Octavianworld

Good Podcasts I Listened To Recently

Doug Weaver on expanding interactive advertising budgets into a new slice of traditional spending on TV.  Very thoughtful way to get insight into how fast the dam will burst.

Dana Todd and Bruce Clay on SEO.  Interesting to SEO nerds and newbies alike.  The comments about getting "theme" right were especially interesting.  At a deeper level, the ideas here are metaphorically extensible to marketing in general.

Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation.  Very entertaining!

One Social Graph To Rule Them All

It seems not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to connect with someone on one social networking service or another.  It's all very flattering, but it's getting really hard to manage, especially as many of these services don't syndicate well, or at all.

In an ideal world, I could connect and interact with people and groups from a single interface.  Of course, different providers of these services would feel very differently about this.  Smaller ones would love to have this outlet as an alternative to almost-certain obscurity.  Bigger ones say, "I already got one, it's my world, and my users are just living in it, thank you very much."

Via Caroline Meeks and TechCrunch,  I just finished reading  Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts on the Social Graph".  Brad does a very good job of laying out the problem to be solved and how to go about solving it.  Better yet, he and friends are actually working on it.  With Google behind him, this is pretty serious.

Still, I wonder if it's a bridge too far.  Prediction:  with agents like Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn at Velocity now out there trying to aggregate interesting web properties into networks with the minimal reach necessary to make them interesting to advertisers (i.e., moving them up from the AdSense basement I live in), we'll soon see "federated" APIs based on these individual properties' collective social graph emerge.  Why?  Because doing so will make it more interesting for advertisers to build their own versions of "Facebook applications" on top of these social graphs. 

Let's take an example.  Let's say mythical new age ad network "Travelamigos" goes out there and rolls out a bunch of small travel social networks.  People who use these networks are more likely to find and connect with buddies if they are connected across all relevant networks, not just bilaterally, so they'll find such a capability useful and be more likely to join the underlying services.  Advertisers will have a larger, better-connected user base not just to sell ads to, but also to develop services for.

For large media firms, who currently control and are expanding their own "social media" properties, aggregating and exposing such a "social graph API" would also seem to be a natural progression.

Joel On Strategy

Joel Spolsky is one of my favorite writers on technology.  I appreciate his ability to range from the "sacred" to the "mundane" on the topic, and to make each better based on his knowledge of the other.  One of his latest articles did a much better job than I did of explaining software strategy, and predicting how things are likely to evolve based on this.   If you are interested in "rich internet applications" you will find his insights very helpful.

LinkedIn: Facing Reality

Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications  that could be spread virally through those networks.  Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph". 

Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence.  My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel".  When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other!  (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)

Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program.  Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps.  That's a red herring, IMHO.  Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice. 

But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent,  is the economic opportunity it creates.  Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself.  It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.

Media as Software: A Conversation With Doug Turner

Kiki Mills at MITX introduced me recently to Doug Turner, whose past includes eight years as a member of the 3D graphics research team at Apple's Advanced Technology Group.  Doug and I met for breakfast and talked shop about digital media.  One of Doug's ideas, which I found particularly interesting, is (his words) the concept of "media as software".  Right now rich media streams are largely analog audio and video once they are "published".  (If you've composed or edited a digital video "project" and then converted it into its final form, you know what I mean.)  Doug describes this  as publishing digital media as platforms on which other people can add/edit their own stuff. 
 

Syndicate This

In the post right before this one, you will see a widget for this blog I created using Goowy Media's yourminis service.  You can help make me famous by embedding it in your blog.  Or, you can install it on your desktop (you need to have Adobe's Apollo player first -- that's their cross-platform desktop equivalent of the Flash player for web browsers) , and wait patiently for it to alert you of my latest big idea.  Or, you can ignore my widget but check out many more useful ones people have built using Flash 8 and the yourminis API.

SMS: Simplicity Makes Sense

Last week I attended a MITX panel discussion, "What's Now in Mobile: The Capability of Today's Wireless World".

It's the best of times and worst of times in mobile marketing.  We're at the front end of an "amazing" new age of capabilities, with video, location-based services, and so much more.  At the same time, the ecosystem's development is hindered, as Nellymoser founder John Puterbaugh put it (referring specifically to mobile video), by "dozens of content formats, hundreds of [differently-configured] networks, and thousands of phone types."

Before the presentations I had a chance to talk with Toshi Uchida, a director at Fidelity's e-business Wireless Group.  Toshi's comments before and during the talk, emphasizing simplicity as crucial to application development in this medium, provided a useful counterpoint to the  hype about mobile.  Among the insights: 

• "aftermarket" application installations on pc's are hard enough for most people; on mobile devices they're well-nigh impossible today, even on a relatively powerful device like my BlackBerry 8700.  (I've added Google Maps and the Gmail client, but browsing web pages is so slow and visually painful that I don't readily experiment as much in this medium as I'd like to.)
• unless they are highly-motivated power users, like traders, most people just will not deal with complexity in mobile application interfaces. The mobile context is just too crowded with other stimuli, time-constrained, size-constrained, and "semi-conscious" to accomodate anything higher than a brain-stem -level assumption about user focus.

This has left me wondering a lot lately about SMS and how to take better advantage of it, since everyone has the capability these days on their phones, unlimited-use plans are now cheap and getting cheaper, and it's really easy to use.  Although Pew reported last year that more than a third of US cell phone users use SMS, very few people I know seem to take advantage of SMS as a service interface, such as Google's (46645), or this impressive array offered by Bankinter in Spain. 

Looking at Bankinter's services, it occurred to me -- when was the last time I saw an SMS cheat sheet posted by a vendor in a public place?  Maybe the answer is to introduce user guides into print advertising, or billboards?  Where's the laminated, business-card-sized, double-sided helper for my wallet?  And, for vendors with whom I have an account, perhaps a refund or partial subsidy (in the spirit of pre-paid postage on business-reply envelopes) of any SMS charges I do incur in using those services?

Related:  this excellent article by Sim Simeonov on the mobile tech stack.

Clouded Vision

My new colleague Steven Forth, who is CTO of eMonitor (the content technology arm of Monitor Group) referred me last night to Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home), which is a social data visualization and interpretation service developed by the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group at IBM's Watson Research Center.   As the intersection of social software and content analysis is currently a high-priority professional interest, I decided to try it out. 

Among other visualization approaches to structured data sets, Many Eyes generates tag clouds from free text files.  Steven noted that in particular, the two-word view seems like a very powerful 80-20 cut at inferring predominant meaning in a body of text. 

I experimented by exporting the contents of this blog as a text file, progressively scrubbing useless Typepad artifact words and html tags that appear frequently (like "title", "breaks", "comments", and my name) out of the source file -- to do this I simply ran "edit/replace/'word', '[]'" in Windows Notepad  -- and then publishing the file on Many Eyes.  Here's the result (click on the image to manipulate the cloud on Many Eyes):

The two-word view does a pretty decent job of communicating the themes I write about, I think.  Unintended side benefit:  highlights recurring cliches and verbal tics I need to purge from my writing, like "drive higher" (argh).

This whole effort took about 30 minutes, from registration to pasting the syndication html into this post.  Two-thirds of that time was spent scrubbing the data iteratively.  This could have gone faster in one of two ways.  First, Many Eyes could provide a custom scrubbing interface where I could register multiple words to be eliminated or replaced from a text file.  Second, and better, they could allow users to share not only comments, but scrubbing filters that would be applicable to data sets coming from common sources with common problems, such as Typepad exports, or government information.

Beyond this, I can imagine a thematic matching capability -- "based on two-word 'keyphrase' frequencies, this data set seems to have lots in common with these other ones..."  Such a capability could be further enhanced by ex-post user rating,  so people could confirm whether, for any given algorithmically-suggested match, the result was actually good, a la "was this useful to you?"  This, like the "Graphic Friendships" idea I wrote about a while back, could help to make the web browsing experience more productive.

Nice job guys! 

Gotuit: Video Search, and its Implications

A couple of weeks ago I had breakfast with Patrick Donovan, and old colleague from when we worked together in the early 90's at a Lexington, MA consulting and software development firm called Symmetrix.  These days Patrick is VP of Product Development at Gotuit Media.  Gotuit provides technology that allows users to "deep-tag" a slice of a video they look at on sites like YouTube and Metacafe. 

Here's a slice I made of a four-minute video on YouTube about the BT around the world sailing race.  I wanted to highlight what I thought was one of the more "that's gotta hurt!" moments in a video otherwise full of them:

 

Here's the url for this slice on Gotuit: http://www.gotuit.com/player/index.html?c=SM_Entertainment&t=8503&s=59028

Gotuit doesn't actually rip and store video itself; rather, it's an interface through which you create a data layer (on Gotuit) that identifies and describes (with title, tags, and a free-form text field) slices of videos hosted elsewhere.  Gotuit provides a browser toolbar with buttons that make it easy to quickly deep-tag a slice of a video and then share it via embedding or a hyperlink in a blog or other web page, or by simply emailing it to one or more friends.

So what?  Search is already a killer app on the web.  Video is exploding on the web.  Ergo, search for video will be huge.  Since video (and audio) is consumed linearly, meaning you can't browse it the way you can browse text, simply tagging and otherwise describing a source file on YouTube or somewhere else is only partially helpful to getting you to what you're looking for and helping you consume it efficiently.  Being able to deep-tag slices becomes really useful particularly for form factors and contexts -- like mobile -- where efficient use of limited resources (time, bandwidth, and memory) are more important. 

It doesn't stop there.  Of course, if you can tag inside a video, and you can sell ads against tags, you can advertise inside a video, in a highly targeted way.  And if you can tag inside a video, you can also string together slices to create what we used to call "highlight reels", but now would call "tag-dimensional mashups" I guess, allowing "omni-directional re-purposing" of content.  Videos of NFL games could be sliced and mashed up to create "best touchdowns", "hardest hits", "ugliest players" series.  Again, particularly interesting for mobile applications and contexts.

While I'm not sure that Gotuit in its current business model incarnation (today's separate service vs. a licensed, embedded capability in major video sites) or UI expression has reached its final stage, this is a really interesting company, and Patrick is a very smart guy.  Check them out.

Appassionata

This morning I went to the OpenACS/ .LRN conference Carl Blesius organized at Harvard Medical School.  Carl recruited Kathy Sierra, author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, as a keynote speaker.  13 pages of notes for a 45-minute presentation suggest she had my attention.  Here are some excerpts of my notes:

There Is No Open Source Community

This post was originally published on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

Professor Jerry Mechling invited me to be a guest instructor in his "Leadership for a Digital World" course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government today.  As part of  the class, we're interviewing Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn on the state's priorities for IT-enabled initiatives.  Peter is a well-known proponent of open-source software alternatives for the public sector, and a primary force behind the Government Open Code Collaborative.

To help myself prepare for the class, I've put down some observations on open-source which I hope will be helpful to others for whom open-source is unfamiliar but potentially important.  In the past, I've been a user of open-source software, a senior executive in both open- and closed-source software firms and at an impartial integrator, a board member of an open-source software consortium, and a sponsor of mission-critical application development efforts that use open-source software in major organizations.  So hopefully my experiences will be helpful too.