It’s been ages since I last wrote here but a lot has happened in the past couple of years. I co-founded a startup which didn’t go so well (a story to be told, for sure), I have been contributing to another which is moving on strong, I changed over to the industry described by the dreaded term of ‘social media consulting‘ (Greek) and last but definitely not least got married and became a father.

Why come back to this blog after so long then? Well, the blog was never really abandoned in the back of my mind and all it needed was a bit of free time and an excuse. I got one of the two now so here it goes.

In a couple of weeks a good friend (whom I unfortunately see all too rarely) will be walking into a room full of his peers looking forward to learn the results of his and his team’s efforts in the Berlin Film Festival 2012. He’s very pro-health so I doubt this will actually be true but let’s assume for the sake of this story that in his suit’s inner pocket there will be a cigar waiting to be lit when the good news are announced.

And the night will unfold and expectations will keep growing. And eventually it’ll be them who win the prize and everybody will be happy and at last justified for all the costly decisions they have made, all the work and the time spent on this and other projects building up to it. It will be a great moment which will be made even greater by the doors it will open and the roads it will pave for higher goals. But that will be a thing of the future because that night at some point my friend will light his cigar and celebrate his success in this among other ways.

Or the results may not favor them.

A good possibility as it is their first time there. Somebody else’s name will be announced, they will probably be happy for them but they will also be definitely disappointed for coming so close and not making it. Surely, being nominated is important and some things will be better than before but it’s not the same as taking the award, is it? And my friend will celebrate the night but with much less passion, less whole-heartedly. Because the cigar in his suit inner pocket will remain unlit.

But it’s ok. He can keep the cigar, save it for the next such occasion – cigars don’t go bad. In fact, you can keep them somewhere at the back of your room (or mind), properly cared for, and work towards them. So, that’s it, even if you don’t get it right the first time, or the second or the third for that matter, the cigar is there to remind you that the game is still on and you’ll have other opportunities to light it.

These days everyone seems to be making an app store. I think it all started (or at least became popular) with the iPhone releasing their SDK or – or was it with Twitter opening up their API? And then Android, Facebook of course, Yahoo, MySpace as well as any startup with a few miles behind them are opening up their platform so that 3rd party developers can create value for whatever it is they are making.

And soon after that even more mainstream companies like Nokia and Vodafone weigh in by making their own platforms (more) available – something that should have happened much earlier actually.

The problem is that there are only so many people with the ability (let alone the interest and time) to actually sit down and create something worthy. Sure, providing a means to make something (i.e. some sort of income for the developer) out of the time and energy spent creating an app – like Apple does with the iPhone – works as an incentive. But what else can be used to grab the attention of the creators – something perhaps even more important than the attention of the crowds?

Some say – even more than money – giving respect to a developer/coder/programmer is enough to attract his attention. I guess it’s respect by demonstrating you’ve created something worthy technically speaking. It may also be respecting his or her values – e.g. by releasing open source or contributing to it if aiming for that community. Or you could show developers respect simply by admitting that they – collectively – know better and as such should be able to significantly contribute to (if not be in charge of) where your platform is going.

Or, finally, it could be a simple list of top peers whose first places they can aim to achieve. I guess that’s taking respect to a whole new level – and turning it into old-fashioned glory and fame among equals as well as the broader public.

What do you think? Is there another factor that developers covet?

In a previous post I mentioned that most of the Greek TV channels main asset is live content: sports and music events is content that cannot be found elsewhere (neither online nor in competitors) so it keeps viewers faithful to their brand.

But that’s not entirely true: live content is not their only remaining major asset much as TV channels like to think so.

They have something else – the effect you get when many people start and keep following a source of information (in whatever medium). It doesn’t matter how bad or good the information quality is, people will still follow it unquestioningly exactly because everyone else is following it.

It’s the same with the Financial Times (you read them to see what’s the information everyone else is getting), it’s the same with Fox News (you watch it to see how mass opinion is formed even though it’s well known it’s biased), it’s the same with sites like Techcrunch (you read their blog to understand what’s on the tech sector map currently – regardless of a million other worthy news that go uncovered by it) and the list goes on.

It’s basically about the basic need that we (or at least some of us) have to belong in some sort of social group – and sharing a news source enforces this. In other words, if everyone at your office keeps talking about how fun or interesting was yesterday’s X show on TV, if you don’t want to stand out too much from that crowd of your peers, you will eventually watch that show too in the weeks to come.

So if you’ve managed to create a considerable following you have – as a bonus – this card to play too. Of course this can only last so long and providing a relatively low signal-to-noise content can burn this asset too.

As I said in my previous post, Greek TV channels most sought-after content is live events (sports, music etc) which cannot be found elsewhere (neither in competitors nor online). Securing licenses for such content turns out as a major asset for such providers – and I can imagine that this holds not just for Greece but any and all countries.

So what would it take for this last castle, which offers possibilities of monopoly to a single (or a few) providers, to fall? What would allow even live events to escape from the stranglehold of large, existing content providers? The making of a commodity out of watching live events could be (one of) the next big things if someone manages to get it right.

Now, most mobile phones can capture video these days and that’s a powerful medium that has remained rather untapped when it comes to live events. So here’s an idea: let’s assume we want to cover a live event, like a football game. All it would take would be to allow everyone who was planning to attend the event to sign up to also stream a portion of it. The streams from all users present at the event would arrive at a website dedicated to the event. There they would need to be synchronised (and perhaps even auto-selected based on quality) and then restreamed to visitors of the website in real time or semi-real time.

Now add to that that most such phones have or soon will have GPS information appended to them and you could even identify where in the event’s location the incoming streams originate from. Given enough people offering their streams, visitors on the website would be able to select a point of view and follow the event from it.

Perhaps a nice concept but where’s the catch? Actually there are two.

For one thing, we’re used to watching content from a few given angles and changes between them are managed by a single human being – the event’s director. Having the viewing experience be governed by whomever happens to be holding his mobile up at a given time and place, will definitely result in a dizzying reproduction of the event. Camera and sound quality will change abruptly along with location, stops will be inevitable, essentially no commentary will be possible, etc. At the very least it will take some getting used to, at worst it will be unwatchable. There is an answer to that however and it is of course adequate – and committed – streamers.

For another, a streamer will need a considerable incentive to do it. Holding a mobile up and stable for any amount of time will make the event less enjoyable for him and even more importantly streaming video will pump his bill by quite a bit if not on an ‘unlimited data’ plan. Obviously the platform which will organise and offer the content of the streamers online will have to share some of its revenue with the streamers – or at least those that offer the best quality streams and whose streams are the most viewed.

Overall, the experience will be pretty much nothing like what we’re used to but I think it’s terribly disruptive if you think about it. Using such a platform, a group of people can organise and relay an event pretty much on their own.

And there’s good reason for that. As broadband use and torrents’ downloading increases any type of content other than live offered by the provider can be found online. Films can be downloaded, news and information can be found in many more sources online, even TV series produced explicitly for (and by) specific Greek TV channels can easily be found online if one knows where to look – as fast as a day after they air. And that knowledge becomes less and less obscure – in fact most of it is quite well-known.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s legal or not – which in most of the cases it isn’t. People’s morality (and even their desire for high-quality) will most often be put aside in the face of a free, effortless choice without side-effects.

So the providers are left with only the content that cannot be found elsewhere: live events. And now as internet TV becomes the next battle zone for those providers a prime prize is them.

These days, if you think about it, it’s super easy to find the answer to pretty much any question we can think of – perhaps excluding very exotic and obscure issues. A simple search engine query is all it takes. If you allow for asking questions to other individuals (who might be keepers of such exotic information), email and the social media are also relatively simple tools to employ when getting answers.

So if it’s not about having the answers, what is it about?

Often, it’s that we don’t know the questions themselves. Picasso said that “Computers are useless, they can only give you answers”. This holds true for the internet as well – and highlights our information overload in conjunction (and contrast) to our knowledge deficit.

Think, however, of a search engine that would accept keywords or entire passages for input and return interesting questions based on the content submitted. As artificial intelligence is not that advanced yet (right?) to create such questions from scratch, that search engine could at least find relevant questions already posed by other people.

And why would that be useful?

For one thing for educational purposes. Questions can lead a mind along a learning path it never knew existed. In particular, when it comes to life-long learning on specific subjects or to educating oneself on a subject, it would be valuable to have the right questions as guidance.

And that’s the other thing. Questions identify what’s important. They pick out what’s worth thinking about and they allow the rest to be ignored. They generate focus and meaning.

And the best thing is that in our current situation the answers to those questions already exist. The web is teeming with FAQs, mailing lists, newsgroups and papers addressing particular and broad questions. So, questions can act as ‘lenses’ that allow us to change focus and evolve our knowledge from one piece of information to the next.

I wonder if it’d be possible to create a service which when fed with a paragraph from a news article or a blog post, it would identify its main keywords (think the top 3 or 4 words in its tag cloud) and supply right next to that text some relevant questions. These questions could be found by as simple means as querying Google with the main keywords and keeping only sentences with a question mark at the end – just that. Such results would also be accompanied by a link to the text following the question – presumably the answer.

Wouldn’t such a feature provide additional valuable content to existing text?

(By the way, such a service could also be integrated quite well with the ‘paragraph summary’ platform I described in this post)

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Mozilla Raindrop aims to become a ‘unified inbox’ for all your online activity. Now that’s hardly a new idea and way too many attempts have been made to address the issue of information overload from the constantly increasing number of sources these days.

But here’s the thing with this particular announcement. My instinctive reaction was ‘Ok, where do I download it?’ – I never do that. After having played around with many applications that proclaim to manage this and achieve that, I just don’t bother any more. Why? Because I know that in the online world it’s very difficult to deliver – especially with startups offering early versions. I’ll usually wait for the early-adopters to weed out the wheat from the chaff. So, unless it’s a friend asking me to test his product or idea, ‘uh-oh, not for me, thanks’.

But not today. Raindrop got me.

Why? Is it the excellent description of Next Web? No, you read stuff like that all the time. Is it the list of features? No, they’re worthless without a good implementation behind them. Is it the video demo? Hardly impressive (but seems on the right track). So, it must be that at least unconsciously I trust Mozilla and Mozilla Labs. From Firefox (ok, leaving its memory usage aside) to it being open-source and from experimental projects like Ubiquity to Jetpack, Mozilla is (or is expected to be) there to come up with the right ideas and deliver – and I’m happy for this. And although I’m all up for, for example, Chrome and Opera when it comes to browsers, and Gmail when it comes to email, I have to admit that Mozilla has me in its stranglehold.

And that’s why I hate it.

Oh, and also because Raindrop is only at version 0.1.

In my previous post I wrote about how information can be broken down to its components. Following that, these components can be summarised and the summaries combined again to create a shorter and perhaps easier to digest and spread piece of information.

So, if this ‘analysis, summary and combination’ approach is a good idea, what would be the best way to implement it on existing bodies of information – e.g. blog posts, news articles and other passages on the web?

Most probably a number of methods can be combined. For example, the author of the text can do this at the time of writing to produce a shorter version of it. In some cases it’s already happening in some way or another: WordPress blogs allow for filling in an ‘Excerpt’ field – ‘optional hand-crafted summaries of your content that can be used in your theme’, CNN articles have 3-5 bullet points summary of the facts of some articles and I bet there are other examples out there.

In addition to this, this process can be crowdsourced. Technically, this is as simple as enabling your site to receive comments – only instead of comments users would leave summaries. And instead of writing them e.g. at the end of a blog post, an icon at the start of the paragraph can be clicked to leave a summary of the paragraph that follows. The summary could then appear as a permanent addition to the post (after it has been moderated, of course).

In a sense that’s an even better approach than letting authors do it themselves since the ‘crowds’ will introduce a selection criterion: only the most worthy texts will be provided with a more concise version. (Of course, there’s nothing stopping the actual author from providing a summary himself at a later time).

Such crowdsourcing is already happening using various web-annotation services (mostly for commenting or editing purposes e.g. GooseGrade) or can be achieved by adapting online translation services (e.g. Transifex). The list of similar services is quite long if one looks into it.

Such services however are not made specifically for the purpose of shortening, promoting and adding meaning in this way to an existing passage, so perhaps a more specific service could be created to cover this particular niche (especially as the business of providing meaning becomes more relevant as Semantic Web technologies mature).

While code is compiling I thought I’d do some maintenance work here and (after upgrading to WordPress v2.8.4) I stumbled upon a draft post which I had started ages ago but never finished. It was inspired by an article by Jeff Jarvis whom I deeply respect as a blogger. The article was about how the hyperlink and the topic are becoming the new most important building blocks in news. (Ironically, I haven’t kept the particular link…) Considering information in general, the idea is of considerable relevance now that a lot of information spreads via one sentence (its title) and an accompanying link – whether in the Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed news feeds.

Perhaps then information can be thought of to be a bit like language and its components where you have a large piece of text, split into paragraphs, sentences, words and finally their roots. Similarly, a blog post or a news article – or even a podcast or a video since they too can nowadays be ‘converted’ to text – can be broken down to its constituents going from larger to smaller parts.

So, for example, in the same way that a word can be broken down to 2-3 parts that indicate different things (e.g. un-forget-able) and in the same way that a blog post has paragraphs with distinct information in them maybe information in general can also be broken down to its constituents – the main building blocks it’s made up of: its topics and its subtopics, the facts building up to an argument, a list of arguments towards a thesis, etc.

Take a closer look at the next article you’ll read – can you break it down to its constituents? These components may be concentrated in the first sentence from each paragraph taken verbatim (works well in some news sites) – or a title/summary of the paragraph written explicitly to contain its core idea. Some blog posts in particular – especially if they are really short – may be ‘summarised’ to a single sentence or two.

I think the main idea of an article’s paragraph can be summarised with minimal loss of content using a simple sentence (hence the invention of titles). So if you could collapse e.g. a 5-paragraph post in 5 relatively simple sentences – that’s a huge step towards limiting information overload.

The question remains however how you can go from the expanded idea to its summary (e.g. from a paragraph to a sentence) but let’s leave this for another post.

Now that other projects (among which the OpenFund) are under way, it’s time to see what’s become of previous projects. Case in point websource.it, a simple website that allows you to compare the number of Google results for up to five searches simultaneously, a side project started about a year back. But it is time it has been taken to the next stage.

So what does this mean? From its official blog:

We are willing to pay 50% of the revenue for the next 3 months to anyone who is willing to take on the business development aspect of the project. The person we choose will be responsible for detailing a business plan (no need to actually write it, just formulate it), promote the service, handle marketing and SEO services, manage the community, use social and new media and generally be creative about expanding it. And at the end of the 3-month period we discuss the collaboration anew.

That’s it. Send us your best shot and we’ll see what’s the best that can come out of a project we believe can still yield good results (and revenue).