Cloud Culture

Moving

2011-10-15T18:20:00.002-04:00

I've decided to stop posting at Cloud Culture for reasons outlined here. Old posts will remain here, but all my new posts will be going up at adamgurri.com.

Amazon Silk and Cloud Browsing

2011-10-01T13:26:00.001-04:00

This week, Amazon announced a series of new Kindle products, including one--the only non-touch interface option--for as cheap as $79. Beyond simply undercutting competitors, Amazon made the biggest splash by announcing their long anticipated tablet, the Kindle Fire. Most of the features had already been leaked by MG Siegler earlier in the month, but one crucial piece remained a surprise--Silk, the new webkit-based browser that the Fire will be sporting.

For Silk, Amazon brings its considerable cloud infrastructure to bear. When you navigate to a website with Silk, Amazon's servers do the heavy lifting of rendering all the big files on the page before your tablet has to use any of its resources. This speeds things up considerably. Furthermore, Amazon uses its predictive algorithms to try and guess the next page you're going to navigate to, or the next link on the page you're going to click--and its servers render it for you before you've even told Silk to navigate there.

The privacy crowd is already making a fuss about the idea of users sending their entire internet history to Amazon. I confess that this doesn't concern me; maybe I am strange, but I don't really care if Amazon has my browsing history any more than I care that Google's servers contain all of the conversations I've ever had on Google Talk, and all of the emails I've received and sent from Gmail. As we move increasingly online, more and more of our conversations and activities will be stored on someone's servers--the conversation about the dangers of this is quite robust, but ultimately I think the benefits will outweigh those dangers.

On the week that Jeff Jarvis' book on publicness came out, I think it is well worth discussing the potential value of allowing Amazon to put our browsing data on their servers.

I used to think that the term "big data" was just a trendy phrase making the rounds with little real meaning, until I read In the Plex. The book makes it very clear that the original PageRank idea aside, the thing that really makes it possible for Google to provide relevant search results is the fact that they have gigantic, dynamic datasets of user behavior from the billions of queries they get in a given day. Just by reacting naturally to a set of results, we are telling Google's algorithms (and engineers) whether we are happy with what we got. Something as simple as clicking a result and then immediately going back and altering our search signals to Google that they got it wrong.

Amazon has been in the data business even longer than Google--their recommendation algorithms have always been amazingly good. From the basic "people who viewed this item also viewed" or "people who viewed this item bought" to the user-specific recommendations, Amazon has pointed me in the direction of a ton of interesting books over the years.

Instead of being frightened of the idea of Amazon having our browsing data, why not take a moment to consider what they could do with that data? For a start, they could feed that data back into their main recommendation algorithms ("people who viewed this set of websites also bought this set of products"). They could build a search engine competitive with Google's--after all, if a search engine points you to a particular page, but you really wanted a different subsection of that site, Silk will be able to tell Amazon where you ended up. If you don't go back to the search engine, Google would be incapable of getting feedback--but Silk could.

And they could use the data to create an entirely new product category that hasn't been imagined yet. The point is, data is valuable; not just in quantity, but in variety. With Silk, Amazon will be getting data that neither Google nor Facebook currently can get at completely.

I have to say that it's strange that Amazon did this first. Think of how much more compelling a Chromebook would be if the underpowered hardware was bolstered with the processing power of Google's cloud infrastructure. It's only a matter of time before Google builds a similar offering into Chrome, and I'd bet good money that Microsoft follows soon after with IE.

Some people find the idea of big companies acting as intermediaries between us and the web frightening--and for those people, the big browser makers will always provide an off switch. If they don't, there will always be alternatives like Firefox--because there is no way that Mozilla will ever have the infrastructure to even contemplate a Silk-style feature.

As a frequent user of Amazon's media services--primarily Kindle books and instant video--I was already excited by the idea of an Amazon tablet. But the concept behind Silk stands to disrupt the browser market all over again, just as Chrome did when it launched three years ago.

The Discovery Process in Publishing

2011-09-03T14:42:00.002-04:00

Photo by crafty_dame

This column by Ewan Morrison in the Guardian makes the provocative claim that we're moving into a world where there will be no more professional authors. I find the conclusion absurd, but I wanted to focus on one specific point the writer makes:

Publishers are focusing on the short term and are dropping midlist writers. Midlisters – neither bestsellers nor first-timers – were formerly the Research and Development department of publishers in the 20th century. It was within the midlist that future award-winners and bestsellers were hot-housed (Don Delillo, for example, was supported as a midlist author over the six underperforming books that preceded his Pulitzer-nominated, multi-award winning novel, Underworld).

Morrison is clearly coming at this from the perspective of someone who has been in the industry for a while and is looking at it from the inside. From the outside, the idea that publishers need a research and development department in the era of abundant information seems absurd.

The discovery process that used to have to take place within a publishing house is increasingly going on outside of them. A writer like Amanda Hocking can make it really big without a publishing house, and then St. Martin's Press is able to come along and scoop her up. She gets to offload all the nonwriting activities involved in making a books successful, and they get a writer who has established she can sell a ton of copies of her books.

With more and more aspiring writers following Amanda Hocking's path on their own, why would a publishing house bother with unproven writers? The web and ebook stores give writers the tools to prove themselves on their own. The result is less risk for publishers which translates into lower costs that are passed on to consumers.

The publishing industry has always been one in which the big blockbusters subsidized the enormous volume of stuff that the publishers put out every year that doesn't sell well. What's going to happen is that publishers are going to be increasingly capable of lopping off the long tail and only going with those writers who have a very high probability of being at the head. The blockbusters won't subsidize the long tail, they will just pay for themselves.

The long tail will be left to the indie publishing market, which will be made up primarily of lone authors attempting to promote their work through various online channels. I disagree with the idea that indie publishing will replace traditional publishing houses entirely--as Amanda Hocking demonstrates, some authors are willing to give up some of the margin they make on each book in exchange for being able to focus their time on writing more books.

In any event, I think we can all agree that publishing's digital transition has only just begun.

Events and the News

2011-08-24T15:08:00.000-04:00

Image from Doc Searls

While it has become cliché to point out that technology and new media have changed the news, what I haven't seen anyone point out is the fact that online media seems to have made our social environment increasingly newslike.

I say this as someone who never had much interest in TV news or newspapers. I always felt the style of coverage was myopic, too focused in the short term. I preferred to wait until things were more solidly sorted out before attempting to soak them up--when possible. Of course, a big enough event would bring me right to CNN or ABC or whoever seemed to have the best coverage.

But I am an avid user of Twitter and Facebook and just about every other social network under the sun, and there's one thing that has become clear--social media responds to big events in a very "breaking news" style.

Writing about what he considered the overblown coverage of a 5.8 earthquake in Virginia yesterday, Howard Kurtz wrote:

And if this modest tectonic shift seemed overblown on a million info-outlets, well, much of the media has only one volume these days, and that is loud. A story isn’t just big, it isn’t just huge, it’s the only story—that is, until the next fixation (have you seen Hurricane Irene on the weather maps?) comes along to replace it.

I'm not sure what Kurtz means by "these days". I am young, so my memory of media is limited mostly to the last 15 years, but my understanding is that media has always been single event focused. In an era where information moves quickly, and professional outlets on the web, radio, and television are expected to be able to cover an event as it happens, this tunnel-vision may seem a lot more obvious to us. But if you go back fifty years and look at what was above the fold on all of the nation's newspapers and what was talked about on the evening news--or during a breaking event such as the Cuban Missile Crises--I am confident that you will find a similar degree of focus. There were just fewer loudspeakers for us to hear it from.

The Event Explodes into Our Awareness

It comes seemingly out of nowhere, depending on how you first experience it.

Since I work in Virginia and actually felt the earthquake happen, it didn't surprise me to go to Twitter and find that it was all anyone was talking about. However, it seems that the London riots had begun on the weekend of the 6th and 7th of August, but didn't really rise to my awareness until that Monday, the 8th, when suddenly everyone was talking about it.

The first hours that an event dominates public focus is in large part about grasping at the essentials--what is going on? What's the timeline so far? Where is this happening, who is involved and what was their role?

When I got on Twitter yesterday, I could see people reacting to the earthquake who were as close as DC and as far and New York City. That didn't give me much of an idea of how big it was or where exactly it had happened. Before long a link to the US Geological Survey page with the best estimate of where it had occurred and how big it was started proliferating on social media and on news sites.

This is the "breaking news" phase of the event. There's a minimum of storytelling, short of people's knee-jerk reactions--which, granted, are often tied to larger stories they already bought into. People in California were going to make jokes about how we East Coasters reacted to the earthquake--it would have taken something very immediately and visibly catastrophic to get any other sort of reaction from them.

But mostly it's just gathering points of reference--CNN says X, USGS says Y, Capital Weather Gang says Z, and so on. This is what defines "breaking news"--it's happening so fast that it's all reference points of varying reliability with a minimum of narrative.

Grasping for Meaning by Telling Stories

Less than a day after an event becomes "breaking news" people begin to try and put the pieces together.

We are a race of storytellers, and so we seek understanding of and meaning from an event by finding and telling stories.

I found that the narratives were pushed especially hard after the London riots. I saw people claiming that this was all a direct response to government spending cuts, or social and economic injustice more broadly. Some claimed that this was caused by the growing dependence on big government. Some thought it was just a bunch of opportunistic hooligans.

As I grow increasingly fascinated by the role of stories and narratives in human life, I have a hard time evaluating the events that are far enough removed from my own life in any other light. I see a bunch of stories about the London riots and I know which ones I'm biased towards or against, but at the end of the day just feel like if you're as ignorant as I am on the subject you should probably just shut up about it.

The stories in question are never something unique to the event--as masterfully conveyed in the post "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics", written two days after 9/11.

Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.

Take this formula and apply it to any political angle you can think of and you'll save yourself the trouble of reading any of the articles or blog posts that attempted to explain the larger story of the London riots.

When an Event is Important

As social media and the real time web take up more and more of our shared experience, people grapple over not just what story to graft onto a particular event, but which events ought to be the center of our tunnel vision focus.

The result is a fairly young genre of story that follows this formula: "(Group of people) care more about (event implied to be trivial) than (event implied to hold a greater moral urgency)." I've documented this in two cases now.

The Howard Kurtz piece linked to at the beginning of the post was written in this style as well. Kurtz's story is "The Media care more about a tiny earthquake than the important history being made in Libya."

His attitude is reflected, with less snark, by my friend Tiffany who writes that the fighting in Libya is "clearly the most important story in the world right now."

But is it?

This is what I wrote when Michael Jackson's death crowded out the conversation about the Iranian elections that was going on at the time:

But why is the bundle of events discussed under the hashtag #iranelection so important? Terrible things happen around the world all the time; in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya, in any number of places and they go unnoticed. The Iranians, particularly the expats, are an unusually connected and media saavy people. Does this mean that they deserve to get so much more attention than the problems faced by other countries?

What is often overlooked when we talk about events like the earthquake or a celebrity death displacing attention to events of seemingly greater moral imperative is that whatever it is that has made it to the head of the power law curve for attention at this moment is, in a way, arbitrary. Not random--but not determined by any obvious rule, either--moral or otherwise.

The question is, what's your criteria for determining what the "most important story in the world" is? The answer is not obvious. I know that when the biggest earthquake the region has seen in over a hundred years happens, I want to be able to figure out what's going on and what course of action I should take. Does the fact that I'm not paying attention to the action in Libya during that time make me a bad person? Does the fact that others who may not even be that close to the quake are talking about it make them bad people?

Is there a moral imperative to pay attention to specific events, and if so, what is it? Because it's clear to me that people feel such a thing exists, but they're always very vague about the criteria. All I usually see is the specific complaint that something that had been getting a lot of attention (disproportionately when compared to other similar events in the world which receive no coverage at all) is no longer getting as much.

The Nature of the News

Thirty years ago it was silly to ask what the news was--the news was whatever was in the newspapers, whatever Walter Cronkite fit into his half an hour. Today it's not so clear where news ends and the rest of nonfiction begins.

But I'll take a stab and a rough delineation--news is the area that deals with an occurring or recent event that people are paying attention to right now.

I say "event" as distinct from "subject matter"--writing about Apple generally is different from writing about a specific announcement Steve Jobs is in the process of making or only recently made.

Mainstream news is simply that at the head of the power law curve--those events that a big majority of people are paying attention to. Specific subjects--like technology--are further down the curve, and there is a power law curve within each specific subject as well. To put it more concisely--events receive degrees of attention which vary dramatically.

I used to believe the story that new media would usher in the death of the news. But now I think that the news will only become more pervasive as internet adoption spreads across the global population and social network adoption spread across the entirety of the internet user base.

As we become more active on those social networks, it will become clear just how ridiculous the Daily Me theory was. We are going to be exposed to events that we find trivial or unpleasant, and we are going to be exposed to stories told from perspectives we may not agree with. Complete disconnection will increasingly be the only way to avoid this, and it will also become less and less of a viable option.

Just because we have a lot more freedom to explore the long tail doesn't mean we'll be able to avoid the much, much more compressed head.

Thoughts on the Coming Post-PC Era

2011-08-21T12:47:00.000-04:00

Image taken from Wikipedia

At D8 last year, Steve Jobs declared that we are moving into a post-PC world. By this he did not mean that people would no longer buy desktops or laptops, but that their segment of the computing market would shrink relative to touch-interface devices like smartphones and tablets.

I didn't really take this seriously at the time. If "post-PC" meant that people would be buying fewer desktops and laptops, then I disagreed. PCs are far too central to the modern household and business and I didn't really think smartphones and tablets could make a dent in that. If "post-PC" meant that soon smartphones and tablets would become as or more prolific as PCs are now, then I agreed but didn't think it was a very novel observation.

Two days ago, HP announced that it would be trying to sell off their Personal Systems Group--the section of their company devoted to making desktops, laptops, and hard drives.

When the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world decides it is in its best business interest to get out of making PCs, it is time to take talk of a post-PC world a lot more seriously.

So what's going on?

Integrated vs. Licensed

This blog notes the difference in approaches between iOS and Android, calling the former "integrated" and the latter "open". Open is sort of a loaded word; I think that "licensed" would be more precise.

The post points out that there will always be one player that massively dominates the integrated market while another dominates the licensed. Before iOS and Android it was Mac OS and Windows.

From the post:

Google’s model will drive hardware and software margins right down to zero, while that company rakes in big bucks from advertising. Google loves low hardware margins because Google doesn’t make hardware. Those low margins, however, drive high user numbers, which delivers more Google services and the advertising that supports it.

This was always true of Microsoft as well. Microsoft's ideal scenario would be for the margins on hardware to get down to zero so that all consumers were paying for was the cost of a Windows license.

Meanwhile, Apple has always been about integrated. They work on trying to create a premium experience by developing the software for their hardware in house. It's a more difficult task than letting someone else specialize in software while you specialize in hardware, so pulling it off fetches a higher price.

Microsoft has had a good run as an industry standard--but the outlook for them going forward isn't so great.

Netbooks: Windows Faces Price Pressure Directly

Things were going all well and good for Microsoft; Moore's Law and similar phenomena were driving hardware prices down and down and down, making it possible for people to afford more and more computers running Windows. Families increasingly moved from having one desktop per household to closer to one computer per person--some combination of desktops and laptops so that mom and dad as well as the kids all had their own.

Only the falling hardware prices eventually led somewhere that Microsoft had not anticipated--people wanted to be able to pay rock-bottom rates to get a bare minimum of functionality. The PC market had always been about getting more for less, but eventually the lowest end hardware was good enough that an increasing number of people were willing to get less for even less.

This was the rise of what became called the netbook, which put serious price pressure on the laptop market above and beyond the already dramatic pressure manufacturers faced.

While Eric Raymond was wrong about netbooks ushering in the beginning of mainstream Linux adoption, he did correctly observe the effect it had on Microsoft:

Among other things, it is effectively certain that the netbook makers have already used the threat of Linux to bargain Microsoft down to price parity with Linux, though each one doubtless has a signed-in blood agreement not to discuss it in public and the price drop may be disguised as bulk discounts or rebates for marketing support. The initial threat to Redmond’s monopoly from Linux-only products put Microsoft’s nuts in a vise; there is no way the netbook makers, operating on the tight margins they do, would miss the opportunity to extract equally favorable terms of business.

I'm sure that Microsoft is not charging the same rates as Linux, because they have brand equity with consumers that Linux does not--but Microsoft did eventually have to create a cheaper license for netbooks, with a version of Windows 7 that had more limited functionality.

But by the time they did that it was far too late.

The Rise of Post-PC Form Factors

In January of 2010, Apple announced the iPad after months of feverish speculation about an Apple tablet by the tech press. According to then editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, Engadget's liveblog of the Apple event received more traffic than TMZ did when they broke the new about Michael Jackson's death--"by several orders of magnitude".

The iPad became Apple's fastest selling new product in its history. As of June 25 2011, Apple had sold nearly 30 million iPads. Many others have attempted to enter the tablet space since the launch of the iPad, but none approach its level of success.

The rise of tablet computing may more directly impact traditional PC form factors because of their size, but the fact is that the earlier and continue trend of the rise of smartphones creates substitution effects as well.

Smartphones can do a lot of the things PCs can--you can listen to music on them, you can play games, read emails, browse the web, even watch videos. Moreover, you can carry them in your pocket--something you can't do with PCs. Of course, the small screen has obvious downsides--it's harder to see things on a smartphone screen than it is on a much larger one.

But that's where tablets come in. Tablets are less portable than smartphones, more portable than laptops, and have the same intuitive interface. Either or both of these form factors fills the "good enough" category that people-myself included--were expecting netbooks to dominate back in 2009.

In the ways that they are limited, smartphones and tablets are good enough, but in some ways and for some purposes they are better than PCs. The interface paradigm that Apple created with the iPhone is much more intuitive to the average consumer than the old mouse and keyboard is.

One thing I am becoming increasingly aware of is the fact that many people don't find the keyboard and mouse GUI setup entirely intuitive even after decades of being trained on it. A recent study found that 90 percent of users don't realize that they can use CTRL-F to search a page they're on. I am sure even fewer know other keyboard shortcuts.

This isn't a critique of those people--the point is that PCs have a ton of features baked into them that the vast majority of users never find a use for or are even aware of. The post-PC form factors are far more stripped down; so that most users will be aware of most of their features.

In general I think Joshua Topolsky gets it right when he says that these interface advances are bringing computers to life for many users by "removing the confusing language of machines."

The PC Market Will Contract

I take HP's recent announcement as strong evidence that not only are hardware margins at an all time low, but we are seeing the beginning of a trend in which post-PC devices begin to substitute for PCs.

This seemed like a strange idea given how much more you can do with a PC in many areas, but consider the family of five scenario explored at the beginning of the previous section. What if more and more families who would have bought desktops and laptops for each member instead start opting to give everyone a tablet, and then keep one desktop for everyone to use when they need it? That wouldn't mean that PCs were obsolete, but that they were being substituted against at the margin.

Moreover, post-PC form factors are still very new--their capabilities will only continue to increase, making them even closer substitutes for PCs. In short (too late), Steve Jobs knows what he's talking about when he speaks of entering a post-PC era.

The New Integrated vs. Licensed Split

Many Apple faithful think that drawing a parallel between Windows and Macs and the current iOS and Android situation means you are saying it will play out the same way. I'm not entirely convinced that that is true.

At the height of, say, the Windows XP era, I think Windows had an over 96 percent market share. But during the early days of the Mac vs Windows competition, computers were a lot more expensive than they are today. The additional price pressure between manufacturers using Windows made a big difference to the typical consumer at the time.

Now, the iPhone has price parity with most Android phones. Moreover, it continues to sell like crazy--by most measures, the iPhone's operating system has slightly less market share than Android overall but the number of iPhones that Apple sells is very close to the total number of smartphones sold by all of the Android manufacturers put together. It is entirely possible that the smartphone market is different enough from the early PC market that the integrated vs. licensed market share may be much closer to a 50-50 split.

Of course, Android also has an advantage that Windows never did--Google doesn't need to make a single penny from licenses. If Android drives mobile search usage, it will more than pay for its development costs. So while Microsoft may have hoped for hardware margins to be driven down to zero, Google is in a position of being able to push down software margins as well.

Another interesting and less talked about angle to this is that Apple's market share in laptops has been growing. I have a pet theory about why that is. When the price of something someone is planning to purchase falls, it creates what economists call an income effect. Basically, the price cut is like putting more money in people's pockets.

When people's income increases, they may buy less of certain goods--inferior goods--proportionately more of certain goods--normal goods--or more than proportionately more of certain goods--luxury goods.

The relentlessly falling prices in the consumer electronics industry must create enormous income effects--and my bet is that the benefits of the integrated approach have the characteristics of a luxury good. In other words, the low prices in the industry overall have made the premium that Apple charges seem less steep.

In any case, when the old split between Mac and PC is being redefined, the outcome between integrated and licensed in the post-PC space is far from determined.

The Story of webOS

2011-08-20T11:54:00.000-04:00

A little over a year after HP bought Palm, the computing giant is shutting down its webOS operations. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the movements in the industry; Apple and Android are devouring the markets for smartphones and tablets. Even Microsoft is unable to buy their way into the smartphone space. It's been clear for some time now that webOS didn't stand a chance.

But the outlook didn't always seem so grim for the operating system that was to be Palm's last stand.

CES 2009

Back before January of 2009, Palm found itself in much the same position that RIM and Nokia face today--after dominating the early days of the high end mobile space, sales were falling off of a cliff. It did not look good. They started to try and build buzz around the promise of some "newness", but no one was expecting much from them.

I had just started listening to the Engadget Podcast, which consisted of then editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, and editors Nilay Patel and Paul Miller. One recurring theme was the fact that Topolsky had once been a Palm fanboy but had grown disenchanted with the company's inability to respond to the new paradigm in mobile that had been set by the iPhone. He got rid of his Palm phone but was never really satisfied with anything he had had since.

The podcast came out weekly, but during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it put out a new episode every night. It was through them, and the blogs I was reading, that I came to understand how completely Palm managed to conquer the show that year.

It was dramatically different--dramatically better--than anything Palm had ever shown before. In point of fact, it seemed better than just about anything on the market on the time, with the possible exception of the iPhone.

The Engadget Podcast episode from that day conveys the excitement of seeing something truly innovative and different, rather than the typical iterative stuff they were used to seeing.

At a time when Android was only on one phone on the smallest of the big four carriers, and the iPhone seemed unchallenged, it felt as though all Palm had to do was bring the Pre to market to capture second place, and maybe give Apple a real run for their money.

So I waited for the Pre to come out.

And waited.

And waited...

"The First Half of 2009"

Palm promised that the Pre would be out in the first half of 2009, and they made their cutoff--it launched on June 6, 2009. Two days later, Apple announced the iPhone 3GS, the third generation of the line. Back when the Pre was announced in January, its internal specs were better than the iPhone on the market at the time, but the iPhone 3GS surpassed it.

Moreover, rather than discontinuing the previous generation iPhone, Apple chose to offer it for half the price, a practice it has maintained to this day. This may have been an even greater blow to Palm's chances, as consumers now had the option of a brand they recognized for $99 as opposed to something completely new for $199. The Pre also came out on Sprint, the third of the big four by a wide margin, whereas the iPhone was on AT&T.

All of this is to say that after the energy around the Palm Pre's initial announcement, its launch was less than stellar.

Still, after my parents kicked me off of their family plan a couple of months later, the Pre was the top contender among the phones I wanted to buy. So one day in August I did just that.

The market situation was far from certain at that point, especially for a newly introduced product like the Pre. Android had been around for almost a year and talked about for even longer, and it had big, stable Google behind it. The Pre had an operating system that everyone agreed was top notch, but Palm was in very serious financial trouble if it was anything other than a blockbuster.

But I was really enamored by the Pre, and while Android interested it, it wasn't clear that it had staying power, either. So I made a leap in the dark and bought it.

Left in the Dust

Two months after I bought the Pre, in October of 2009, the Motorola Droid exploded onto the scene. Motorola had been in a similar situation to Palm; formerly a giant in the mobile space and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Instead of developing their own OS, however, they chose to go with Google's and focus on creating high end hardware to run it on.

Moreover, it was the flagship device for Android 2.0, which was a big jump in terms of the quality of the OS.

The Droid sold like hotcakes, and many view it as the big discontinuity beyond which Android would begun its unstoppable march towards mass adoption. Being honest with myself, if my parents had kicked me off of their family plan in October, I would have bought a Droid. If they'd done it in January, I would have bought a Nexus One.

As Android became the industry standard for manufacturers who didn't want to develop their own operating systems--much like Windows had done in the PC space years ago--the iPhone's progress did not slow down one bit, either. Each new generation of the iPhone saw a greater than 100% increase in sales year over year. A lot of Google and Apple's gain came at the expense of those companies who had previously dominated mobile--RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, and, of course, Palm.

A lot of it also came because the smartphone market, even today, is very nascent--the number of people who will buy smartphones for the first time from now on will greatly exceed the number of people who have purchased smartphones up to now. The vast majority of people who are buying smartphones for the first time are buying either an iPhone or an Android device.

Because the market is so nascent, in theory someone could come along and, by doing well with the market of people just buying smartphones for the first time, pose a legitimate challenge to Apple and Google. That's why it seemed as though webOS had some hope--an operating system that polished must have a chance if brought to market under the right circumstances, right?

With Palm hurtling towards bankruptcy, this did not seem very plausible. As I said, Palm's financial situation was such that if the Pre was anything other than a huge blockbuster, they were doomed. And the Pre was anything but a blockbuster.

When HP bought Palm for a cool $1.2 billion, there seemed to be some hope. HP was, after all, the largest seller of PCs on the planet--one thing they had in spades was resources.

But all of HP's efforts echoed the same problems that Palm had from the start--they always announced new hardware that was competitive with what was out there at the time, but lagged so long in actually getting the devices to market that they fell behind. However few fools like me there were that bought the original Palm Pre when there existed no clear challenger to the iPhone, there were even fewer who would give webOS a chance after Android had established itself.

And now HP has axed webOS devices altogether. There's some talk of them licensing it, but I don't know who they think they're kidding. Microsoft is pushing their smartphone OS very hard right now and failing to gain any traction, the odds that HP will do any better seem like a case of the triumph of hope over experience. It is clear to me that webOS is for all practical purposes dead, and in many ways fell dead-born on the market from the very beginning.

My Time With webOS

For what it's worth, I have really enjoyed my Pre. I still think the interface is fantastic.

Most of the things that I liked about having a Pre were the benefits of having nearly any smartphone. It was vastly simpler for me to play my podcasts through my Pre than through my iPod. Having Google Maps in my pocket wherever I went has made such a positive impact on my life, as I have a terrible sense of direction. I enjoyed being able to take pictures and immediately share them on Facebook or Twitter. Having instant access to Pandora wherever I go is also pretty awesome.

So do I regret choosing the Pre almost exactly two years ago? There were definitely moments during those two years when I did. But ultimately it's been useful and fun to have, and there are worst mistakes that I could have made (like buying a Blackberry). Moreover, the Android devices that were available at the time were not very good.

I suppose I could have bought an iPhone but some contrarian part of me resisted the idea. I'm much more open to that today than I was two years ago--but I'm also so deeply into Google's ecosystem right now that I know my next phone is going to be an Android phone. I'm holding out hope for the rumored Nexus Prime; as the Nexus phones lack the crappy manufacturer skins and are always the first to get OS updates.

In the end Palm made a fantastic, polished operating system that they simply weren't in a position to give the kind of support it needed. It's unfortunate but just having a good product isn't enough.

So long, webOS--in the end you were just another failed product created by the vast process of trial and error that drives the consumer electronics industry.

The Consumer Surplus of Podcasts

2011-07-23T12:16:00.001-04:00

Image Taken from Wikipedia

At the end of my last post I rounded up a discussion about the consumer surplus generated by the internet. I mentioned that I believed it was quite large, but didn't elaborate.

Let me start by clarifying for those not familiar with the term that consumer surplus means something very specific. It deals with the circumstance where the market price of a good is less than some consumers would be willing to pay for it. The absolute amount of the difference between what all consumers were willing to pay and what they did is the consumer surplus.

People like Bryan Caplan who believe the consumer surplus of the Internet is large point to the fact that after paying for access, consumers get an enormous universe of content which they often don't have to pay anything for. Skeptics like Tyler Cowen point to studies that estimate the surplus to be quite small as a fraction of the overall economy.

I think it's difficult to talk about the consumer surplus of the Internet overall, but it may be useful to look at specific segments that the internet makes possible.

Since 2008, I have had a long commute to work--it used to be longer, but it's still about 45 minutes in each direction. I have made my commute tolerable by listening to podcasts. In fact, it is more than tolerable--my fiancee is fond of poking fun of me for worrying that if I ever had a shorter commute I would have trouble finding the time to listen to all my podcasts!

Let's say there are about 200 days that I work during a given year. If I did an hour and a half of commuting on a typical day then I've listened to at least 900 hours of podcasts that I have listened to. In fact, it is much more--I used to commute to grad school two or three nights a week, adding at least another hour and a half each time. All told, 1200 is probably a conservative estimate of the number of hours of podcasts I have listened to while driving.

If we lived in a world without computers or the internet, and someone offered me a service that allowed me to access all the podcasts I listen to now in my car, whenever I wanted, as many times as I wanted, and almost entirely without commercials--what would I be willing to pay for that?

My first inclination is to say $200-300 a year, but it's difficult for me to get a good point of reference here precisely because I do live in a world where the Internet exists. If I wasn't paying for Comcast and a 3G data plan, how much of that money would I roll into paying for podcasts to listen to during my commute? My inclination is to say nearly all of it, which adds up to a lot more than $300 a year.

I am an extreme case of course; I'm sure that most people who listen to podcasts on their commute wouldn't be willing to pay as much as I would be. Never mind the fact that most people don't listen to any podcasts during their commute, and not everyone has long commutes (indeed, one of the biggest benefits of the internet is the ability to eliminate commutes entirely). But if you add up the consumer surplus from podcasts for people like me on down, it would be something. And if you then took every specific category of content that people don't have to pay for because of the Internet, I have to think that it would end up at something much larger than Tyler Cowen's cited estimates.

The Internet and Progress

2011-07-23T10:40:00.003-04:00

Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.
-Frederic Bastiat

Attempting to assess the present state of the tech industry, John Battelle looks back to the recent past.

In the 1980s and 90s, developers were the most important class of value creator in the digital economy - they were the entrepreneurs and marketers leveraging the new platforms of Apple and Windows, building new businesses out of thin air. Borland, Oracle, Lotus, Intuit - I could list scores, if not hundreds, of successful developers from that time. Many still exist today.

As a reporter, developers were often my best sources, because Apple and Microsoft would show them early versions of hardware and operating systems. Developers would then talk to me about those new products, and I'd get my scoops. That was how the information ecosystem worked, and everyone knew it. Developers had a ton of power - they made the products which drove sales on the Windows and Apple platforms, and if they felt slighted, they could always go to the press and apply pressure as needed.

By this standard, he finds the present state of things wanting:

But I'm not seeing great new companies born on Apple's platform, as they were back 20 years ago. Angry Birds aside, am I missing something here?

One could argue Facebook is such a platform, and declare Zynga proof that great companies have been created thanks to Facebook's platform. But last time I checked, Zynga was one company, not scores of them.

Battelle argues that the cycle of industry will come around and we will see swaths of big developer companies rise again. He may be right--I myself think that there will be a role for big institutions in the new interconnected environment.

But I think Battelle is wrong in thinking that progress is measured by the number of companies or the amount of revenue generated.

Kevin Kelly has a much better idea of what progress looks like.

When an entrepreneur is pitching venture capitalists an idea, the VCs are asking themselves several questions. One is: is this idea a feature, a product, or a company?

As a consumer I find myself asking the same question, but I hope for an answer the opposite of an entrepreneur's.

The VC and entrepreneur want to know how high up the hierarchy this innovation will settle. It may be novel, useful, desirable, and marketable. But how big and autonomous will it be? Is it big enough to sell as a product in itself, with all the necessary support that requires? And is that product big enough to be able to sustain a company and all the overhead an organization demands? Maybe the invention is simply an idea that should be added as a feature in a existing product. Or, if it is strong enough to be its own product, maybe it is a product that can't support its own company, and should simply part of an existing company.

Most entrepreneurs, especially those starting out, dream of creating a company around their successful idea. And most VCs want to fund a company and not a mere feature. Features can easily be replicated by incumbents.

But the best thing for the consumer, as Kelly points out, is for it to be a feature. More companies mean more devices to store, or more logins to memorize, or any number of other hassles. New features to existing products, however, involve much less pain to add.

To tell you the truth, even features are too big. I'd like to be completely unaware of features, and have them disappear out of my consciousness; I just want functionality and benefits. I don't want more companies.

This is where Kelly gets it right and Battelle gets it wrong. Battelle is a brilliant thinker, but he is ultimately an industry guy--and sometimes he gets the interests of the producers confused with the interests of the consumers. As Bastiat emphasized in the 19th century, the only perspective that matters is the perspective of the consumer; because everyone is a consumer, so anything that benefits consumers benefits the human race as a whole.

If the new technology landscape will result in a lot more value for consumers but only generate enough revenue to support a handful of new companies, I don't see that as a problem.

Meanwhile, in the econ blogosphere, a debate has broken out about how to measure the consumer surplus generated by the internet. I'll conclude with a wrapup of the posts I've seen in this debate.

What is the Economic Value of the Internet? by Tyler Cowen
Networks and Growth, by Bryan Caplan
Would You Give Up the Internet for One Million Dollars? by David Henderson
Consumer Surplus from the Internet, Revisited, by Tyler Cowen
From the Comments, by Tyler Cowen
Consumer Surplus from the Internet: Remember the Producers, by David Henderson
The Value of the Internet and Double Counting, by Tyler Cowen
The Consumer Surplus of the Internet, by Matthew Yglesias

I personally agree with Henderson and Caplan that the surplus is quite large but Cowen makes some very compelling and quantified points for the other side.

Where Google Stands on Antitrust

2011-07-03T14:33:00.000-04:00

It's the same old story--company is successful, federal government seeks to squeeze revenue out of it under the guise of an antitrust investigation.

I don't expect everyone to have the same attitude about these sorts of investigations as I have, however, so I thought I would lay out what I consider to be the substantial evidence that a successful antitrust suite against Google will not make consumers better off.

TechCrunch just made a list of all the areas that Google is facing credible competition, but this list, while a decent starting point, doesn't even begin to take the full picture into account.

The evidence in Google's defense falls into two broad categories--Google's impact on industries external to Search, and the actions taken by Google which indicate that they perceive credible threats to their core source of revenue.

External Impact

The best thing ever written on this subject was Eli's A Theory of Google, which I recommend everyone read in full. The short of it is that Google has every incentive to reduce the cost of getting online as low as it can possibly get, often taking measures to make other industries more competitive in the process.

By disrupting complementary industries and making them more competitive, Google is increasing their profits in their downstream industry.

A lot of Google’s projects make sense when viewed from this angle. Google Docs is an attempt to reduce the Microsoft tax. Android is an attempt to reduce the Apple tax. Google’s participation in the spectrum auction a couple years ago (and lobbying of the FCC to require open access) was an attempt to reduce phone carrier market power. Google Voice is the next iteration of that attempt. Ditto for selling phones without contracts.

The list goes on; Google has begun an attempt to set up a 1 Gig per second, open access fiberoptics network. They have started shipping out the cheap, browser-only Chromebooks in order to make getting online as affordable and easy as possible. Suffice to say, so long as Google remains on top of the Search market, consumers will reap benefits in any market that are at all related to getting on the web.

The spillovers have gone far beyond what anyone could have guessed, as well. The most visible non-Search specific innovation that Google has taken part of recently is their fleet of automated cars. They've done more than just developed the cars, too--they've helped push through legislation in Nevada that would allow them to use them on real road conditions more extensively.

Speculation as to how this is related to Google's core revenue source is abundant. The most popular theory is that if automated cars take off, people will surf the web--and therefore use search more often--with a lot of the time they used to spend concentrating on driving. The most interesting observation I've heard is the fact that the LIDAR technology that the automated cars use collects an enormous amount of location-specific data which could then be baked into Google's Maps product.

But the potential benefits are enormous. Google's announcement cites some 1.2 million people a year who die in car crashes. They think they automated cars can cut that technology in half--if so, then Google will have done an enormous good for mankind, approaching the level of curing cancer. This is of course all speculation--it could be that Google's technology won't ever be adopted. Still, it's clear that they're pouring their resources into efforts that most reasonable people would agree are worthy.

The bottom line is even if Google does have an outright monopoly in search and online advertising, which I do not believe they do, it's not obvious that antitrust action would make consumers better off. Returning to Eli's post:

The broader lesson is that monopolies will provide public goods in complementary industries, meaning that they are not as economically harmful as a static analysis would suggest. This is something that policymakers and government agencies should keep in mind as they prosecute firms for antitrust violations.

I won't hold my breath waiting for the FTC lawyers to take this into account.

Credible Competition

My belief is that search and the advertising that relies on the data from it involve enormous economies of scale, but remain fundamentally contestable. While Microsoft's Bing has been successful in growing during the short time since it was introduced, I think you can ignore this fact and still come to my point of view from the available evidence.

Back in September, Google unveiled Google Instant, which does not wait until you have finished typing before it brings up your search results. This means that Google has to get really good at autofilling your search--one engineering effort--and simultaneously be able to handle showing several times more search results than they had been--something that must have been an enormous engineering effort. All this just to shave a few fraction of a seconds off of your search. If Google had a monopoly, why would they bother pouring so many resources into efforts that would yield such a small incremental gain for consumers?

For at least the last half, if not all of, 2010, criticism over the quality of Google's search results began to mount. At the end of February, they rolled out a big update to address this. Here's the most important part of this story: nearly every one of the sites that Google had highlighted in the past as case studies of extremely successful AdSense earners were demolished by this update.

Let me say that again: in order to improve the quality of their search results, Google was willing to bury websites that they themselves had acknowledged in the past were making them a lot of money. How anyone can think that they are a monopoly with just this point in mind is beyond me.

The final piece of evidence comes from Google+, their latest effort to enter the social arena.

This is where regulators need to have a little more imagination than an economics textbook might provide them. A superficial look at Google and Facebook would show a search engine on the one hand and a social network on the other--apples and oranges, right? Wrong. In reality, Google and Facebook are both in a race to create a search engine informed by data generated by social network users. So far, Facebook has opted to do this through a partnership with Bing and Google has made a few tweaks to use what public data is available. Nevertheless, this is a genuine competition.

The best available information we have on the thought process at Google and how urgent this is for them comes from this article by Steven Levy, who was embedded at Google for many years. He described Google+ as part of a much larger project, codenamed "Emerald Sea", aimed at remaking Google in its entirety. Observing the level of resources that were being devoted to Emerald Sea, Levy asked project leader Vic Gundotra if this was a "bet-the-company" effort, and Gundotra told him it most certainly was.

If you have any doubt that Google is taking the potential for social search to render them irrelevant very seriously, I strongly recommend you read Levy's article.

Search is a Competitive Market

The bottom line is that Google is in a highly contestable market, and they have provided consumers with enormous benefits. Not only do I think that slapping them with an antitrust suite is an extremely ingrateful thing to do, it is also clear to me that it will not make consumers any better off.

We would all be better off if the FTC would get the message and just back off.

From PageRank to Plus

2011-07-01T20:42:00.000-04:00

PageRank was revolutionary in the field of search when it was first outlined.

Search engines had, up to that point, attempted to focus on things about specific HTML documents in themselves; the number of times the keyword in the query appeared in said documents, for instance.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin recognized was that links were providing information about human judgments. As smart as machines have become, human beings are still able to accomplish many things with almost no effort that the most powerful and sophisticated supercomputer could not. This is especially true when talking specifically about figuring out what human beings want; few things beat other human beings for that task.

PageRank recognized the World Wide Web for what it was--interconnected silos of content, with a lot of human context provided by the particulars of the connections.

When Google began, links between HTML pages were the single greatest source of human-provided context.

Unfortunately, once PageRank became widely known, methods for gaming it began to occur to people. Over time, Google had to evolve in two directions--to get better at figuring out what people beyond what PageRank could do on its own, and to get better at screening out content that was set up purely to game the rules rather than to add any value. As a result, PageRank for some time now has been only a tiny fraction of the overall algorithm.

Still, the algorithm has grown smarter. And Google has grown much better at fighting those who would game it.

Still, in the interval since PageRank was first outlined, the web has changed enormously. One big shift has been the rise of silos of interconnections; that is, of social networks.

The people who were producing content on the web in 1999 were much nerdier than the average Facebook user today. That is because it took a certain level of nerdiness to get to the point where you could get content up at all.

Blogs made it much easier to create a lot of content and to link to content--other people's as well as one's own. Still, the idea of creating a whole separate site so that you could create content, and then link to stuff, is something that has only ever appealed to a minority of internet users.

A much, much larger share of internet users are interested in engaging in the kinds of activities that one engages in on a site like Facebook. My mother is not interested in creating a blog. What she is interested in is sharing pictures of my family with her friends and extended families.

The very value of linking that PageRank was in response to--the value of having a human input into figuring out what other humans would be interested in--is enormously magnified in social sharing.

The kind of context you get in a service like Facebook--who I associate with, what they're sharing, what I am sharing and the specific people I share it with--these all make linking look socially tone deaf by comparison.

The first company to come up with the social media equivalent of PageRank--a SocialRank, if you will--will own be able to dominate search, even if they have to roll over Google in order to do it.

But don't take my word for it--if this Steven Levy article is to be believed, Google is desperate to get at the kind of data that Facebook has and they do not. Google+, their latest effort in the social space, is only the first stage in a larger project which they are betting the company on.

I have been on Plus for the past three days, and I'm very impressed by it. It's not revolutionary; it matches Facebook in many dimensions, with a few original additions and a more slick and intuitive UI (in my opinion).

Right now, Google has demonstrated itself to be far better at sorting out what is relevant in a given set of data. Meanwhile, Facebook has what is increasingly becoming the most valuable data at all, but it isn't nearly as good at making use of it. Something is going to give--Facebook is going to get better at search, Google is going to get social data from their own properties or by striking a deal with companies like Facebook, or some other party is going to step in and beat both at their own games.

The enormous amounts of resources that Google has poured into making Plus, and the rest of its "Emerald Sea" project, shows that the company's leaders are aware that its very existence depends on their ability to break through this barrier.

Video Gaming in the Continuous Client

2011-06-26T10:49:00.000-04:00

A Scene from the Future of Gaming

It's a scene we would easily recognize from the present--a 16-year-old boy sitting in front of a TV screen, holding a controller that is wirelessly connected to his console. The console is connected to the TV, and displays the game on the screen.

Now imagine the boy's father demands to use the TV to watch something. In the past the boy might have complained, but in the not-so-distant future this boy simply pauses his game, turns off his console, and leaves the TV to dad.

Why doesn't he pitch a fit? Because he can walk right over to the family computer, plug in his USB controller, boot up his game and continue right from where he paused it. The game synched in the cloud the moment he paused it.

Later, his brother has to use the computer to do his homework. But the boy doesn't mind--he pauses the game, shuts it down, and gets out his smartphone, which latches into an add-on with physical controller buttons. Now the smartphone doesn't have the same computing horsepower that the TV console or the desktop computer have, so the version of the game that it displays has more simplified graphics. It also has some additional features--levels and secret passages--that can only be accessed from that version of the game, so the boy doesn't mind.

All of the progress he makes from each device is stored in the cloud, ready to be synched back up to any one of them as soon as he fires them up.

Redirecting Gaming Innovation

In May of last year, then Engadget Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky wrote an editorial about a concept he called the Continuous Client.

So what is a Continuous Client you ask? Well the premise is simple: when you leave one device, you pick up your session in exactly the same place on the next device you use. Meaning your IM, Twitter, web browsing, applications, even your windows (given the availability of such a thing on the corresponding platform) appear just as they did on the previous device. The situation I describe above would be obviated by this setup, allowing me to move from my laptop to iPad in a seamless manner which would in no way disrupt the activity I was currently engaged in. This solution seems particularly well suited for desktop to laptop transfers, but allowing for a platform which was rich enough for both PC and mobile devices (hello, Chrome OS), it could very well be carried out through desktops, laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones. Put simply, you are placeshifting your computing experience from one device to the next with no break in your work, timelines, or conversations.

This is exactly where gaming needs to go.

Now, I am a longtime Nintendo fanboy. I got the original Gameboy when I was five years old, a Super Nintendo a few years later, an N64 shortly after it came out, a Game Cube, and a Wii. But I think that Nintendo has taken the focus of gaming innovation down the wrong direction.

All of this occurred to me as I read about the Wii U, the coming successor to the Wii. Again, we have a novel controller as the most anticipated aspect of the console.

There's nothing wrong with controller innovation--but frankly I'm more interested in games than I am in cool new ways to control them. I'd be much happier with a really exciting new game concept that used an old style button controller than with a game whose entire novelty was derived from how it was controlled. I realize this is entirely a matter of personal preference--but there you go.

Consoles Give Way to Platforms

What I really want is for companies like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and anyone else who wanted to get into gaming, to emulate Amazon's Kindle platform. Sure, Amazon sells physical units to display their ebooks--and the Kindle is one of their bestselling items. But you can also read Kindle books on your computer, your tablet, or your smartphone.

The consoles sold by the big gaming companies should merely provide the processing power and memory capacity for playing games on a TV screen. Discs and cartridges should be done away with entirely--even the highest end game should be bought in each company's version of an iOS-style app store. Then each company should develop a platform for moving a game between the console, the desktop, the smartphone, the tablet, and any other device with a screen.

Gaming has been taking baby steps in this direction. Using the internet for multiplayer gaming and other features has become the default. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are much less idiosyncratic, and much more computerlike, consoles used to be. With Sony and Microsoft going into the smartphone game, each are working on building a bridge between mobile and their TV consoles. Sony has just this month shown off how its mobile platform will include continuous client features.

In many ways it is surprising to me that there hasn't been more progress on this front. It's true that the smartphone revolution is a relatively recent event in the history of gaming--but desktop computers and internet connections have been ubiquitous for long enough that you would think someone would have done this for desktops and consoles, if nothing else.

The Benefits

Just synching gaming progress to the cloud would have the benefit of protecting that progress should something something happen to your console. Making it possible to play on any internet connected device leaves you with more options; whether it's because your console broke, someone else is using the TV, or you're sitting in the back seat of the car on a long road trip.

Think of the possibilities for multiplayer gaming, as well. Sure, you can already play with people online today--but the continuous client aspect will augment in-person multiplayer gaming. There are only so many people that can realistically share one screen-and having just three or four already requires that some trade-offs be made. If everyone who brought their own laptops, smartphones, or tablets could play along too, think of how many people you could get in on racing games, or free for all fighting games like Smash Bros.

Obviously there are costs to developing and maintaining these platforms, but it seems to me as though competition will eventually drive gaming in this direction. There are simply too many benefits for gamers, and too many benefits too owning the biggest platform, for gaming companies to ignore.

One Vision of Content's Commercial Future

2011-06-07T19:58:00.000-04:00

I am among the few people that I know who is completely unconnected to the iTunes ecosystem. It wasn't deliberate, at first--I wanted to try out Ubuntu a few years back and Apple simply didn't make a Linux version of iTunes. Nor would I have expected them to.

As a result, however, I've ended up turning to Amazon more than most people I know for my music and video needs. Now that I have a Kindle, I'm turning to Amazon for the whole trifecta of content--text, audio, and video. I still get most of those for free from other places, but when I can't find something for free and have decided it is worth paying for, Amazon is my source.

Several of Amazon's recent moves have me picturing a specific path for commercial content to follow.

I can see myself in the not to distant future getting digital video, music, and books for free from Amazon whenever I want and from a plethora of devices. As with everything, it's not literally free--I would pay for an Amazon Prime membership once a year. For less than it costs to subscribe to Netflix for a year--which only gets you streaming video--you would get unlimited streaming video, music and Kindle downloads, and free two day shipping.

Advertising on cheap Kindles and other Amazon-branded devices would help to finance this. Content rights-holders would be compensated based on the popularity of their work, measured in how often the work is streamed or downloaded. This would allow Amazon to offer the premium kind of experience you get with a Netflix without missing out on the opportunity to bring in independent unknowns who might turn out to be the next Amanda Hocking.

This is not a new idea, but I feel like if anyone is likely to finally get us there at this point, it's Amazon.

More Than What You're Having for Breakfast

2011-05-24T20:39:00.000-04:00

One of the most common criticisms of Twitter by non-users is "no one cares what you had for breakfast!" As if that's all anyone on Twitter ever talks about.

First off, if you tweet about what you're having for breakfast you might just find that a surprising number of people actually do care. I tweet a lot of links and random thoughts, but nothing gets a sudden slew of responses like tweeting something about my meal!

But of course there is a lot more to Twitter and social media than what you're having for breakfast. I've continued to try and explain this, but have found it very difficult to really capture the experience for anyone who hasn't already dived in.

Well, today I have a good example of the kind of value you can get from Twitter, and social media in general. More to the point, why it is wonderful to connect with smart, fun people, and maintain those connections.

So @ustreetgirl and I are heading to San Francisco for a wedding and vacation. Neither of us has been there before, so we asked our Twitter followers: anyone have any recommendations? Her followers were extremely helpful--check out all the great recommendations she managed to get from one simple question!

I didn't get as many responses on Twitter. However, one of my good friends, Stephen, follows me on Twitter. He used to work in San Francisco, so his network has a lot of people who live or lived there. So on his private Google Buzz account, he shared an item on San Francisco with the note:

Open thread: Adam Gurri is visiting San Francisco and looking for the best cheap eats. I have my favorites, but since half my followers are San Franciscans, I thought I'd open it up.

The response was kind of overwhelming. A big group of people contributed a huge number of recommendations. One of Stephen's friends in particular gave very detailed recommendations, including his Google Map with all of the places he's ever eaten at with notes about each.

There have always been travel guides, and those will continue to be valuable in the future, but this is so much better on at least two levels. First, there's a lag between when travel guides are published and when you're taking your trip. It might not be a big deal, but it's nice to get information from people who were in the place you're going very recently, or who are there now.

Second, it's nice to get people's personal recommendations, and multiple perspectives. The fact that many different people who don't know each other recommended some of the same places is a definite plus for us when we're making decisions about where to go. Moreover, having people that you're talking to and able to ask questions is way better than a book, which is static content.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me, though it is the most dramatic. Another instance was when I asked for advice from people on whether to buy a Roku box, Apple TV, or Boxee Box--the feedback really helped me!

Less practical but equally fun instances include the countless conversations that serendipitously crop up on Twitter, Facebook, and the many other corners of the web I frequent. Once I expressed my shock at learning that you're not supposed to put two spaces after a period and man--did that get a ridiculous number of responses!

Social media is about conversation. And, contrary to what some cranky old media types seem to think, people had conversations about their breakfasts before there was an internet.

But Twitter isn't only about what you had for breakfast--in this case, it seemed to be largely about other people telling me where I could go to get good a breakfast!

Lowering the Barriers to the Web

2011-04-23T11:31:00.000-04:00

According to our source, Google plans to make the notebooks available for $10-$20 a month per user, and will provide hardware refreshes as they are released as part of the package, and will replace faulty hardware for the life of the subscription. On top of this, Google will make the devices available for a one time payment as a normal retailer would, but is likely to not distribute the devices directly. Instead, the company will distribute them in a fashion similar to the way Android is distributed.

-Neowin.net

This is a rumor about the forthcoming Google Chrome OS notebooks, and I can't speak to how credible it is. I will say that I like the idea, and that it seems to me to fit in perfectly with Google's cloud strategy.

Let's say that the subscription really is an option, and it's at the higher end of Neowin's estimate--$20 a month. That's $240 a year--less than even a cheap new netbook. Moreover, you're only paying the $20 up front to get a computer right now. On top of that, you get to break out of the tragic cycle of technology--when the new, better version of the laptop is available you can simply trade yours in.

The trade-in option makes all the more sense for a Chrome OS notebook, because one of Chrome's main selling points is how easy it is to synch your settings across multiple computers. So the transition to a new computer would involve a minimum of inconvenience.

Google's ultimate goal is to reduce the barriers to web browsing as low as they can go. Odds are Chrome OS notebooks will be equipped with 3G radios with several different pay-as-you-go price points depending on what you need--including 100MB for free every month for the first two years. This means that for $20 you get a notebook, right now, that can start surfing the web, right now. If this business model works out, you just know that Chrome OS notebooks will eventually replace the 3G radios with LTE radios, lowering the barrier to faster web connection.

Again, I don't know if this rumor is true, but I hope it is. And I hope Google succeeds in this.

Networked Friendships

2011-04-09T11:57:00.001-04:00

It’s interesting and distracting to me, seeing all of these new faces and watching what is a community of friends interact in person after only doing so online.

It’s like they’ve picked up where they’ve left off, a continuation of a conversation they’d just left the day before.

-Tom Bridge, "Things I think about at a Tweetup"

When I was in Middle School, and early in High School, I did make friends of a sort online--but they were a casual, transient sort of friend. As indeed many friendships are at that age, even when they are in person.

Lately, and especially over the last year, I have made connections to an increasing number of people online whom I would consider to be truly my friends.

In the post quoted above, Tom emphasizes how networks have allowed us to connect with people who are geographically distant from us. That has certainly been an important part of my online friendships, and I have made sure to meet up with as many of my friends who happened to be passing through the DC area as I could.

Equally as important, however, are the friends who live near me that I probably would not have known about without the internet. Tom is one of them--as one of the founders of We Love DC, he's right in the middle of the DC blogosphere and (just as important or maybe even more so) the DC twittersphere. Despite living near one another, most of us don't necessarily see each other on a regular basis--our different jobs and lives giving only so much time. But when I do meet up with people from this wonderful community, it is just as Tom described--we pick up as if continuing a conversation we'd left off on just recently.

Of course, I have also met up with people who lived in more remote areas who I definitely wouldn't have connected with if there were no internet.

One of my absolute favorite people is someone I have not even met in person yet. I first connected with Stephen through this blog, actually, and I have Chris Anderson to thank for linking to me. From the start, I recognized that Stephen was an intelligent and thoughtful guy. We continued to talk in a wide variety of places--the comments of shared items in Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, email--many different mediums, many different ways of carrying on a conversation.

Over time, I've learned that we have a lot of common interests--speculative fiction and many other geeky things. He even sent me a book once, to my surprise and delight!

More importantly, I've learned that Stephen is the kind of genuinely good person that is all too rare. He lives in Texas and I live in DC; we will meet eventually but we have not yet. But I don't need to meet Stephen in person to know that I'm extremely lucky to live in an era in which I can connect with him from over a thousand miles away.

Publishing's Digital Transition Begins

2011-03-26T13:59:00.000-04:00

The ebook market has just crossed an important threshold. The first hint I saw that this was coming was in the form of a tweet by genre author Tim Pratt.

I can't speak for Tim Pratt's standing in the world of paper books and brick-and-mortar stores. What I do know is that Pratt has a big digital presence. Every major science fiction, fantasy, and horror podcast has not just aired stories by him, but multiple stories. It's also an ongoing thing--if you listen to the Escape Artists podcasts or the Drabblecast, you can expect that you will hear multiple Tim Pratt stories in upcoming episodes. He has a number of books in the Kindle Store along with a few offerings he serialized for free. In short, I feel that his sales could make a good early indicator of a general trend, as his popularity is more digital than most.

Then economist blogger Tyler Cowen came out with a digital only book which was extremely widely read.

Then came all the stories about Amanda Hocking. I think this Novelr post may have kicked off the media frenzy, but regardless Hocking suddenly found herself to be a big talking point in the discussion over the transition to digital novels. What everyone found to be remarkable is that without the help of any publisher and through her own efforts (and of course a lot of luck) she managed to get to a point where she was selling over 100,000 copies of her books a month in the Kindle store.

Conversations about Hocking tended to focus on the lone writers vs. the big publishers angle, but Hocking herself argues that this is the wrong way to look at things.

Traditional publishing and indie publishing aren't all that different, and I don't think people realize that. Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

I don't think people really grasp how much work I do. I think there is this very big misconception that I was like, "Hey, paranormal is pretty hot right now," and then I spent a weekend smashing out some words, threw it up online, and woke up the next day with a million dollars in my bank account.

This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.

Sure enough, not long after all this media attention was brought her way, Amanda Hocking signed a deal with a publishing house. Her reasons include, among other things, the fact that the publishers will take over all the non-writing aspects of selling a book so that she can focus on spending more time actually writing books. I think she's a good example of how this really isn't about lone authors vs. publishing houses, though obviously the internet makes it possible for lone authors to compete with publishers in a way that used to be unimaginable.

The real story is the digital transition. There will still be a role for intermediaries in the writing business. Today we call those intermediaries "publishers" because historically that has been their primary distinguishing role. But odds are they'll end up adapting in a manner similar to how Chinese music studios have adapted. As Chris Anderson documented, music studios in China are no longer about selling music but about managing popular artists and taking a cut of the proceeds-be those proceeds from shows which they organize and broker sponsorships for, or corporate events, or any number of things.

Publishers may end up being more about high quality editing and marketing for a cut of an author's proceeds than about the actual publishing itself. They will probably adapt in ways we can't yet anticipate, but something like them will almost certainly remain.

Tim Pratt and Amanda Hocking are just specific examples; I wasn't sure that we had crossed a threshold until it came out that digital sales in January had more than doubled year-over-year. After reading that, I then heard a podcast in which digital pioneer Scott Sigler disclosed that ebooks had gone from being 10 percent of how his books were consumed a year ago to 25 percent today.

Of course, paper books are still more widely read than ebooks. Nevertheless, there has been a shift in the order of magnitude of consumption of the latter, and the trend will only continue. Right now publishers are pricing ebook versions of print books at ridiculous rates, considering the nonexistent marginal cost of producing a copy of an ebook--a cost borne by companies like Amazon, not by publishers. Kevin Kelly recently argued that this will not last. Even if you don't believe in the free hypothesis, you only have to look and see how pricing has worked out in digital music to realize that a 15 dollar ebook is an absurd proposition in the long run.

All of this is looking very narrowly at books. In terms of written words, I would wager that digital became the vast majority of what we consumed years ago. I don't know if that's true for fiction or not--it is for me, personally, but I can't pretend to be the typical consumer in this regard. For writing overall, however, it is almost certainly the case.

The music industry is in many ways still in the midst of the digital transition, but it has already experienced an enormous shift. I think that publishing is only now entering the phase that music was in ten years ago. Over the next couple of years, I expect the Kindle store or possibly a competitor to become as central to the publishing industry as iTunes already is in the music industry.

Beyond Content

2011-02-26T13:01:00.000-05:00

In his column complaining about Huffington Post and the new economics of content competition, I think David Carr makes two understandable but fundamentally fallacious assumptions about news and media: that the value in journalism is in content and that making content must be work. Because that’s the way it used to be.

In their op-ed the next day in The New York Times complaining about copyright losing its hardness, Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro extend the error to entertainment, assuming that content is entertainment and content is what content makers make.

Not necessarily.

-Jeff Jarvis

It is a straightforward perspective that is not necessarily wrong: a writer or a news outlet produces content, and make money by drawing a lot of attention to that content and displaying ads. This has been a basic business model in content industries for a very long time, and it has been extended enormously as content has migrated to the web.

The thing is, the way we interact with content is changing enormously. The audience has become the people formerly known as the audience. The silent mass audience has begun to talk back. It's an exciting time to be alive and be a content consumer, but it's unclear how this will ultimately play out for the big content producers.

Take Engadget as an example. I have listened to their podcast for a couple of years now. It does help inform me on the latest in tech news, and it does provide quality commentary on it--but that's not the real reason I listen to it. There are many informative tech podcasts out there. The reason I listen to Engadget's is because I find the hosts fun to listen to; they really bring their personality to the podcast. Other podcasts may be more informative but less fun--even Engadget's own mobile-specific podcast is boring to me, because the hosts don't have the same chemistry.

The fun aspect of the main Engadget podcast has resonated among other listeners as well. When the hosts joked about an Engadget movie along the lines of The Social Network, a listener put together a trailer in short order. Another listener put together an Engadget Podcast Bingo game that pokes fun at the hosts' recurring themes and jokes.

The bingo game is a great example of how some people on the content side understood how to play in the new media space, and some absolutely did not. The Engadget podcast hosts loved that a fan was into their show enough to make the game, and promoted it (repeatedly). In fact, it may soon be necessary to include a "mentions Engadget Podcast Bingo" square in the game!

Engadget is owned by AOL, whose legal staff apparently does not listen to the podcast. They discovered the bingo game independently and served the creator with a cease and desist for trademark infringement. Fortunately the creator got in touch with the podcast hosts, who called AOL and asked them to give him a license to use the trademark.

From AOL's point of view, the game serves no obvious business purpose. They could conceivably make the guy's use of the license conditional on displaying ads, but odds are he wouldn't find it worth the trouble. He was just a fan doing something fun. The podcast hosts understood that this was the sort of thing they should be encouraging, and fortunately AOL decided to let them make that call.

I think that that kind of fan engagement is something you can't pay for. It creates value, not in the sense of providing an obvious direct source of revenue, but by strengthening Engadget's brand. Engadget becomes not just a place to get news about consumer technology, but a fun place with an engaging fan community.

Engadget recently lost two of its editors, and one, Paul Miller, was one of the podcast hosts. His farewell letter gives the impression that this gap--between the editors who understand the importance of the community aspect of what Engadget does, and the business guys at AOL who can't see beyond a simple content production model--was a big part of why he left.

Operating at a much smaller scale, I think podcaster and novelist Scott Sigler has done more to make his livelihood off of the community aspect of modern content production than almost anyone. At the end of the episode he gives shout-outs to everyone who recently signed up for an account on his website. Every time you do anything on his website--comment on a post, write on the forum, anything--you are given points. If you accumulate enough points, Sigler will write you into one of his stories; usually killing you in some gruesome manner.

Are fans more likely to pay for the print or Kindle version of your book if you write them into it? All I can say is that it worked on me.

Sigler has also recently started experimenting with an episode of his podcast dedicated just to fanfiction written in the universe he's created in his books. This both encourages participation from his fans and gives the rest of us more stories to listen to.

There is nothing wrong with the old straightforward approach to content, and many successful outlets will continue to employ it. Content farms in particular are unlikely to ever include a serious community aspect to them. But it is my belief that we will become used to an increasingly thick social layer on top of a lot of the content we consume.

The Great Content Farm Debate

2011-02-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

A big debate has been brewing over content farms, those companies that mass produce written and visual content is enormous proportions. At the center of this debate is Demand Media, the poster child of aggressive content farming. As of November 2009, Demand Media's system produced 4,000 pieces of content a day--and that's just the content created by the paid freelancers, that number does not include all of the user-generated content on their properties.

The debate covers a number of issues--how ethical is Demand's system? How good can the quality of the content be when quantity is the clear focus? Are content farms going to replace systems that produce higher quality content in smaller quantities?

The true focal point of the debate is search quality and, therefore, Google.

Before I took interest in the subject of content farms, I noticed a sudden surge in articles and posts about a perceived decline in the quality of Google's search results. I remained on the fence on the issue, because sometimes narratives like this gain prominence for reasons independent of their accuracy, and because I personally felt satisfied with most of my search results most of the time.

Google was not about to sit back and ignore what people were saying about them, of course, so at the end of January Matt Cutts wrote a post on their blog discussing search quality. According to Cutts, Google has grown much better at filtering outright search spam. The problem is that at the bottom rung of content quality, there's a big grey area that is only growing.

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

So the debate over Google's search quality has boiled down to a single question: should Google block content farms?

This is something that Google has clearly struggled with internally, even going so far as to reach out tech forums and the comments sections of tech sites for more perspectives on the matter.

The content farm debate has raged well beyond the confines of Google, of course. Some think companies like Demand Media are doing nothing but "polluting the web" with useless content.

Others don't think the issue is so clear cut. John Battelle wrote:

Demand has clearly found a strong and scaleable place in the search and content ecosystem. If journalists and publishers find it the model insulting, I suggest they create a better one. Demand's content studio isn't ever going to win a Pulitzer, nor, frankly, should it be asked to. But it works for me when I want to tie a tie. And that, times millions of uniques a day, is a real business.

The nature of judging search quality is so difficult and subjective that it's an open question whether it has deteriorated at all. It could be that there hasn't been a deterioration, or our perception of what deterioration there has been has been magnified by increasingly unrealistic expectations of how good the results should be. John Battelle again:

The truth is, we're asking far more complicated questions of search than we used to, and we're expecting the same magic we used to get back when the web had magnitudes of order less content. Back in 2002, when we put "dishwashers" into Google, we'd probably find someone's blog who was talking about his favorite models. Now, we have five hundred or more attempts at gaming the keyword itself, each promising a potential answer, but rarely delivering it - at least not if we have a complicated question in mind. For simple answers, content farms most likely do a fine job. But the truth is, we are not asking many simple questions of search. We're expecting a lot more.

Never the less, Google is clearly trying to figure out how to filter out content farms more effectively.

I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with what companies like Demand Media are doing. Whatever your standard, higher quality content is always going to be smaller in quantity than lower quality content. From a technical perspective, it takes a lot more time and resources to produce Avatar than David After Dentist. There are fewer people who have the skill to produce a beautiful photograph than are able to create a new LOLCat.

Content farms are not the problems, the problem is with our filters. If I search for information on the iPhone 4, Engadget's in-depth, thorough review is more likely to be useful to me than an eHow article on the subject. And in fact if you search "iPhone 4 reviews", none of the top ten results are from content farm properties--it is a subject that has been saturated by higher quality content producers.

The reason that people are seeing so many content farms in their search results is because their method of content production allows them to cover a much, much broader range of potential subjects than an outlet like Engadget ever could. Wired compared Demand Media to Ford's original mass production lines. Describing the content production process, ReadWriteWeb wrote:

The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.

For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid.

This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor.

There are many extremely idiosyncratic searches for which content farms may provide the only relevant results. There is no reason that Google should not display them in these instances. The relevant question is whether companies like Demand are also gaming the system such that they are beating better quality results when such results are available. I'm not sure how you could answer that question systematically and in a way that Google could built into their algorithm, but I guess that's why search engine companies aren't tripping over themselves to hire me.

Suggested Further Reading:

Twitter as Chatroom

2011-02-17T22:51:00.002-05:00

The Evolution of New Online Conventions

2011-02-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

In the summer of 2010, then Googler (now Facebooker) Paul Adams shared his presentation, The Real Life Social Network, setting the parameters for the conversation about social media since. In it, he pointed out that the way we interact with people in real life is very different from how our tools are set up for them to interact online.

The presentation sparked a lot of interesting discussion, but the best response by far came from John Battelle, who wrote:

As we move online, we're once again making a great migration of social mores, and this time it's one not entirely tethered to physicality, location, or regional constraints. And this shift is happening far more quickly than the last one. Adams does a good job of outlining some of the new interactions that occur online - temporary ties to people we'll most likely never interact with again, but who might have commented on our online review, or liked our picture on Facebook, or answered our product registration question via IM, text, or phone call.

This is uncharted territory, and we're very early in the instrumentation process. We're not certain, in advance of a given interaction, what's right and what's wrong, but we seem to know it when we see it. Adams' advice is to design for how humans interact with each other, and at some core level I agree. But I also think we're not always certain how we might end up behaving in this new world. So I wouldn't want it limited to the mores we currently evince. That would be like designing Victorian London with the mores of a farming village.

Modernity and progress bring with them great disruption to established conventions. Mankind responds through many and varied discovery processes aimed at building new conventions that are better suited to our new circumstances.

As Battelle points out, the movement online is the biggest disruption of our time. We can instantly communicate information and culture to anyone anywhere in the world. We are constantly inventing new contexts in which to interact with people we've met in person but rarely see, people we see on a regular basis, and people we have never met in person at all. We have no idea how this will play out even in the relatively short run, much less the long run.

The discovery of new conventions is a trial and error process that we are all participating in to various degrees.
Witness two blog posts: one by Dave Stroup and one by Nick Disabato. Both attempt to address the same question: how much should one share about oneself in public venues online? Both answer the question through a mix of what they are personally comfortable with and what they consider to be appropriate.

Most of us are coming to terms with this and similar questions every day. We struggle with them as individuals, and as members of communities. I have written about how communities are engaged in a constant rule-making process based on the practical, on the ground knowledge they have. There are an enormous number of online communities generating standards of conduct for internal use right now and their number will only grow.

A minority of those standards of conduct will end up being adopted a majority of people; that is the nature of cultural evolution. It is a process of trial and error on a massive scale, and in a networked world that scale is inconceivably large.

Paul Adams' argument, while well researched and insightful, boils down to the notion that we have some idea of how people generally interact and we can design for it. John Battelle's reply was that how we interact with one another is certain to change in ways that we cannot yet guess at. I think he is right, and I think the tool-makers of the future would do well to imitate Twitter's approach of empowering user conventions as they emerge.

Internet TV, Removing Barriers to Entry

2011-02-06T14:02:00.001-05:00

Consider The Engadget Show. It is a product put out by a professional outlet--Engadget. About once a month, they get a studio in New York City and broadcast for about an hour. It's a technology talk show, so it doesn't require any fancy special effects or anything like that. As a technology news outlet, Engadget is credible enough to draw big names like Steve Wozniak or Steve Ballmer. So on the basis of the guests, the video quality, or any other margin you might conceive of, The Engadget Show is comparable in quality to similar shows that are on broadcast, cable, and satellite TV.

Even a professional-quality show faces serious barriers to getting onto a major or even minor television network, one that has a deal with cable or satellite providers. Part of the problem is that all major TV providers display shows on the broadcast model even though it is technologically unnecessary for anything but broadcast. In short, this means any additional show must justify its existence as being more valuable than a different show that could be on during its timeslot. The transaction costs associated with proving to some TV network that they are valuable enough to go on the air probably aren't worth it to Engadget.

However, I just watched the latest episode on my TV. How? Well, I recently purchased a Roku Box which is able to stream content from specific partners. One of those partners is Mediafly, which has all the episodes of the Engadget Show on it. So I was able to get the latest episode, when I wanted it, in a format that filled my 32 inch TV and remained high quality.

So being on Mediafly meant benefiting from Mediafly's partnership with Roku. Video producers on vimeo reap the same benefits. Though YouTube has not partnered with Roku for some reason, you can get it through Apple TV or Google TV, or any number of other means. Many blu-ray players, for example, have a YouTube app.

Meanwhile, Leo Laporte's TWiT Network has sought to stand out by partnering with all of these new internet TV setups and having its own distinct app. This is probably a higher transaction cost approach than the more passive tactic adopted by The Engadget Show, but a lot lower in transaction costs than getting adopted by a major TV network.

2010 saw a big push in attempts to get the internet into our TVs. On the hardware side, we now have Roku, Boxee, Google, and Apple all offering products geared at getting net content into our living rooms. Meanwhile, intermediaries like Netflix and Hulu have been working on getting as much legacy professional content onto our TVs on demand as possible, sometimes shelling out ten figure amounts to expand their offerings.

With traditional television still making more than anything comparable on the internet by several orders of magnitude, many have understandably expressed skepticism that the internet would disrupt the TV industry the way that it has the music and print industries.

Make no mistake. It will. It may take time, but it will. When a majority of households have streaming video options on their TVs, the industry will look very different. There's no telling how it will change, only the certainty that it will.

The Emergent Online Community of Scholars

2011-01-30T13:31:00.000-05:00

There exists a robust community of bloggers who write about economics. This has been true for years. The success of early pioneers coupled with the increased interest in the subject that the recent recession brought about has led to a big expansion of that community.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution stands at the top of the pack in terms of attention and influence. It could be argued that Paul Krugman is up there, too, but I put him in a different category. Though he does engage in discussions in the econ blogosphere, he got to where he is by virtue of the institutional weight of the New York Times. Marginal Revolution became big on its own, without a big media outlet behind it.

Eleven days ago, Cowen posted an announcement: he had written a 15,000 word work that was available exclusively in e-book form for 4 dollars. His work, The Great Stagnation, put forward an interesting and provocative argument about the state of the American economy today relative to where it was fifty years ago.

This kicked off a discussion that resonated throughout the econ blogosphere. A quick search in my Google Reader account produces 20 items written in response to the book's argument, and that's only from the places I'm subscribed to--reviews and critiques of the book have spread far further than the little corner I pay attention to. Scott Sumner called it a "marketing coup".

I have written about how our networked world might produce a new community of scholars, and the economics blogosphere has always been my personal point of reference for that idea. The response to Cowen's book provides some insight into what that community looks like in practice.

Some of the responses have relied on logical argumentation rather than providing a lot of data for counter-evidence. Others have fought data with data. There were a lot of posts written on this subject that I would consider scholarly. Moreover, discussion isn't limited to blog posts but also the comments on those posts. And of course, Cowen has been actively engaging people along the way.

This is discussion at a scale and speed that would not have been possible before the internet, and would have been much more difficult before blogs were developed as a platform and became so ubiquitous among those who write online. The conversation has also been spread across the web through the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the various people interested in it.

When standard practices for conducting and discussing scholarship online fully mature, I bet that they will look a lot like this.

One last thought: some might wonder where this stands in relation to the free hypothesis, given that Cowen charged 4 dollars for the e-book. I don't think it contradicts the free hypothesis as I have stated it:

All content--written, audio, and visual--will eventually be available in digital form. The vast majority of content that people consume--that is, more than 99% of it--will be available free of charge, and most of the tiny fraction that people will be willing to pay for will be a premium version of something that has a free version

Cowen wrote a 15,000 word piece that you have to pay for in order to read. However, the discussion around that piece has generated enormously more than 15,000 words, even if you don't include the words generated in the comments sections of blog posts--which I consider a legitimate part of this conversation.

If you are Tyler Cowen, you can credibly charge a small price for a work such as this and expect that there will be people who will pay for it. After all, it is important to have read it if you want to remain relevant in this discussion. However, if you are not a Tyler Cowen or similarly positioned individual in terms of the amount of attention you can command, it is unlikely to work out for you. And I would wager that even Tyler Cowen couldn't pull this off on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, I would bet good money that many more people have followed the discussion, which is available on disparate blogs online for free, than have actually purchased the book. I am among those who has not bought the book but has followed the discussion with interest. If I wanted to write a substantial response to Cowen's argument, then I would feel like I ought to buy the book. But as it stands, I don't have any device that has a Kindle app at the moment, and I'm perfectly content to be a spectator to this discussion as greater minds than mine process the contents of Cowen's book.

In short, I think that eventually paid content like Cowen's book will be among a tiny minority of content that is consumed, and in many cases will follow the same pattern of sparking a lot more free content around it. Where scholarship is concerned specifically, there will be a few highly influential people, and possibly journals, that will be able to get away with charging a nominal fee. But the vast majority of the scholarly discussion will take place in open forums, freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

Digital Legacy

2011-01-23T12:08:00.000-05:00

But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.

-Archive Team, The Geocities Torrent

When the Library of Congress announced that it would be archiving every public tweet that ever was and ever will be, it was immediately met with a number of sarcastic responses. Why should government resources be spent on the inane dribble that's said on Twitter, people asked. The Library of Congress' blogger made the case for it:

I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.

In other words, there is plenty of historic value in saving these tweets! The question is not why the Library of Congress is saving tweets, the question is why isn't the Library of Congress saving a lot more than that. In fairness, they apparently have made some unnoticed strides:

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

Still, it isn't enough. Nor are the efforts of the Internet Archive, valiant though they may be, nearly enough.

In an ideal world, every blog post, video, and image posted on the internet today will still be publicly accessible a hundred years from now. As things stand, we are unfortunately nowhere near that world.

There are of course technical difficulties--an inconceivable, not to mention historically unprecedented, amount of content is produced and put up on the web every single day.

But the technical difficulties aren't the biggest problem. After all, nearly 38 million websites were turned into a 652 GB torrent in fairly short order by the Archive Team when Yahoo! announced that it would be shutting down GeoCities. Granted that is nothing compared to the amount of content on YouTube, which at last count had 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. But clearly it is possible to store all of that--YouTube manages. There just needs to be a process in place by which that content gets safely archived somewhere.

The biggest problem is not technical, but institutional. Groups such as the Library of Congress and their Digital Preservation wing are constrained by tight intellectual property laws whose application remains uncertain in the new digital frontier. We would all be better off if some of the really big players--Google, whose Blogger and YouTube properties alone are enormous sources of content, Yahoo!, which has in Flickr one of the biggest sources of publicly available photos, Wordpress, and others--would make deals similar to the one that Twitter made. It would reduce the transaction costs of protecting a large percentage of our digital legacy.

Our Vast Digital Wealth

2011-01-08T10:59:00.000-05:00

A very interesting post by Leftsider explores the movement from hand-made production by artisans, to mass production, to digital technology and how it in many ways brings about a similar mindset to the earlier form of production.

He argues that the original change had to do with going from judging things by their quality to judging them on whether they were good enough for the price. I disagree. To me, this story is entirely about wealth.

For we always get what is "good enough", within the boundaries of our own wealth and what else it could be used for.

Think about clothes. Back before the Industrial Revolution, all clothing was hand made. The resulting supply was so low that most people couldn't afford to buy much--if any--clothing. So many poor households made their own, and only had so many total.

The introduction of mass produced clothes didn't help the primary purchasers of clothes; the small, wealthy fraction of the population. It helped the poor and anyone less than rich by providing cheap clothes of a consistent--if not high--quality. It saved the time it would take for them to make their own, and made it possible for them to afford a much larger quantity of clothes.

The experience of being rich didn't change; if anything, it got better as society grew wealthier overall. The quality of fabric that tailors were able to get to custom make outfits for the wealthy only got better as global trade brought them supplies from distant places.

Nevertheless, I think Leftsider makes an important point about how digital technology and the internet are a big phase shift. The question is, why?

I said that I thought the explanation for all of this was wealth. Wealth is simply the ability to acquire a large number of things that are of value to you. When it comes to music, things to read, images, and video, we are unimaginably wealthy compared to where we were even five or ten years ago, much less twenty or thirty.

In the realm of anything digital, we live like the rich. We can have our pick of the lot. Most of it we don't even have to pay anything for, other than the time it takes to discover and consume it. Sometimes we decide to really splurge and maybe spend a couple of bucks in an app store.

The point is, our relationship to digital goods much more closely approximates the wealthy landowner's relationship to clothing back in pre-industrial times than it does the median citizen's relationship to clothing after the industrial revolution. Our wealth is so vast that we can afford to be very discerning.

It's still just "good enough" for what we can afford. But we can afford more than anyone in history.

Are Bookmarks Necessary?

2011-01-02T19:07:00.000-05:00

The recent fiasco with Delicious has spawned a number of posts reminiscing about when the social bookmarking service was cool, and how bad Yahoo! was at taking advantage of what it had to offer.

I was all about social bookmarking back in 2007. To me, there were two really cool things about it.

First, since you come up with the tags yourself, it makes it easy for you to save hundreds of bookmarks without hindering your ability to find any one of them later (I currently have over 1,700 such bookmarks). Tagging a hundred pages with the word "webcomic" and then having other tags to filter out all but a handful of them is much less cumbersome than having a "webcomics" folder in your browser.

Second, Delicious' site-wide search learned from people's behavior. The more people that tag a specific site with the word "webcomic", the higher the ranking that page will receive in the search results for "webcomic".

Recently, I've begun to wonder how much value bookmarks like this add. In fact, I've begun to wonder whether bookmarks in general are really necessary.

The main use I always had for Delicious was finding something after the fact to share with someone. Yet for 90% of the cases where I want to do that these days there is usually a quicker option available to me. If I saw it relatively recently, I can usually just go straight to the source--Twitter, Google Reader, or Facebook in most cases. If it isn't recent, then Google is still the fastest option 90% of the time. From Chrome's omnibox or Firefox's search box I can get straight to Google without going anywhere else, and it's rare that I don't find something right away.

For that other 10%, Delicious does often come in handy. But only if it was something that I thought was worth bookmarking, which is a fairly small minority of stuff that I see.

For the more traditional use of bookmarks--to make it easy to get to the websites you frequent the most--modern browsers have in my experience made this entirely unnecessary. In Chrome, if I type the letter "F" in the omnibox, it immediately fills in Facebook.com. If I have Chrome Instant on, it doesn't even wait for me to hit enter to take me there. While Chrome is the only browser with the instant option, all other browsers have a similar autofill option based on user activity.

Browsers, search engines, and social networks are working as hard as they can to personalize a user's experience without demanding any effort on that user's part. As such, concepts like social bookmarking that seemed so promising at first face the insurmountable problem of asking users to make an effort, however minimal. As personalization gets better and more effortless, services like social bookmarking will no doubt be left behind, if they haven't been already.