You may remember Sam from an interview I conducted with him late last year after he fell out with Michael Arrington. He’s very eminent within the UK and European web startup scene, and blognation gives me an exciting new platform to take blogging and podcasting further.

This obviously leaves the big question of what happens with GizBuzz and Oratos. I cannot continue to blog on GizBuzz, since it is obviously in a fairly similar niche to blognation. Whilst I am fairly keen that it should not die, we haven’t found an editor to run the site, and so it looks as though it will be dormant for the moment. It will certainly stay online, however. The future for Oratos is looking more rosy; FOSSwire, the blog we launched late last year, is doing phenomenally well. YouMakeMedia is also growing nicely.

So, if you want to keep up to date with my writings in the future, I encourage you to subscribe to blognation. Since I won’t be writing about US startups at blognation, I might post the occasional thought on what is happening in Silicon Valley at my personal blog.

Finally, it just remains to thank all those who have contributed to GizBuzz, commented and read, as well as all those who have helped us along the way, whether by giving us an interview or tipping us off to news. Two people in particular stand out; Peter, who has written a huge quantity of fantastic content for GizBuzz for well over a year, as well as helping out with the podcasts, and Chris who designed the site for nothing, without being asked, and has written and podcasted on numerous occasions. When I started the site in January 2006 I had no idea that GizBuzz would become what it has, and I will always be grateful to those who helped make that happen through their incredible generosity of time and spirit. Thank you.

Update: As you may have read, blognation failed as a result of Sam Sethi’s dishonesty in public and to his employees about the funding status of blognation, and his consequent inability to pay anyone involved. Gory details abound on the internet, but suffice to say that this is a sad failure, both because it was utterly preventable, and because the concept had so much scope for success. The silver lining is the number of fantastic people I met through my involvement with blognation, both internally and in the wider UK startup community. At present there are no plans to restart GizBuzz, although this may change in the future. In the meantime, you can read my blognation content here.

The new launch of Zooomr has been a shambles, with about two weeks of downtime, and the final product isn’t even that interesting. As I write this it is down yet again, and the latest version is far too buggy to have been released and adds little in the way of innovation, with most of the new features either minor or ripped off other sites (most obviously Twitter for Zipline and Flickr for ‘awesomeness’). Chris Van Patten, editor of YouMakeMedia and previously a fan of Zooomr, described it as “it’s a half-hearted new look with a few disconnected features”. I think that’s fair. Robert Scoble, normally an enthusiastic evangelist for the service, has written a post which criticises their lack of a business plan and implores them to take serious steps to take Zooomr to the next level. He has some ideas, and so have I.

I had originally written these ideas in an earlier version of this post on my personal blog (which has fewer readers) a couple of days ago, because I felt that it was unfair to be too critical publicly, given the fact that Zooomr was built by a then 17-year-old Kris Tate, singlehandedly. Zooomr is an incredible achievement for him, and I have a huge amount of respect for him. However, the disastrous nature of the launch of Mark III looks as though it could be, at least in part, down to his lack of experience. My main evidence for this is an excellent account of the release by Zoli Erdos. He writes of Kris’ lack of focus on the core of what needed to be done to bring Zooomr back online, instead becoming obsessed by making use of a Sun server which wasn’t necessary to actually launch. He writes:

Good intentions aside, what he really needs now is razor-sharp focus on doing whatever it takes to bring Zooomr online now. When you run a Software-as-a-Service business, even if it’s all free, people, in this case 50-100,000 users become dependent on you - that’s a responsibility. Understanding that responsibility is what differentiates business leaders from dreamers - however well-intentioned, talented they are.

Note that all this is second hand information; if it has got mixed up at some point along the line, someone tell me and I’ll correct it.

Where from here, then? It has become clear that the Kris Tate - Thomas Hawk (brilliant amateur photographer, investment manager and part-time Zooomr CEO) partnership on Zooomr is no longer enough if it is to prosper. They have handled the community aspect mostly brilliantly as I wrote a couple of weeks ago (albeit with an occasional lack of sufficient information according to Zoli’s post). Things that haven’t been handled well have been engineering (the massive downtime is evidence enough for this) and business strategy. Whilst some might dispute the last point, citing the launch of the Zooomr marketplace which allows users to sell their photography as stock, I doubt that will bring significant revenue. The stock system at the moment works fine for the people it is supposed to work for (the buyers of the stock and the agencies), and I expect there will be serious problems with the signal to noise ratio in the marketplace, making it mostly useless for people wanting to buy stock.

Both those problems point to needing VC or at least angel funding. Funding would provide the ability to hire a couple of experienced engineers as well as enough hardware to ensure a reliable, effective service. They would also provide the pressure to find a proper business model. I suspect that Kris and Thomas are hard at work trying to find investment already.

They should also build out a ‘community board’. Zooomr’s strong point is its cult-like following from many key people, some of whom would have invaluable insight. Get famous people from the community with a track record of predicting the curve like Scoble (who would be happy to do this, I would have thought), as well as some non-competing clever founders, who might be less known but have better ideas, some amateur photographers and finally some random Zooomr users who live locally to help in coming up with ideas and strategy, with monthly-or-so meetings. Zooomr gets great advice and coverage, and in return Zooomr leverages their community to generate lots of good will for everyone who helps them out, as they have done with those who lent them hardware this week. They shouldn’t pay the advisors.

My other thought was that maybe Yahoo should buy Zooomr, and make it an experimental, cutting edge test ground. Chuck random ideas at it and see what happens. Kris Tate would be a real asset for Yahoo/Flickr, and the new experimental site would already have a passionate, vocal user base. I guess this is pretty unlikely to happen, though.

Zooomr could go far, but isn’t going anywhere at the moment. There’s lots going for it, but hard, shrewd decisions need to be taken now in order to realise its potential.

Having read the extracts published, his main issue seems to be that much user generated content (UGC) is poor quality, and that the ease with which it can now be published and reach an audience because of facilitating technology is therefore a bad thing, because poor quality content pushes out the considered, well informed contributions to the media.

So what defence does the accused enter? I thought this would be a good opportunity to actually examine why the new media phenomenon is a good thing, and while I’m at it rebut his argument which, in my opinion, fails miserably. Much of this post is an adaption of what turned out to be a rather long comment I left on the Newsnight blog.

His central premise seems to be based around the abundance of poor UGC. However, he has overlooked the fact that bad UGC tends not to reach an audience. A poor quality, ignorant rant on MySpace will not reach any audience significant enough for it to do any damage. Since most people producing UGC tend to want an audience, there is actually an incentive against creating ill-informed, poor quality content because anyone with two brain cells to rub together will be able to work out that it will have a negligible reach. Those without the aforementioned brain cells will continue to produce bad content, but hardly anyone will read/watch/listen to it. And no-one forces him to watch those ‘poor fools’ on YouTube.

Contrary to his belief, there is no threat posed by bad UGC to good quality content, and the incumbent providers of much of it. The risk to the ‘old media’ is that they fail to maximise their routes to content and thus as people become less likely to buy a newspaper, their reach decreases. So long as an old media entity produces content and makes it accessible in as many ways as possible, they will continue to be a powerful voice in our society.

The new media revolution has, in fact, increased good quality content in real terms. A long tail has been created, much of which is of real value. The technology sector perhaps has the most developed media ecosystem (simply because it was the first to adopt the new technologies, and has therefore had the longest to mature), and is a good example of this. There is a clear distinction (I hope) between GizBuzz, a member of that long tail, and an ill informed rant on MySpace.

The democratisation of media has brought profound benefits. The work of the charity MySociety (behind sites such as TheyWorkForYou and the Downing Street Petitions website) is an excellent example of what the internet can do to promote good governance and make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. More people can become involved in the running of their country thanks to better communication. More people can feel enfranchised, a powerful weapon in fighting dangerous political apathy. To dismiss all of this based on the increased availability of drivel, which does no harm and he is not forced to watch, is ignorant and unhelpful.

For this episode, I interviewed Chris Saad of Particls, an attention management application of which I am a great fan. They’re coming out of a private beta today, and are also announcing a revenue sharing version of Particls for online publishers. You can download it here.

The official description of Particls here, but essentially it is a desktop application which works out what you are interested in, ranks incoming information in order of importance and then displays it in various different ways proportional to that importance. This approach goes a long way to solving the problems of information overload which anyone with more than a few feeds in their RSS reader will be aware of.

Some of the things Chris and I discussed included the phenomenon of attention metadata, who might want to use Particls and why, monetisation (Particls is pretty unique in Web 2.0 for having a rock-solid plan to make money that will almost certainly work well), the APML Workgroup and Sam Sethi’s concept of iPALS. It’s not too long, and don’t be put off if you haven’t heard of APML or iPALS - they’re quite simple really, and Chris explains them well.

Get the Podcast

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Music in the episode

I decided to try something new this week, and stick some music on the end of the podcast. I like Jamie Cullum, and couldn’t help thinking that the lyrics to this song could equally well apply to Web 2.0. Below are the song details, and a link to download it (legally - it is specifically licensed for bloggers and podcasters to distribute it by Cullum’s label as a means of promotion).

Download “I Want To Be A Popstar” (mp3)
from “Pointless Nostalgic”
by Jamie Cullum
Candid Productions

• Buy at iTunes Music Store
• Buy at eMusic

Vecosys has confirmed TechCrunch’s rumour that Google will partner with O2 to launch a UK phone network. The partnership with O2 is not unlike Virgin Mobile’s with T-Mobile. Known as Virtual Mobile Network Operators, Virgin Mobile piggy backs on T-Mobile’s network infrastructure which means they don’t have to make that massive outlay. I found myself posting quite a long comment over on Vecosys, so I thought I may as well rehash and develop it to post it here.

According to Sam Sethi, Google will use branded Nokia phones as their handsets, and will obviously preload them with Google software. Google already has a lot of mobile apps; you can download Google Maps and a Gmail app to your phone, and many services such as iGoogle and Google Reader are available online in mobile versions, as well as obviously search.

So why are Google doing this? Sam sees the move as an attempt to enable Google to collect our attention data on the move as well as at our computers, as they are already doing.

Whilst he’s probably right indirectly, I’m not sure that’s the main reason behind the decision. At the moment the penetration of mobile internet isn’t that great in the UK, partly due do expensive data bills and partly down to culture - most people just don’t see the need to regularly access the internet on their phone (the most widespread use is probably getting football scores), and are unlikely to be aware that they can access email on a normal phone, without requiring a Blackberry. Presumably the Google Mobile network will be about changing that by making data as cheap as possible, subsidised by adverts on Google services. If the apps are already on the phone, and aren’t expensive to use, people are likely to use them.

It strikes me as a slightly silly thing to do; data costs are coming down (T-mobile and 3 are both offering fairly cheap ‘unlimited’ data plans now). Also, by launching this, they’re tying themselves into a market which is a long way from their traditional core of information organisation and advertising. Virgin Mobile, for example, runs a customer service operation to support its network. Whilst it may be possible to avoid some of that by whitelabelling some of O2’s operations, there will still inevitably need to be some ‘drag’, like sales operations.

It seems like a desperate attempt to increase adoption of their mobile services, which might well help in the short term but will probably hurt them in the long run as they realise that they don’t want, or need, to be part of the mobile business. Had Google itself been invented in the earlier stages of the internet, they might have been tempted to launch an ISP to increase adoption of the internet and indirectly their search engine. I think it is clear that that would not have been a sensible move.

The redesign itself is very nice; it’s more minimalist than any recent effort, and gives big emphasis to discovery of content, with a frankly enormous tag cloud and a selection of three videos, blogs and music albums which are deemed to be of the moment. Visually it maintains the obligatory rounded corners, so it must be a success.  The interface throughout is tidier and more effective than previously.

An interesting change (in that I don’t remember it last time I used Technorati) is in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are manfully attempting to do something fairly similar to Google’s recently announced Universal Search, in which a single search will result in the most relevant content, whatever the form. On Google this can include anything from text to images, maps to books. On Technorati this would include video content, podcasts and blog posts, for example.

Technorati is, however, less successful than Google. Their attempt revolves around a ‘featured’ tab on the search, which is far less clever than Google, because all they do is search various mediums and then plonk it in a relevant box. Video results are shown in the video box, blogs in the blog box. You get the idea. This easier to do because it doesn’t require ranking algorithm, and all it really amounts to is a metasearch of the different content-type searches. Whilst a nice UI touch, it isn’t really much more than that. They continue to push using Technorati tags; if you want to show up on that ‘featured’ page, my initial look would suggest that you must use them.

So what’s that change in emphasis that I mentioned then? CEO Dave Sifry alludes to it in his post on the Technorati blog:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.

I think what he’s talking about (the emergence of many different forms of new media) only really scratches the surface of what Technorati is becoming, or could become. I’ve talked before about the problems of content discoverability in the long tail (explanation of what that means), and Technorati is well placed to provide a completely different solution to the problem from what’s being done by the current leaders in the area (Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon).

Through some sophisticated, well developed algorithms, it should be possible to leverage the vast number of blogs which they search to come up with personalised recommendations for a person based on their OPML file and/or web history, by analysing past reading patterns and then ranking possible content recommendations by similarity and discussion on other blogs. At the moment all they do is come up with the one-size-fits-all suggestions that you see on the homepage, which is possibly useful but of fairly limited value.

All in all, an update that goes in the right direction but isn’t massively exciting. The UI is now impressive, and they appear to have recognised their importance in facilitating the discovery of content. They’re not doing such a great job in that, or the universal search idea, at the moment but that will come. They face the ever-present challenge of Google Blogsearch, but seem to be growing well and crucially they are out-innovating Google in the space at the moment.

Flickr-alternative Zooomr is launching a major new version over the course of today, and is doing a number of interesting things with social media to promote the launch and engage users. Quite a few of the Oratos team use Zooomr because of the price advantage over Flickr (it’s completely free without limits), so I expect there’ll be a review of the service when it launches later today, but what I want to look at in this post is the way that they are going about launching it.

Zooomr CEO and well-known photographer Thomas Hawk is (and has been for a few hours now) sitting on a UStream.tv channel, embedded below. This is a live video stream from a web cam, with a chat box below. Thomas has been taking questions from users on everything from Zooomr to his recommendations for SLR lenses. The chat room and direct interaction between users and him (and occasionally founder Kris) is encouraging a great sense of community; a sense that users have some sort of ownership over the service that they use. He’s also getting potentially valuable feedback by having that direct conversation. Equally importantly, it helps to take the sting out of the fact that Zooomr has now been down for quite some time while they do the upgrade.

Kris Tate, the legendary 19-year-old founder of the service, has also been making posts on Vimeo, a great video blogging website. Much of what applies to the live stream is significant here, with his chatty, honest style doing much to encourage anticipation of the relaunch and subdue irritation at the service being down. He’s also posted a demo of the service, which is in general a great thing to have done because it helps bloggers who want to cover the next version (Mashable has already done so, for example, despite the fact that Mark III is not live yet) and gives a hype-enducing titbit. The one criticism, though, is that the demo isn’t great. Kris tries things that don’t work, which he doesn’t need to demonstrate, like geotagging Japanese landmarks in English. The lack of this functionality doesn’t matter to the vast majority of those watching the demo, so why embarrass oneself by letting the service fail?

Maybe I’ve over analysed all this, but I just thought it was a really neat way for a small startup for which community is essential to encourage that community and make it feel enfranchised through the relaunch. It shows that conventional PR, and even standard new media evangelism , just isn’t necessary in some cases to get coverage and hype for a launch. Now all that matters is the product itself, which we’ll see in the morning. Hopefully!

You’ve probably already heard of OpenID. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a new and upcoming standard for user authentication (and fellow Gizbuzz blogger Huw gave a nice introduction here).

I personally think OpenID is a great idea, and I’m a proponent of the idea and the standard. For a web development project I’m working on at the moment, we’re going to be using OpenID as the sole authentication system for users. That is to say, you will need an OpenID to actually sign up for the service and it will be the single system controlling your sign in.

There’s a problem though. The average computer user has never heard of OpenID, doesn’t really understand it and might be turned away from using this new service if they don’t very quickly ‘get’ how to sign up. We could have just shunned OpenID, built another proprietary username/password system and be done with it.

As a web service provider, though, I feel we have a responsibility to be pushing for new standards and helping spread OpenID. After all, it’s only through the widespread adoption of standards that the web is what it is today.

So we want to push OpenID and bring it to the forefront. What do we need to do?

Service adoption

I’m doing my bit here. New services (and existing ones) need to either support OpenID or use it as their single authentication solution. Until services force people to get OpenIDs, people simply won’t bother.

Huw mentioned in a follow-up comment on our previous OpenID post:

“I initially got an OpenID because Zooomr required me to have one. Now I use it on other services.”

If that’s the case for techies, it will be the same, if not more difficult, to convince the average user to get an OpenID. Which means new services need to push.

User education

Users need to be shown the benefits of OpenID to them - the fact that they don’t need to remember millions of passwords, maintain separate accounts on different services.

Privacy. Interoperability. Time saving.

We need to sell OpenID to them on the benefits to the end user (and leave the techie stuff where it belongs).

Interoperability with other credential systems

AOL have already done an excellent job at this by giving everyone with an AOL/AIM Screen Name an OpenID, in the form of openid.aol.com/screenname.

Now we need everyone else to join in. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, I’m looking at you. Maybe we have to do something to sweeten the deal for them, I don’t know. Without the support of the big players, OpenID will be in for a tough fight.

Advertising

This sort of ties in with user education, but still, we need OpenID to get advertised and publicised. Again, stress the benefits for the end user and where appropriate, also show the technical advantages.

The more people who know what OpenID is, the more people might use it.

I personally am very keen to see OpenID becoming a success and I hope that with enough effort, it can become a part of the future of the web.

Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

We are producing so much information in so many different places that it makes sense to try and pull that all together into one place. Jeremy Keith did that himself, and you can see the results here. That used a PHP script, and is fairly basic. However, a number of different services have cropped up which emulate the basic functionality, and they have all have evolved Jeremy’s concept in a slightly different way.

Jaiku is an interesting, slightly Twitter-like, product which is much more comprehensive and allows you to pull in your own feeds. iStalkr doesn’t have the mobile emphasis of Jaiku, and is more true to the original concept with a few nice extra features - in fact Jeremy Keith is a user of the service.

The one I really like, though, is Tumblr. Tumblr was originally conceived as an easy way to create Tumblelogs,  which are described by Wikipedia as preferring “short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” The whole point with Tumblelogs is that they are supposed to be a joy to update, with no work required, posting interesting things as and when. Tumblr realised that a great way to take that further would be to allow you to import your own feeds and republish that, lifestream style.

The result is a great service, for a number of reasons. It is a study in usability;  signup is incredibly quick, and the backend dashboard is brilliant, ensuring that anyone will feel confident using it. Crucially, the whole concept is instantly understandable, in a way that perhaps iStalkr and to a lesser extent Jaiku won’t be to those not well versed in the concepts involved. At the same time, there are a number of brilliant features on Tumblr, including custom themes and domains, as well as a friends system, adding the possibility of getting a network effect going.

I’ve been really enjoying my Tumblr blog. I’m not sure that anyone’s reading it, but in a strange way it is extremely satisfying to see everything you produce online collected in one place. I guess we’ll see this gaining popularity in the tech world, and probably even breaking out of that - you don’t need to know what RSS is to use Tumblr, which makes barriers to entry low. Give it two years, and Tumblr could be big.

Formerly The Venice Project, Joost is an on-demand IPTV (television over the internet) startup from the founders of Skype, and it has has never been far from the blogosphere’s attention. Indeed everyone in media seems to have decided that it is the ‘next big thing’. It looks like the whole effort is going well - they’ve done deals with many key content providers which will ensure that they will have TV franchises such as CSI available, and last week I got yet another press release telling me that they have secured advertising from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nike. I’ve been part of the closed beta since it was called The Venice Project, and I wanted to take the opportunity to do a look at the product, the ideas behind it and its chances for success. This is an obscenely long post, for which I apologise, but I think it does cover most of the important aspects of the product.

The Application

The downloadable application and the content itself is completely free, and it is ad supported. It is on demand in that the user chooses what programme to watch and what time they want to watch it, but the programmes are organised into conventional-style channels which play their content sequentially. A widget platform is perhaps the only nod to social networking, as it could potentially allow users to chat to other people watching the same thing (as possible with YouTube), rate content and have content recommended. If features such as this were well developed and robust, it would go a long way to dispel people’s concerns about the lack of community.

The Philosophy

There are three areas of innovation with Joost: the use of peer-to-peer, the on-demand channel model and advertising.

Joost, like the founders’ previous endeavours, makes use of p2p technology to enable the streaming of reasonable quality TV over the internet without ridiculous bandwidth costs. There is an excellent page on Skype site giving the technical lowdown on the advantages of P2P, but simply put, if a centralised system were used then every time a new user joined the network costs would grow, because that centralised system has to support one more user. However, with P2P, as users join Joost they become part of the distribution system which means that Joost’s costs do not spiral with growth. That has to be healthy from a business point of view, but it also means that the speed of distribution is likely to be greater, and obviously there is far greater redundancy. The downside is that Joost has a significant bandwidth footprint on a user’s computer; according to their own help, “in one hour of viewing, approximately 320Mb data will be downloaded and 105Mb uploaded”. That will be enough to cause problems for many UK internet users, burdened by restrictive fair use policies and bandwidth caps.

The previously mentioned on-demand model, in which shows are organised into channels but a user can choose what to watch and when to watch it, is unique. In some ways this provides the best of both worlds, as you don’t always have to know what you want to watch when you sit down in front of it thanks to the channels, but you have the flexibility of on demand. Others (including our very own Chris) argue that the lack of any attempt to build a social network around the content is ignoring the success of YouTube, which has made use of its network effect to enhance discoverability of content and provide a two way experience.

Advertising is probably the most interesting part of Joost; it is the raison d’etre, after all. Whilst one might expect the advertising model adopted to be very similar to television, the unique aspect of the platform makes it much more interesting, in two ways. First of all, Joost is not limited to having only boring 30 second and 10 second video adverts inserted into their shows. From last week’s press release:

Creative executions, which will be added to Joost on an ongoing basis, include both conventional advertising units, similar to those found on TV and the Internet, such as stills, spots, overlays and widgets; and innovative types of advertising, such as branded entertainment and channel sponsorship and promotion. Users will be able to learn more about the advertised brands by clicking through the interface.

That gives advertisers many more options than previously available. Agencies like to be seen to be innovative, and Joost gives them an ideal way to be seen to do this.

However, it isn’t the most exciting part. Joost is part of the attention economy; it knows what you watch, how much you watch, when you watch and quite literally where you live and thus is privy to a significant amount of information on you. This, whilst scary, is obviously of immense value to advertisers, who are constantly looking to maximise their return on investment by targeting their ads at the right people. In some ways, the goals of the audience and the advertisers are quite similar; the audience doesn’t want to see ads that aren’t relevant to them, and the advertisers don’t want to show such ads because they are a waste of money.

Conclusion

Joost stands every chance of being successful. It appears to be getting great content deals, fuelled by a genuine belief in the mainstream media that Joost may be the future method for distribution of TV programmes. That content, combined with the on-demand aspect, will bring massive audiences who want flexibility currently not available easily or cheaply. And the massive audiences will bring advertisers, attracted by more ways to advertise and engage, and crucially better ways to target. It sounds like one big virtuous circle to me; Joost could well be the next, well, Big Thing.