Total Cash (mrq): 12.13B

MSFT - Revenue (ttm): 57.95B, Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): 16.42B, Total Cash (mrq): 24.02B

Not to mention its large user base and portfolio of useful assets. In other words there is lots of life in the old dog yet, and plenty of runway to learn new tricks. As Scott Karp says, the company that joins the dots in the new media could be the next Google. And Yahoo has a head start.

Looking at this, and putting myself into the position of a CEO on the bridge, its not immediately obvious to me why I would scuttle the ship just to make some short term financial players and a few noisy bloggers happy, and solve Microsoft's strategic problem as it battles for Chief Tech Behemoth. Underperforming? - hey, the whole planet's tanking, (up till yesterday its yearly performance was the same as mapped to the NASDAQ and Microsoft, and Google was seriously tanking till mid April) - so what's your issue .

Sure, it probably needs a new course to be plotted, new sails to be set, and some new crew to come on board, but this is no ways the first company that has hit stormy waters as it comes of age. In some industries this sort of periodic crisis is traditional, almost.

Interesting comment here by Tim O'Reilly re the real purpose of Web 2.0 (from his post on the Goohoo deal - hat-tip Antony Mayfield for the link):

The real source of my argument for this position,... is that Web 2.0, the internet operating system we're building, is much bigger than search. Search is an incredibly powerful subsystem of that OS, but it is just a subsystem.

And that link takes you on to this comment:

I believe that we're collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows. That is, it will be an aggregate of best of breed tools produced by an army of independent actors, all playing by the same rules so that those tools work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

IN other words, to say that "Web 2.0" is Social Media, or Search, or User Generated Content, or Open Source / Open Access, or Converged experience, or REST, or AJAX, or Long Tailed Freeconomics, or Mashups etc etc is going down individual rabbit holes. It is a systemic shift to build an open operating system / platform / ecosystem (call it what you will ) - ie a new systemic approach to utilise the opportunities of the Broadband Internet. Getting too hung up on one piece today is fruitless, as the whole system is undergoing that massive period of wild creation and experimentation seen in all new technology waves.

We've always cleaved to the original thoughts of Web 2.0 (from the original piece) as a good definition - there were 7 overall (see here), 3 of which 3 were imho tactical (ie how-to's such as lightweight programming etc) but 4 were strategic:

1. The Web As Platform

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.

3. Data is the Next Intel Inside

Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML."

6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform. In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that "Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come."

Over-hyped it may be, but Web 2.0 has been useful as a shorthand to describe this emerging ecosystem - if anyone out there had drawn up similar observations beforehand, like we had, and then tried to explain it, then you'll know how hard it was. It is a re-structuring of the value chain and supply chain, from content creation all the way through to the service on the end user device - and even the end-user device itself.

Thus there is bound to be "creative destruction" at all point in the emerging "Web 2.0" value chain - what would be more surprising is if there was not. Like the legendary buggy-whip companies in the days of the automobile, some players will become redundant. Other pioneers will falter (General Motors was the combination of 5 previous entrepreneurial ventures), some will reinvent themselves time and again (think IBM).

However, history does - in my view - give us some time unassailable facts that we can apply to this as to all others.

1. Any system that loses sight of basic economics will fail

Its for this reason we think that FreeConomic based models will fail - all the funders in the world cannot put enough money into things that don't cover costs as they grow. It works for a while in the early days, but is not scalable. Bubbles are typical subsets of this - early investment in uneconomic businesses allows them to grow to unsustainable sizes, but when they prove unable to lift off the runway, the whole thing collapses.

2. Stopping overconcentration of power in a small number of bodies is good for speeding up innovation in the early days.....

Historically, Darwinian evolution has always produced better things faster than large, controlled structures. Anti-Trust was put in for a reason in earlier eras, as experienced showed that network effects concentrate power very quickly, and that is a bad thing.

3. ....with the exception of basic common infrastructure

DARPA, GSM, PSTN drove standards to give confidence for large investment in "Common" infrastructure - ie systems where the benefit of all connecting was huge, but the initial cost was far greater than any one party could invest. Even where big money is poured into Walled Garden services, at some point the economics of infrastructure demands the become common. The Social Network is just the next example of this.

As we noted yesterday, with Social Media - a part of the Web 2.0 Ecosystem - we are now starting to see signs of a shakeout that marks the end of the beginning. I would argue that Search is a little way further along, and that we will see similar in other areas such as UGC Video transport (see the Net Neutrality debates starting to bite now) in the next year or so.

Update - in his own inimitable style, Fake Steve Jobs makes similar points about the turning of the cycle.

Once a year Telcoland goes away to a nice place and contemplates its converging digital navel for 2 days - this year it was Goodwood. Instead of writing a blogpost, I thought I'd Twitter it as it happened (Live Microblogging) and then thought I'd put my Twitters up as a "Lifestream experience" for you, dear reader. This is Day 1.

The Future of Networks

GEMAYA – Google, EBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL – are attacking over the top using the free ride on Telco pipes – not a sustainable play.

Bell Canada guy saying the pipes are filling up from video - have to charge for heavy usage to fund upgrade, everybody hates us

There will not be 2 mega ISps and one Google, there will be increasing infrsastruture standardisation and service fragmentation

Context search will kill Google (dominance)

Next major change is going to be sensory networks...

The Inevitable Session on Green ICT

Obligatory talk on climate change and Green IT now, but bright side is its Good For Biz apparently. Or am I getting too cynical 

Datacentres now have higher carbon output than Airline industry - never mind stopping flying, get off the Internet ?

If UK stopped producing all carbon emissions this year , it would be equal to the change in China’s output.

Green means giving up something we don't want to - we want green palliatives, not hard answers -

There isn’t enough water on earth for the biofuels projections the GreenLot want us to have.

I must log here that the "Pro-Green" platitude play got heavy pushback from a lot of people - not because people were anti-green per se, more that they felt a lot of the "Green" options were immaterial, politically correct or out of their control.

Hints for Entrepreneurs

Cognitive Dissonance - an irrational inability to take in rational input - all entrepreneurs need it or else they'd never do anything

In developing countries, mobile data is far less useful as- people are still illiterate (ie voice is key)

For UK Entrepreneurs / Startups - you have to pretend to be US or you get no action - get a 415 number and a box address.

c 95% of UK startups that do not fail are trade sales to US companies

Ex 3i guy - UK tech entrepreneurs stuff tends to be low quality, low calibre, low innovation. But who is to blame - VC, Entrepreneur, Ecosystem

His solution – de risk by only funding companies who have already got contracts with major corporates or are spinouts that get a supply contract with parents.

Panel on Mobile Innovation next - if thats not an oxymoron

M:Metrics says that sideloaded music is smaller than legal music on mobile in Europe among women. Eh - are women that honest?

Mobile vs WiFi – wifi/wimax is far better, 3G is has better coverage - interesting battle developing - cheaper to expand wifi than improve 3G?

On Internet, c 95% of PC's are standard, mobile is a total mishmash - huge barrier to mobile apps - 80% iPhone users browse Web, 24% of other smartphones

Mobile Video media - short form media seems to be the only thing that is working today.

Killer failure for Apple 2.0 - no keyboard!

The Future of Advertising

Don't expect it to fund your Web 2.0 startup as advertising itself is changing since its broken.

Ad funding for Web 2.0 companies - Ad agencies will not compensate Co's for poor economics in creation, distribution etc - need alt. funding from other streams

Two 80/20s - swop media and production budgets and create the content, and spend 20% of marketing spend on innovative stuff from web

Future of advertising - increasing personalisation of lower and lower value items - from motorcars to M&M's

The Future of the Web

Big fastest growing trends on the broadband Next web after social media - (i) Local Services and (ii) 3D Environments.

Major barrier Issues with 2nd Life et al - around IP, regulatory obligations, low volumes and metrics are hard to quanitify from

BT in virtual worlds - noting they did a lot of virtual world stuff 10 years ago, no demand then, starting now - dusting off the patents….

Discussion on "what is the point of Virtual Worlds" - one thing it does is audience shifting for musicians - but what are the volumes?

Key with New Media is to demo the use cases - "Sold more Slingboxes in airport terminals than in any other way" from

Slingbox up now - allow a fairly healthy cynicism for takeup of any media service to the mass market - Sky took 7 yrs, £40m for Sky+ now

The Future of Social Media

In a Socnet you have to "write yourself into existence" - Brands are only useful to the extent that they can help this happen.

Brands do not belong in pure social media - behavioural targeting does not work in advertising, as if its properly targeted it can't be Ads

Consumers value the telling of the story of Me – music is “referential” in that it tells the story of Me, the music, brand etc itself is not the point

Sales of music per artist in volume terms in China, India dwarfs what we are used to in EU, is at US levels or higher.

Music Industry on ScoNets - willing to try out new models outside of US, EU - too much money / heritage legal issues involved. Trying to manage their from

Most used area on Bebo is photosharing, similar for Facebook etc. Music is not consumed on site, its more a means of expression / social belonging ...

....but don't fool yourself that viral will work on its own - need a lot of DM to make it work as there is so much other noise.

Ex Bebo'er Angel Gambino - major issue is helping people find the content they want in a long tailed world - word of mouth still only effective way

I asked the inevitable question on metrics etc - got the standard response that old metrics don't understand new media. No advance there then

Now its done, reading the "Lifestream" laid out like this is interesting - its not as structured as a writeup, and it only takes points that really impressed themselves rather than the whole session (ie the points were novel or controversial to me). Be interested on your take on how this impacts vs a writeup.

Another twist in the YouTube - Viacom copyright issue - from the BBC:

In court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web.

The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they responded properly to claims of infringement.

Hmmm....this can be more accurately stated as threatening the way hundreds of millions of people exchange media illegally on YouTube Also, YouTube adheres to the DMCA in the sense that when there is a takedown notice it takes down that infringement, content in the knowledge that someone else will soon repost the content back up.

The real news here is that Google is going to use its considerable resources to hold up any attempt to clamp down on YouTube for as long as it can:

Google's vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court. We've been very clear about it."

In other words, this will still take some years to resolve, and in the meantime YouTube can continue to make hay - no doubt in the hope that in the interim either:

(i) Copyright Law changes to reflect the new realities

(ii) Google / YouTube find an alternative business model.

(iii) The media industry won't find a way to block the copying of content

This is - in my opinion - a rather interesting bit of game theory now. The cost of going to court to either party is not a major cost in their worlds, so both will continue on this path. The outcome has massive impact of course, but is several years off, so both sides will be thinking about how to mitigate worst case outcomes. They will thus be looking at conflict as well as collaboration in their strategies.

The best mitigation for both, however - the lowest total risk outcome - is probably to move towards some form of compromise position over time. Google knows that it will probably eventually lose with its position as things are, Viacom knows that it can't re-bolt the stable door.

So, expect lots of posturing, but the slow hammering out of a New Accord for copyright.

Update - Ars Tech has an interesting summary here, but I don't agree that Ars Tech is in the same boat - I think there is a huge difference between them and YouTube.

This article on the BBC from Jakob Nielson re Web page usability struck 2 chords with me - firstly:

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.

This is impacting the CPM rates of pages, so rates on pages where people do very specific tasks (like social network pages for example) tend to be valued at lower rates than more generic pages. Jakob notes that:

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

I think this is true of some sites, but other smart sites are doing a lot of work in testing varying site design configurations to see what works - one of the benefits of the internet is that you can try lots of options and see what works best - and get the feedback fast.

The second thing that resonated with me, though, was this:

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

I resemble that remark! I am increasingly frustrated not just with the impact of loading widget-filled sites, but once they load they have a noticeable effect on my computer's performance, and I'm thinking increasingly that widgets are at risk of being the new popups - I think sites are going to have to be fairly moderate in widget usage until bandwidth is quite a lot higher for the average user.