The Long Tale
I wrote A World of Producers in December 2008. At the time I was talking about camcorders and increased bandwidth demand in both directions: And as camcorder quality goes up, more of us will be producing rather than consuming our video. More importantly, we will be co-producing that video with other people. We will be...
hNews vs. rNews?
It’s been almost two years since the Associated Press issued a press release that began this way: 07/23/2009 AP Press Release Associated Press to build news registry to protect content Registry will provide tools to monitor use of AP and member content online while also enabling new business opportunities NEW YORK – The Associated Press...
IIW: Investors Invitational Workshop
We’re doing something different at next week’s IIW: inviting investors. So here’s a pitch that should resonate with investors — especially in Silicon Valley, where IIW happens (appropriately, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View)… Here’s a chance to check in on development work on a huge new disruptive market play: empowering customers as...
Let’s move tweeting off Twitter
Blogging, emailing and messaging aren’t owned by anybody. Tweeting is owned by Twitter. That’s a problem. In all fairness, this probably wasn’t the plan when Twitter’s founders started the service. But that’s where they (and we) are now. Twitter has become de facto infrastructure, and that’s bad, because Twitter is failing. Getting 20,500,000 Google Image...
World Wide Catacombs
What started as plain old Web search has now been marginalized as “organic”. That’s because the plain old Web — the one Tim Berners-Lee created as a way to hyperlink documents — has become commercialized to such an extent that the about the only “organic” result reliably rising to first-page status is Wikipedia. Let’s say...
Uniting airlines
I don’t envy anybody in the airline business. There is so much to do right, and the costs of doing things wrong can be incalculably high. Required capital investments are immense, and the regulatory framework is both complex and costly. Yet the people I’ve met in the business tend to be dedicated professionals who care...
Open Cardspace opportunity
Just learned from Craig Burton that Microsoft has killed off Windows Cardspace. Here’s the report from Mary Jo Foley. Here’s the Twitter search. Plenty of pointage to follow there. Here are Mike Jones’ reflections on the matter. I don’t have time to get my thoughts together on this right now, but here’s my brief take...
Learnings from the Browser Wars
The question on Quora goes, What lessons can be learned from the first browser war between Microsoft and Netscape? I covered that war when it broke out, more than fifteen years ago. No magazine was interested in my writing then. Blogging was several years off in the future. All we had were websites, and that...
What if Flickr fails?
[2 February update... A new case has come up, of accidental deletion. More details here and here. The company has also updated its community guidelines. It's still not clear why the company does not save deleted accounts. My provisional assuption is that the reason is legal rather than technical. But I'd love to hear somebody from...
A toast to common genius
Although I appreciate being called “smart” (as Hugh MacCleod kindly does here), that adjective has always troubled me, no matter what, or to whom, it’s applied. Two reasons: 1) because I believe smartness is a far more common quality than our bell-curving institutions would have us believe; and 2) because the label too often serves...
