Opinionated

Google Books enables Embedding

18 Jun 2009

Here is a book I wrote in 1988 for Penguin. It is available free on Google books. And as of today I can embed it in a web page.

With the recent rise to prominence in the UK of the BNP, it may be an interesting read again. At the time I used a non-de-plume (Keith Tompson) because it was actually dangerous to be an open and active anti-racist.

It also has some relevance to the internet debate about race hatred.

(2) Comments
Tags: bnp, Google, internet debate, non de plume, race hatred

fotopedia launches

In: Internet| fotopedia

9 Jun 2009

Jean-Marie Hullot and Gilles Samoun have – today – launched fotopedia.com. It is the culmination of the work done by the fotonauts team over the past 2 years.

fotopedia is both a web site and an optional downloadable client. At launch the web site brings together awesome images covering more than 4500 subjects. It allows those who download the client to create encyclopedia pages for subjects of their choice, or to add images to the already existing encyclopedia pages. Users vote for their favorite images (either on the web site or in the client). Each subject is produced dynamically from the votes of the contributors and the users and will likely change over time.

The subject pages bind to Wikipedia content for the same subject.

Here is one I did earlier, for Manchester United. I am using the embeddable widget feature to put it here on my blog.

Manchester United F.C. on Fotopedia

fotopedia brings to the Internet the photographic equivalent of what Wikipedia did for text. It is inclusive and community driven. And above all else it is beautiful.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in fotopedia…and I am very biased. But it truly is wonderful.

(1) Comment

Real Time Streams

In: Internet

17 May 2009

John Borthwick has captured in words what many have been grappling with in a less articulate way for about 18 months. The new paradigm we need to think about the internet has finally emerged.

This snippet outlines the broad trend:

Start with this constant, real time, flowing stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites are, to varying degrees, becoming open and distributed. Its blogs, media storage sites (ie: twitpic) comment boards or moderation tools (ie: disqus) — a whole site can emerge around an issue — become relevant for week and then resubmerge into the morass of the data stream, even publishers are jumping in, only this week the Times pushed out the Times Wire. The now web — or real time web — is still very much under construction but we are back in the dark room trying to understand the dimensions and contours of something new, or even to how to map and outline its borders. Its exciting stuff

John draws a single, and important, conclusion from this:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

With this insight I believe John has just moved the needle to a place where we can begin to talk about the third phase of the internet.

The first phase of the internet was about portalization. It was the age of Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek. This was the era in which DoubleClick came into its own as an advertising platform, with lots of big accounts on both the advertiser and the publisher side.

The second phase was what Fred Wilson characterized as deportalization. This was the era of the rise of user generated content – blogs, social portals like MySpace and Facebook, aggregators like Digg and an ad network built for lots of small advertisers and millions of web sites – Google AdSense.

The third, and new phase, is about real time data streams that emanate from the users and the myriad publishers. Blogs and rss remain important (sorry Steve) but added into the mix are Twitter, Friendfeed, and other forms of messaging. This third phase has a number of big consequences:

1. Search changes. Searching static pages remains important. Indexing and parsing the stream becomes a must have addition.

2. SEO takes on new meanings also. Having your URL’s in the stream means that those who attempt to index and classify the stream will find you. Using RDFa or Microformats to enable your data to be understood will also become important as semantics meets the stream.

3. Advertising changes too – in ways we cannot see, but it clearly involves the sources within the stream and the stream itself being made available to an advertiser who wants to target an audience.

3. Aggregation moves from a simple combination of sources created by users (DIGG) or by algorithm (Techmeme) into the need to parse and filter the stream into meaningful buckets. In this world bit.ly and other URL shortening services are simply adding a new signal to the pool that allows a filter to distinguish between an important and a less important URL. Managing and understanding the content they carry is the big challenge. (see http://www.seriouslywine.com and http://twitter.com/seriouslywine for an example of how John Merrells and his team are thinking about this. seriouslymedia is an experimental and as yet un-launched service in which I am a founder).

Erick Schonfeld has a great post on TechCrunch about this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

(14) Comments
Tags: advertising, aggregation, fred wilson, john borthwick, new paradigm, real time, Search,, social component, streams

In Defense of “nothing”

In: Internet

5 Apr 2009

Today's issue of "The Observer"

Columnist Henry Porter is generally considered to be a wise observer of the human condition. Today, in an article in the UK Guardian owned Sunday, The Observer, he blew it ….. badly. As a newspaper man he ought to have been aware of his almost certain bias and perhaps counted to ten before pushing “send”. And, given that he didn’t, his editor should have saved him from himself after the fact, perhaps by asking “are you sure?” But then I would have nothing to say… and neither would others.

Mr Porter’s key contention is one that is being heard more and more from the seriously wounded media industry:

“Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.”

Let’s take this apart:

“Google is … a parasite” – Well, clearly Google has a dependency on the existence of content…. it is, after all, a search engine. So, no content, no Google. But is this parasitic, or is Google more like a librarian… an essential organizer, making discovery of content within a vast mass of it, possible. Do I need to answer?

” Google ….creates nothing” – Nothing? What is the vast index and the algorithms that make the index produce search results. Is it nothing? Again… no answer required.

” Google is … merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.” – “little aggregation”; “lists”; “ordering of information”. Mr Porter has clearly never attempted to crawl, index, and scale a search interface for hundreds of millions of people. He thinks it is trivial. Sadly it is not. And Google does it better than anybody else. How many of Mr Potters readers come via Google’s lists and ordering? Please tell us…. (hint, it is a lot).

“…On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues” – This takes the biscuit. What work did any Mr Porter do to make his content discoverable by a vast and growing army of readers? The labour is all Googles. It places ads on top of its own canvas, the Google search engine. It also offers advertising to 3rd parties and according to its earnings reports, shares more than 75% back with the sites who use its advertising engine. The vast sums of advertising money flooding to the Internet are coming because of Google – because Google gave a way for an advertiser to spend its money effectively and measurably. Google makes advertising revenues for the entire ecosystem.

So.. what is Mr Porter really saying. Is it a cry for help? I don’t think so. He is way past help. Bitter, angry and lost in a new media world he finds unfamiliar.

At the root of it is the fact that the role of a media company, and its ability to serve its 3 audiences – readers, creators and advertisers, now rests almost entirely on technology. Specific technology at that… the ability to find, organize and understand data (content). Distribution and monetization are all about technology. Mr Porter’s employers – the Observer – (perhaps parasites on his writing, simply adding paper and print to his efforts) are not a contender to provide these services.

Google represents a company typical of the future of media. It brings technology to scale and serves consumers, creators and advertisers. If you want to be in the game, you need to grasp that content can not stand alone. It needs help to be discovered, distributed and monetized. Googles only fault is that it is better than anybody else at these tasks. Can it be bettered, absolutely! But not by clinging to the past. My advice – read Jeff Jarvis and his book What Would Google Do Mr Porter, you will learn a thing ot two.

Update:

Here is the TechCrunch take on the story.
Here is the updated techmeme discussion