The digital democracy’s emerging elites

Yesterday I attended the IE-Club conference that took place in Paris. The most notable speech was the one Marc Simoncini, the man behind Meetic, gave. He talked about the entrepreneur spirit and the 4 pilars required for an economy to foster such climate: seed money (think VC), technology (it’s all there anyway), entrepreneurs (wanna quit this safe job of yours?) and society (French people tend to think “entrepreneur” and “mafia mobster” are synonymous). To him, it seems this fragile virtuous cycle has just begun here in France.

Interestingly enough, a day before this event took place, an article from my favourite newspaper, the FT, touched on the emerging elites of the ‘web 2.0 economy’. Here it goes.

The digital democracy’s emerging elites.
By JOHN GAPPER
September, 25th 2006
(c) 2006 The Financial Times Limited.

There are no prizes for guessing the most popular (and sought-after) types of internet enterprise at the moment. Anything that can be labelled Web 2.0 – social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, news aggregators such as Digg and Reddit and user-generated sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr – are the new new media.

Facebook is the latest such company to think of selling itself, with companies such as Yahoo and Viacom being asked to cough up Dollars 1bn (Pounds 526m). With News Corporation’s purchase of MySpace last year for Dollars 580m now being regarded by Wall Street as a master stroke, other media companies are trawling for their own Web 2.0 acquisitions to transform themselves in the eyes of investors.

The hoo-hah over Web 2.0 companies is more than a matter of financial credibility. These companies, unlike most newspapers, magazines or television operations, do not employ professional writers, editors and producers to create material for their audience. Instead, they encourage their users both to contribute content and to select the most interesting things to display to others. Old media “gatekeepers” (such as the people who edit this column) are out of fashion and what Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, calls “collective wisdom” is in. As Rupert Murdoch said last year of young internet users: “They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important . . . They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

But such democratic rhetoric (what one critic has dubbed “digital Maoism”) ignores one awkward fact. While anyone is free to launch a blog, contribute to Wikipedia or publish photographs on Flickr, a relatively small number of activists often dominate proceedings on Web 2.0 sites. Although they are unpaid, they can nonetheless achieve an elite status reminiscent of the old media’s professional gatekeepers. An illuminating spat occurred last month at Digg, which encourages its 500,000 registered users to submit news stories from around the internet and vote for (or “digg”) the most interesting. The most popular rise up its rankings and are displayed on its home page. It is the kind of thing that might have pleased the original Diggers, an 18th-century English sect that believed people should form self-governing communes. After protests that a group of about 20 Digg activists were promoting the stories they liked by supporting each other’s choices, the site changed the algorithm that helps to rank stories. Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, said it would give more weight to “the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story” – in other words, make it harder for a cabal to distort the results. That created outrage from the other side, with its activists complaining that they were being accused unfairly of cheating. Its top user, ranked by success in promoting stories to the home page, threatened to abandon the site. “I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign,” wrote the user known as P9. He was persuaded back and is still ranked at number two. Mr Adelson insists that Digg is more democratic than some other sites because it is easy for anyone to contribute: users simply click to vote. Others, such as Wikipedia, demand more effort and have narrower participation. Jimmy Wales, the latter’s founder, estimates that 70 per cent of editing is done by less than 2 per cent of registered users.

At one level, the fact that an elite often emerges within Web 2.0 sites is neither surprising nor sinister. The same thing can be seen in physical communities such as political parties. Relatively few have the patience or inclination to attend meetings and work on projects. The result is that groups of like-minded people who are particularly dedicated to the cause gradually gain dominance. All the other slackers (or lurkers, as people who browse community sites for news and information without themselves contributing are known) gain a free ride at the expense of not controlling the agenda. “Things will always be done by the people who most want to do them. I don’t think we will ever be shielded from that,” says Clay Shirky, a consultant and academic.

But it does, as Nicholas Carr, a technology writer, says, “contradict a lot of the assumptions promulgated about the great egalitarianism of the web”. There is not much of a logical distinction between someone who edits stories for money and someone who does so for recognition and social status. Indeed, Netscape has lured away some of the most active Digg users by paying them to submit stories to its site instead. These are early days for Web 2.0 sites so it is difficult to predict the degree to which new media will come to look like old, with small groups of people filtering content for mass audiences. The optimistic view is that technology will make it so easy to switch among filters that gatekeepers will have less power. Digg already allows people to see stories that have been recommended by their friends rather than all of its users. Still, the fact that there is an “A-list” of bloggers who garner a large proportion of internet links and traffic indicates that just because the web is an open medium it is not necessarily an egalitarian one. This generation of consumers has learnt to be sceptical about how information and entertainment is edited and filtered by groups of professionals. It ought to remain on its guard in the Web 2.0 world as well.

Atlas powered websites create a richer user experience

I guess some of you may have heard about the Atlas framework Microsoft will release fairly soon. In a nutshell, it is an extension to the ASP.NET framework which makes it very easy to use Ajax. One of the common problems with Ajax technologies is that they make for very painful development as one has to juggle between “real” code and script languages. Atlas is a set of components that provide developpers with the ability to easily extend their existing applications while using a visual IDE (like Visual Studio for instance).

Now, why should users or customers care about AJAX? It is a fair question since end-users should not (and usually do not) give a damn about who coded the sites they surf through. The answer is all about user experience. The standard user interaction with a web page is “I click-I wait-I see something new-I click-I wait-aso”.  Now, with AJAX-enabled websites, parts of a page can actually refresh without the user noticing. In the end, it makes for a smoother user interaction, and ultimately it may translate into a higger transformation rate (think e-commerce here).

Anyway, if you want to feel what Atlas can do for you and how easy it is to turn your existing applications into Atlas ones, check these two links:

• From an end-user perspective, Pageflakes, where you can create you personal mashup and share it with others; mine can be found there;
• From a technical perspective, short videos can be found there.

Frimr …

If you have not seen it already (for the french speakers among you) it is not too late… the Buzz is spreading fast!

My blog everywhere

So it seems my blog is getting famous, at last! Last time I checked Technorati, I was ranked in the 400,000th position… still a long way to go

But look what you can see in places like Paris or Amsterdam these days:

 Info from the city of lights

 Tagging the walls in Amsterdam

These actually come from the letterjames website!

Microsoft is considering online versions of its software

Still unpacking my emails and here it is, an interesting article about what may well be the future of the software industry, at least from the consumers’ perspective. The BusinessWeek article they refer to is not as good in my opinion, but if you want to take a look at it, here it is.

Online Works might be in the works; Software maker considering online and perhaps ad-funded versions of the low-end productivity software.
Ina Fried, CNET News.com
September, 14th 2006 – (c) CNET Networks Inc.

For years, Microsoft Works has been a software Cinderella -a kind of stepsister to the vastly profitable and nearly ubiquitous Office package. Although preloaded on many PCs and still sold at retail, many people never even notice the software, which includes word-processing, spreadsheet and database software. Increasingly, though, Microsoft sees Works as an overlooked gem. The company is looking to Works as part of a future in which much packaged software is delivered online, and in many cases, free to those willing to view ads.

With the next version, Microsoft is looking beyond the traditional ways it has sold the software in the past to explore both online distribution and ad-funded options, a Microsoft executive told CNET News.com on Thursday. “What we are trying to do is make Works fresh,” said Alan Yates, general manager of business strategy for the Microsoft Business Division, which includes the information worker unit.

Roughly two years ago, Microsoft decided to give Works a new focus. The product’s management was moved out of the home products unit and into Microsoft’s information worker division, the group responsible for Office and reporting to that unit’s vice president Chris Caposella. The Works team was given the task of exploring whether future versions of Works should be online, or continue to run from the PC itself. It was also asked to look into whether Works should be funded by ads, or whether it made more sense to have PC makers continue to pay a small number of dollars to include it on new computers.
Microsoft still hasn’t made any final decision on how it will market the next Works, which is slated to arrive some time after Office 2007. The new Office package is expected to be broadly available early next year.

Companywide, Microsoft has been trying to grapple with the reality that its historic way of selling software, particularly to consumers, is seeing difficulties. As reported last year, the company has been struggling internally with whether to offer free, ad-backed versions of its desktop software. “The outlook for the packaged consumer retail software market is poor,” MSN workers said last year, in an internal strategy paper seen by CNET News.com. “The size of the market is shrinking, and consumers appear less willing than ever to buy software applications off the shelf.”

With Works, the paper’s authors said that Microsoft gets $2 per copy from PC makers, on average. Figuring that the average person keeps Works for about three years, the authors said that Microsoft could make more money giving away the software, assuming it could generate more than 67 cents per user per year. But, Yates said, advertising is also “kind of a double-edged sword.” “On the one hand, consumers are quite reluctant to be bombarded with ads,” he said. “The introduction of advertising with productivity software has to be pretty elegant. Some consumers don’t like it at all.”

One of the other challenges is that an ad-free version of Works is pretty standard on consumer PCs. “It looks pretty free to you,” Yates said. “It’s kind of a necessity to be shipped with a PC. What we are trying to look at very hard is whether there are other distribution options for that entry-level user or not.”
Microsoft has seen opportunities in adding online components -and advertising- to other consumer products such as its Money personal finance program and Encarta encyclopedia. “Advertising can complicate things, but it can perhaps open up some really new, fun, exciting things as well,” Yates said.

No matter what, Yates said it is unlikely that the new Works will be online-only. “It’s pretty rare that we wind up closing down options,” he said. “There are plenty of places around the world where online distribution isn’t very mature.”
BusinessWeek reported earlier on Thursday that Microsoft is looking at both free and subscription options for an online version of Works, which it said could come under the Office Live moniker. Today, Microsoft Web offers free and subscription services for small businesses under that banner, things like Web hosting and customer management software.

The kind of debate over what to do with Works is being replicated throughout the company -and not just with consumer software. The company has also been trying to add “Live” services components to its small business and enterprise software.
“As we do our product planning for each subsequent version, we don’t just think about the features,” Yates said. “We think about the distribution options and the payment options and the service options all together.”

Long tail trend poses a challenge for conventional media owners

Yet again, another interesting article from the FT about the latest Nielsen Netratings survey of Internet brands. Interestingly enough, the web 2.0 brands are growing very fast and the media industry is getting nervous.

Consumer content on the internet increases.
By CARLOS GRANDE
September, 15th 2006 – (c) 2006 The Financial Times Limited.

The sharp rise in consumer-created content on the internet was underlined yesterday by figures showing five of the 10 fastest-growing online brands were websites for people publishing and sharing their own material.
When Nielsen/Net Ratings, the data company, did the same survey for 2005, only one of the top 10 fell into the consumer-created category.
Analysts believe the changing market reflects the greater availability of broadband internet access, which makes it easier for consumers to distribute home-made material such as video or photographs via the web.
They said the trend posed a challenge for conventional media owners investing in and charging for content.
However, sceptics argued that many consumer-created web brands have yet to show they can recover their running costs from revenue streams such as advertising.

The latest figures, which cover the period from January to July, are notable for the growth of YouTube.com, the website which encourages people to upload and share video clips for free.
Nielsen/Net Ratings calculated that YouTube’s unique UK audience – the number of individuals looking at the site at some point over the month – was 3.58m in July, up 478 per cent from January. YouTube is a privately-held US company that has not even launched a dedicated UK website.
The growth outstripped that of Flickr, a website owned by Yahoo, the search engine, which provides online storage of photographs. Flickr increased its audience by 131 per cent to just over 1m.
YouTube’s unique audience for July was also larger than the 3.5m recorded by MySpace, the networking website owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has launched a dedicated UK variant.

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen/Net Ratings, said: “Last year indicated the potential for sites utilising the internet as a method for users to communicate and share information and the first half of 2006 has confirmed this. The audience to video-sharing phenomenon YouTube is testament to this, having grown by a factor of almost five during the year. More than one in eight Britons online now visit the site.”

The audience figures are important because both YouTube and MySpace aim to remain predominantly free to the public and charge advertisers to reach their users, who are mostly young.
While advertisers have been drawn to the websites by their growth and the lengthy average times that visitors spend on them, they are aware that the sites often contain raucous and copyright-infringing material, which could prove damaging to brands advertising on them.

Other content-sharing websites in the top 10 list included Photobucket, for image and video-sharing, and Bebo, a social networking website and rival to MySpace.
American Express was the fourth fastest-growing web brand.

We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them

Reading through my emails I found this article. It was released in August (so it is no news anymore) but nevertheless I found it interesting as it dwells on the importance design and emotions have taken over the last few years.

MICROSOFT, DESIGN GURU
It’s pushing a sleek new hardware vision to PC makers. Will they bite?
By Jay Greene and Peter Burrows, with Steve Hamm in New York
August, 7th 2006, BusinessWeek, (c) 2006 McGraw-Hill, Inc.

A how-to kit for the ideal PC has been making the rounds of leading design shops. It calls for “accelerated curves” and “purposeful contrast.” The preferred colors include a shade of black called Obsidian and a translucent white dubbed Ice. “We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful,” reads the enclosed booklet. “We want PCs to be objects of pure desire.”

Doesn’t sound much like Microsoft, does it? But it is. BusinessWeek has learned that a team of 20 in-house designers has been working quietly for the past 18 months on an elegant new look for PCs that will run Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows Vista. It’s a major departure for the company, which historically has left design to the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Persuading the hardware guys to embrace the tool kit won’t be easy. They’re already work-ing overtime to build better-looking gear on their own.
But Microsoft Corp. feels the PC world needs a major face-lift, and one way to do it is through better integration of software and hardware. No one does that more effectively than Apple Computer, and the folks in Redmond may be worried that their resurgent rival is getting too much traction in the race to dominate the digital home.
What’s more, a slick new look can only help the debut of Vista, which will reach consumers in January, years late and lacking many of the features it was supposed to have. “This has always been the issue with Vista: Who cares!” says Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., an industry analyst. “So they’re going to try to pull all these elements together, to make [the launch] into a major event.”

Microsoft is no newcomer to hardware design, of course. The company has made PC mice and keyboards for years. The Xbox game console has been a hit. Microsoft is working on a music player, Zune, that it hopes will rival the iPod. And the company routinely gins up ideas for PCs, including a small LCD screen on the outside of a laptop to display appointments and e-mail.
But trying to transform the PC ecosystem – even peripherals makers such as Logitech Inc. received the kit – takes things to a whole new level. It reflects the fact that the economics of the computer business is chang-ing. The PC world used to be divided into two camps: those who made lucrative software and the poor schlubs who built the low-margin hardware it ran on.
Apple has turned that model on its head. From the beginning it has managed to create a unified design for its products by building everything itself, first with the Mac and then later with the iPod. Although Apple sells one computer for every 20 PCs, the iPod’s success has proved how crucial it is to create a seamless experience for consumers, who are buying much of the gear these days. Says a top PC design executive: “You’re going to see more and more of this desire to integrate hardware and software.”
Even if it means borrowing from Apple. Microsoft denies doing that, saying it’s simply responding to demand for good design. Yet its approach has more than an echo of the Apple ethos. “We’re decomposing the look and feel of Vista and bringing it into a language that hardware designers understand,” says Steve Kaneko, design director of Windows hardware innovation. And here’s another Apple-esque detail: The Zune player will work only with Microsoft’s planned music service, sources say. In other words, it will be part of a closed system, like iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

SOFT SELL
So far, MIcrosoft is using a soft sell with PC makers. The Windows Vista Industrial Design Toolkit, hand-delivered to about 70 designers, contains everything a PC maker needs – color palette, suggested materials, even graphics for icons and power buttons – to create computers, laptops, and peripherals that hew to Vista’s look. A separate booklet exhorts hardware makers to eschew drab, utilitarian boxes. Microsoft is providing the tool kit for free and vows not to strong-arm any company into incorporating the concepts.

Will hardware makers take the hint? Those most likely to use the tool kit are upstarts with tiny design budgets and little brand identity. One is A Living Picture PLC. The British startup plans to launch digital picture frames in October that use Wi-Fi to display photos stashed on a PC. The first two products rely heavily on the tool kit, from colors and materials to suggestions for geometry. In the end, Microsoft saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Jesse Grindeland, president of A Living Picture. “The question of using it wasn’t really why,” he says, “but why not.”
Big PC makers such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo won’t dive so deep. “This will look to [the hardware makers] like another way for Microsoft to take value from them and move it back to Redmond,” says NPD Group Inc. analyst Steve Baker. “If they can’t offer a unique look and feel, that takes away a lot of the value of being a hardware company.”

In other words, if everyone uses the same design, a market with razor-thin margins will be further commoditized. Lenovo received the tool kit but is cool to the notion of implementing its concepts. “Our ability to differentiate ourselves comes from our industry-leading innovation,” says a Lenovo spokesperson. “And design is a big part of that.”

Trying to influence PC design is a no-brainer for Microsoft, since doing so costs the company almost nothing. That it’s bothering at all shows that having a software monopoly isn’t enough anymore.

BlogMusik rocks

Here is a very cool site I came accross today: BlogMusik

 I strongly advise you checked it out!

It basically provides you with an online (and slick) iPod and is very “web 2.0″ in the sense that it lets you share your playlists with your friends. Check it out I said! 

Zune: familly pictures of a good looking toy

Just thought I’d share these official pictures from the upcoming Zune media player. They do look good!

 Zune in white… reminds me of a well known device!

 The Zune familly. Good blood does not lie!

 Zune in brown… want a Vuitton case to go with that?

Zune me up!

 So today Microsoft publicly announced that Zune will be available in the US for Xmas ‘06.

Zune is targeted directly at Apple’s iPod. If you want to know more, you may want to check ComingZune or Engadget.

Regardless of the impressive specs of this new portable media player, I believe Microsoft stands a good chance of eroding Apple’s marketshare. From a design perspective, Cupertino is way in the lead. However, they may become victims of their own success as owning an iPod has now become so mainstream that it has lost mostof its appeal. Teenagers and young adults are the heaviest consumer segments in terms of music and to them emotional items are everything. Ask Nokia how they feel about Samsung and LG!

On top of that, you can be sure that acquisition costs will not be irrelevant when Microsoft launches Zune by Xmas… expect nothing less than feature galore!