Wikipedia, Reputation and Accuracy

"There's been a fascinating uproar in cyberspace about the estimable Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia I discussed in my column early this year and in the book. One of the topics was whether a site written entirely by its readers -- and where every page can be edited by anyone -- could meet any kind of "standards" of accuracy and reliablity."

Sell Side Advertising: A New Model?

"I love this model because it's viral and it's publisher driven - it lets the publishers decide which ads fit on their sites. Publishers won't put ads on their site that don't perform, and they'll compete to put up ads that do. Now when I say "publisher" what I really mean is "blogger" - in particular the kind of blogger that uses AdSense - or would if it worked well enough. Bloggers like, well, me, and Rafat, and Om, and loads of others who provide a service that readers appreciate. This allows us to proactively vote for ads we think fit our site, that we think work for our readers. It's also a big win for advertisers, as their downside is protected by pay for performance, and upside is that the market is optimizing the ads through both the network effect, as with AdSense, as well as honoring the crucial endemic relationship between publisher/author/blogger and reader. Publishers are, in a very real sense, endorsing the advertiser, and that publisher's endorsement carries weight with the reader. (Publishers who endorse lame ads, or ads that take advantage of the reader, will be punished by the readers voting with their feet...)"

Where the Fantastic Meets the Future

"[Bell Labs is involved with] telecommunications and networks in particular. There are things [in the works] like very broadband wireless pervasive networks. Things are getting cheaper, smaller, better, more efficient, using less power, and we understand how to pack more bits into spectrum, for example. [A promising area of innovation is] efficient wireless spectrum usage and how to build, design, construct, and manage a worldwide network which is high-bandwidth. [The network must be available] to everyone all the time, and [needs to know] where you are all the time. It will be there in 10 to 20 years, depending on the market."

Boring Game? Outsource It

"But now, the reality of exchange rates and international income gaps has spawned a virtual version of the real-world relationship between rich and poor countries. While players in wealthier countries casually drop hundreds of dollars to buy their way into better positions in the games -- or out of tedious parts of the games -- some workers in poorer countries are playing around the clock to produce virtual goods that earn them real money."

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

"Realize, that whatever happens in the next couple years, that you won't be able to buy the newest releases and the biggest hits this way. There is no major media company who is going to disrupt their DVD cash cow to take a chance on a new business like this. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentally is big. But again, that's a good thing for entrepreneurs with content. While they hope it won't break, we can be out there trying to break it, and then they usually can't fix it."

On the Web, Branding Is Back

"Like most auto makers, Honda Motor is a big buyer of online advertising. It's continually hawking low prices and special offers in banners and click-through ads on popular auto sites such as Edmunds.com. But last year, it witnessed the power of online branding. To augment a TV campaign that showed Honda owners who look like their cars, visitors to Honda.com were invited to post photos of themselves and their automobile doppelgangers. It was so popular that Honda (HMC ) produced a separate Web commercial featuring the submissions."

Jeff Bezos: "Blind-Alley" Explorer

"Online, it's easier. If we ran a big network of physical stores and we wanted to try a new department, there would be literally a physical build-out, there would be physical signs that would have to be made, there would be different kinds of furniture that would have to be installed, and so on. So some of those experiments are hard to do. You can only do a certain amount of them. Online, we can show half of our customers one thing and half of customers another, and very quickly get some results back on how people actually behave."

Design Software Comes with Machine Shop Attached

"It's the Internet Revolution meets the Industrial Revolution: a new program that lets people design 3-D objects like car parts and door knobs in metal or plastic then order them online. Programs for computer-aided design, or CAD, have been around for decades, but eMachineShop.com appears to be the first service that checks whether a design can be made, tells the customer how much it will cost. If the customer wants the item the design goes to a "real world" machine shop for manufacturing."

Friends With Benefits

"Here's how they work: Members browse one another's collections online using filters such as friend groups, geographic location, or other affinities. This isn't file-swapping in the old outlaw Napster sense. They can access one another's stuff, but the original copy literally traded with others, rather than downloaded and duplicated via P2P. Getting hold of the goods is mostly a low tech affair. Members often mail or hand-deliver items."

Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection

"All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production. But I think we're seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices -- these are all like those technologies...that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible."

Pay-TV outstripping advertising

'There are fundamental economic shifts in the landscape with long-term significance,' said Ofcom's senior partner of strategy and market developments, Ed Richards. 'For the first time ever, subscription revenue is greater than advertising revenue in the television industry.'"

Must-download TV

"But Sailes didn't think that anyone had gotten it just right, and this spring he and a roommate set out to build a stand-alone RSS reader meant specifically for TV trading. What they came up with is Buttress, an open-source Java application that, while still very much a work in progress, looks extremely promising. Using the system is easy: You give the program a few RSS feeds to monitor (here are some to get you started), and you give it some keywords of shows you'd like to download -- 'sopranos,' 'buffy,' that kind of thing. The program periodically scans the feeds, and if it sees your keyword, it launches your BitTorrent app and downloads the show. Because this happens in the background, while you're sleeping or at work or out of town, it's painless -- you don't need to look around for the show, or to wait while it downloads, or to worry about whether you recorded it, etc. All you've got to do is trust that someone, somewhere, has put the show online -- and when you check back on your machine, you'll see that you've got it and it's ready to watch."

Most Popular Online Activity: Figuring Out A Way To Go Somewhere Else

"For all that fear that the internet was causing people to spend less time actually seeing other people, it turns out that the number one activity online appears to involve figuring out a way for someone to get out of their home to go somewhere else. According to the latest study from the folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number one activity online is finding maps (this is based on the percentage of people who use the internet for this activity, and not how often this is being done, of course). Coming in at second is communicating with others."

Some "Web as platform" noodling

""I'm beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I'm thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages." This, then, is the promise of Web services. Nothing new, but it's nice to see things continue to head in this direction."

We're All Journalists Now

"It's disruptive to business models, which is always terrifying to people in high-margin businesses. While the ability of anyone to be a journalist -- and attract an audience -- is noteworthy in itself, the serious threat is a financial one. And not because of digital copying or other such stuff. It's the erosion of the advertising model that has supported journalism for so long."

Open-Media.org

"Bascially we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school and work. The idea is that common APIs and Schemas get established that are then supported by the notion of a 'personal media server'. This code gets baked into all sorts of existing platforms, devices, etc. - while also being given away - in multiple languages. We'll make sure that these 'media servers' are supported by several major, large scale systems - and then sprinkle the pixie dust to the wind - and see where it lands. Then all this content at the Internet Archives can be accessed - built-right into your image gallery or jukebox (audio or video!) We're also going to establish a way for ANYBODY to contribute their media (via OpenMedia's and other orgs web sites) to this common Creative Commons pool of media. All this stuff gets indexed - like a giant media DMOZ - and made available through a Directory system, that can switch between visually oriented iconic interface and a more traditional hierachical interface - searchable and sortable in many different ways - of course."

Porn Blogs Manipulate Google

"But that's exactly what's happening, as an outfit called CyberQuest has recently set up a few dozen cross-linked, porn-themed Blogspot blogs (powered by Blogger), all of which link to three of its for-profit porn sites. According to a couple of experienced bloggers, the purpose behind the cross-linking strategy is to artificially raise the Google rankings of the three porn sites."

The screen-age: Our brains in our laptops

"One of the most striking observations in Turkle's findings was a quote from one multi-tasking student who preferred the online world to the face-to-face world. 'Real life,' he said, 'is just one more window.'"