Web 2.0: The killer map
: Keyhole systems shows its wowy map with 3-d imaging and many data feeds. He turns on traffic data. I want it. I want it with flash-mob user-generated content, too and Keyhole says they are building that in via local blogs.
Web 2.0: Music
: Hank Barry of Hummer Winblad starts off with a call to action aginst the Induce Act. He said that the consumer electornics, IEEE, and net guys after a long meeting all sent letters to the Senate saying they will not go along with Induce. Notwithstanding, he says, the sponsors vow to go ahead. “That bill can be opposed. I advise you all to talk to your senators.” There’s a list of senators involved at www.netcoalition.com. “End of commercial. Induce act is not cool.” Mike Weiss of Morpheus says all employees of these companies here should call their senators. (Ernie Miller has more links here.)
Michael Caren, head of A&R at Atlantic, says he looks under every rock to find talent, including reading blogs, checking out local sales, going to small clubs. He says 90 percent of his music is now recorded directly into the computer; that allows them to lower costs and increase cooperation.
Danger Mouse tells the story of the Gray Album. He says he did it all on Acid (the program) and ended up buying a legal copy. Michael Weiss says says Bezos is right: Sampling drives sales.
Weiss, of Morpheus, announces Neonet, next generation peer-to-peer search technology. “The copyright cartel is gonna hate this,” he says.
Cory Doctorow says the question is being framed in how to help the record labels. He says he wants to solve the problem that Danger Mouse’s CD is illegal and 70 million Americans are breaking the law.
Danger Mouse says it’s unfortunate that artists have “sold ourselves to the man, the devil, whatever you want to call it… it’s caught up.” He says the days of “making a song gets you rich and worshipped” will not last long. But he also acknowledges that it is a business that supports a lot of people and you can’t pull the rug out from them.
Web 2.0: Lessons learned
: John Battelle is interviewing Marc Andreesen and Yahoo honcho Dan Rosenzweig.
He asks Andreesen whether the browser has a future. He says he was amazed that Microsoft got the advantage in browsers and then did not use it.
Battelle says, “a lot of the things you developed — RSS — are huge.” Andreesen nods. How many people get credit for developing RSS?
Andreesen says that with Firefox, Opera et al innovating in browsers, Microsoft will finally start competing.
Rosenzweig says, “I hope Marc doesn’t keep waking them up.”
He adds: “The more we try to cage people up in how they do things the less likely they are to do it.”
Battelle asks whether you need client software on the user’s computer. Andreesen shakes his head no. Rosenzweig says there are clients like music that matter and he’s looking at more clients, for such things as photos.
Andreesen says that if the walled garden of the past was portals, the walled garden of the future is data. Many have eBay envy, for eBay owns your data and there’s no way to export your reputation to use elsewhere.
“I think it is the application of data and not using data as a weapon against your users,” Rosenzweig says.
Andreesen says there is no personalized or job service, for example, that lets you get your profile out. You can’t get your email out of Yahoo.
Rosenzweig: “As unopen as you claim it to be, nobody’s required to do anything.” Cop-out.
Moments before, he said this: “The more we try to cage people up in how they do things the less likely they are to do it.”
Esther Dyson just leaned over and said we need Marc Canter in this discussion. Thirty seconds later, Canter stands at the microphone.
Andreesen says the reason people are trying to lock-in data is because there is no brand loyalty and if a new and better product comes out, people will switch.
Jarvis’ First Law: Give the people control of media, they will use it.
The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose.
: Battelle asks them about the rejuvenated web-as-OS meme. Andreesen says Google is being led by the nose, willingly or unwillingly, into a confrontation with Microsoft. Who’s leading? Press, analysts, users, everything — “I’ve seen it before…. Everybody loves the fight.” He says that a desktop OS and a search engine don’t need to be competitive. He thinks “Google is going to do some things that are very surprising.” A browser would be obvious. Battelle reminds him that John Doerr said last night that Google is not going to do a browser. Andreesen answers: “The day they start listening to John Doerr is the day they don’t do a Dutch action.”
Rosenzweig: “All this tech talk is fun and it’s great for blogs and the 12 people whose lives it will change.” Bloggers belch. Somebody asks why they added blogs to MyYahoo if they’re ready by only 12 people. He says he didn’t say that.
: Battelle asks, “You both just got fired. Where are you building your next company?” Andreesen says, “I think Dan would start a blog.” Dan says, “Actually, I would. I think blogs and personal publishing are great.”
Andreesen says there are a few levels: the number of users, the amount of usage, the number of mobile users are all growing hugely. The cost components have all declined dramatically: hardware, bandwidth, even people. On the business side, he says “in the last five years, we’ve cracked the code on advertising.” He says the capital requirement to start a new internet business is coming in under $500k in many cases and the question is whether they will even need to raise venture capital. He never does says what he would do.
Steve Gillmor pushes his RSS synchronization theme. He says there is a roach motel strategy: the meta data goes in and it never comes out. “Are you willing to commit to an open standard around attention meta data.” Rosenzweig says he’s not ready to commit to anything today. “It’s going to take more time than many people want it to take but at the end of the day we’re all going to end up surrending to what the user wants to do.”
And Marc Canter brings up, of course, FOAF. He says standards setters need some help from “the billionaire boys’ club.” Andreesen says it’s not money; “the answer is obviously open standards.”
Chris Tolles asks whether Overture will go into RSS advertising. He says the guys at Overture say the guys at Yahoo stop them. “You should give me the name of that person at Overture,” Rosenzweig says. “You want to understand whether Yahoo, which is in the ad business, wants to roll out an ad business that will make more money…. The answer is yes.”
Web 2.0: Dave Sifry Technorati infoporm
: Dave Sifry gives us our fix of infoporn. Dave gives goooood PowerPoint.
They’re now tracking 4.1 million bloggers. The median time from post to Technorati listing is 7 minutes. As Esther Dyson said yesterday, this adds the vital factor of time to Internet connections. Google becomes dynamic and connected.
Dave says the web is the “exhaust of a person’s attention stream.” I thought it but the guy next to me said it: “Isn’t that a fart?”
He shows a chart of the blogosphere doubling and doubling again and again. The slowest that it has doubled is very five months.
New blogs are being created at a rate of 12,000 a day.
Big news: English is no longer more than half of the blogosphere.
Abandonment rates are at 45 percent.
He shows a chart of spikes of the volume of posting. Big spikes for the convention; big spike for the beheading of Nick Berg. A spike not as big is the Dean Scream. Another big story is the Kryptonite lock story.
He shoes the chart he has shown before comparing the influence of big media vs. bloggers. Bloggers are rising up the list. Can’t read the specifics on the screen.
Corporate bloggers are proliferating: Micrososft, media sites, Sun, SAP, Macromedia, blogging companies, Oracle are the biggies. There are only about 5,000 today.
He finds the RSS adoption rate in blogging is low: about 31 percent. Only about 28 percent of those RSS feeds are full-text. But… He finds that the greater influence you have (that is, the more links to you), the greater the chance that you will have an RSS feed. Attention breeds attention.
He said Socialtext integrated Technorati into its wikis.
Web 2.0: Mobile
: Rael Dornfest of O’Reilly is running a panel on the future of mobile. I’m hoping to hear podcasting.
Trip Hawkins says the phone is turning into a “social computer.” It’s about connecting. He says it’s not about the technology — “all you technology people, get over it” — it’s about the ubiquity.
They’re batting back and forth about what phones and phone software will look like. It’s a bit too vague and speculative for my taste.
I didn’t hear about podcasting, so I asked about it. I do believe that these devices will become a primary means of delivering entertainment and content via first storage and then ubiquitous broadband. See this post on podcasting.
