As I May Think...

In the early 90's, and for some time afterward, the newspaper industry had an opportunity to lead in the development of online classifieds and, in a number of forums, I actively encouraged them to take the opportunity... Today, I argue that they shouldn't put much effort into online classified ads. What made sense 15 years ago is no longer sensible.

In the early 90's, even as Internet technology was being rapidly deployed, there was still very little commerce on the Internet. The newspapers came to this new environment with an existing database of classifieds, relationships with vast numbers of advertisers, and a clear position in the minds of Internet users who had learned, through years of exposure to the paper-based pre-Internet world, that newspapers is where you went to find classifieds and job postings.

Given this opportunity, the newspapers could have not only maintained the revenue streams that then supported them, they could have vastly increased those revenues. What is the ad business of Google today, what is eBay or Monster today, could have been (some would say *should* have been) a business created, owned and dominated by newspapers. Of course, as we now know, the newspapers forfeited their historical franchise in classifieds and advertising. The result is that they will probably never recover from the loss of those revenue streams. As a secondary result of their forfeiture of these revenues, we, as a society, are now faced with the problem of finding an alternative means to fund and organize the paper-free dissemination of the news and information that we require. The newspapers have done more than just hurt their stockholders, they have failed the society that they once claimed they had a special duty and privilege to support.

But, by simply forfeiting the opportunity, it is probably the case that the newspapers simply sped up the working of inevitable economic processes. The advantage the newspapers once had was a temporary one based on the dynamics of an older and rapidly obsolescing technology. Their advantage wasn't rooted in any inherent binding between the business of journalism and the business of advertising. As such, it was always inevitable that news and ads would become distinct businesses.

Cliff Gerrish writes on his Echovar blog:

The consumption strategy that makes the instant messaging model of Twitter work is to follow a core group and then track keywords of interest. Tracking keywords adds people you don’t follow into your stream and provides a proper level of noise and negative feedback into the information ecosystem. ... It’s tracking that makes a decentralized Twitter nearly impossible. ... This feature radically changes the shape of the social graph underlying the information stream. Since you don’t know who might use a tag you’re tracking, the regular RSS style contract around publication and subscription doesn’t work.

Gerrish's claim that tracking makes it impossible to decentralize Twitter seems to have convinced Steve Gilmore of Techcrunch who writes: "Decentralizing Twitter is unnecessary, if not impractical." Fortunately, both Cliff and Steve are wrong.

Distributed tracking of Twitter-like streams is easily accomplished using what are now well-known systems for distributed publish/subscribe. Certainly, it is easier to implement tracking if you have everything going through a single choke-point in the network, but it isn't necessary. In fact, as long ago as the 80's we had USENET based systems that handled the distributed fan-out of messages (news posts) that were then "matched" against user's local subscriptions (Yes, matching was normally trivial "topic-based" matching, however, "content-based" matching systems were often deployed locally). What we could do in the 80's we can do today -- but do it better. After all, we've learned a great deal since then.

Fred Wilson, of "A VC" recently sparked a great deal of controversy with his post: "We Need A New Path To Liquidity".  Fred suggests that with the IPO market "closed," we now need new thinking about how to reward innovators for their work. Today, getting bought out seems to be the exit strategy that innovators build for, but buy-outs, while enriching those who sell, have tended to result in many innovative solutions languishing or being diluted in the process of assimilation into the purchasing organization.  Luminaries such as Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque have already commented on the main body of Fred's piece, so I'll limit my self to something he writes in response to comments:

Fred Wilson wrote:

The web is decomposing into smaller and smaller pieces And those pieces are sustainable as standalone opportunities

I think we'll find that these pieces aren't quite as sustainable as Fred would like them to be... Its a simple matter of economics.

As the pieces become "smaller and smaller," the barriers to entry are lowered and thus there are more opportunities to enter the market. Lower barriers lead to intensified competition, reduced differentiation and lowered returns for individual developers even as the overall market grows. In such a market, the qualities of your implementation eventually become irrelevant. Sustainability in such an environment comes from one of: lowered expectations, integration with a larger platform or branding. Getting bought out early is the best thing you can hope for...

In the recent debate over who would be best to answer 3:00am phone calls at the While House, most commentators have focused on the relative "experience" of Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John MacCain. However, experience alone is the not the only measure of who is best to be hauled out of bed and faced with a crisis call. We should also consider basic elements of personality such as the degree of emotional response to stressful situations... Which candidate is most likely to answer the call with a level head and respond rationally, not emotionally?

Today, the NIH described research that finds a genetic factor in stress response variability. According to the press release:

Inherited variations in the amount of an innate anxiety-reducing molecule help explain why some people can withstand stress better than others...
Scientists led by David Goldman, M. D., chief of the NIAAA Laboratory of Neurogenetics, identified gene variants that affect the expression of a signaling molecule called neuropeptide Y (NPY)...
"NPY is induced by stress and its release reduces anxiety," said Dr. Goldman. ...
The researchers evaluated the NPY gene variants' effects on brain responses to stress and emotion. Using functional brain imaging, they found that individuals with the variant that yielded the lowest level of NPY reacted with heightened emotionality to images of threatening facial expressions. ...
In a preliminary finding, the low level NPY gene variant was found to be more common than other variants among a small sample of individuals with anxiety disorders. The researchers also found that low level NPY expression was linked to high levels of trait anxiety. "Trait anxiety is an indication of an individual's level of emotionality or worry under ordinary circumstances," explained Dr. Goldman.

So, will we one day be asking presidential candidates to submit genetic profiles so that we can objectively determine which is most likely to respond rationally and unemotionally to these 3:00am phone calls?
What sort of a world will we have once scientists are successful in working out the genetic code? Will genetic testing become a common criteria for a wide variety of jobs?

bob wyman

Like Senator McCain, I am an American citizen born overseas to American citizens. As a result, I'm deeply and personally interested in the latest furor over whether McCain's birth in the Canal Zone disqualifies him from running for the US presidency. All my life, I've been told that because I was born in Germany I was a kind of "second class citizen," unable to even consider running for President.

Unlike McCain, whose father was in the military, my father was an American diplomat. Thus, I must admit that I'm not sure what to think about Senate bill S.2678, introduced yesterday in the US Senate by Claire McCaskill (D-MO). The bill is entitled: "A bill to clarify the law and ensure that children born to United States citizens while serving overseas in the military are eligible to become President." Of course, my question is: What about the kids of US Diplomats? What about the kids of folk that worked for Agriculture, Customs, FAA, CIA, or any of the many other US agencies? Are we somehow less worthy, less American, less good than the military kids? In fact, what about the kids born to US citizens who weren't working for the government at all? (Does the fact that one's parents worked overseas or had an unexpected birth while on vacation in the Carribean make one less of an American?)

I strongly encourage Congress to finally resolve the long standing debate over the quality of citizenship experienced by American kids born overseas. However, I feel it will be insulting and counter-productive if only the children of military families are to have their status clarified.

bob wyman

When the hackers warn that your machines are easy to hack, it is wise to listen.. ComputerWorld reports that the famous German hacker club, Chaos Computer Club, has gone to court to get an injunction against the use of electronic voting machines in German elections. They argue, quite sensibly, that as an organization of hackers, they are quite confident that they could hack whatever machines might be used. Hopefully, people will listen more to these people than they have to organizations of computer professionals like the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) who have consistently argued against the use of paperless electronic voting machines.

The Chaos Computer Club press release on this issues says, in part:

"There is a growing resistance stirring among the population against the use of the NEDAP voting computer, known to be vulnerable to manipulation", said CCC spokesman Dirk Engling. "After a virtually identical voting machine from the same manufacturer was recently completely rejected in the Netherlands, more and more concerned citizens have turned to the CCC. The voters do not understand why the same rejection cannot also be drawn in Germany. The legal path which has now been chosen is the last chance to save the transparency of the elections in Hesse."

I find it amazing that even though respected members of the computer industry have consistently argued against the use of paperless electronic voting machines, non-technical people and journalists keep suggesting that the industry might be able to build reliable machines that we could trust. Perhaps now that the hackers have spoken, the non-technical types will finally begin to realize that those of us in this industry understand what we do much better than they do...

bob wyman

Some blog posts (very few) are so brilliantely written that you know the instant you read them that you'll be seeing links to them for years to come. Such is the case with Mark Pilgrim's post "The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)" which will hopefully teach people an important lesson about copyright, DRM, and the future of authorship online.

Mark does a wonderful job of pulling quotes from a variety of sources.  By combining these purloined texts into a logical sequence he delivers a powerful message without actually ever writing a single word that is original (other than the title and section names). Mark's original contribution is all in the selection and sequencing of the texts -- a great demonstration of the power of "mashups"

My only criticism of his piece is that he didn't find a way to quote from Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants."

bob wyman

It appears that the well-known Amazon "One-Click" patent has been successfully challenged in a re-examination by the USPTO. This patent has always intrigued me for two reasons:

• I've never been able to see anything in it that warranted a patent
• The One-Click patent references two of my patents (5204897,5260999)and I've never been able to figure out why there was any connection between my patents and the "One-Click" patent...

Now, I think we'll all be better off without this patent on the books -- but, I'll miss the links. Hopefully, when people see that it was possible for someone to challenge this patent and have it modified, they'll be encouraged to challenge more of them.

bob wyman

Today, I'm going to do something that becomes harder and harder every day. I'm going to add to the network some lines that apparently aren't already there. I'm going to write something original...

I can do this because the network is still only a few decades old. While billions of lines have already been indexed into the monstrous memories of Google, Ask, and Yahoo!, there still remains an ever-shrinking collection of billions of lines that have yet to be written for the first time. But, time is running out.

Someone first wrote: "Good Morning" and someone else first wrote: "A rose by any other name..." But, when they wrote those words onto the network for the first time, what they wrote could never again be considered "original" or "fresh." They permanently erased a tiny portion of the space of original lines. They made it harder for the rest of us to be original.

Given the above as context, I'll now get to it. My contribution to the original lines on the net is two of the four lines in the short poem below: (Written when I was in prep school -- exploring the similarities between "W", "Q" and "C"...)

Waiting...
Waiting quietly and without qualm
Never knowing why the end will come
Only wondering when

The first and last lines appear on the net today but the two middle lines appear here for the first time - -and the last time as "original" lines. Or, should I say "virgin texts": not yet copied, not yet plagiarized, not yet indexed.

Yet another sign that the world is changing comes from the recent decision by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to publish their standards openly and freely on the Internet. This standards body, through standards like X.25, X.400, X.500, etc., has had a great impact on the Internet and computing in general. However, they have always charged tremendous amounts of money to those who actually wished to read their standards. The result has been, I think, a lesser rate of adoption than would have otherwise been possible. It  is also quite possible that we might have fewer standards groups today if the ITU had been willing to make their content availlable earlier. (The high price of their standards has often been cited as a reason to avoid them as a forum for standardization.) For those looking to find out how X.25 was really defined or who wish to delve into the intricacies of ASN.1 (X.680), you can now find everything online, free at: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X/

bob wyman