Results tagged “leolaporte”

Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we've all been discussing here lately. Here's some highlights:

Startup.gov

After I posited that the U.S. executive branch is the most interesting startup of 2009, there have been some amazing responses. Craig Newmark (you love his list!) very kindly gave a nod towards my post, adding "In some results, it's run like a really good Silicon Valley startup", and spreading the word on The Huffington Post as well. Mike Masnick at Techdirt chiimed in as well:

For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both [Federal CTO Aneesh] Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.

Towards the end of my essay, I'd pointed out one particular challenge that faces this new startup-minded government effort: "Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience." Amazingly, the latest perfect example of the type of talent that are heading to D.C. these days just popped up, with Christopher Soghoian's announcement that he is joining the FTC. I only know Christopher's work by reputation at Harvard's Berkman Center, but I think the fact that the government is looking for talented people in academia (a talent pool that typical tech startups often overlook) is a great sign.

Of course, there are skeptics. Gautham Nagesh covers the government for Nextgov and Atlantic Media, and he thinks I'm believing the hype". Of course, I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general, and that I'll take small signs of progress as successes, even if there is a lot of work left to do yet.

In fact, I'll be talking about this a bit later today on Federal News Radio's Daily Debrief show. If you're in D.C., tune in to 1500 AM at 4:05 EDT and one idea I'll be discussing is how the recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing.

The potential is also hinted at in Brady Forrest's post about EveryBlock's acquisition over on O'Reilly Radar. I'm ecstatic to see Adrian and his team at EveryBlock get even more resources for their work, but just as pleased to see the government's work being discussed as a peer to even the most cutting-edge startups in the private sector.

Google's Wave Moment

After my recent posts about The Wave Way and Google's Microsoft Moment, I was very graciously invited to join Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis on their awesome podcast about Google and cloud computing, This Week in Google. If you have an hour or so to spare for listening to a podcast, I am very proud of how it came out, and especially that I got to participate with such pros on a show like this. TWiG is available on iTunes and Boxee and all of those usual services as well.

The idea that Google is facing a reckoning as it grows in size and influence seems to have caught on, and comparing the company to Microsoft has gone from seeming a bit radical at the time I posted to becoming much more popular when Wired covered the idea to finally having become something approaching conventional wisdom in just a few weeks. Take, for example, New Google is the old Microsoft, by Galen Ward, which lists the ways that Google ties its nascent (or even unsuccessful) efforts to the results of its dominant search engine.

Apple Blinks on Secrecy?

Less than three weeks ago, I was arguing that Apple's culture of secrecy can't scale. Fortunately, we may never know if I'm right. Astoundingly, Apple has opened up to some degree, most notably via VP Phil Schiller reaching out personally to bloggers John Gruber and Steven Frank. Of course, that's not a complete course change for Apple, but it is still significantly more human, personal and open than any recent communications they've made about their efforts.

Meanwhile, the idea that Apple's traditional secrecy is untenable has gotten an even larger audience with The Times' lengthy look at Steve Jobs and Apple:

[A]long with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”

But employees are one thing; shareholders are another. Should Jobs (who, as far as the world is concerned, is Apple) have been allowed to conceal the seriousness of his illness? Warren Buffett, the greatest investor alive, doesn’t think so. “Whether [Steve Jobs] is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”

Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy, but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple’s obsessive secrecy.

Pushing the Right Buttons

Finally, the idea of the Pushbutton Web seems to be gaining steam. I am delighted to point out Om Malik's The Evolution of Blogging, which Om uses as an example of a longer-form blog post he's enjoyed recently, but which I also hope will be a catalyst for the evolution of blogging that he's calling for in the post overall.

That point is taken even further with Farhad Manjoo's ruminations in Slate, which reference my Pushbutton post:

[A]s technologies like PubSubHubbub proliferate around the Web, with companies like Google, Facebook, and others embracing them, real-time Web updates will become the norm. It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. Winer envisions these systems coming up alongside Twitter—when you post a status update, it could get sent to both Twitter and whatever decentralized, next-gen Twitter gets created. If these new systems take off, Twitter would be just one of many status-updating hubs—and if it went down, there'd be other servers to take its place.

Seeing so many great conversations pop up recently around the topics I've been obsessing over has been very inspiring; Right after I made offhand mention of one of my Big Think interviews being about the Philology of LOLcats, my original piece on LOLcat language, Cats Can Has Grammar, was indirectly cited in Time's profile of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", through a reference to "kitty pidgin". It might seem like a minor mention, but the idea that a random dude like me can write a post that results in a phrase showing up in Time or The New York Times is still very exciting to me, after all of these years.

Best of all, there have been a spate of amazing comments on all of these posts lately, both on this site and in some of the responses I've linked to above. I'm having more fun than ever in watching the conversation across the blogosphere.

In the meantime, two to consider:

• Slow Web: "There's a web that well-considered and worth savoring. We'll show you where."
• Every Friday, Rain or Shine: "When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays."

Some tenets:

• Contributing to a community, online or offline has value.
• As long as that value is recognized and rewarded, a community will thrive.
• Rewards can take the form of money, recognition, or just personal satisfaction.

The premises having been stated, let's review some of the latest blogosphere fuss. The current wave of conversation around recognizing the value of community contributions began with Jason Calacanis offering to pay the top contributors of link aggregation sites to migrate to the new Netscape site he's managing. Like many things Jason does, it's clever, a smart recognition of a new market and opportunity, and not particularly elegant.

To me, it was initially most notable because of the reuse of the phrase "Netscape Navigator" to describe the users who make the most contributions to the site. A friend referred to it as "brand necrophilia" on a private blog, and I find that a particularly apt description. But of course, the post got a lot of attention for being a fairly brash attempt to grab both users and attention.

Jason also offered the following false assertion, I suspect not because he believed it, but because it's effective propaganda:

The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.

There were some immediate responses, such as Thomas Hawk's overwrought contribution, titled "Did Jason Calacanis Just Offer to Hire me for $12,000 a Year?" I mention Thomas' post because it references my post from last year, The Interesting Economy, along with the response it inspired from Caterina Fake, Economies of Interest. I wanted to revisit those posts because it gives me a chance to clarify something.

I wrote the "Interesting Economy" post as a half-formed thought, literally thinking out loud, right before I jumped on a plane. Foolishly, I had asked the (honest) question "So does that mean the right answer for cashing in on my interesting work is to ask for a penny from Yahoo?" Naturally, by the time my flight landed, people seized on this as if I had said "OMG FLICKR OWES ME MONEY".

Which, um, is incorrect. My goal was to have a conversation that I would have easily had over dinner with Caterina and Stewart, not recognizing how that could be colored by the hysterical contributions of the blogosphere peanut gallery. A conversation about how most great web efforts will have to appeal to both people's emotional motivations as well as their financial motivations

The good news is, some great conclusions came out of it. Simply, money is a useful way to reward people, but some things are rewarded by things far more meaningful than mere money. Caterina explained this rather eloquently:

Giving and caring include even the simple acts of putting pieces of yourself on the internet -- your photos, your poems, your words -- and these too are fraught with difficulty when it comes to money.

People will contribute to a community if they feel it's worth their time. Now here's where things get tricky. Some people get mad or defensive when you point out that pontification, punditry, and politics are only a tiny part of the reason people communicate through blogs. Similarly, a lot of people have emotional reactions to the fact that contributions are made to online communities like Wikipedia, Craigslist, Flickr, or yes, Digg, for reasons other than pure monetary value.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money; That's just not why most people use communication tools.

But there's more than one reason to make a brash offer on the web. Business 2.0 points out, "If nothing else, it's a good PR move to raise the awareness among the Digg-erati that Netscape wants their attention." Even the usually mild-mannered Leo Laporte weighs in, stating a truism that should be obvious: "Digg is what it is because of the entire community that participates there. Ditto del.icio.us, and Flicker, and Newsvine."

And that's the most reassuring part for me about Kevin Rose's response to the latest kerfuffle. He addresses the most critical point in making a successful effort on the web.

Listen to your existing community. Think of what your loyal Netscape users must think - you're essentially telling them that they aren't good enough and that you have to buy better users. You can have the best submitters in the world, but if your community doesn't support you it will never work.

I have met both Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose a number of times, and I genuinely wish them both well with their efforts. They've both built good sites. If either one's a successful, scalable business, then both sites likely are. But you get what you design for.

Netscape will end up with users who value getting paid for their work. Digg will end up with users who are motivated by the desire to contribute to the community. The question is which kind of site you want to participate in, which one makes the web better, which one makes people happier.

Three weeks ago I said I feel strongly we all need to make something meaningful. I think that we're seeing a clear example of how there's going to be a reckoning between the two types of motivations. I'm pretty comfortable with the side I'm on.