April 17, 2007

At the first Web 2.0 Expo

I missed the first two days of the Web 2.0 Expo (created because the Web 2.0 Summit proved so popular), so I can’t make any general observations other than this one: It’s a shame that there was no interaction between the speakers and the "former" audience in the main hall. Unlike the preceding Web 2.0 summits, not a microphone to be had.

I always love the State of the Blogosphere updates we get from Technorati founder/CEO Dave Sifry. This year he offered a different twist and was paired with Hitwise head of research Bill Tancer.

The twist was that it’s too limiting to describe this explosion of user-created media as "the blogosphere." We’ve seen an explosive growth in videos, photos, podcasts and other materials. So Dave now calls it "the Live Web" (a term borrowed from Technorati board member Doc Searls) or "the next-generation web." Tancer called it "the participatory Web, or Web 2.0."

Sure thing, guys. Or, how about the Social Web? :~) Live Web doesn’t mean much, other than no apparitions posting here. Social at least imparts a theme of interactivity and conversation.

Tancer cited an astonishing 668% growth for the top participatory web sties from April 2005 — when 2% of U.S. Internet visits went to these sites — to today’s figure of 12%, measured just last week. We’re talking about sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Ourmedia, where users create the content.

Two years ago, Wikipedia was more popular than Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia site by a factor of about 3 to 1. Today, visits to Wikipedia outnumber Encarta visits 3,400 to 1.

In the photo-sharing category, 56% of visits to photo sites go to participatory photo sites. Photobucket rules the roost with a 41% market share, Slide has 5% (it does??), Flickr has 4%, Imageshack 3%, Rock you! 3%, and the remaining 44% is divided among the also-runs. It always amazes me when I see these numbers: I’m a Flickr fanatic, and I can’t understand how 10 times as many people use Photobucket instead. (Oh, yeah, OK. MySpace. Baaaa-baaaa!)

Participants vs. consumers: The 1-9-90 rule

The most fascinating numbers to come out of the conference came when Tancer and Sifry said it was time to cast aside the 80-20 rule in favor of a new paradigm. The 80-20 rule states — well, let Wikipedia tell it: "for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes." Or, in practical Web 2.0 terms: eight out of 10 visitors to a Website will be passive consumers, while 20 percent are generally hands-on creators and producers.

Said Tancer: "It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90." Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are "highly involved participators" (don’t ask me why the word "participants" isn’t good enough), and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.

This played out in a Hitwise study of visits to three popular sites:

At YouTube, only 0.16% of visits were related to uploading a video during the course of the study. At Flickr, only 0.2% of visits were related to uploading photos. The percentage was markedly higher at Wikipedia, where 4.59% of visits were related to editing articles on the site.

And while the popular perception is that this is a youth-driven phenomenon, not so. Younger people were doing most of the viewing and older people were doing most of the creating. At Wikipedia, it broke down like this:
• 4.6% of 18- to 24-year-olds edit the site;
• 13.5% of ages 25-34;
• 27.3% of ages 35-44;
• 54.6%, age 45 plus (combined the last 2 categories because they were up so briefly)

A similar trend emerges at YouTube:

• A shockingly low 1.9% of 18- to 24-year-olds upload videos to the video sharing site, compared with 24.1% of ages 25-34 and 35.6% of ages 35-44 (again, don’t have the full stats).

The 25- to 55-year-old age groups do the heavy lifting.

When it comes to viewers on YouTube, it breaks down 51% male vs. 49% female among viewers, but 60% male to 40% female among participants. The gender gap is even more pronounced at Wikipedia: 52% male vs. 48% female among readers, but 76% male vs. 24% female among participants who dive in and edit the site. (The strong-willed women readers/participants of the Social Media blog are exceptions to this general rule, of course.)

More Sifry: 37% of all the 72 million blogs that Technorati tracks are in japanese; 33% are in English. A fast-growing segment: Farsi (at 1%), the language of bloggers in Iran. More than 237 million items have been tagged by the creators. About 37% of users are using tags, or keywords. More than 125,000 posts appear each day.

Eric Schmidt

Some notable quotes and insights from Google CEO/billionaire/good guy Eric Schmidt (that’s one of the photos I shot of him above):

He told an amusing story about how the Australian Broadcasting Company supposedly sent a takedown notice under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Google, which promptly took down the company’s videos from Youtube last Friday. By Monday it was discovered that the takedown notice was actually sent by a 16-year-old Australian teenager. The videos were put back up.

Schmidt said Google would soon release a new tool called Claim Your Content, allowing the copyright owner to monitor videos appearing on the YouTube site and automating the takedown process. No audience questions were allowed, so I couldn’t ask if that technology would be made available to other video hosting sites.

"Network neutrality is very important for the next generation of enterpreneurs. They’re going to need a network that connects everyone. It’ll be an enormous setback if we lose that."

"The biggest growth areas are going to be in the mobile space. Mobile, mobile mobile. People treat their mobile phones as extensions of their persons. … The next generation of 3G and 4G networks will have tremendous power."

What does he think about what he wakes up each day? "The thing i think about at google is scaling. In order to win in the Internet, you have to have a scaling strategy. So I’m constantly thinking about more data centers [which he referred to a couple of times as "super-computers"), more fiber optics, more people. It's amazing to think how early we are in that process. We're just at the beginning of getting information that's been kept in small networks or privae networks onto these platforms."

And, last but not least, he flat out pledged Google's commitment to data portability -- the ability for users to take their data (search history, etc.) to another service if they're not happy with their experience at Google.

"We are committed to user portablity. we'll never trap user data. We want you to be able to take the information [collected by] Google and go somewhere else."

That’s a customer-centric promise we’ll be happy to hold them to.

February 26, 2007

Meeting Howard Berman at the Tech Policy Summit

I’m attending the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose, a first-time conference about technology issues that is drawing a crowd of heavy hitters — most of the 150 or so people in the audience could well be on stage. Some of the speakers include Deborah Platt Majoras, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz, Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn, top execs at AT&T, Sybase, SAP and Cisco. Some interesting fare so far, though after attending so many unconferences (like Bloggercon and Vloggercon) and inclusive conferences (like WeMedia), the setup here is a bit stuffy for my tastes. There’s no "former audience" here. We’re allowed to ask questions, but it’s still very much us and them.

Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, was on stage for a half hour, discussing patent issues and immigration reform. But I wanted to talk about the looming copyright crisis in this country.

From the floor, I told Rep. Berman that I have this old-fashioned notion that congressmen are servants of the people, that they’ve been elected to do the people’s work. Just today BitTorrent announced a distribution deal with several of the big Hollywood studios. Viacom has announced a plan to distribute its content on Joost and continues to demand that YouTube take down its copyrighted videos, which is all well and good. But the landscape is changing rapidly, and I believe we’ll see a backlash against Capitol Hill’s formulation of copyright in a few weeks if and when Google banishes millions of videoclips that contain short snippets of copyrighted video or music from YouTube’s servers. (Media coverage has focused on YouTube’s spat with Viacom, while ignoring the potentially larger and more knotty issue of individuals using copyrighted music in their soundtrack or taking news show clips to create a commentary.) Copyright law never envisioned a culture where millions of us are content creators who want to borrow, annotate and comment upon the culture.

I asked Berman whether it was time to reform copyright laws to take into account the millions of us who want nothing more than to express our creativity in a noncommercial way in this new digital era, and whether he was open to listening to both sides of this issue in hearings before the House.

Other than a short riposte in which he equated taking others’ copyrighted works with piracy ("That’s not people expressing their creativity. It’s people expressing someone else’s creativity."), Berman had some reassuring things to say. He said he wouldn’t be a rubber stamp or advocate for any one side, and that Congress shouldn’t be in the position of propping up outdated business models. He said he wants to solicit all viewpoints when these issues come before his subcommittee.

I followed him into the hallway (along with Steve Levy of Newsweek), introduced myself and gave him a copy of "Darknet" to read on his flight back to D.C. (He said he’d read it.) He repeated his position that he won’t be a "shill" for anyone and that his committee will be an honest broker with respect to IP issues. I also suggested that he take up the "orphaned works" cause championed by Lawrence Lessig and Brewster Kahle, among others.

Next, James Cicconi, Sr. Executive VP of external and legislative affairs for AT&T had an interesting exchange with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg. Walt pointed to a number of countries where true high-speed broadband is deployed much more widely than in the U.S. — Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia, "even France, for God’s sake!" In some of these countries, you can download video at 50 megabits a second and upload your own video at 10 megabits per second. "Why can’t we do that?" Mossberg asked point blank. In the U.S., he pointed out, the best you can generally do is 15mbps down and 2 up — if you’re lucky.

Cicconi danced around the question, blaming government regulation, the dispersed population in the U.S. ("what about Manhattan!?" Mossberg said), and the telecom companies’ ongoing fight with the cable companies over access to local franchise systems.

Pointing out that AT&T carries 18% of the broadband traffic in the U.S., Cicconi noted, "The Internet wasn’t really built for video. The move to high defnition will exponentially increase the amount of traffic." The company is "very concerned" about the ability of the network to deliver all those bits. "It’s a very fragile structure and we need to upgrade it."

Next, Mossberg and Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz chatted about Schwartz’s blog, one of the best-read business blogs around.

Mossberg: "Did your lawyers have a heart attack when you started your blog?"

Schwartz: "No. I had a heart attack when our general counsel started a blog."

Schwartz says he doesn’t blog at regular times. "It fills a lot of the white space during my day." No one edits his blog posts in advance. The only time it’s reviewed is immediately after an earnings call, when Schwartz runs his entry past the lawyers.

Schwartz also invited the government to step in and set some standards for Internet broadband deployment (or something like that; see Schwartz’s blog for details). In general, Silicon Valley wants the government to stay out of technological affairs. "I’m not interested in having the government regulate technology," he said. But in this case, "It’s a mean to an ends: enhancing this country’s competitiveness" with countries ahead of us in the broadband game.

Some familiar faces in the crowd: Dan Farber, Shel Israel, Lisa Padilla, Lauren Gelman, Drew Clark and others.

Since Dan Farber is here, you can follow the conference’s goings on at ZDNet. (I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s sessions.)

~~I’ll post photos tonight.~~ Here are nine photos from the summit.

November 8, 2006

More at Web 2.0

Citizen journalism

Tuesday afternoon, Barry Diller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger shared the stage with emcee John Battelle. (Moments earlier, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt walked backstage, Diller joined him. Would have loved to have listened in on that conversation.)

I asked Sulzberger — who’s a hero in the media world for supporting some of the best journalism in the world — why the Times doesn’t showcase more rich-media citizen journalism. There are astonishing examples of user-created photos and video on sites like Flickr and Ourmedia, and sites like BBCNews.com and the Dallas Morning News showcase amateur works, and NY Times reporters can’t be everywhere. When a political rally or disaster occurs, why can’t we see a citizen journalism showcase on the Times?

Sulzberger said they’re working on just such initiatives, and that we should see it soon. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Best quote of the conference so far came from Diller, who said, "It’s impossible to argue against net neutrality. Who’s on the other side? [AT&T's] Ed Whittaker?"

Related: Paul Krugman’s column in the NY Times critcizing Diller for earning an exorbitant income last year after a mediocre year for his company: America’s Laziest Man? "Last year, Barry Diller took home a pay package worth $469 million, making him the highest-paid chief executive in America."

Open media profile

One of the event’s highlights was Tuesday afternoon’s appearance by Six Apart founder Ben Trott (a friend). Ben announced Vox, a way-cool new blogging platform that aggregates all your social media sites.

SixApart has managed to find a way to tap into Web services and open APIs such as Amazon’s open search, Google GData, Yahoo Media RSS, Flickr’s open API, etc., so that you can bring all (or many) of your online presences under one umbrella.

"We took open search as a base, extended it, and come up with an Open Media Profile" that you can take with you," Ben said. Want to get your API hooked into this service? Get the whitepaper at development at sixapart.com or contact Ben.

O’Reilly

From Tim O’Reilly on stage: "This is the start of the real disruption. … The bubbling up of user-generated content is just the beginning of Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 of next year is going to be very different rom the Web 2.0 of this year. " Still waiting to hear how.

November 7, 2006

Coverage of Web 2.0

I’m here in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, which has become the must-attend tech conference of the year. As customary, Day 1 is made up of workshops, with the formal conference in the grand ballroom kicking off in the mid-afternoon.

Advertising 2.0

First panel I attended was Advertising 2.0, with Rafat Ali, Founder of paidContent.org; Adam Gerber, Vice President, Ad Products & Strategy, Brightcove; Jeff Lanctot, VP and General Manager, Avenue A | Razorfish; and Michael Steib, General Manager, Strategic Ventures, NBC Universal. Some nuggets:

Gerber: “Marketers need to think about advertising as an experience. They have to stop thinking about it as exposure. It’s about delivering a compelling opportunity for users to engage the product as an experience.”

Lanctot: “Advertising 2.0 is about the activist consumer. They can shape brands, but I believe they’re not yet fully in control.”

The panelists agreed we’ll see a multiplicity of online advertising forms in the coming years, everything from short-form 5- to 10-second ads to longer-form advertising that’s integrated into a two-hour program. They also agreed the landscape will evolve slowly. Online advertising is still miniscule compared to the $67 billion annual ad spend on traditional television. “Companies are not going to dramatically change how they advertise for a 1% share of the audience,” Gerber said.

Steib: “If an ad’s irrelevant to me, two seconds is too long. On the other hand, I went out of my way to see the Mac ads on apple.com.”

55% of online ad dollars go to sites that reach 15% of the online audience.

Lanctot: “The notion of media fragmentation today will pale in comparison to how it’ll look three years from now.”

Gerber: “The majority of Youtube’s traffic is international, and a substantial amount of the content on Youtube is pirated.” In the near future, professional content will come online in large numbers. “The media companies will be part of a bigger wave than the first wave of user-generated content.”

More Gerber: “There’s no way a fragmented world scales without aggregators.”

The Mobile Discussion

Panel 2 was The Mobile Discussion, with Om Malik of GigaOm; Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone; and Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, Nokia.

Appelquist: “The place where we are with mobile today is where the web was in 1996-97. Look at what happened as the Web evolved. It all became about openness and consumer choice."

Vanjoki: "There is no mobile Web. It just doesn’t exist. But Web 2.0 is all about mobility."

Appelquist: “You usually get a bad user espeireince if you try to access the web on your mobile phone.” The .mobi suffix is useful because it tells consumers “this will work on your mobile phone.”

Vanjoki: “It’s a mistake to begin designing web pages for a 128 x 128 screen.”

Malik: “Do we really need to browse on our mobiles?” … “Sites like MySpace took off because they’re brain-dead simple.”

LaunchPad

Some of the more interesting startups shown off at LaunchPad:

- In the Chair lets you "perform and get real-time feedback from professional musicians." They don’t say how they do this, but it looks pretty cool. They have thousands of users around the world. "It’s music performance as a video game," the CEO said.

- Instructables is a site for user-contributed collaborative learning. Some 2,000 people have contributed tutorials on how to build funky stuff. Today they’re launching a feature called Collaboration that lets you work with friends, a small team or everyone.

- Pidgin Technologies has developed something called BoardTracker, which tracks forums in the Boardscape, "the blogosphere of boards," or forums. "Boards are more active today than ever, with 300 million members generating 50 billion posts." But it has been virtually impossible to communicate with people on other boards.

Solution: Klostu, a network of boards with some social network seasoning. You can bring your Flickr, Youtube, Gmail and delicious accounts into the boards. Looks fascinating, I’ll be giving it a try.

- Stikkit. From the site: It’s "the way notes should work. Stikkit
gives you the digital equivalent of a sticky note: the easiest thing
you can grab to jot down an idea or reminder. As you type, Stikkit
watches for appointments, to-dos, people, bookmarks and more, magically
extracting and organizing the important details. It’s like having a
personal assistant following along after you."

- Sphere, which does something I considered doing two years ago. They clue in readers on blosophere conversations about an article that appears on a publication’s site. So, Time or Marketwatch have buttons that readers can click on to get additional background and context on a subject.

- Adify lets you build your own ad network. "Let 1,000 networks bloom!"

- My favorite LaunchPad presentation was the 12th one, given by Nicole Morris of 3B. Using 3B, you can create a 3D walk-through experience, complete with avatar, around your digital media. (She showed off Flickr photos and MySpace pages; don’t know if it works yet with videos or other rich media.) It pulls out individual photos and creates 3D wall galleries. It looked really, really amazing. Will definitely be checking it out.

More to come, including photos later. And more coverage found on Technorati, via the Web2con site, and more photos.

October 24, 2006

Notes from Digital Hollywood

Appeared Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA — the second time I’ve attended (the first was a few years back with Doc Searls, who told me, "You should be up there." This time, I was.). Spoke on the citizen media panel about emerging trends in participatory media. Some random notes from the conference:

• Jason Calacanis, who heads up Netscape and Weblogs, Inc. for AOL: “If you want to be an A-list blogger, the formula is very simple. Pick the top story on TechMeme every day for 30 days and link to three other A-list bloggers who are blogging about the topic.”

Jason says Weblogs, Inc. and AOL have hired 500 bloggers in the past three years “and paid out millions,” more than any other company has ever done.

More Jason: The three main reasons why people blog (or at least bloggers he’s worked with) are, in this order: recognition (and passion), affiliation, and compensation.

And: Google’s text advertising has been “the most efficient advertising mechanism in history.”

And this final Jason nugget, which I wholly disagree with: “If you make something great, it’ll rise to the top.” I challenged Jason on this point, saying that lots and lots of quality works are lost in the cacophony today. He countered by saying that telling 10 people about it will lead them to tell 10 other people, and you’ve got a snowball effect. Well, sometimes, but not often. Ask anyone who’s written a first-rate book but can’t break through the noise of mediocrity in any bookstore’s racks.

Interestingly, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, agreed with me on a later panel, saying that we’ll soon see services where your contacts will help point you to the 5 or 10 videos a day that you’ll find relevant, perhaps relying on the 10 percent of site visitors who are natural-born organizers. “People want someone who can filter interesting things for them.”

More Mary: There are 200,000 videos being uploaded every day to 270 video sharing sites.

Kevin Sladek, head of VideoEgg called Comic Life for the Mac “the last piece of software that absolutely gave me chills.” And: Quality will become increasingly important to amateur video makers because “nobody wants to make a bad movie.”

Sites mentioned during the day:

• thisnext, a social shopping site.

• Outhink and its SpinXpress p2p media collaboration application.

April 5, 2006

Amber MacArthur: Tech news up north

At Real People Network, I have a new video interview with Amber MacArthur, the co-host (with Leo Laporte) of "Call for Help," a great tech show on G4 cable TV in Toronto.