Octavianworld

Identity Theft or Fair Game?

Check out the sponsored link (Click on the image to see it full-size.):

I'm very flattered to know that AOL thinks they could make money off me, but to drive traffic to their music store? 

Naturally, I'm wondering how this happened.  My best guess:  when I uploaded the mp3 of my talk at the May 2005 .LRN Foro Hispanico in Madrid on the Internet Archive (a free resource for podcasters), AOL was watching and concluded I am a musician.

Now I appear in their music store as an artist.  There's nothing to sell and no bio yet.  Perhaps they are anticipating my big break on American Idol.  When this happens, it's nice to know my storefront on AOL will be ready.  Until then, I guess my job is to drive sales of Vonage and Eminem's albums.  But even though I have a Vonage line and like a couple of Eminem's songs, I have mixed feelings about AOL buying my name as a keyword. 

I'm wondering what's next.  If I don't come out with an album to justify their investment in me, or if I'm too successful as a traffic-driving keyword (unlikely) will they concoct a Cesar Brea avatar (check out http://www.oddcast.com) and put it to work?

This also made me think about how AOL might have chosen its keywords more carefully. One idea:  AOL might ask Google for an AdSense-like API.  With that, before buying my name as a keyword, AOL could Google "Cesar Brea" via a web service, and parse the resulting XML for occurrences of music-related words.  If the results are positive, AOL could increase its confidence that I'm a musician, and maybe  worth the pennies they'd spend on my name. 

What's in it for Google?  Doesn't look so good from here: fewer keywords bought, less brand exposure (the work gets done by a web service that doesn't develop brand affinity), and more work (yet another API to expose and stabilize).  Clearly AOL would have to chip in to make it worth Google's while, perhaps funding any fees from its savings on keyword spending.  Right now, that's probably small potatoes, which is why we haven't seen this yet.  So I'm guessing from time to time you'll still see me as a sponsored link.

As for the talk, I'm thinking of laying down a House beat track to spice it up, maybe market it as a Kwaito remix (you know, open-source = freedom, etc. etc.)

Does anyone have a better understanding of how AOL might have done this?  And, thoughts on the issue of names bought as keywords?

Experiments in E-Commerce

One of the lasting positive lessons of my time at ArsDigita several years ago was the value of getting your hands dirty in order to really understand what was going on with technology (we were all encouraged to do the problem sets, whether we were engineers or business guys). 

In that spirit, I figure that if I'm going to really understand e-business, I have to be in it, no matter how modestly.  So I've become an Amazon Associate and signed up to sell ads on this site through Google's AdSense program.  Lest anyone suspect this is a thinly-veiled attempt to take on Walmart and the New York Times, I'm donating all commissions to charity.  So please help build the data set by telling your friends to start  clicking and shopping here.

What am I trying to learn?  This post of course is the first in a series of experiments to drive traffic.  Later, while staying true to the goals of original and objective commentary on the topics I write about, I'll experiment with content styles and formats to gauge their impact on conversion (at least through Amazon).  When I try stuff, I'll note it explicitly so folks who don't care to be treated as guinea pigs can opt out.   And I'll share what I learn.

Framing Expectations In Open Source Communities

As open-source continues to gain in popularity, it's important that users and developers have proper expectations of the communities they participate in, or they will be frustrated.  I've been noodling on a simple scheme for describing open-source communities that might help set these expectations.  Like all good schemes, it's got a simple 4 C's mnemonic to describe four increasing levels of organization:

1. Communication -- the community provides means for members to let each other know what each person is doing, but people basically do their own thing -- even if there's a shared point of distribution.

2. Coordination -- community members say to each other "If you're working on A then I'll work on B", but A and B are pretty separate things architecturally.

3. Collaboration -- various community members combine their efforts in ad hoc joint efforts to build X, Y, and Z, but each member funds his/her own way.  You also begin to see more formally coordinated feature and architecture planning at this level, along with some sharing of common community infrastructure expenses through formal legal vehicles like foundations and consortia.

4. Control -- in this model, a big pot of centrally-controlled money is distributed to developers whose work, even if open-sourced, is for the Man -- in other words, development unfolds according to the will of a central sponsor and its users, rather than through the reconciliation of "federally-developed" code sponsored more broadly by many patrons and developers themselves.

I make no normative judgments about these different models.  Each has pros and cons.  In general, as you move toward control, you give up control unless you happen to be the one (or one of the few) writing checks from the big pot in the middle.  Moving toward the other extreme gives you more say over what *you* do and may get you helpful bits of code from time to time, but it can be a pretty random experience.

My own experience with .LRN, which is a "Collaboration"-style community according to this framework, has been that it's a pretty nice balance if you can control your expectations for having everything wrapped beautifully.  The openness of the community has produced an incredibly rich and broad array of capabilities, but they aren't always a matched set, even if they run just fine on the more tightly controlled central core of software that is the true secret sauce of the project.  But from time to time some members wish for more than the lack of an enormous central budget can deliver, which can be hard on everyone involved.  On the whole though, I prefer this to a prettier but inevitably less substantial offering, because if the central powers take a powder, I have nowhere to go.

Moral of this story:  ask about users, governance, roadmaps, and funding, and match your choice of open-source community to the model that fits your expectations and needs best.

Toothing Goes Commercial

I've posted a short speculative piece on the prospects for advertising via Bluetooth over on Marketspace Advisor.  Note to engineer friends who read Octavianworld -- I'm especially interested in your assessment of the relative technical complexity of the personalization scenario I describe.

Marketspace Advisory Blog

I'm contributing to a new blog we've set up at http://www.marketspaceadvisory.typepad.com.  The purpose of this weblog is to share and comment on news, technologies, and ideas related to improving customer experiences across multiple channels.  I'll continue to post occasional essays and other items on enterprise software, the Internet, e-learning, online collaboration and other professional interests here at www.octavianworld.org.  Please have a look at the "Marketspace Advisor", subscribe if interested, and let me know what you think!  Thanks.