Blogs are dead - Participation is over

According to Valleywag and Technorati the number of active blogs have stalled at 15 million,

I guess that's the end of the inexorable and exponential expansion of participant created content?

I don't think so...

Blogs only represent a small fraction of what can be considered content creation and participation by...well... participants.

Other forms of content creation include comments, video, audio and lifestreams. Participation, however, includes an even broader set of 'gestures' such as clicking, voting and rating.

Web 2.0 and Media 2.0 are alive and well.

Web 2.0 and Media 2.0 destroying communities?

In a recent discussion on a show called 'Difference of Opinion' on ABC TV here in Australia, a panel and studio audience discussed the impact of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0 on community and 'Gen Y'.

While it was nice to see traditional media engaging the issue, most had very little idea what was really happening out here on the edge.

After the show, Chris Saad, Cody Robb and Nick Hodge joined a call to discuss the implications. The result was this recording.

Questions discussed include:

• Do online communities have the same value as offline communities?
• Do parents have a responsibility to control their kids on social networks?
• What role do teachers and schools play in education about ethics and morals?
• Are internet online problems just magnified manifestations of offline problems?
• Online identity vs. Offline identity?
  
• Chris' Twitter Habbits?
• What is Windows Messenger called this week?
• Privacy on the network
• Transition of old media and baby boomers into Media 2.0

Listen to the podcast

Show Links:

Tim Brunero - Ex Big Brother housemate and new media junkie

Google is exposing more of your Attention Data

As we've mentioned before, Google is collecting your Attention Data. They have been doing it for a long time. So has Amazon and others. They use it to learn about you as an individual and us as a market.

Today Google has decided to expose more of that Attention Data back to you and allow you to search on it.

From the blog post:

"Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of Web History, a new feature for Google Account users that makes it easy to view and search across the pages you've visited. If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. Web History lets you look back in time, revisit the sites you've browsed, and search over the full text of pages you've seen. It's your slice of the web, at your fingertips."

Well done to Google, but there are still a number of open questions.

1. Why can't we export this data as Attention.xml and APML?
2. Is there a way to turn this feature off while still using the Toolbar?
   
3. What is the endgame of all this data collection - how is it used (both for our benefit and theirs)
   
4. Are they trying to help create an Attention Economy, or are they trying to dominate it?

Ultimately though, if Google releases these sorts of features in an open and transparent way (answering each of the questions above) they could help users and the industry better understand the value of Attention Data.

If not, it could cause unnecessary fear and doubt and break their own rules about avoiding the dark side.

iPALS - Identity, Presence, Attention, Location, Status

Sam Sethi posts a fantastic post about Twitter, Attention and Information Overload.

He refers to Twitter as a great conversation tool to help reduce the friction and increase the pace of innovation by bringing participants closer together.

Some, however, have given Twitter credit for killing the aggregator and becoming the ultimate tool for incoming alerts and information.

Both Sam and I disagree.

He writes:

I think we are getting closer to the point in time where our social networks, search & discovery engines and the semantic web combine to provide us with said relevant timely information based on our current location, attention and status.

Sadly Twitter is not the answer, it is just another example of us trying to acquire better information faster from our trusted social network. In fact Twitter is just another disorganised stream of information for us to manage.

While Twitter helps to lower the barrier to getting a message out fast, it does not help you route incoming messages particularly effectively.

Think of Twitter as the outgoing pipeline. What's needed is an incoming pipleine. One into which we can put our Twitter stream, our friend's lifestreams, our favorite authors and the applications we track and through which we can route messages based on a number of criteria.

Sam describes these criteria as iPALS:

In the future to help us manage this vast array of data that has overloaded us with information, I envisage us trusting online services where we share our identity, presence, attention, location and status - i.e iPALS in exchange for timely relevant information

Well I’m Sam Sethi (identity) sat at my desk using my PC (Presence), whilst listening to Paul Weller, (Attention) writing this post, at home in sunny Cookham Dean (Location), but I’m busy so don’t disturb me (status). i.e iPALS

I love it. The pieces are emerging. It is now time to stitch them all together.

• Identity = OpenID + hCard
• Presence = Does anyone know a definitive Presence service?
• Attention = Jaiku (An aggregation of all your Attention data from Twitter and beyond)
• Location = Plazes
• Status = Anyone know a definitive status service?

So if we combine these services, we have what Sam calls an iPALS application. I call it Attention Management. Whatever it's called - it's the personalized incoming pipeline of your life.

We also like to call it Particls.

Announcement: APML Open Source Libraries in C#

In yet another milestone for the APML Workgroup and the APML format, we have published the first open source libraries for loading and manipulating APML files.

From the site:

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

These libraries are a result of months of R&D and iteration by the Faraday Media development team and we donate them to the community in the spirit of open collaboration and mutual benefit. They are released under the extremely liberal Apache 2.0 license.

We encourage anyone who would like to support or modify the libraries to get in touch so we can help in any way we can.

My thanks to Ashley our CTO and Mike and Paul the two ninja programmers who have been involved with the library and the APML workgroup who's input has helped to create the 0.6 spec.

We look forward to seeing what new and interesting projects get created with this resource.

The repository can be found on Google Code.

Maybe professional journalism is dead?

The Scobleizer is once again (for the 495th time by his count) launched an attack against partial text feeds.

The most interesting part of his post, however, is the comments - in which he tells the guys at ZDNet that their content is good, but he would rather read coverage elsewhere because of their partial feeds.

The ZDNet guys claim they can't make money from full text - they need the traffic back to their page.

This comes back to a more long term question - how does one make money from the long tail.

In my post on the subject I quoted Chris Anderson who wrote:

Producers. Effect: Largely non-economic. I responded to a good Nick Carr post on this last year with the following: "For producers, Long Tail benefits are not primarily about direct revenues. Sure, Google Adsense on the average blog will generate risible returns, and the average band on MySpace probably won't sell enough CDs to pay back their recording costs, much less quit their day jobs. But the ability to unitize such microcelebrity can be significant elsewhere. A blog is a great personal branding vehicle, leading to anything from job offers to consulting gigs. And most band's MySpace pages are intended to bring fans to live shows, which are the market most bands care most about. When you look at the non-monetary economy of reputation, the Long Tail looks a lot more inviting for its inhabitants."

So four questions arise from this statement in the context of ZDNet and partial feeds.

1. Are ZDNet part of the long tail? After all, they publish mainstream IT news. Perhaps the long tail can be seen as replacing the head?
   
   
2. Is the Publishing/Advertising model dead as long as content, in its full form, is syndicated and repackaged by an aggregator resulting in little need for users to head back to the source and generate page views?
   
   
3. Will we tolerate (and can we monetize) ads in the feed? The ZDNet guys say feed ads do not pay the bills.
   
   
4. Do Aggregators have a social responsibility to somehow give back to producers?
   

This ties into another debate that has sprung up on Brian Oberkich's blog about his feed being used as part of a collective newspaper. He claims that it was OK with him until it seemed like the newspaper was running ads (which was against his CC) and he was being grouped with commentators he did not want to be associated with.

That page is, in essence, a single topic aggregator. What responsibility does it have to the publisher?

If professional publishing can't be monetized to sustainable levels, are we biting the hand that feeds us (as aggregators)? Or are we 'all the media' now and we don't need professional journalism?

Update: Brian says that the "Edge is not about content".

"You could always publish something to the Web. Now someone can acutally find it in real-time, relay it through their own attention signal systems (blogs (including link and tumblelogs), email, bookmarking services, social news sites, twitta, etc.) and help the collective swarm around things it finds useful."

Follow up - Instructions for running Particls on Mac

We have had a lot of interest in a recent post showing David Cancel from Compete.com running Particls on his mac.

Well Nik, our Business Development manager here at Faraday also has a Mac and he wrote some step by step instructions for getting it all up and running. There are really not that many steps so don't blink!

1. Install Parallels on your Mac.
From their site Parallels is described like this:
Parallels Workstation is a powerful, easy to use, cost effective desktop virtualization solution that empowers PC users with the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine.

2. Install Particls on the Windows installation running inside Parallels
This should be a simple matter of downloading the app from the URL provided in your invite, running the setup and stepping through the wizard. Again this should all be done inside the virtual Windows installation

3. Hide the chrome
To have Particls appear to be running on the Mac OS Desktop without the Windows desktop in the background, you will need to select the Auto-Hide the task bar so that the Windows task bar is hidden.

Then Within the Parallels software you need to select the button "Coherence" which is below the Full Screen option to remove the windows desktop background.

Enjoy!

Got to love Mac


Thanks Nik!

Announcement: Track the Web 2.0 Expo using Particls

Can't make it to the Web 2.0 Expo? Keep in touch with a special Web 2.0 Expo edition of the Particls Client.

It has a special skin and is pre-set with all the feeds and the right Attention Profile so you can great real-time coverage of the event while you work.

The download is actually the full featured Particls client so you can re-skin it back to the standard skin or add-remove your own feeds and OPML after the expo is over.

More about Particls
Particls is an Attention Management Engine. Check out the screencasts to learn more how it works or check out the website.

Wondering how we did it? Watch a video of Particls (then Touchstone) being reskinned and pre-set in 4 mins here

Web 3.0 - Attention Management

I've written a few times about Web 3.0 before. I have been pretty dismissive to say the least. The definitions keep shifting and none of them particularly convince me that the paradigm change is sufficient enough to justify a version number change.

In recognition of that confusion, there has been a fun competition run by Read/Write Web for a one line description. As part of the converage, James Brown claims that Web 3.0 is actually about better metadata and smart agent-side filtering.

As an example - he cites Particls:

"But perhaps the next step is for it to analyse attention data, like which articles I delete and which I click through; then apply some clever filters appropriately. It looks like Google is on the way to doing this.

And then there's tools like Particls. Formerly called Touchstone, this is a "personalised news and alert service" which monitors the internet, your feeds and other information like your calendar and emails, learns which are important to you, and alerts you in different ways according to their importance."

I do think that intelligent filtering on the agent-side is important (what a surprise hey!) but I am not sure it's called web 3.0. It's called Personalized Aggregation, or Personal Relevancy or Attention Management - and it can fit neatly into the current web.

And next... it needs to move into Media 2.0

Want to see Particls running on a Mac?

Lots of people ask if Touchstone will be released on Mac. One man has actually just gone ahead and made it happen - well done David!

Check it out here.

Conversation Economy

There is a fantastic post about the Conversation Economy on BusinessWeek by David Armano.

There is really nothing more I can add to it. It is beautifully written.

Here's an excerpt:

"Conversation architects move marketing beyond the idea of one-way messaging. Traditional marketing efforts were founded on this tried-and-true format and are still prevalent within the industry. Consider the example of a typical creative brief template, which usually says something like, "What are we trying to communicate?" Can you can see the old-world residue in the word "communicate"? It lacks the dimensions of experiencing something and having an ongoing two-way dialogue. "What are we trying to communicate?" implies a one-way conversation. Maybe we should ask ourselves: "How can we facilitate?""

Announcement: Particls Private Beta released

Hi everyone,

We would like to announce that the first full private release of Particls Beta has been distributed. If you signed up to our mailing list your invite should be in your inbox.

All those months of locking Ashley in the programming box have paid off!

On behalf of all the team I would like to thank all the people who have made this milestone possible. You all know who you are but if I may highlight a few below (in no particular order!):

• Ashley Angell
• Nik Seirlis
• Stephen Kelly
• Cody Robb
• Paul Jones
• Michael McNeil
• Michael Starky
• Julie Angell
• Marty Wells
• Michael Liubinskas
  
• Marjolein Hoekstra
  
• Ben Metcalfe
• Daniela Barbosa
  
• Marianne Richmond
• The Alpha and Beta testers of Touchstone and Particls

Thanks everyone

We look forward to your feedback.

Missed out? Drop me a line and the next 50 requests get an instant invite.

Update: The 50 Slots have been filled. But keep paying attention.

Announcement: Touchstone renamed to Particls

In anticipation of a wider release of the Application, we are excited to announce a new name for Touchstone. Introducing... Particls.

And, of course, a new domain at www.particls.com. Please update your links!

Why the name change?
We feel that Particls better reflects our future plans for the product as it evolves into the definitive tool to manage and filter your incoming personal information.

Stay tuned... more updates soon!

Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote

I avoided writing about twitter for a long time - everyone has posted how wonderful it is. Even mainstream media including the local Australian Financial Review (in which I was quoted).

There are two main reasons why Twitter is so great.

1. It's dead simple
2. It has lots of great people on it.

As Robert said in one of his Twitters:

"theuer: well, Jaiku is reacting slower than Twitter. It requires more clicks to see your messages than Twitter. And is more complicated. I never knew of it until today, which isn't saying much. What's cool about both of these is the people on them. NOT the technology."

The success of Twitter, though, makes me both happy (to see something grow so quickly and succeed so much - we should all be so lucky) and sad (to see two other services in the same space loose out on all the hype just because the 'right' people were using the competition).

Both Leo (TWiT fame) and Scoble got into Twitter around the same time and started a huge Twitter land rush. That, combined with a celebrity co-founder (Ev - of Blogger fame) made Twitter an instant success.

I actually posted about Twitter and Jaiku a long time before it became popular and actually said that Jaiku was better. But I think I made a mistake. A mistake the Robert Scoble repeated today in a discussion on Twitter itself.

Both he and I (much earlier) compared the two and equated them to the same thing.

I actually think they are quite different. Twitter is simpler, but Jaiku is attempting to be something more comprehensive and different than Twitter. The two can actually co-exist and compliment each other.

While Twitter strives to answer one question "What are you doing", Jaiku asks a very different question (implicitly). It asks "Who are you".

Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.

What's the difference? Well what you chat about and 'do' is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.

The advantage of a Lifestream is that it creates a living record of ALL your digital activities. Jaiku calls them Presence Streams - but they are the same thing.

My Jaiku Presence Stream has my blog posts, my Twitter stream and my Flickr photos. Others include their del.icio.us links and more. While there are hacks and mashups out there to make RSS imports into Twitter possible - I don't think it belongs there.

So now Leo is moving to Jaiku. Does this mean everyone else will follow him? Robert already has.

With all the Attention being paid to both these services, a little known service called Loopnote is being overlooked. In part this is because their team is not engaged in the conversation. If you read the comments on Robert's post about setting up a Jaiku account, Martin (who I presume is the CEO of Loopnote) is asking frantically why no one is paying attention to his product.

As Robert says - you have to join the conversation Martin.

Maybe Loopnote is not quite as good as Twitter (for example it seems to have more of a focus on announcements from groups to individuals rather than individuals to individuals), but it's also a little bit of luck. If Leo stumbled into Loopnote first, maybe the whole thing would have gone a different way.

This post is getting a little long.. but I'd also like to point out a very clever observation that Robert makes on this post about Twitter's potential for advertisers.

"You're missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE.

If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you'll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I'd hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I'd start building a database of behaviors shared.

Someone say "changing the diapers." Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!"

What you are actually talking about is 'Attention Data' Robert. I think that Jaiku does a better job at getting a complete picture of your Attention Data (considering you can stream all your personal RSS into it). But rather than give it to advertisers (yuk) there are opportunities to create personal filters out of the information to help reduce information overload.

See: APML and Touchstone. More on this later.

Controlling the message in Media 2.0

I am very late to the story where Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Read an insightful commentary on it by Jeremy Wagstaff from the Wall Street Journal.

To me this underscores the level of command and control large companies try to exhert over the message of the day in the Media. A level which, in the face of Media 2.0, has been severely diminished

While orchestrated media campaigns can still be waged by PR companies driving the message for mainstream media outlets and A-list bloggers (with B and C list bloggers following the Techmeme cluster) the great long tail means that something worthy of discussion is still discussed and covered - it still gets ink - somewhere.

Take the launch of Peepel yesterday. The coverage was huge. It seemed like every blog was talking about it (with notable exception of Techcrunch - I think Michael has something against Aussies from Brisbane).

I know that Peepel is a startup and I assume like all startups they don't have a Microsoft level PR firm pulling the strings. Yet they still managed to get plenty of coverage. Coverage that mainstream media would have never provided.

With feed readers and new content discovery/delivery tools like Touchstone, that coverage is being heard by people who are interested. We can now each have our message heard by people who want to hear it.

The leveling of the playing field and the increased diversity of voices can only be a good thing for innovation, understanding and the human race in general.

Attention Metric

Our friends over at Compete.com (fellow APML Workgroup members) have launched a new metric called 'Attention'

While I am not sure I 100% agree with the way they calculate it, it is yet another example of the value of Attention in the new media landscape.

Are you a Peepel Person?

The original genesis of the idea for Touchstone came about when I was working on Web-Based Enterprise software back in the day (you know... Those Web 1.0 days?). The issue very quickly became apparent to me that if you wanted to display an alert like Outlook routinely does from a web-based CRM or CMS system, you were in trouble. There was no convenient way to do it.

So the question arose in my mind... "How can you alert the user to stuff". Then other questions followed... "how do you build a unified alerting tool that worked for all applications - not just the ones I was making" and then "how do you keep the user in control of all this alerting without overburdening them with a rules engine".

The result is Touchstone. It's scope has expanded to handle news and content discovery and all sorts of other things, but at its heart, it is still a way to get messages from the web, to the user - on their own terms.

Enter Peepel (Disclosure: Peepel and Faraday share an investor). At its surface Peepel looks like the newest player in the Web office suite marketplace. What it actually is, is a realization that online environments need to be platforms. Just like Windows is a platform for other software on the client-side.

In the diverse coverage that it's getting today and over the next few weeks most blogs will probably focus on the office stuff. But I actually think the most interesting part is the environment that is being built out to support the applications themselves. Windowing, File Handling, Task Manager etc.

One of the pieces of that environment will be Notification. And notification is what Touchstone is all about.

"A document in your workspace has just been updated..."

"A spreedsheet you are monitoring has been updated..."

"Chris Saad has logged onto Peepel..."

Etc..

So I look forward to see Peepel grow into its own and establish a viable platform inside which a whole range of applications can live - and notify - for the user.

Check out Peepel!

Digg stuff from inside Touchstone

Right click on items on the Ticker or any Touchstone Alert and you can now Digg/Reddit/Del.icio.us/Etc it right there!

Developers can even add their own 'ActionExtensions' by writing a little bit of XML.

Have fun!