DISQUS

Nick: Great post. For 4 a.m., I think Robert made some very compelling points that, at a minimum, will foster some heated debate today.

I agree with you on merit though. A MSFT acquisition at that valuation I find ludicrous. But I also don't find it has scary regarding the "world domination effect" for the very reason you point out. Why would we go back to the AOL walled-garden is precisely something I was thinking.

We've spent that last 10 years opening. I don't think the value proposition of Facebook is compelling enough for users to stay behind the wall.

Jeremiah: Understood. I was making the statement in jest more than anything else. Added clarification to the post itself. Would be great to see a study around the topic in the future as it impacts many elements of the social media space including adoption and in the end, valuations that these social networking ventures will ultimately see.

Stefan: welcome. completely agree on your points. data is not data. and discussing it as a simple, clear and single type is both wrong and simplifies the problem being solved to an unrealistic level. your comments about niche and special content are absolutely correct. I will even extend that to archived and previously published content, many players will not go back to their systems to re-play their data even if new semantic-based publishing systems are available. and your addition of time horizon to the conversation is a valid one as well. clearly this is not going to happen overnight, the semantic web has been getting discussed for how many years now? it certainly isn't going to happen overnight.

-Lou

Kash: Thanks for the reply and joining the conversation. I couldn't agree more that technologies like Kapow are being deployed to expose semantics and if I may say in a quite impressive way. I think the stuff Kapow has built and demonstrated to the market is extremely powerful. And I do not question the traction you and similar firms are getting because put simply, you are creating value. There is untapped value in the information on the web and it is extremely challenging to get to it. In fact, that is part of the reason I wrote this post. The fact is that some really viable initiatives will meet some real market challenges if the true promise of the semantic web takes off and people begin publishing their sites to semantic web standards such as RDF. That being said, you are welcome to question my assumptions, that is what makes the conversation. So let me comment back...

It all depends on the value creation and whether that value can be dis-intermediated. And my belief is that the companies that do screen-scraping data gathering type approaches because the web is currently not published using these standards will have problems. Your last point acknowledges that a large share of your business is to help those NOT publishing with semantic implementation need help implementing a semantic layer where non existed. That is precisely the business I see disappearing because soon many will wake up to this fact and start publishing to standard and thus not need that additional layer from external services. In fact it will be part of publishing system frameworks. Do we honestly believe that a company such as Wordpress may not have an outside developer publish a plug-in in the future to help with this if not do it themselves in a later release if it makes sense?

My belief and assumption is that it will be in companies best interests to publish to these standards and I do not believe it violates any economic premise. Frankly, the economics are simple. People will publish their sites in ways where others can utilize that data if that benefits the publisher. And I think that will be the case. I go back to to RSS. I remember the emergence of RSS quite clearly. It first met the debate that publishers would not publish feeds of their content, content was king and if you wanted to read the content, you needed to come to their site to do it. And that went on for some time but that battle is pretty much over, almost everyone has an RSS feed and many have going as far as to move to full-text RSS feeds, putting the content where their users need it. The premise extends here. There will those that say, if you want my information or data, I'm not going to put it in a standard where you can freely grab it, you want it, you need to come to my site to consume it. My premise is that isn't going to hold, just like it didn't with RSS.

You bring up some very good points with regard to the API world. That is probably a whole new realm of conversation and perhaps there is a post in my future to discuss my thoughts on it. High level, I envision a shift happening there as well because players need to have market power to demand that you use an API. If they do not, other players will enter that can create value without this restriction and others will have to respond in kind. If the web has proven one thing it is that a track record of open systems is gaining momentum. Facebook, a company with seemingly growing market power, is facing this every day.

In summary, I think there is some real viable businesses in this area as long as they are not predicated on the fact that sites will not publish to semantic standards on their own. My sense is they will. But is there business in helping them do so? Yes, from the extraction and publishing side. Where there is going to be an emerging business is in data portability, data access and data protection. Who can access the data, how and under what terms? All interesting questions and business opportunities.

Glad to hear that I am not the only one Scott! It still befuddles my mind to think that it is the consumer that is expected to figure this out to get the ultimate value out of your monthly purchase. Imagine if you could get better connectivity and range, or even a faster data plan with your mobile phone but the mobile carrier doesn't tell you about how to get it and there were a secret set of keys that you had to do Google searches to find it and utilize it. I am sugar-coating by saying it is "far from reasonable".

As for your "access ibm", I can't help you there. I converted fully to Apple and my MacBook Pro last year. And I can say, I am very glad, Apple has not added a "access apple" button on my laptop and an unaesthetic BLUE button!

i must say that I am shocked in disbelief. :)

Jim, very interesting find regarding the Wired article. Completely agree that it does make you reflect on how much you base your "knowledge" or generalize on certain topic simply based on a little bit of information. And search results are just that, a look into a particular topic and not a complete look, and depending on the person searching, it may not even be a good look. If you do not know about a topic, logic would dictate that you don't know what you are looking for necessarily, that in itself does not bode well for getting a holistic picture returned to you about that topic via a search engine.

Bill: Thanks for the catch. Made the correction. I'm not sure where 1996 came from, perhaps was reminiscing to the first bubble! :)

Interesting timing in 2006 though, right about the time that all the talk about Google's move into driving advertising in magazines began. Definitely synergy there. While their penetration hasn't been something near their online, it will be interesting to see if they decide to invest and productize in this customized publication area.

Graeme: It was great to meet you as well. I was planning on editing my post yesterday to clarify, I was not only a final tidbit, I was 1/4th tidbit since it was a panel discussion!

Thanks for the comment. I will certainly let you know when I am next in MN, I hear the steak houses out there are wonderful!

Trying this new thread software, not sure where my comment reply went?

hmm, I had some words to describe you, evil was not one of them :)

ouch... good one.

very interesting, because Firefox is what I am using in OS X. And I'm getting the full list in Firefox and search by tag or search by feed. interesting.

I've been using it a bit actually. And I haven't had that problem. In my pull-down area all of my tags and all of my subscriptions as well. I would like to see an advance search capability at some point because I would like to search more than one feed but not all.

I'm not sure if Safari on OS X is supported, I surmise not. I tried using Google Reader there and the drop-down isn't working.

Sure it will take some time (probably matter of days) before we see additional improvement on the search area of the reader.

Thanks Glenn. Still working through the elements of improving the research elements around multimedia, as we discuss often, it is something that will continue to gain more and more importance. As we've had numerous dialogs, people do not want to be listening/watching large blocks of multimedia when doing research (i.e. trying to achieve an objective). Video & audio is great for the browser, hence the success of YouTube.

This is just the first step, I look forward to the input from our customers on how we move to the next step of bring multimedia further into the research fold.

Guess the parallelism with your views is that you do in fact, on occasion, use the Persona Quotient and not necessarily always the meritocracy of the ideas. In fact, you build an additional view that you often will read or click to someones blog (i.e. idea) when you believe that they have no merit.

Very well-thought points. I've never read Attention Economy but it does lead us towards a set of conversations currently taking place at the moment. First, the aspect of viewer-ship or "eyes on the internet" is clearly shifting towards eyeballs and page views towards other elements such as time-on-site and transactions. This is evidenced by the strategy shift just taken by Nielson. Secondly, the emergence of attention, APML, etc has been a growing point of discussion. I wrote a post on the topic in June.

As for education, I'm not sure I would disagree with your point about literature and history backgrounds are more aligned with this sort of thinking, at least from my own experience. While I have an MBA, I do not consider myself a bean-counter and able to shift into this angle of qualitative thinking.

And finally, I do think we have already seen the shift to a lot of journalistic coverage in the digital domain. The question remains how much of the journalistic coverage will be on the continued growth of the digital age and for that matter, will there be less of "real life" to cover as digitalization continues to take over (or perhaps my currently reading Snow Crash has me currently thinking along these angles).

Steve, welcome to the new correlate, it seemed that I may have lost you in the transition to its new home.

As far as "horsepower", I cannot disagree with you. But that is the way with spur-of-the-moment comparisons of word usage. I think horsepower is used a lot more than 'column-inch' but it was a high level point we were trying to make. (We did actually negate the parallel because of the automotive industry use of 'horsepower'). In any case, I do not want to speak for Simon but my sense is we were discussing journalism in its entirety, not the journal's coverage.

I'm not surprised that I personally did not know the term, I am a digital guy, not a writer (as anyone who reads this blog knows! :) And because of that, I DO in fact, know what above the fold means....it means the visible area of the screen that you want your content so the user sees it before they scroll. :)

Eli looked pretty good. This is a big year for him so we will see. His numbers are always strong, particularly in the first half of the year so I think he is a good FF pick-up but guess it depends on who is on the board. :)

yep, great point. always catch myself reading a ton of blogs, writing and then going off to do something. always must remain mindful of keeping the conversation going in the threads. But for the most part, I reference blogs that I read so that there is the trackback.

Chris, you are right about installing widgets as a core kernel. I may not have been clear on that point.

The point I was trying to make (albeit not clearly :) was that your templates needed to be widget enabled in order to take advantage of the core widget sidebar functionality. I'll take a look to see if I should clarify.

Glad the beta idea hit home. Just something I did out of frustration thinking that it had to be annoying to all three of my readers with the site flickering as I made template changes!