Thursday, January 26, 2006
Gang planks
Steve Gillmor has a series of podcasts (three so far) following up on the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld. First with Ephriam Schwartz, second with Dan Farber and third with yours truly. ...this is as close as Doc and I have come so far to having a conversation just like the conversations we usually have.
Observations
The web is the last place in the world to attempt to protect anything.
The code is against you.
The browser is against you.
The computer and its connection are against you.
The structure and protocols used in the internet are against you.
I am against you, but I did offer you a solution that I know works.
If you want to protect things the web is not the place for you.
Therefore, he says, The internet has a Problem. It's called Copyright.
That's the pitch. The wind-up is much longer and, as always with the Lemur, a fun read.
Doing less evil, possibly
David Weinberger finds himself in reluctant agreement with Google in the tough choice it faced between pure pursuit of its mission and compromising that mission to comply with Chinese government restrictions on search there.
So do I.
I believe constant engagement — conversation, if you will — with the Chinese government, beats picking up one's very large marbles and going home. Which seems to be the alternative.
And, like the good doctor, I'm not sure I'm right, and I have huge misgivings.
Endless means to living ends
First, Rajesh Setty on Why you can't ignore blogs:
...it is important for us to adapt to the new world order at a breathtaking speed. The questions, therefore are:
- How do we know what are the new rules of the game?
- How to we know how to adapt to these new rules?
One answer may be to become an eternal student and keep upgrading our knowledge at a breathtaking speed. Traditional education mediums have a disadvantage here.
Second, Mike Warot on Connections:
It all adds up to an addictive mix of discovery and learning when blogging works as a system. The ah-ha experience in the mind of a reader gets written down, then edited by the rest of us, and the cycle of life continues. It's fun to be part of this, gosh darn it.
Third, Bernie DeKoven on Defending the Playful. In this case, Eric Grohe's mural in Marion, Ohio:
There are a lot of people who don't like to have their eyes played with, even for a second. Especially those who have strayed too long and too far from the Playful Path, if you know what I mean. They just can't seem to find delight in it all, in their eyes getting played with like that, their very vision, their understanding of what they are actually looking at, redefined. It says alot aboout the artist, but also something about Marion and whatever mysterious civic forces were engaged to pay for the whole thing.
Fourth, The Community Engine says Mass Conversation Tracking Doesn't Work:
Just consider technorati. They track 26.3 million sites and 1.9 billion links. That's less than 75 links per site. In a good month of blogging, I can generate that on one site. So, technorati's coverage is not adequate to the task of tracking every link. The same is true of icerocket and Google blog search.
Last, but hardly least, I got a call from David Sifry last night asking me to take a look at Technorati's new subject explorer feature (the five boxes on the front page, plus the list of topics in the right column of results pages). [Disclosure.] While those moves by Technorati — and similarly inventive moves by Icerocket, Feedster, Pubsub and other Live Web engines — may not address directly the concerns Community Engine expressed in that post, they also both demonstrate some of what Scoble talked about on Tuesday when he advised Yahoo not to cede search to Google, after reading Steve Rubel saying he no longer uses Yahoo search because I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn't aspire to make best of breed.
First, it's clear that search is hardly a Done Thing. Not by a long shot. Second, it's clear there is an awful lot of differentiation happening in search. Which will only increase as the Web itself continues to differentiate and branch off in new directions.
Which raises a question for Robert, Steve, and the rest of ya'll: What breeds are we talking about here?
I suggest that the two breeds are Static Web Search and Live Web Search. The Static Web is the one with sites that are designed and architected and constructed and are, on the whole, buildings on real estate that front the Web. The Live Web is the one that's written and authored and published and blogged and podcast and tagged and syndicated. There is some overlap, of course. Static Web search engines cover both. They just do a better job with static sites than they do with live ones. Live Web search engines (including Bloglines, Blogpulse, Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Pubsub, Technorati and Yahoo's blog results sidebar on its news search), by responding to RSS feeds, only follow the Live Web.
Here's another difference: The Live Web engines are evolving a lot faster, and a lot more responsively, to a market they can't help following if they do their job.
By the way, I intend to write a book about The Live Web by the end of this year. It will be an open process. More about that as the project moves along.
From the Blawgiver
Denise Howell: I, Sandwich Dominatrix. Doorknob spam, anyone?
Overheard
Eric Schwartzman's latest podcast is an interview with yours truly, recorded Wednesday. (Pretty fast turnaround, as these things go.) Here's where the file lives. And here's the file.
I'd rather not be there when it happens
Brian Oberkirch wants to know what you want out of blog monitoring.
Wish him luck. He'll need it.
Chris Albritton is heading back to Iraq for the Nth time. I wonder just how many more times I can go through seeing a friend on TV surrounded by gunmen.
This time he'll podcast too. ...my office manager and I will be taking questions, once I get the final logistics settled. These "mortar side-chats" will then become regular podcasts...
Bonus link: Riverbend's latest.
Blues news
Among other news, Tony Steidler-Dennison's Roadhouse Podcast is now devoting tip jar income to The Blues Foundation's Handy Artists Relief Trust. His goal for the year: $12k. I just reduced that a tiny bit. If any of the rest of ya'll love the blues, and the Roadhouse (the world's best pound-your-steering-wheel-to-the-music podcast), do the same.