Adopting the Web

My Internet reality is increasingly attached to applications from Google.  Nearly every week a new feature manages to mysteriously finagle a path into my daily routine of organizing, reading, searching, communicating, calculating, traveling, etc.  Most recently, my personal Googlesphere added the ability to use both Google Chat and AIM accounts simultaneously from the same interface.

Even limited feature applications such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets are slowly winning my loyalty.  The shift to both applications - despite obvious inferiority to Microsoft Office and Zoho - is primarily for convenience and collaboration.  The process of composing a document in MS Word, selecting save, uploading the file into an email, creating an appropriate subject heading so the recipient will recognize the message, etc is 2-3 steps longer than the same task in the Googlesphere.  Who cares that spell check is subpar and custom formatting is limited?  As Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb suggests, the number of users who care about these functions is decreasing at a steady pace.

To prevent a complete metamorphosis into a Google fanboy, I am consciously striving to make 2008 a year devoid of Google search (too bad next year does not end in an -ee sound so I could create a slick slogan like “Google free in ‘03″).  A difficult endeavor, but I hope to persevere through the following search alternatives - each of which capitalize on my existing, ever-expanding social networks:

Eurekster provides custom search portals entitled “Swicki’s.”  Building a swicki allows users to customize a search community with relevant resources including blogs, videos, images, etc.  Colorado based Lijit provides a similar service, which is visible in the left sidebar of this blog (already making progress!).  Both services construct tag clouds based on searches within your created community, continuously refining the results.

Another solution is available through Mahalo - the human powered search project of Jason Calacanis.  Mahalo Greenhouse provides the backbone of the search engine, allowing people to submit result pages for $10 - $15 depending on quality.  Relying on Greenhouse contributor’s to populate and refresh the search engine is most likely an arduous process, but the engine is already beneficial for ephemeral information.

Longtime Google competitor Ask.com is also an option - especially if I want my search information to remain anonymous.  Turning on the “AskErase” feature deletes search queries and related data from Ask.com servers, prohibiting cataloging of my IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies for later use in advertisements.

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Kudos to Radiohead’s successful experiment in music pricing. Praise to Prince for releasing an album as a free insert in the archaic, decaying newspaper industry. And finally, a high five for 50 Cent who recognizes that “File Sharing Doesn’t Hurt Artists.”

The aftermath of these headlines incited a wave of euphoria among die-hard fans and aspiring musicians worldwide comparable to the British Invasion or Elvis’s first pelvic gyrations on national television. The glory days have returned! Further examination, however, reveals several misleading messages hidden behind the topical glitter coating a DRM-free, file-sharing friendly music industry.

1. 50 cent is a superstar. Tremendous crowds provide tremendous opportunities for profit. During the last half of the 20th century, album sales were the primary offering and thus dominated the revenue pie chart for the music industry. As 50 cent aptly recognized, however, money is shifting toward merchandising. A combination of products - water, shoes, concert tickets, films, and clothing for 50 - account for today’s profit line.

For an unknown artist to earn a living off t-shirts is unfathomable and the patronage of a well-connected producer or executive is still required for success.  Look at the following lineage: Wrecking Crew - NWA - Dr. Dre - Eminem - 50 cent.  Each artist was hand-picked by an established entertainer and inserted into an existing music making machine.  The names may change but the game is still the same.

2. All marketers are liars. Musicians are forced to double as marketing majors and outspoken anti-commercial groups like Radiohead are no different.  Their “free” album release was not quite so revolutionary when considering the subpar 160 kbps quality. The popular British band understands people do not want to pay full price for something with diminishing value as a commodity. Poor quality music files are readily available on a number of file-sharing sites, so Radiohead made a slightly more appealing offer with hopes of capitalizing. Worked well, but do they deserve the excessive heralding from bloggers and journalists?

Anyone with an Internet connection can conceivably record an album, but producing an epic concert or stitching an ornate t-shirt still require some expensive tools of production. Way to go Radiohead for misleading the masses.

3. Music provides emotion, not a product. Returning the market value of music…ubiquitous access to recording tools (I tinker with music via my laptop with time as the only capital requirement) diminishes the value of music as a product. Music as a product - or art for that matter - was a relatively short lived concept, beginning with the proliferation of sheet music in New York’s 19th century Tin Pan Alley. With phonographs, cassettes, mini-discs and a host of other dead mediums exhausted, music no longer has a necessary product. The art has aptly returned to its mathematical routes - a string of 0s ans 1s.

So how can labels and artists monetize the remaining emotion inflicted by music? Create a number of artifacts representing the original emotional state induced by the music. Music artifacts will be the CD of the 21st century.

4. The arts are steeped in patronage. The historical attachment of the adjective “struggling” to artist is no coincidence. Deriving money from a creation of the mind that does not mow the lawn, wash the dish, or clean the bathroom is difficult. Beauty is superficial, talent is objective - and the majority of artists are destined to struggle because of these laws of nature.

Michaelangelo’s relationship with the Medici family is a perfect example of classical patronage. If you prefer modern examples - look no further than MC Hammer’s connection to baseball tycoon Charlie Finley. Artists need someone to believe in their abilities, preferably someone with deep pockets.

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Until recently, searching for accurate, well-written pieces in the expanding blogosphere was a bitch. The struggle was particularly tiresome if you were not familiar with the first generation of authoritative sources such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, BoingBoing, etc. However, the quest for accuracy and refined writing skills was not surprising for those viewing blogs as an alternative to mainstream journalism - every amateur driven industry inevitably collects sub par content (porn anyone?). Digg and Technorati provided early solutions to the problem by aggregating content into a single platform. Unified content facilitates more accessible data, and thus the first semblance of a ranking system. These early aggregators, however, suffered (to this day) from bubbling eclectic news that does not always scream “know this information or else.”

For lack of more accurate terminology, I refer to this era of headaches and fragmented idea threads as BT (Before Techmeme). Site creator Gabe Rivera responded to the following blogosphere hindrance: “the next big story in technology may reside on a blog you’ve never heard of or a news site you don’t have time to scan.” The Techmeme solution provides timestrapped readers with access to the most prominent discussions throughout the technology blogosphere. Simply compare and contrast the discussions following several Techmeme threads to develop a list of favorite commentators. “Apple to Unveil Faster IPhone, AT&T’s Stephenson Says” is the top headline as I type and contains over twenty ancillary sources each with unique viewpoints. For example, an Apple fanboy may be driven to reports from Macworld or MacDailyNews instead of visiting a more biased source like CNET News.

My initial response to Techmeme when I stumbled across the site in the summer of 07 was one of astonishment. Amazing…I can track conversations throughout the Internet through a single portal. Also, I no longer need to discern importance since the Leaderboard informs me of popularity. Several months of Techmeme devotion, however, induced a sense of stagnancy from reading the same sources repeatedly…definitely not an activity for the inquisitive.

So what is the reasoning for my waning fling with Techmeme? I am still clinging to a conception of the blogosphere as a myriad of opinion, choice, and editorial freedom not available in mainstream media. But as much as my naivety would like to deny, the blogosphere is transforming into a commercial ecosystem driven by CPM, ROI, and linking. The Techmeme’s of today are the mass media outlets of tomorrow - still force feeding reading material, only grabbing articles from a larger pool of commentators. Fred Wilson describes a similar experience in relation to mainstream media adoption: “So what happened? I think it’s pretty simple. Everyone knows that you can write to techmeme if you want to be part of the conversation. Can’t think of what to write about? Go to techmeme, grab one of the memes, write a post that links to it, and your post will get picked up on it. Dave Winer predicted this would happen four days after the leaderboard launched.”

The contrast between AT (after Techmeme) and BT is growing rapidly through a number of other solutions aimed to organize the blogosphere. Blogrunner arose from the NY Times interactive staff earlier this month as a more diverse response to Techmeme, expanding coverage to entertainment, politics, health, Iraq, etc. Feedhaus is another application in this sector, allowing users to follow the hottest news via self-selected tags. Outside of the the customization enhancements, Feedhaus also offers relevant videos and photos.

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The relationship-search connection attracts a variety of labels from leading Internet authorities.  Facebook’s Zuckerberg ambiguously refers to the combination as a “social graph” - loosely defined as the map linking personal data through social applications.  Internet visionary Tim Berners Lee recently hypothesized on the ”Great Global Graph” (he loves consonance), describing a new level of digital understanding in which different applications instinctively recognize the user’s established network.  No more repopulating a social network upon joining. 

Typically, descriptions of this new relationship -based connection are speculative, but the future is always available in the present.  An example of the Berners-Lee vision exists through the convergence of web-based email services into social networking sites.  Email accounts, especially those with large storage capacity like Gmail, are bursting with enough uber personal information to induce salivation throughout Facebook’s Beacon team.  

Yahoo recently released a rudimentary module to incorporate Facebook information into email start pages, which only enhances the value of the data within a web-based account.  Facebook, however, is also employing an inverse attack with new email notifications and the ability to migrate addresses through “friend finder.”   And you thought email was dead… 

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Continuing with yesterday’s theme of global technology initiatives, I decided to expose several startups located throughout Africa.  Africa remains a drastically different continent than North America and Europe with different technological demands.  However, the same bizarre company names are still apparent.  The names are most likely a response to common domain scarcity and the desire to create a new dictionary entry, but could be demonstrative of the universal  insanity of technology entrepreneurs.

Afrigator is a blog trending site similar to Digg, aptly named to represent the long tail of the African blogosphere.  According to analytics on Afrigator, the site directs approximately 400,000 users per month to blog posts from specified African channels.  The user base does not, however, appear to participate heavily in the ranking functionality of Afrigator (both the home page and South African list are littered with zeros in the voting section).  Language barriers may be to blame and have plagued similar efforts in Europe from gaining mass acceptance. 

While a number of the African 2.0 companies listed on Black Looks pertain to blogging, video and picture sharing platforms are represented by Zoopy.  Think Flickr meets YouTube with a uniquely South African twist.  Curious why the opening credits from Who’s The Boss and The Nanny are featured on the home page (even Zoopy’s holding company - Full House Technologies - references early 90s television).  

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