Tom Watson

The Case for Old Comments

Fred Wilson is  thinking about closing off his older comment streams to help adapt to a new technology that will make his well-traversed blog's comments a bigger part of the clickstream. I understand the rationale - comments have been buried in blog architecture for too long - but I think it's a mistake.

I love getting comments on old posts, and I get them all the time. My Guitars R Us post from way back in 2004 is great case in point. It's become the de facto public commons for Guitar Center employees (current and former) to dissect the company's management practices, compensation structure, and business plan. My original thoughts have been long since cashiered to mere background status; the commenters have been going at it for years. The most recent post there is from August 19th - indeed, that single post has almost reached full-blown blog status on its own.

There are others. I got a comment from a friend of Marina Lakhman just the other day. In the spring 02 2004, I wrote about Marina, a terrific young woman who died tragically young. It was a short remembrance of a colleague and a friend who didn't live to see Web 2.0, but would have embraced its social aspects in all fullness. I get comment on that post a couple of times a year. Last week, I got this from Manny:

I agree with the poster who said she is one of those people that when you hear they're dead, you go "what the..." One of the saddest days of my ife is when I found out she died.

And, of course, it brought Marina to my mind. That's a good thing. I still get comments on some of my Mukhtaran Bibi posts from awhile back. And punk rock fans of a certain vintage are always liable to drop in and defend Johnny Ramone's politics or mourn untimely demise of Johnny Thunders. That's great. Over on Fred's blog, commenter Shannon Clark nails it, I think:

There is indeed value to the comments in certain old posts - I know of many bloggers whose old posts on a given topic have sparked a small community in the comment threads for a given post (usually on topics hard to find elsewhere online).

Exactly.

We need to open comments to the distributed media model; our posts go everywhere, but comments stay home. And comment spam is an incredible annoyance. But I'd hate to see Fred close off comments to older posts - his is an influential blog and it may lead others to take the same step. and I think he'll miss the little late-arriving gems that can really pick up an old post.

Platform Facebook

I joined Facebook a year ago, built a small network of contacts (mainly political bloggers), and left it at that. Turned to it now and then to look people up. But lately, I'll admit to spending more time. Facebook has become a big-league platform and frankly, it's wonderful to have a still-independent big-time new media platform out there and growing.

Now, Facebook germinated with the college kids - linking campuses and causes, "faces" and wannabes. It's often thrown into conversation by middle-aged guys who need a buzzword or two about the hot social networks. "The MySpace and Facebook crowd." So the names drop.

But while MySpace remains a generally inpenetrable mess (sorry Rupert, you bought a lemon), Facebook has grown up and it now has real professional uses. It's also a pleasure to use.

So much so, that I created a newcritics Facebook group today, rather than add bulletin boards and other features on the site itself. It just made sense. For one, the ease of use at Facebook and its new open platform (you can build apps there now) is attractive. For another, there's a built-in audience that can come to newcritics from the Facebook platform itself. I like that.

Bits and Pieces

Whatcha got under the hood there, fella? That a six-cylinder or the eight? What kind of gizmos and flibgadgets are you using on the front end? How's the mileage on the hozzle? These are the kinds of high-tech questions that we hard-core early adopter types have to field on a daily basis. We try to boil it down to layman's terms, of course, so that even the non-engineers can attain a vague grasp of the fundamentals. So now and again, we take a quick look at some of the more technical advances at Tom Watson: My Dirty Life & Times - a tip of the virtual hat to the massive team that keeps this blogmobile moving down the highway. Some new additions to the basic muscle car Typepad V8 powertrain:

See that box of head shots and avatars down the left side - no farther, the LEFT side. There. That's the handy little widget from MyBlogLog, a newish web service that Fred tipped me off to. It's incredibly viral - and for grownups, too. Kind of a MySpace for middle-aged people who write blogs. Basically it tracks other bloggers who visit your site, creating a kind of central community around blogs. I like it very much so far,and I'd love to see more of the bloggers in the B-roll join up. Here's a hint: it's already bringing in new readers. so please sign up and join my community. I'm curious to see what feature sets MyBlogLog adds down the line.

Also down that left column is the feed from my coComment account - a nifty service that I use to track my comments left on other blogs. Too often, I've found I drop a comment or two and orget to come back and follow the conversation. Then too, how will my own readers know what I'm commenting on elsewhere? In the open spirit of this conversation of ours - and with coComment's help - you can track my virtual footprints around the web and leave your own as well if you choose. I like this feature very much.

On the right side are two features that have been up for a while. The first is my Flickr box, which has been a feature here almost since the start. Love Flickr - an almost too obvious thing to say. But since it's recently been redesigned, I love it more. Keeps track of my pics, helps distribute photographs to a wider world, and lets me in on the lives of many friends and colleagues online. Visit my Flickr page. Tell me how cute my kids are.

Finally, there are the charts from Last.fm, a social music site that is really amazing - not only does it track what I'm listening to on my desktop (but not my iPod, alas) and report it back to me - and me to you - it offers up an infinite set of tag-based "radio stations" that allow me to discover new music and old faves. I use it all the time. Feel free to comment on my taste in music. (Strangely, my most-played track at work is Brand New Cadillac by the Clash - hmmm). That's what this sucker is for.

Part of the purpose of this blog is pure experimentation with the medium - of it there's anything else I should add, let me know. Features are liable to come and go, depending upon whether they work for me. But hey, it's my blog. I'm the digital grease-monkey here. Over and out.

UPDATE: Of course, as soon as I endorse coComments, the javascript for publicizing the service takes the site down for a couple of days for those of you stuck using the Internet Explorer browser. I endeavored to take it down - from the shore, via my Treo phone - and patched things together. Fred apparently suffered the same problems, and comments on his experiments with "blog bling." I agree with him - this is an experiment for me, and if a script takes my breathless writing offline for IE users for a day or two, well that's the price ya pay for living in a transparent world.

MySpace is YourSpace

Typepad is like the ancient Buick Skylark I used to drive. Sometimes it flies, that killer 350 smacking down shiny Camaros out on Central Avenue. And sometimes it just answers with a cold, empty "click, click, click" when you turn the key. Today was the dead battery Typepad, so while I sat there unable to post, it got me thinking about these internets of ours.

Specifically about social networks, actually - those hotter-than-Hades social-bookmarking, social-tagging, and social-er-hooking-up sites that are sucking up more and more user time online, and more and more ink in the press.

First off, I'm not hooked.

Yeah, I use tags...sometimes. When I forget, I forget. Mostly I use 'em to keep track of stuff for myself, whether on Technorati or Flickr or my own blog. I don't use them to meet other taggers. Same thing with Delicious (when I can figure it out). The only other reason I use tags is the somewhat hypocritical notion that they'll deliver a larger audience. Both selfish reasons, unrelated to a wider sense of online community - for that, I rely on comments, both on my blog and the many other sites I track on a regular basis. Comments are social networking, to me.

I was thinking about this after reading a terrific post by Mark Hurst of Good Experience, who was hired by Delicious (again, no dots, I'm too tired) to help in making the site/service more user-friendly. Mark's key observation hit home:

Since we finished the project a few months ago, I've noticed a lot of attention in the press paid to this area. Every other week, it seems, there's a major story about "social bookmarking", "tagging", "folksonomies", or some such term. Despite the fact that the average user has no idea what these mean, and no easy way to reach the benefits, these stories proliferate. And here's why: techies are so adept at understanding these tools and reaping the benefits that they sign up in droves; journalists talk to techies to get story ideas; and voila! a new "hot trend" is born in the press.

Now, I'm something of a techie (slightly lapsed but recovering rapidly) and an early-adopter in these matters, but the benefit of spending hours creating a complex taxonomy for free, so that other users may somehow benefit (in mysterious and often unclear ways, as Mark points out) seems to come up a few dollars short of a bargain. This is something Joshua Porter over at his Bokardo blog took up in a post back in May (pointer by Mark):

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Still, you've seen the news about MySpace, haven't you? It's gotten more bytes in certain circles than the North Korean missile program - and in my book, the trajectory is just as steady. MySpace - where I spend zero hours and zero minutes per week because of age restrictions - is the new traffic leader, blowing by Yahoo and eBay in terms of total percentage of Internet traffic.  According to Hitwise, 4.46% of all Web traffic is MySpace. That means Rupert Murdoch - who picked up MySpace for half a billion - is the king of social media, the master of tags, kaiser of social bookmarks.

Strange, actually.

I would have thought that for people of Murdoch's generation, "social bookmarking" conjures images of sweet old ladies gathering on Saturday nights to crochet lovely placemarkers for their Bibles and book club bodice-rippers. Pass the lemonade dear.

In reality, big media masters like Murdoch believe that anything pulling people away from their traditional properties must immediately be tamped down and defeated or purchased and rolled into their empires. And they're right, quite honestly. Big media companies, if they're to remain big media companies, have to evolve or die - these days, just faster. And yet, if people roll their own media, where's the value to content-laden media vaults like Fox or Time-Warner or Disney? Robert Young has a terrific essay over at GigaOm that raises more questions than it answers, but is well-worth reading. He argues:

But just as the Internet was not a subset of AOL, social media will not become a subset of traditional media. In fact, social media will increasingly begin to compete directly with traditional media consumption. Yes, it is true that the media output produced and distributed by the audience itself will generally be of lower production value and quality. Even so, they will prove highly competitive to Hollywood products, as the personal engagement factor inherent in personal media outweighs any loss of production value.

So given the competitive nature of social media and the operational challenges it represents, why should media companies even think of embracing social integration? Because they have no choice… social media will continue to take market share away from traditional media, regardless of whether the media companies participate or not.

Defense for the social media startups seems rather difficult: anybody with a server farm and slightly-tipsy naming committee can come up with the next YouTube or Flickr. New services hit the clickstream daily. But the connections that people are making seem to be permanent - or at least the time they take to make them seems as permanent as the time they take on telephone calls and email. Notes Fred Wilson:

So we may have to wait until the fall to see where all of this is headed but my sense is that "social media" is here to stay. The individual properties may rise and fall (remember Geocities and Tripod?), but the idea of media that is personal and social is a lasting one and an important one.

I agree that social media is a permanent addition to our media lives, but it probably won't resolve in one big company. MySpace is hot as hell, but how do you play defense in a company like that? When you give the people full power over the tools that create media, who knows how it shakes out? We may well face a media future with lots of smaller companies, a trove of tool and die manufacturers for the digital age and a vast media heartland of server farms. Which will be pretty cool to follow, actually.

Well, I notice that Typepad is back up so I can go in and start tagging. Ah forget it, I'll just drop this post in and call it a day.

UPDATE: Jay at Compete adds some original analysis to the MySpace vs. Yahoo debate (which apaprnetly matters to some people, though I'd say revenue and profits are better yardsticks). And Markos points to a Wired story that claims MySpace has been "Foxified" under Murdoch's reign. It apparently pulled a video critical of right-wing Sen. Ted Stevens (he of Bridge to Nowhere fame).

The Man Who Hears Music

No sooner had I thought to myself "it's too bad Pete Townshend now only posts to his regular, old rock star web site - no more two-way communications with a core group of bloggers" than the landscape changed. This morning, Pete's reopened his Boy Who Heard Music site on Blogspot, probably in reaction to the outpouring of intense discussion that erupted earlier this week over the origins of Won't Get Fooled Again.

Wait, a rock anthem released in 1971, fully 35 years ago. A lanky 60ish rock geezer clutching maniacally to a pitted Telecaster. Uh, cutting edge of the Fab New Media Explosion?

Yeah man.

Townshend gets it. After a lifetime at the very cushioned pinnacle of big media - and there is no more cushioned environment than that of the mega rock star (just read the riders) - Pete is making music and other in closer collaboration with those who consume it than ever before...or at least since his days at Ealing. Earlier this week, I posted on the National Review's insane list of 50 most conservative rock songs, giving my own semi-humorous choices, but more importantly, touching off a nice little debate among regular readers - which centered, not surprisingly, on the No. 1 on the Right Wing Hit Parade. Multiply this blog by about three dozen other blogs with similar conversation and the news of the ongoing debate reached old man Townshend's ears toot-sweet:

Won't Get Fooled Again has been listed in the UK Independent Newspaper as the number one song with - as I understand it - the political message most often misunderstood - in this case the message is said to be 'conservative', a word that may mean different things in the UK and USA.

Of course the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.

The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause.

Has the world changed? When, in the past, could a group of writers essentially ping a rock star and get a thoughtful response in a matter of hours? I'll tell you when - never. But tag a bunch of posts with Pete Townshend, get the feeds fired up, and word gets passed up the big media food chain pretty quickly - or rather, pretty directly. The point is: there is no food chain now - no Under-Secertaries of A&R and Communications to keep us away from them.

This is something that Old Blue Eyes - always an artist before a rock star, really - understands quite well. In this post, he talks about live webcasting of music (which he and Roger Daltrey plan to do when The Who go on tour this summer) and how it changes the who, what, and when factors of media production and consumption.

...if you wish to address a Live audience, in real time, intimately, and free of interference from petty government regulation, broadcast restrictions, or even internet controls – Live webcasting is the future for you. On In The Attic we can smoke, swear, attack hypocrites, even be hypocrites. We can have fun and be funny. The most important thing is that we can play Live music when the whim takes us. No one can argue that you are a true performer if you can appear Live and do your thing. No tricks. No ‘auto-tune’. No computer fiddling. No puffed up personality stunts effected by extreme video editing (of the style that made Keith Moon – for example – appear insanely funny every moment of his life when in fact he was often depressed, serious and incisive). The beauty of Live webcasting is that it does not preclude the inclusion of small films, or even pre-recorded music; the Live presentation element makes it all hang together.

The circle here? Imagine logging on each day to a report from Robert Fisk on the ground in Baghdad and being able to send him a Blog comment that let him know you were with him as he exploded with frustration over what was going on around him. Imagine being logged on, and knowing there was probably less that a two or three second time delay, and witnessing a truck being blown up, or a group of police-volunteers being attacked. Such news could be relayed on Robert Fisk’s terms, and not his editor’s. Imagine knowing that you were in a small elite of subscribers who were seeing what was happening first hand, and had a duty to help spread the word. Journalism as we know it will be unravelled by Live webcasting – sadly (perhaps) it seems Rupert Murdoch is the only person on the planet who can see this ahead of time and is buying up web companies like candy. He is – like me – rather old to be so prescient. But there it is – I predicted music downloading in 1985 at a lecture at the RCA and most people walked out.

Sometimes it pays to watch the icons - especially those who prefer life off the pedestal. Oh, and something else. You may recall that Townshend supported the invasion of Iraq, and Britain's involvement. Well, he's changed his position a bit - and painfully - with an openness and honesty that's missing in Whitehall and Washington:

At first, personally knowing one of his torture victims, I wanted Sadam Hussein removed at any price. I also wanted to send a message to the Islamic world (again, a place full of many of my friends) that the West was run by dangerous men with powerful weapons and our going into Iraq to ‘tidy up’ was a better option for sending that message than dropping nuclear warheads on Afghanistan or Pakistan which has such deep and tenuous links with Britain. It is too easy to sanction war when you don’t know what is actually happening to the soldiers and civilians in the conflict, and pretty much all British newspapers have kept everyone abreast of the true horrors. The Independent through Robert Fisk has been a leader in speaking of the reality of the conflict in Iraq, and the real ‘price’ of removing Sadam. I won’t go back on my initial support for the invasion, but I feel blooded and humbled, deeply, deeply ashamed at the way things have turned out.

UPDATE: Pete's serious about video - the very first Who rehearsals are already up in QT. Oh yeah, PT welcomes TW here. And comments here. New world? Yeah... [He also hit Blue Girl and Mannion].

Technorati tags: Pete Townshend | Who | The Who

Prosumers on March II

We had about 100 people out last night in the rain for NYSIA's panel on DIY Media Technology, and overall, it was a terrific, wide-ranging discussion. After my opening remarks (more in a second), we started out with a demo by Pat Cummings, CEO of iGuitar, which is developing USB-wired guitars for plug-and-play recordings. Fred blogged about this a while ago, asking whether his many guitar-playing buddies might adapt to the USB guitar - answer, hell yeah. The demo had the crowd at JPMorgan Chase buzzing, as Pat played a bunch of licks and chords directly into Apple's terrific Garage Band program - and using internal controllers on the guitar and the software - also performed on "piano, harp, organ, and bass" - yeah, software instrument models for the keyboard-challenged.

Clearly, the ultimate prosumer tool and a great lead-off for the panel - led by Chervokas, and featuring Don Loeb, veep for biz dev at FeedBurner, Charlie Matheson, media and entertainment software specialist for IBM, and Chris O'Brien, founder of the pre-beta video network company MotionBox, which operates out of NYSIA's (totally full) incubator space at 55 Broad. Jason, who runs one of the best podcasts extant and is what I'd call an "uber-prosumer," had the topic nailed and led the panelists through a discussion that included every-fragmenting audiences, advertising models, youth culture, and distribution models.

Here are some of the notes I used for the introduction, which was aimed at setting the stage for a wide-ranging discussion (audience questions were great, as well) - see if you agree:

More than a decade ago, I helped put a panel discussion together for the Columbia School of Journalism that examined the future role of the “gatekeeper” – in journalism specifically, in media more generally. The panel included some of the bigger lights in media: all of whom have, shall we say, moved on to other careers. Except one – Barry Diller. At that time, Diller was a movie studio guy who greenlighted mega projects and billion-dollar entertainment deals - but he had a different vision of the future (this after he’d stepped from his chauffer-driven, cream-colored Bentley outside the school). Diller thought gatekeepers were done – that in the future, users would create and distribute content over ever-faster networks using better software tools.

He was right – the rare mogul to see that clearly.

Alvin Toffler had been there 15 years earlier of course – when he identified a coming shift in consumer consumption – from pure, lemming-like buying of packaged goods to the actual creation of things – including media – he called these future consumers “prosumers” – the people who produced and consumed. I listened to Toffler speak two weeks ago in L.A. and he’s not resting on his FutureShock laurels. Hardly. Now Toffler has a new vision for his “prosumer” vision – now a quarter century down the road, and brought to palpable fruition by the Internet. That vision is of a vast, partially hidden economy – one that doesn’t included currency, or accounting – but one that he believes rivals the trillions of the world’s monied economy.

Another 25 years may or may not prove Toffler right, but Barry Diller and those like him aren’t waiting around. That unmonied economy – people who Do It Themselves – is moving to the fore, on the back of ever-more-open software standards.

At the same conference in LA, there was Edgar Bronfman, head of Warner Records, talking about easing up on digital rights management and attacking his own industry for being short-sighted, for slighting prosumers. And of course, Bronfman is a prosumer himself, a songwriter with a home studio (though of course, it’s pretty damned high-end), a mogul who just might use some of the gear we’re going to see demonstrated in a minute.

Blogs are all around us – open sharing of information by DIY publishers. David Sifry says his search engine now tracks 37.3 million blogs. People creating content for other people, with little or no money changing hands in most cases. Prosumers are building wikis the size of vast encyclopedia. They are creating virtual stores and video games inside a virtual landscape on Second Life. Google Earth is run by and for DIY types, who create their own geographic overlays. Video mashups are all the rage, despite what some would see as their quasi-legality. Flickr users build tricked-up photo maps. Even the big consumer companies are experimenting with allowing users to create advertisements.

In New York, especially over the past decade since the advent of the commercial Internet, we talk a lot about media technology without ever really defining it. The problem is, I think, one of separation. We approach the question with the notion that media and technology are separate things—separate disciplines, separate industries. But in fact, media — movies, television, video games, books, magazines, recorded music — can't exist without technology. Media is nothing more than the commercial exploitation of the creative arts. And the process of turning a creative work into a commercial media product is entirely dependent on technology. As Jason said to me last week, A Grateful Dead concert isn't necessarily media. But a CD  recording of that concert IS.

Prosumerism is a big movement, and a change that goes beyond blogs and RSS - which are terrific, generally lightweight software that rely on tecnhique and strategy as much as millions of lines of code in a tightly-controlled working group in a software lab. This goes past the PC - Tehnologies not talked about as prosumer – yet I believe will be at heart of DIY in future – voice recognition and gps.

Investment follows innovation and acceptance (and sometimes, profits). So why are two Web 1.0 old guys here tonight? Because it’s happening again – what happened in New York in 1994 and 1995 and 1996 . Innovation (and I hope, not an overvaluation bubble).

Technorati Tags: prosumer | toffler | web 2.0 | feedburner | NYSIA

Prosumers on March

The Astounding Trickster and I will be panel-bound on Monday evening here in New York, hosting a discussion on DIY media technology up at JPMorgan Chase from 6 to 8 pm. Full details are here. Guests will include smart people from iGuitar, FeedBurner, MotionBox, and a little outfit known in the technology trade as IBM. Thanks to NYSIA for hosting. Should be a lot of fun, and there may - I stress, may - be some live guitar-playing.