The Gus Log

Who has the Knol-edge?

Google's Knol project is harder to get into than NYC's hippest underground jazz club. There's no address, no door and no guestlist. Just who exactly on this closed beta and what are they up to? Even when hot new things were hitting the internet in closed beta form (remember when Joost was a hot new thang?) getting a license key from a mate was never particularly hard.

It's a pity because Knol threatens to be one of Google's most disruptive ideas in years. It's obvious first line target is Wikipedia, because it's being touted - visualised even - as a knowledgebase. But loosening that concept enables it to be a publishing platform for any kind of expert content, and that strikes at the heart of specialist publishing, editorial experts, commentators, feature writers - nerds. Whatever label you fancy.

Rather than take the publishers shilling, Google will offer them 30 pieces of silver deriving from - well, where does Google get all its money from? - contextual advertising included in each knol.

What is a knol - basically, it's a page-based article, like a Wikipedia entry. The distinction between th knol and the wiki is the element of editorial democracy that allows anyone to go in and edit a wikipedia entry. Now this is an idea, to quote a wikimedia foundation spokesperson, 'which works in practice and fails in theory'. The potential for it to fail comes from the sheer number of idiots and vandals using the internet, and the access Wikipedia gives them to freely edit controversial or sacred topics.

Wikipedia is generally seen to work as an army of concerned individuals exercise the 'wisdom of crowds', repair the edits, resolve genuine disagreements through debate. The wiki application has also developed some sophisticated tools and controls that can flag up issues, lockdown subjects and sinbin users.

So not all users are equal, actually. And there's the rub. For some Wikipedia is drifting - or moving purposefully to a multi-tier community, with a self-appointed set of guardians setting the rules and applying them in a more draconian and sometimes arbitrary fashion. This concern exploded in late 2007 with the revelation of a secret email list used by Wikipedia administrators to discuss tactics and alleged 'saboteurs'.

Knol appears to take a fundementally different architectural approach, and therefore will encounter a different set of problems. There is no problem with controlling editing and vandalism: each 'knol' is created and maintained by the author alone. Other users can submit comments (peer review) and Google will, apparently automatically, contextualise the article in relation to similar pieces and other media.

The problem is not with authorial control, but conflict. It would appear there will be duplicate articles, contradicting each other. How will users navigate this volume of content? Who will they trust? Who will sort it out?

I suspect these are questions being explored, in private, as part of the beta. Google's theory of practice maybe navigation based on popularity and affinity. I.e. if someone writes a crap article on shakespeare it either won't be read, or will receive negative feedback. The cream will float to the top and the, er other stuff, will sink to the bottom.

This aspect could be magnified by attaching different levels of prestige to the peer review. Perhaps experts in a field will recognise their peers, acknowledge them, and as a result their influence in the appraisal process will increase.

It's not clear whether there will be barriers to authoring rights based on peer acceptance of credentials. Where that has been tried previously, e.g. Citizendium, the result cannot compete with Wikipedia in terms of breadth or depth. Google is generally not in the interest of producing smaller, or constrained information sets. It has also said its role is not to act as editor, so it suggests the authoring side will be a free for all.

Is any of this really new at all? Experts, and non-experts, have had the tools via blogs - like this!- to author and publish simply for several years. Google indexes their output and makes it searchable. However, the experience of a holistic, and uniform presentation of information that a wiki provides, plus the communal aspect are genuinely novel.

The question for my company and me is what impact will it have on our experts, their sites, and our readers?

The last supper?

I was at an 'industry dinner' last week. What a hideous phrase! I had been enticed by the prospect of free food served at an exclusive perch - the 39th floor of the 'Gherkin' building (30 St Mary Axe) which is that strange sex toy-shaped building in the middle of the city of London.

The event was hosted by a magazine and sponsored by a consultancy but it was pretty good. The speakers knew their stuff and delivered it eloquently as we munched and the debate over coffee got lively.

Ettiquette maintains I cannot divulge personalities or revelations, but the whole thing resembled a trad media sumptuous 'last supper'. One of the world's biggest entertainment and consumer electronics multinationals was represented, as was the troubled private equity owned record label, one of Britain's terrestrial television broadcasters, the IPTV arm of a major telecoms company and of course me, the participant representing Britain's newest multimedia publishing group - Bauer Consumer Media.

It was the last night of Emap Consumer Media. I'll leave my views of how we got to that point out of it, but I made the salutory point that consolidation may be the inevitable outcome for all those trad media companies who cannot figure a way to prosper on their own.

Television was heavily represented and it faces the greatest current threat from newcomers using the internet for distribution. What used to be extremely difficult and expensive - content scheduling and distribution - is now easy and cheap. Take WorldTV for example. Someone can compose a schedule of TV using a simple search and playlisting tool - even insert their own links and adverts if they want - in a matter of minutes.

Distribution is handled for them as a service so they need no technical support. We are going to see the rise of semi-professional tv distribution networks that offer a higher degree of service than something like Youtube, but affordable for the long tail. In fact, Brightcove (who we use at BCM), Maven, Roo and the like are already there.

Bringing this from the PC to the TV needs little more than a browser and wi-fi built into the TV. How many years (months?) will it be until we see a TV remote with a 'Google' button and the small amount of software and hardware built into the device. For 20-30 pounds extra a TV set will be enabled for the internet TV revolution. The future will be in-set rather than set-top.

The respite position of the trad media companies is that it will be about content. People are still going to want to see 'quality' programming and much of that will be denied to internet television channels. This is okay to an extent with the mainstream. Most of us can differentiate between good and poor quality drama.

The problem comes with niche interests. Metropolitan media execs scoff at what they see as peripheral programming like DIY, hobbyist and niche sport programming. But there is a huge unsupplied demand for that kind of subject matter video which event cable and satellite spectrum cannot support.

These tastes will inevitably be catered for, and attract niche advertising. What that will do is eat further into the overall TV viewing time of the population for mainstream. It threatens indirectly, rather than directly, the business models of the existing TV networks. They are not competing for the same ad clients, but fighting over viewer attention.

The second problem is that while affection for specific programming will remain, affinity for specific channels will - is - fading. The channel is an editorial construct, a historical artefact from the days of a rationed spectrum. It has the familiarity of spam and will continue to be available as such. But in future scheduled television will be to video what radio is to our music collection.

There are no answers yet to some of these challenges. No clear win strategy. Trad media is hand-tied by regulation which belongs to a similar age of post-war spam. The regulators have no intention of de-regulating themselves. The TV one OFCOM, even had an iniquitous proposal to promote itself to a multimedia regulator - a proposal thankfully squashed by the government. There is no clear answer to piracy, which has gone from being the pastime of career criminals to become a locust-like feature of general behaviour. I know a couple who bring up their young son with impeccable morals and behavour but don't relate that to their own downloading of movies - which can take days at a time!

The most apparent danger is that the middle ground is squeezed and we all suffer. The common or garden but well made cop shows and general programming with modest viewing figures and average budgets.The blockbusters will still command huge audiences and rewards (though the risks in making one will increase) and the lower end - from steam railway channels to amateur porn- will thrive on a shoestring. The danger is we may lose what's in between.

The disc is not dead - Do the math

In plot-twists wothy of a Shakespearean drama (or a bad soap) the latest 'format war' was pretty much settled over this weekend, prior to the Las Vegas CES. Warner and then Paramount's decision to dump HD DVD, and the anticipated desertion of more names from their consortium provided a coronation for Blu Ray. Thanks God - wasn't the writing on the wall 18 months ago with the PS3 spec announced?

What is really dumb is those commentaries saying it doesn't matter because 'down the wire' availability of network movies and television is going to render disc storage formats like Blu Ray obsolete.

A simple appreciation of the storage and network mathematics explodes this theory. Blu Ray discs store 25GB on a single layer, or 50GB double layer. Series boxsets ( a big seller) are already emerging with 5-discs included - or 125GB of high def picture data. The same format transfers data at around 34MB/s.

The capability for households to receive streaming standard resolution and High Resolution video on demand (in the UK) is tied into the fortunes of ADSL 2+. 75% of broadband connections in the UK are ADSL, not cable, and the capability to receive HD, or even DVD quality A/V is dependent on the ADSL connection to the susbscriber.

Only connections at the upper end of the ADSL2+ spec, of 24MB/s are capable of delivering content of quality that can compete with a HD disc. Most people do not - will not have these connections because they are content to sign up to discount, packaged ADSL deals of 4,8 and 16h MB/s. Also, ADSL has an inbuilt issue with degraged data transfer speed the further you live from the exchange.

The result is a fragmentation of the service quality that's going to be there for the lifespan of disc formats like Bluray (5-7 years tops). By the time innovation has led to a reliable HD-carrying connection to the majority of broadband homes, Blu Ray will be on its way out anyway.

The bigger issue is storage. If indeed users are picking titles from a network library, then the idea of having a shelf at home packed with discs may indeed seem archaic. But will they be happy with that, assuming they have the connectivity to get it immediately on demand? The problem with libraries is that they can only lend out what they have.

Intellectual property rights are going to make it difficulty for any library provider to achieve the critical mass. This is going to make the process convoluted for the consumer. Easier then to go out, pick up a disc and bung it in a machine.

Local storage is the third problem. That boxset I was talking about is 125GB. That would be half my current home PC drive - not backed up. Even the new larger home HDDs in media centres and PCs are going to support very small libraries. Whatever the ongoing cost reductions, optical read-write discs are always going to be cheaper than magnetic storage.

Therefore Blu Ray's penetration may be even greater as a DIY storage mechanism than as a retail container for pre-burned discs. Why DVD burning at home hasn't taken off is intriguing - obviously the issue of piracy looms large. manufacturers and service providers have colluded to make the transfer of files from HDDs like Sky Plus onto rewriteable DVDs more difficult than it needs to be.

Rewritable Blu Ray will allow users to store many hours of SD programming on a single disc - creating their own DIY series boxsets, or HD movies from HDDs, removing the local storage problem. Content channels like BT Vision and Sky won't rush to embrace this, but if the threat from online downloads of video does begin to materialise, they will become more amenable.

All in all, the threat to Blu Ray from 'down-the-wire' is mitigated by so many factors, it can be discounted.

Breaking with custom

A synonym for customer

I am quite a pedantic person, as anyone who attends the same meetings as I do comes to know over time. I would say my fetish around terminology comes in some part from my background studying English, where I found the whole basis of meaning, comprehension and ambiguity fascinating.

One of my favourites is use of the word 'customer'. I did a quick check on Dictionary.com. Among various meanings, the most prosaic - 'One who buys goods or services'. Let's just check 'buy' for good measure - 'to acquire in exchange for money or its equivalent'.

It is these definitions that lead me to dislike the word customer in relation to most of the visitors to our website. Time and again when I hear us talking about serving or knowing our web customers, I keep thinking - where is the money or equivalent?

I am much happier with the term 'consumer' - 'one who uses goods or services'. Unquestionably that is the case, and it's better than 'visitor' because it denotes the fact that resources are involved, and being depleted. Value is being transferred.

A business that transfers value and does not recover it in some 'or equivalent' form, will not stay in business forever. There was nothing more complicated than that about the first dotcom bust. Value was pumped in through investment in creating (mostly) services which were consumed for free, with insufficient recovery.

The problem is partly historical. Some of these consumers are, or were customers of our business. As a publisher we recovered value through money (cover price) and equivalent (patronage). Patronage - AKA 'eyeballs' is a form of value that needs further conversion into money through the medium of advertising, with all the apparatus that entails. We persist in labelling them customers, even when they consume for free, perhaps because we remember our former obligations or simply nostalgia.

When I raise my objection, the counter argument is that the distinction is specious and that we have to give the customer/consumer as we require their patronage.

To this I think, it's true you can't have bacon without rearing the pig - but is it a 'customer' of the farmer? This means you do what you need to do, but no more, to rear your commodity.

Because that, if you are alienated already by the logic, is what your consumers are. They are a commodity to be delivered to advertisers, offering direct or indirect messages, and prepared to pay. Eureka - we've found our customers!

The plain truth for most web businesses is that they will always be consumed for free by end users and their customers are advertisers. The horrible truth is that the current growth in social networks, and the inexorable growth in net usage is creating a massive excess of inventory.

excess of any commodity only leads to one outcome - devaluation. In other advertising mediums, limitations of the channel placed limits on inventory growth. On the web, no such modifier is the case.

There are only two ways out of catastrophe. One is to be able to create the commodity in such large volumes that even in its devalued form it is still lucrative. The other is to differentiate the commodity to add value. Arabica coffee, or low sulfur coal. The differentiation of advertising inventory is relevance, and there are only really two types - relevance of target and relevance of position. If we can develop advertising products that maximise targeting the right consumers, and displaying in the right context to a high degree we can delight the constituency prepared to pay us.

In addition to relabelling customers - sorry consumers - and identifying the real customer, we have to do one more thing. Reorientate our customer strategy back to customers and away from consumers. It's difficult for a creative company to do but we should be as creative as we NEED to be to execute our advertising strategy, but no more so. Any excess inventory, or lavish content is the equivalent of feeding the pig gourmet grain - it doesn't lead to better bacon.

Content strategies need to be at the service of advertising strategies, where historically it may feel advertising has existed to furnish the creative business with resources. Multi-channel publishing is going to be a lot like multi-channel television, not very pretty, for the most part, but solvent.

Life - needs organiser

Get a Life!

Yahoo Life!: Yahoo's main attempt at CES 2008 to breathe new life into its brand was a demo of how it could organise yours. Yahoo Life! (exclamation mark) is a vision of convergence around personal data, communication and scheduling which reflects both the need to simplify and consolidate our digital footprint and reflects the emergence of 'life organisation' behaviour mainly through social networks.

To Yahoo this must be painful. Yahoo was organising the web's information before Google, and it was one of the first to offer copious tools for personal data storage and profile, communication through mail and messenger and social networking through groups.

So why didn't the plethora of services constitute the critical mass of becoming THE life organisation tool. Well, there is no single life organisation tool yet. Although many people use Facebook for organising their social contact and maybe even their diary, they will still use other services for mail, content feeds, instant messaging and other stuff.

I'd argue it wasn't life organisation that attracted users to Facebook anyway. It was peer pressure and curiosity for the bits and pieces which came with the open platform initiative.

However, once someone is established on Facebook and has tired of the games, polls and widgets it's the basic life organisation capability that provides the stickiness.

It must be said that Facebook still does not exhibit great usability in this respect. The mini-feed was perhaps the inspired presentation device of the last 12 months, but it can become irrelevant. Event planning is difficult, messaging is cumbersome, presence is not properly represented and a tie-in to location not apparent. However, the open application architecture means that the market will soon provide all of that.

The issue is that most people nowadays shop at the supermarket, not the market. They don't want 10 types of wall function - they want one.

But what constitutes 'Life organisation'? When we created our new generation of specialist platform sites, the 'community' aspect was a key consideration. Community functionality was well understood as being about communication, profiling, networking socially, sharing media.

I began to realise in a specialist context that there was a whole set of activity spawning from 'community' that was more accurately defined as 'Life organisation'. If your a fisherman, it means deciding where to fish, when to go, plan how to get there, invite your fisher mates, garner their replies, set yourself a reminder and add it to your calendar.

In any other specialist community its about helping you do what you want to do. No one service or application is doing this currently and people are converging them manually in order to achieve that result.

It remains to be seen whether there is desire for a converged life organisation tool, or if people are happy to work across several as currently, but there is a clear case that developing life organisation with specialist interest or content sites, either by building them bespoke, or integrating a service like Yahoo Life! will have takers.

Whose friends are they anyway?

The first teacup storm of 2008, amongst netwatchers, is a brouhaha concerning internet commentator Robert Scoble and Facebook. Facebook apparently blocked his profile after detecting unauthorised scripting executing off his profile. Scoble claims he was experimenting with a script from another site that would allow him to export his list of friends for use offline.

There's an interesting blog piece on this at Publishing 2.0 which gets the salient point:

http://publishing2.com/2008/01/03/the-coming-war-over-data-on-the-web/

Data and ownership of is going to be the territory fought out by large players and pretenders in the coming months and years. And it may not always be good for consumers, as what is EASY and USEFUL for the consumer may not always suit the provider's agenda.

And should it? Facebook is a great tool - pirates and zombies aside - and it's a free tool. It's something for nothing, except the nothing includes certain inherent restrictions that effectively constitute the license for use. We accept this with all consumer digital/electronic goods we buy - that there are certain limitations put by the vendor on their use - so why not on the ones we use for free?

Except, is something like a function which exports all the details of friends we have on Facebook an unrealistic expectation? Is that asking too much? I'll leave you to debate that, but it leads to a further question - who owns that 'friends' data?

Now it might appear clearcut - I do - they are my friends, after all. But they wouldn't be my friends on Facebook unless they had signed up for Facebook already. So they're Facebook's. But then again - the nature of our relationship is something between US - not them and Facebook. And finally, the complete set of my friends is something unique to me, which would not exist on Facebook without me, and is highly personal data.

So who owns it? More importantly, what rights are assigned to it?

This will become increasingly important, as the focus of social networking and content discovery moves away from acquisition (getting everyone to sign up) to exploitation. The single most valuable aspect of Facebook users is not anything they've said about themselves, but the pathways they have created through social connection that allow information (read marketing messages) to flow. And flow in a way where they are likely to be read unlike spam, although effectively unsolicited, because they come from a 'friend'.

So if Facebook has any clear intention of recouping its investment, and keeping Microsoft happy, it is going to flex those rights it has as the platform operator. But what's the harm in allowing its users, who pollinated its service with all those friends' connections, owning, or sharing that use?

Well, end consumers are not the problem, rivals are. What Facebook, its social networking and search competitors are looking for is competitive advantage. There are all in the same space, because the revenue-generating product they offer is contextual advertising, whatever the consumer application. Their product advantage is manifested either in the scale of the data they have, or the quality of it. Facebook and Myspace now have a huge amount of implicit data that none of their own employees have ever had to work a day to create: the network of social relationships built one click at a time, which must now be groing exponentially. If that network information is allowed to permeate their own systems, the product advantage is gone, and literally the entire last two years a complete waste.

So it's little wonder they would risk a little bad PR at this point in time, before just giving away what they've had the great fortune to create.

Why fi?

Since being gifted an Ipod Touch  (thanks Mark!) in the last few weeks I have become acutely aware of the limitations of Wifi. I love my Touch, even more for tactile browsing than playing my sorry music collection, but it's highlighted how patchy and disconnected still the wifi world is, some five years on from its emergence.

Wifi was unquestionably the biggest improvement in home computing since the internet itself. Not only did it create the multiple device home in one fell swoop, it allowed connection between devices and mobility. Wifi is directly behind the massive growth in laptop sales, and the common adoption of the laptop, which was once a business device, into a consumer electronic device. And the cultural effects are only just playing through - once you take the laptop out of the office and into the kitchen and in front of the TV, connectedness, as a part of minute-by-minute living changes.

So in the home, so good. The operability and compatibility of wifi is pretty brilliant. You can change broadband providers and modems/hubs without any problems and just a password change. Connections are reliable and easily repaired.

Outside, its a different matter. The technology is the same, but its the business of wifi that is holding it back. whenever you try and log on you are passed through a convoluted and cripplingly expensive sign-up/payment process. Ok, there are some established networks, and many people get airtime minutes on wifi as part of a broadband or mobile package but few use them.

This stuff needs to be free for godssake! Providing a wifi hub and a broadband connection in a cafe is no big expense for the chain or proprietor. Trying to screw £5 or more an hour for access is pointless greed. I want to see everyone in Mcdonalds browsing on their Ipod Touch's instead of reading the nutritional info on the page liner.

The networks should be having ad-funded portal pages, not be erecting credit card barriers. So let's not hold back wifi any longer.

Top 10 Tech resolutions

I don't remember when I last thought up a new year resolution. I don't smoke (really) and I'm not a half-ton mum. I give to charity, have a hobby, so smug glows all round. However, I need an entrypoint for this blog, having deleted all its frivolities for its renaissance as my commentary on tech and digital. So 10 new year's tech resolutions:

1. Have my first web site (since 1997). I really should. I think Freewebs should do me nicely.
2. Transcode some of those 50 hours of mini DV onto Youtube.
3. Find a use for Twitter.
4. Stop ignoring people on Facebook/ Delete my Facebook acct.
5. Challenge anyone using nonsense words like 'orthogonal' in professional meetings
6. Make an enterprise decision around a widget provider.
7. Update the GPRS settings on my mobile - I've done without diahorre-mail for at least 3 months and I don't care!
8. Pay to download a movie from somewhere (for the hell of it).
9. Get some friends on the PlayStation Network.
10. Relaunch a website that is not subject to instantaneous vituperative attack from the loyal userbase.