Blogging away the Midnight Oil
No not the Australian Band - but its late and I’m blogging - and I needed catchy title, so there you have it.
Judith Meskill is alive and well and finally blogged something (after a 6 month hiatus.) Its not like she isn’t working, runing Weblogs, Inc. for AOL. She’s blogged that today was their highest traffic day ever - what with MacWorld, CES and the Detroit Auto Show - all going at once.
Martin found whobar.org - totally coolio.
Social Media Clubs - all over the place
I’m actually proud of our Governor. He’s got the balls to stand up to his fellow Republicans and demand Health Insurance for ALL in California. Right on!
Cuts, Mojiti, Bubbleply - all three sites via pk. Bloombox, Conduit, MediaFLO, Capressa and People’s Choice Awards by P&G.
Kaliya thinks URLs are cool. You see what a geek babe has to go through? Everybody gets all uptight as soon as she says something that’s not pure nerd alignment. God forbid some NON-early adoper gets confused - huh?
Read/Write goes over OpenID - its history and how it compares to the Big Boys. We’re ryng to integrate Yahoo’s BB Auth into PeopleAggregator right now. We’ve been supporting OpenID since day one (back in June ‘06.) The article doesn’t mention us or the fact that OpenID2 will also have a key missing element up until now ‘attribute exchange’. Hopefully that code will get finished and we can use it for our Import/Export features.
Dirty Burning - trying to get Burning Man into the public domain.
I found this post entitled So, Who Isn’t Doing A MySpace Clone? - and its just so silly I have to respond. Joe (or Techdirt) ridicules Toyota for wishing to offer their customers personal pages to talk about Hybrid cars. I not only don’t see anything wrong with this, but I’d like Toyota to go further - offering a people’s marketplace to selll used cars, provide feedback on new features and perhaps even sponsor contests for new design ideas. Of course there are many many bad ideas for social networks appearing everyday, but Joe is missing a key trend. Humans will migrate from wide, horizontally based networks to niche vertical networks - which are populated by people like themselves, talking about the things that interest them. Its one thing to directly clone MySpace and have the same horizontal aspirations, its another to provide compelling networks to niche customers. Joe is outright WRONG!
50% of a stately pleasure dome - for $125M.
Paul Boutin sees through the hype and notes that ALL of Apple’s announcements were Vaporware. While Om buys the hype, hook line and sinker.
January 11th, 2007 at 2:33 am
Re Toyota: One area that the internets are bad at right now is supporting small groups of people talking about niche subjects. The Few-To-Few communication paradigm. We used to use usenet, then mailing lists (yahoogroups) but these are currently broken with spam, Outlook users and a general loss of netiquette. For real time comms in these groups we used to use IRC and now Skype Public Chat but it’s hard keeping these going. On the web we used BBS systems like phpBB but they don’t go far enough and the UI for all these discussion forums is clunky. Blogs have enabled an outpouring of verbiage but it’s One-To-Many publishing not Few-To-Few discussion. Even with blog search tools its almost impossible to follow a 10 person discussion conducted via blog postings. Blog comments are fundamentally broken as well for this as the discussion is taking place in multiple places and troubled by spam.
And as you point out, supporting a niche group is more than just the comms. There’s feedback, marketplaces, meetings, subscription management and many other functions needed t do it well.
I reckon in 2007 somebody’s going to do “Discussion Groups 2.0″ directly aimed at supporting millions of 150 person groups. It’s an area ripe for re-invention and for a player to knock Yahoogroups off it’s perch.
Back to Toyota. Who’s going to do the job of moderating? it’s a horrible, painful task where everyone hates the moderator. But for a corporate forum it’s absolutely vital. No corporate is going accept flame wars, teen-stalking or porn spam. There’s a business there outsourcing moderation for corporates.
January 20th, 2007 at 10:56 am
I like both Marc’s and Julian’s points.
There’s so little undertstanding .. yet .. of how companies and the people charged with “control” inside them (whatever control comes to mean) will come to grips effectively and on an ongoing daily basis with what hyperlinks and digital content and flexi-space can offer / bring / create.
I think there will be a real resurgence of what is now called OD, and some wag (well, i’m a wag and have written about it) will call it eOD … and it will involve customers, conversation, and champion-and-channel rather than command-and-control.