Web 2.0

You just gotta love "The Complete Web 2.0 Directory" powered by ... Flash? Among the tags, no mention of Drupal. The "service owners" link just has code to embed their logo in your own blog. The "suggest" link is an email link.

Draw your own conclusions. My apologies to the owners. I'm just sayin'....

I've spent my Sunday morning mostly online. It's a lovely day, sunny and cool outside, and I've been wanting to get outside and do stuff. But I wanted to catch up online with some blogging and reading and such.

Which means that I've spent a bit of time struggling with the pathetic, slow, DNS-forgetful DSL service from Qwest I have at home. Every page view was taking ages to load. (How does Qwest even stay in business? Oh yeah, I forgot.)

And what's worse, among the slowest sites to load this morning was your humble hostess' own blog. And it wasn't just Qwest making things slow to start with -- it was the widgets. The slooowwwwww widgets. I'd sit there, watching the sun rise higher and higher while I wait for "Read" and "Transferring data from" messages in my status bar cycle through all the different services trying to load their widgets.

The. Widgets. Must. Go.

Into my feed-reader steps a new post from friend and pingVision colleague Greg Knaddison on how he just killed all the widgets on his blog. And rather than just rant about the woes of having page loads slowed down by widgets having to load from different servers in the far reaches of the virtual world, Greg has some useful advice for the widget-makers out there:

As I've pointed out, the problem can't be solved by "get faster" solutions like just speeding up the internet connections of users or making the servers that run the widgets faster. That would certainly help, but the "more files" problem means you are still limited to a few widgets.

The real solution, in my opinion, lies in solutions that are integrated into my site's software. Don't give me a flickr javscript widget - give me a flickrrippr module that pulls my photos into a local cache. Don't give me a comment plugin that takes years to load - create the "intense debate" by reading my comment rss and aggregating that information with some form of universal login so that my comments can be tracked from blog to blog (if I want). Having integrated applications you can take advantage of javascript and css aggregation/compression to reduce those files from 10 to 2. That helps.

Of course the problems with my solution is that 1) it requires lots of things like microformats that are only slowly picking up 2) site users will need powerful website building software that can be more difficult to install 3) some of these widget companies have "collect lots of data and do stuff with it" as a business model and they can do more of that without you knowing about it when they do it in this format.

Greg is dead-on. Maybe we can collectively "scratch our own itch" in the open source world (and in particular, Drupal) to help bring about widget reformation.

Meanwhile I'm going to rip out the widgets and put them into an "about me" post, so they are still there but don't drag down the entire site with every page load. I'm going to do that. Soon. Right after I get out and enjoy some of this gorgeous fall day.

Seth Godin is worth reading because he so frequently comes up with some interesting insights about this modern world that's evolving and growing before our eyes. But I think here he gets it this wrong:

If I had to pick one word to describe what's new, what's different and what's important about now vs. then, it would be "choice."

The choice of more products.
The choice of more retailers. Many a click away.
The choice of more consumers to ask for an opinion.
The choice by marketers over who to market to (precision increases).
The choice of workers to be virtual or flexible or change careers.

He goes on with some for-instances.

The thing is, I don't see choice as being some "new" 21st-century phenomenon. In fact, in many ways, there's less choice today than there was 25 years ago. There may seem to be more banks around, but what I've been seeing is massive bank consolidations. The local banks in my area are being absorbed by -- or absorbing -- other banks. I can buy insurance for my company from any number of brokers, but they're all selling the same thing, often the same underwriters, especially when it comes to health insurance. There may appear to be more credit card offers out there, but these companies have been consolidating so rapidly, I think I have one single card in my purse that has not merged and changed names in the past 2-3 years.

Bob Warfield takes on Seth's idea and riffs a bit on "scarce," as if it were the opposite of "choice," but then points out:

The web moves in punctuated equilibrium. Most of the time, choice is illusory. It consists of thousands of minor variations on what are just a few common themes. Most people crave consistency, because they can’t handle too many real choices. And yet thousands of minor variations are strangely unsatisfying. We can invest all the time, seek all the answers, work hard to get to depth, and we’re left wanting more, or at least wondering if this is it. Delivering something deeply different to break us out of the drone of all that mundane choice is valuable.

Seth does hit on one thing, though: "More choice in who to listen to (and who to ignore)."

That's true. However, I feel that is only a symptom of the real paradigm shift in our economy and culture today:

Voice.

Every day, in the "old media" of traditional broadcasting and newspapers, we see closed-minded -- and I'd say willfully ignorant -- attitudes expressed about how unimportant blogging and social media are. But they are speaking from platforms that are feeling a bit disempowered by the new media.

The new media are what have given people their voice. And it's not just that now we can hear what people used to just shout back at the television. We (the people) are changing. It's amazing what happens when you get a sense that maybe, this time, when you speak out you will be heard. That's profound. It's revolutionary.

People can talk back. Talk back to companies. Talk back to politicians. And, most important, talk to each other. We have more choices to listen to because we have more people saying things.

We have voice.

What do you say?

While I was laying in bed last night, I found myself questioning my post yesterday and the attitudes reflected in Joe the Peacock's mocking of what appears to be a rather clueless potential client.

He seems to have struck a nerve, judging by Joe's forums:

Yes let us hear the douchebag please!

I think Joe's got to have at least a little bit of masochist in him to be a consultant, especially an Internet consultant. Sir Geek and I did it for several years and listening to the clients blather on about what they think they want/need is enough to make your brain explode.

Freaking hysterical.

Okay, at first reading of Joe's rant, I confess I did laugh a little. It certainly was outrageous enough to inspire me to post a link.

But to publicly share such mean-spirited attitudes towards potential clients strikes me as rather sad, and what I would consider unprofessional. Now maybe the person on the other end of the line was a jerk. I certainly have encountered my share of jerks.

But Joe mocks this "potential client" for his (?) ignorance.

We in web and software development live in a world that is scarcely understood by most of the people who use what we produce. That's all the more true in the corner of that world where I spend my time: open source, which is a community-of-a-commons concept that seems to elude even the majority of folks in Silicon Valley (who are much more attached to that other source, "outsource"). Quite often we are in the business of educating and enlightening the client, sometimes seemingly as much as we are developing for the client. It comes with the territory. After all, clients come to us, in large part, because we are knowledgeable in things which they are not.

Hello?

Jerks have what's coming to them, imho. But calling someone a "dipshit" for simple ignorance? That's ignorance.

I suppose it's natural that such cynical attitudes will bleed into all areas of business, even this "new economy" we're all a part of that's supposed to, you know, change (read: "improve") the way business is conducted in the world. People are people, and cynical contempt is all-too-common a human attitude. Just don't count me among its willing practitioners.

Then again, Joe is a writer so maybe it's all just fiction. If so, never mind. I'll just walk slowly away from the computer and sit down for another viewing of Office Space.

An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today. Dear dear!

[Update: I posted some more thoughts here.]

A few weeks ago, I started telling friends my wild and crazy prediction that Apple will own a majority share of the personal computer market within three years. Apple's biggest weakness is in their vertical monopoly over their own hardware. OSX is fabulous, but their hardware is crap, let's face it. You simply have to figure the cost of Apple Care into any Mac purchase because you can count on some sort of hardware problem.

Despite this -- and who's to say Apple won't change its tune regarding hardware? -- Apple's star is definitely rising, while Microsoft's is in a self-inflicted crash and burn.

Paul Graham, in is post, "Microsoft is Dead," has the quote of the month:

Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.

The same could be said for a number of companies. Graham recognizes that a number of folks will scoff at these assertions.

Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Graham still succumbs to the notion that all "applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop." Such black-and-white thinking may provide a poetic flourish, or add drama to pronouncements on the future, but my own sense is that the general public is going to start noticing the pound of privacy flesh web companies, like Paul Graham's employer, demand for the convenience of the services they offer.

The desktop is not dead, but it is changing. So is the web (duh), and just as desktop übercompany Microsoft is feeling the heat for their business practices and strategic decisions, we might see the same thing happening to the übercompanies of the web before too long.

It has taken me a few days to recover from the intense energy and excitement of attending, participating in and speaking at the OSCMS 2007 (and sundry adjunct events of equal intensity and delight), and so I've been publicly quiet so far about the obscene and possibly illegal cyberbullying that has happened in the past several days regarding one of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra.

If you've somehow had your feedreader in the sand this past week, here's a brief snippet of what Kathy wrote about it on Monday:

We all have trolls--but until four weeks ago, none of mine had threatened death. (The law is clear--to encourage or suggest someone's death is just as illegal as claiming you intend to do it yourself).

At about the same time, a group of bloggers including Listics' Frank Paynter, prominent marketing blogger Jeneane Sessum, and Raving Lunacy Allen Herrel (aka Head Lemur) began participating on a (recently pulled) blog called meankids.org. At first, it was the usual stuff--lots of slamming of people like Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Maryam Scoble, and myself. Nothing new. No big deal. Nothing they hadn't done on their own blogs many times before.

But when it was my turn, somebody crossed a line. They posted a photo of a noose next to my head, and one of their members (posting as "Joey") commented "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."

The horror gets worse. For more background on this, I refer you to Kathy's own post on the thing, and these various excellent posts on BlogHer here, here, here, here, here and here.

On a couple of email lists, I've expressed the feeling that to respond to trolls is to feed them -- to give them the validation they so crave. They're online terrorists, in effect, who behave the way they do to get attention, and in general I believe it's counterproductive to elevate their status to some sort of Public Enemy, for that gives them exactly what they want, and has the unfortunate effect of elevating them to your status. My sense was that with regard the Mean Kids garbage, the best response was to respond by ignoring these depraved individuals, encouraging the prompt deletion of such content, and moving on.

Mine was not the popular sentiment. In fact, there has been an incredible groundswell of push-back against the Mean Kids trolls, to the point of declaring today, March 30th, as Stop Cyberbullying Day. For better or worse, and I prefer to think it's for the better for now, what has happened to Kathy, and untold other women and men who've been subjected to this kind of online abuse since USENET days, cyberbullying has become the topic of the day.

It's an essentially important subject in this "web 2.0" world of online communities. How do we "police" (for the lack of a better word) such patently offensive and possibly illegal behavior while at the same time while keeping the internet free?

In my session on Building Online Communities, held Thursday last week at OSCMS 2007 (video), we arrived at the subject of dealing with trolls about 2/3 of the way through, and stayed there long past our hour we were allocated. And it became clear that there was no single way. Some folks had more permissive attitudes -- let the trolls vent and be ignored -- while others said it's best to be more proactive, and suspend or ban trolls to protect the community in question.

One thing was agreed: It's essential for the community to have clear standards of behavior, standards which are publicly posted and there for anyone and everyone to refer to in case of any questionable behavior.

What's clear about the meankids.org case is that we're not just dealing with any ordinary trolling, but rather posts that seem to threaten violence, posts that strike me has hate speech. I don't see how we, as a civil worldwide web society, can accept such behavior, and we're long overdue for a public discussion on what really is "acceptable" online.

Personally I'm against any new laws, as threatening violence already is a felony in most jurisdictions, and I hate to see efforts to make the web less like a jungle turn it into a zoo. But I hope the special day today helps start a serious discussion of online community standards.

And maybe, just maybe, some of the misogynist twits out there will realize that their self-indulgent kicks result in real harm of others.

[More via Technorati.]

Over recent years, we've seen how social media and "web 2.0" sites have changed how we use the internet. Now we're starting to see how we use the internet change how we think about and interact with non-internet things.

Take politics. If you've been paying attention to the news lately, you've seen how presidential candidates have implemented community-style websites as key parts of their campaigns. A quick glance at the BlogHer Politics & News blogs shows more and more posts relating to how the very fabric of campaigns is changing as candidates and their campaign staffs learn how to navigate the waters of the blogosphere.

The blogosphere isn't just covering the political challenges of the day -- it has become a big political challenge of the day.

Of course, this kind of thing isn't quite new. The disruptive nature of "web 2.0" has been the focus of forward-looking businesses for some time now. On SiteProNews, Kalena Jordan writes that social media is "The Instant Brand Killer":

The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there's the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet. And if their experience is bad, the noise is generally louder. To protect their reputations it's not just journalists that companies have to impress these days. It's anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Love it or hate it, the user community now has enormous power over the online reputation of a company or brand.

Not surprisingly, businesses and individuals alike clamor for the attention and mostly enjoy the limelight that social media can bring. Others hate the intense scrutiny that often accompanies the popularity. An example is usability blogger Kim Krause Berg's unpleasant first experience of Digg - I Don't Digg Being Dugg (http://cre8pc.com/blog/archives/198).

Users aren't the only fickle creatures. So are voters. Now, after working primarily the margins in prior years, we're seeing social media play a similarly disruptive role in politics -- especially presidential campaigns -- as it has in business, by taking control of the message away from the campaign managers and placing it into the hands of the people ... all of the people.

Whoops!

The mix between political and blogging communities can get rough, and the politicians aren't always coming off well. It doesn't seem like they were quite expecting that. What with the choice by several campaigns to make their announcements online first, rather than on network news or talk shows (or comedy shows), perhaps the campaigns didn't quite know what they were getting into -- especially with regards to the inevitable trolling and flare-ups that can happen in the political blogosphere ... or how some loud, well-financed political operatives can get at politicians who've committed themselves to listening.

As a result, DC insiders are already getting gun-shy when it comes to the internet. Get a kick out of this post from Liza at culturekitchen:

I was told by a party insider they could not link to this blog because I used the word "panties" in one of my posts.

Yes people. Like 9 year-olds, Democrats are skittish of the word used for a girls' cootie catcher.

Do I have to be a multi-millinaire political socialite or a couple of guys dressed in blog drag for it to be acceptable? What of the DNC linking to the aforementioned blog back in 2004 when it had a media dilettante who's shitck at said blog was to endlessly pepper her posts with sodomy jokes?

Does choosing not to link to this blog have something to do with common decency or is it just out right censorship?

What will happen to the American political culture that has been safely ensconced in the one-way announce-only paradigm of the mainstream media, as it continues to interact with a voting populace that has platforms to talk back? It's already proving a volatile mix.

And we're only just getting started in this campaign.

Recently, Lynn d Johnson wrote about a new political website, techPresident:

The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who's got the fastest growing group of friends on Facebook.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we'll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

One sample:

Marianne Richmond at Blog the Campaign in 08 takes a look at the blog on Hillary Clinton's site and find something missing: Hillary.

Mitt Romney is trying his best to replicate Barack Obama's Facebook popularity. However, the University of Arizona's student paper, the Wildcat, points out: "Of the 36 posted photos of Romney's life and campaign, he seems to only interact with white people. (Note to the Romney 2008 campaign: These things can be both an asset and a liability.)"

It will be interesting indeed to see how the carefully managed, massaged, powdered and spun presidential campaigns fare in the wild and wooly world of social media, where you don't need to buy expensive airtime to be heard, where spin from ads and corporate media has limited effect, and where news can spread like wildfire.

If we are now the machine, which candidate will we choose before the election even takes place?

[Cross-posted on BlogHer.]

YouTube is 30,000 files smaller:

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, found 29,549 video clips such as television shows, music videos and movies posted on YouTube's site without permission, an official from the group, Fumiyuki Asakura, said Friday.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company quickly complied with the request to remove the copyright materials, made on behalf of 23 Japanese TV stations and entertainment companies, Asakura said.

Most videos posted on YouTube are homemade, but the site also features scores of copyright material posted by individual users. YouTube's policy is to remove such clips after it receives complaints, though some have suggested the startup eventually could be sued, especially with deep-pocketed Google Inc. about to buy it for $1.65 billion in stock.

This is almost inevitable. The media industry is built upon control over distribution, and 'net outlets like YouTube blast their oligopoly back into the 20th century. They are trying to hang on by using DRM and sniffer technology:

The company agreed to deploy an audio-signature technology that can spot a low-quality copy of a licensed clip. YouTube would have to substitute an approved version or remove the material automatically.

But the writing is on the wall: There is no room for the controlling middle man in the new economy. Content creators, producers, writers, photographers, videographers, filmmakers will be taking their work more directly to their audiences. In the end, while things will inevitably shift around, my guess is that the new economy will be better for the creators.

It's the "owners" who don't create, just speculate, that will lose out. They require big jackpot payoffs, and the market is shifting to the long tail.

So far, all the buzz is pretty much about IE7's "new" features like the tabbed browsing that other browsers have had for years now, with some mention of the upcoming Firefox 2 release.

But just wait until websites start breaking. Internet Explorer has always required non-web-standard hacks. The net effect of this has been my thumbnail estimate of 30-40% of loss of productivity in the web design field while developers work around Microsoft's "we don't need no stinkin' standards" attitude and break out the duct tape and chewing gum to make sites that work in every other browser work in IE.

IE7 honors some more web standards, but still has its own quirks -- some new ones, apparently.

Let the kvetching begin!