Category Archives: Dave Winer

Booting up a personal recommendation system for news

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As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a big fan of ‘Rebooting the News’. That goes for both meanings: I love the podcast series by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer; and I’m also totally intrigued by the phenomenal transition of our system of news which is happening right under our noses.

In the 9-minute passage of RBTN 82 that I transcribed, our hosts talk about an idea that Dave put forward in a recent blog post, ‘Find me stuff that I’m interested in‘. It’s a discussion about the concepts of a personal recommendation system for news, on Dave’s part inspired by collaborative filtering technology which underpins Amazon’s personal product recommendations.

Not only do I agree with all the conceptual choices that Jay and Dave favor, – such as avoiding categories, using gestures, using feeds, looking at other users’ previous behavior, including information about authoring as well as consumption, including serendipity… – ; I have actually been thinking about these exact concepts for years.

Now, I’m not going to say, “It’s all been done already”, because Dave would think I’m trying to pitch a product :-)   Truth is, had it been done, we would all be using it. A personal system of highly relevant information is pretty much the Holy Grail of the Internet.

One potential complication with applying collaborative filtering to news content is that, when news breaks, there is no critical mass of gestures from previous users. This may cause some delay in the build-up of a recommendation. Instead of immediate, mass-scale amplification of the breaking news event, the news item might be a more slowly developing “trending topic” as per Twitter.

Also, when the news is very fresh, and its relevance is very personal (i.e. highly relevant to a small number of people), it may take too much time for a collaborative filtering system á la Amazon to collect sufficient gestures from other users in order to deliver the recommendation to the right people.

Therefore, rather than waiting for a new news item to pick up the critical mass which can enable collaborative filtering the Amazon way, we could instead look at the *history* of users’ gestures. If the stuff I have “gestured” in the past is very similar to the stuff you have “gestured” in the past, there is a likelihood that what you “gesture” next will be of interest to me.

So what I propose, instead of collecting many gestures from different users in order to generate a recommendation to one specific user, is to identify pairs of users whose gesture behavior is most similar, and let their behavior inform their mutual recommendations.

One could calculate a “similarity-percentage” for each combination of two users based on their gestures. With a view to serendipity, the ideal similarity is not necessarily approaching 100 percent. The system could offer users a feature to mix their own doses of serendipity. Want more off-beat news today? Turn the potmeter down to 70 percent signal and get 30 percent noise!

BTW, one headache which this idea would take care of is the eternal question: “What is news?” Whatever news means to you is defined by what you “gesture”. Hence the more accurate question to ask would be: “What is relevant?” or, indeed: “What is interesting?”

Like said, I’ve been pondering over this stuff for a while and I’d just love the opportunity to help make it happen.

Transcript of 9 minutes ‘Rebooting the News’, episode 82

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I have listened to all 82 episodes of ‘Rebooting the News‘, the podcast series by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer. (This probably means that I’m their biggest fan and/or that I should get a life)

I felt an urge to transcribe the following 9-minute passage from episode 82, recorded on February 14, 2011. (More about that later)

Forgive the occasional typos and other glitches.

How is that for a gesture? :-)

http://soundcloud.com/josschuurmans/rbtn82-9mins

[STARTING AT 04:43]

Jay Rosen: ‘Find me stuff that I’m interested in‘.

Dave Winer: Yeah, oh, that’s not a question for me, is it?

J: That’s an opening for our next theme here. This is something that’s interested you for a while; it’s interested me for a while.

D: I don’t know. No, actually this is a recent thing. This is recent. This is like the mantra, you know, when you are a product developer camped out in a category, you know – if you’re listening -, you know what people want. I mean, you get that short list of features that everybody wants and on that list are some thiings that you have no clue how to do. But you’re listening and trying to understand it. And *this* is at the top of the list.

Absolutely the one that you hear the most often is: ‘Just find me what I want.’ Now, my brain kinda turns off when I hear that, ’cause what I think is going to happen if you ever trust somebody to do that for you, they are not going to give you what *you* want; they are gonna give you what *they* want you to have.

That’s what I worry about, that you’re not gonna get… So, any diet of news that I’m interested in has to also include subscriptions to places that are going to give me news that I don’t know that I’m interested in.

J: That’s one of the problems.

D: Well, that’s easily solved, actually. Just take… but you know, here is the model. You might say that I’m addicted to Amazon. I just, like, in an idle moment, if there’s nothing happening in the world, I’ll go to Amazon, I’ll go through their recommendations, right?

J: Recommendations for what?

D: For products that they want me to buy. Things they want me to buy. So I can influence that, I can definitely influence it. Like, I was looking for a lamp a couple of weeks ago. And now they show me lamps. Or, I buy a lot of shirts through Amazon and… I always get shirts. I buy a lot of books, I get a lot of books. I’ve bought stereo equipment, computer nerd stuff, vitamins… This is an interesting mix…

J: It’s just reacting to what you bought before.

D: And I can manipulate it by just looking at things. I can inform them that this is an interest of mine. And they will start recommending things for me. I think, well, the epiphany was, why don’t we do this for news?

What we need is a way of expressing an interest in a news area, right?

J: Right.

D: In other words, the equivalent of looking at lamps. Or the equivalent of looking at cameras. Well, I look at a story about prince Charles, right? So, the system infers… Maybe I don’t look at a story, but I tweet a link to it.

J: Well that would be a stronger signal.

D: And maybe that’s the only signal I want it to use, is the fact that – and this is a way that I have become… I think of this as becoming my own editor-in-chief.

J: Yeah, I would love that. If it took everything that I tweeted…

D: Actually, you know, the technology…

J: That’s not a bad idea.

D: The technology here is…

J: It can’t be that far away.

D: It’s not far away. I was about to say, we know how to do this. This is like a well-worn path. It’s not something, not a whole lot of innovation, *no* innovation needed here.

The bad new is that, as far as I could tell, only one or two people reading that blog post understood what I was talking about. ‘Cause the responses that I got were like, oh that’s already been done.

J: People always say that.

D: They do. And they’re always wrong. Because usually they are the people who made the product and they are pitching it. They are trying to sneak in all their spam there.

So, I don’t know, if anybody listening to this wants to do this, just let me know. I want to do it. I’d like to get into a position to do this.

J: Every time I look at a product that [claims] to be able to do this, to send me a quote-unquote ‘personalized news stream’, the problem I find is that they have these pre-fab categories that represent what *they* think of as the significant divisions of news, right? Like: ‘business’. Well, I’m not interested in ‘business’.

D: That’s bogus. This is why I get bored, my eyes glaze over…

J: It’s a category of production, it’s not a category of use.

D: Correct.

J: And that’s the problem…

D: Do you know why it’s a problem for them, is that they’re not… First of all, this wouldn’t work for everybody. Okay? Let’s be clear about this.

J: Right. What I want is something that works for me.

D: Exactly. And you would be easy, because we already have a very good handle on your stuff.

J: [Well, I would be...]

D: We have it in a database. I have your links in a database, right?

J: Right.

D: So, building it for you would be easy. And you know, once you get a little critical mass thing going there, it is just self-maintaining. Because the things I link to, you know, if I have a hundred people in this mix, I can now do collaborative filtering. That’s the name for the technology you use here.

J: Right, so give me a quick sketch: what is collaborative filtering? I think I know, but…

D: ‘People who like this, also like this’. That’s the idea.

J: Right right right.

D: It’s like Facebook recommending friends to you. It has noticed that you and this person are friends with five other people. Therefore we might guess that you might like anybody that this person is a friend with. So we’ll start suggesting this to you.

[Technician:] …products…

J: Product, yes, Amazon does that.

D: News is a product just like that. There is no reason news can’t submit to this. Also there is another source of valuable information here that could be used is your blog. You know, I’ve been blogging for god know how long. That is an incredible base of information about my interests.

J: Right.

D: So, I’ve always said Google ought to take that into account. I ought to be able to tell Google, ‘Hey Google, this is my blog and I can prove it to you.’ Okay? Now I want… or, why should I have to prove it? All I’m saying is I want my search results to be customized for the author of this blog.

J: Right.

D: Period. You know, that’s how Google… Everybody says, oh, we need a new generation of search. Why hasn’t anybody tried this yet?

J: Right. So, instead of using consumption behavior as the signal, you use authoring behavior as the signal.

D: That’s correct. Yeah.

J: Now we’re cooking.

D: I think we’re definitely cooking. I think, this is a business model by the way that would work for editorial organizations because the way we evolve something like this requires an understanding of news. Which the tech industry typically, as you have noted, doesn’t really have.

J: And also, the more of your user base you have authoring, the better the recommendation engine gets.

D: Always. That’s exactly how this stuff works.

J: And that’s the incentive – right? – to get more people blogging at your site an recommending things and sending links and comments and… yeah.

D: Well I don’t want people blogging on anybody else’s site. ’cause I want them to operate their own infrastructure.

J: Right.

D: But we’ll get to that later.

J: But you could affiliate your blog with the news system you’re using and it could therefore learn from what you blog about [...]

D: Oh, absolutely. Just give me the pointer to the feed. Or give me the pointer to the blog, from there you can get to everything. There is no… absolutely. But I think… just because you use Tumblr and I use Tumblr doesn’t mean we have anything in common as far as our interests are. [...] the list of feeds that I subscribe to might give you another good idea.

J: Here’s what I like to do. I don’t read most 99% of the news or commentary written about the NBA. I’m not a big fan of the NBA. However, if anybody writes and article about race and the NBA, I want it. Because it’s like this hidden subject that almost never gets talked about. Like, black players, white players, white coaches, black players, the compositions, the racial mix, different ways that these things play out in the politics of the sport. Like, I’m totally fascinated by that. But, the system as it stands says, ‘Do you want NBA news?’ No, I only want ‘race and the NBA’-news.

D: You can’t… I think that the point here is that you could never ever customize… you can never be the editor-in-chief of your own news channel by setting up queries like that. It has to be done with gestures. It has to be inferred from…

J: ‘With gestures’. What do you mean by that?

D: Gestures would mean pointing to… pointing to an article is a gesture. Reading an article is also a gesture.

J: Right.

D: As you pointed out, pointing to intuitively feels as a stronger endorsement, a stronger gesture if you will.

J: Well, let’s move on. That’s definitely need.

[ENDING AT 13:53]

Would we still call it journalism?

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Tweet (by me): [Reading:] The End Of Hand Crafted Content http://ping.fm/kzv9s

Tweet (by Katri Lietsala): @josschuurmans What did you think about Arrington's article? In my opinion, he is so right: excellent journalists can have their own brand.

We're talking about Michael Arrington's article on TechCrunch, 'The End Of Hand Crafted Content', which by now has received 350 comments and, according to Topsy.com, was retweeted 1246 times.

Tweet: @katrilietsala http://ping.fm/lxNzC I agree that excellent journalists can have their own brand. There are several push factors at play.

For one, "disintermediation" and "sources going direct" imply that one
no longer needs to be part of a news organization – the news industry -
to conduct and share acts of journalism. We really are witnessing a
revolution, with the means of production changing hands.

For another, the social web, particularly the blogosphere and the
real-time web, appear to appreciate personal perspectives just as much
as "objective reporting". This seems like an opportunity for
individuals, including the "excellent journalists" that you mention, to
build their personal brands.

Furthermore, I expect that journalists will be increasingly compelled
to go solo if their news organizations keep hanging on to their model
of "lecturing" rather than facilitating conversation.

Some freelancers have always been successful at franchising their personal brand across various channels and publications.

The Demonic Verses

Having said all that, the other interesting point that Mike Arrington made has to do with the advent of highly automated,
"fast food" content production.

The illustrating example here is Demand Media, a company whose way of producing “content” was characterized by Jay Rosen as "demonic".

Demand Media immediately brought to my mind the animated video "EPIC 2015" (the Evolving Personal Information Construct), in which GoogleZon operates in a rather similar fashion and the New York Times finally goes off-line to continue as an elite newspaper for the rich and the elderly.

Yet, personally, I am not so afraid of this type of spam. As Doc Searls wrote:

"(…) Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content”
for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn
thing. I kinda don’t think FFC is going to shut down serious writers
(no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed
the market for serious chefs. (…)"

The web has always challenged us to distill signal from noise. The vast
majority of content on Twitter, for example, is of no consequence to
most of us.

If anything, should spammy businesses like Demand Media succeed in
gaming the major search engines (which I doubt), it would only boost
our reliance on social filters: if I know you and you have read
something that you'd like to share (and possibly discuss) with me, I'd
probably be interested and trust that it's not spam. We are already
relying more and more on human filters this way.

The business model is still up in the air

The big question remains, how is "excellent journalism" going to be
paid for in the future? Jeff Jarvis is exploring possible answers within the 'New Business Models for News' program at the City University of New York's CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Nikki Usher contends that the business model for news has always been broken – which, in my view, seems to imply that news provision may have to be subsidized. Looking at it
that way, Arrington may be right in suggesting that for some, the only
way to keep publishing may be pro bono.

Perhaps if we made a distinction between b2b and b2c journalism?

The revenue model for b2c journalism relies on sales and advertising.
Selling journalistic content to consumers seems an increasingly
difficult proposition. And on the flip side, Dave Winer sheds some doubt on the future of advertising as well, in Rebooting the News #35:

"(…) advertising itself may go away. “In a way an ad is a query… They try to
guess as to what I’m interested in. And the better they guess, the more
it becomes information." (…)"

The revenue model for b2b journalism is a content model. Businesses
will always be willing to pay for timely and/or exclusive information
as long as it's an essential part of their supply chain. The potential customer segment here is not limited to the media.

But what then, if the customer is not a media organisation? Let's say it's a mobile phone producer, or an insurance company instead. If journalists were to supply them with information which has been researched and packaged exactly as if it were supplied to the media, would we still call it journalism?

Amplification is the new circulation

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When one quotes, forwards or retweets a reported fact (or opinion, for that matter), I believe it is considered good journalistic practice to try and reference a source as close as possible to the original event, observer or report.

David Weinberger‘s “transparency is the new objectivity” would support the suggestion that such practice is just as much required on the Net today than it has been in the press and public discourse traditionally.

(And BTW, Just like professor Weinberger does, I should really apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.”)

Dan Gillmor appears to support this principle as well by recommending that we should be skeptical of everything (while not equally skeptical of everything) we read and always consider the trustworthiness of the source and the verifiability of its claim.

And while I agree that the transparency and verifiability of a story’s origin  is an important attribute of its credibility, I also observe a dilemma here:

With the proliferating practice of reblogging and retweeting, it often seems increasingly cumbersome to track down the original source.

Amplification is the new circulation.

As we move away from the lecture model to the conversation model, facts and opinion spread through the social graph as by “word of post”.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @jayrosen_nyu Is it reasonable to expect from everyone who amplifies a message that they link to the origin?

Jay Rosen, I believe that this is a challenge for the rebooted news system and I would love to learn your take on it.

Let me offer an example.

My wife, Minnna Ojamies, is a native Finn, who follows the Finnish mainstream media closely. She serves as my “human filter” to the news in Finnish. She uses Google Reader to share the news reports which she considers most interesting. I subscribe to her shared reading on Google Reader.

Also I happen to share stuff I read; articles, posts and tweets which I think may be of interest to others and/or which I would like to capture for possible future reference.

What I share on Google Reader flows into an RSS feed (edited on Yahoo! Pipes to include the string “[Reading:]” in front of the headline), which is forwarded by notify.me via Ping.fm onto a number of “social” web services including my account on Twitter.

The other day, she shared this article published on Taloussanomat, reporting that the 100-dollar laptop, for which Nicholas Negroponte has been campaigning, had arrived.

I hadn’t seen this news in any of the other RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Unfortunately, the article was rather poor on source references. Also, it didn’t mention much anything about the timing of availability of the laptop in question, nor about its competition.

In other words, there was little transparency and verifiability to go by. Yet, when it comes to overall credibility as a news brand, Taloussanomat finds itself – in my perception at least – in positive territory. Therefor I shared it.

The topic interests me and if the report turns out to be “new and true”, I will be happy that I captured and amplified it. If not, I will be disappointed in Taloussanomat and regret amplifying noise rather than signal.

I could have done my own background check, of course. A simple web search would probably have done the trick. And services like Techmeme are helpful, too.

But my point, really, is that it may not be realistic to expect “amplifiers” to routinely carry out verification checks.

Personally, when I am in “reading mode”, catching up with my RSS subscriptions, I don’t  necessarily want to allocate much time to verification. My priority is to read, capture and share (and amplification is a by-product which serves the rebooted news system).

So, I’m kinda wondering if it would be acceptable that we simply link to where we read the news – in my case the article by Taloussanomat – and perhaps trust that the rebooted news system will somehow take care of verifying the origin itself.

That, across all these chains of amplification, some people will actually go back and refer to the origin of the story – especially when doubt or controversy (combined with a lack of transparency or verifiability) pass a certain threshold.

 

There’s another remark or two that I wanted to make around amplification being the new circulation.

If we accept this framing of the new news system for a moment, it might lead us to believe that pay walls a la Rupert Murdoch constitute indeed an act of shooting oneself in the proverbial foot.

Let’s assume for a moment that the way to reach people on-line is less about signing up subscribers and more about amplification.

In a sense, the newspaper sales model can be associated with “push” and the amplification model with “pull”. Through subscription and sales outlets, stuff is pushed to people on certain terms, but only after recieving the package will they find out what they appreciate and what not. What they subsequently do like and decide to amplify is what they have pulled out as signal from the noise.

You can’t put it back into the tube, Mr. Murdoch!

In such a world, where pull trumps push and amplification trumps circulation, any content behind paywalls cannot be amplified.

Or rather, of course the message can be amplified – Washington Post readers also have Twitter accounts – but the paywall discourages the referencing of the original source.

So, if amplification is the new circulation, perhaps the amplifiers (that’s us) won’t always take the trouble of reading and verifying the original source, especially when it’s made cumbersome to do so. If important enough, we’ll do the fact-checking somehow routing around the paywall. Perhaps we’ll find our own sources.

Hm, Dave Winer, perhaps it’s not only that sources are going direct, (@davewiner, what would be the best link to this theme?), but also readers will go direct, namely directly to the source.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @davewiner Seems to me that not only sources, but also receivers go direct, namely to the source.

(When sources go direct, they become senders. And if senders can go direct, so can receivers or readers.)

Finally: how about if the half time of news is approaching to zero, much like the cost of storage of digital content is approaching to zero?

In a variation to Chris Anderson, will it make best business sense to give the news away for free and sell something else? Some type of premium content? Live experiences?

In such scenario, high-quality news including investigative reporting will merely be a brand builder, an investment rather than a business of its own.

Capturables from Rebooting the News #10

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Just arrived to the office. Lots of stuff I feel like unloading.

On my way here I listened to episode 10 of Rebooting the News. I think it was one of the best shows in the series so far (among the first 10, that is – I have some catching up to do).

Jay Rosen makes two very pertinent connections between the tech world and journalism. The first connection is about bug catching, a very common and appreciated practice in software development, but very under-utilized and unappreciated in journalism.

In software development, everyone acknowledges that you cannot ship a perfect product. There will always be bugs and users are actually thanked for pointing them out. In journalism however, the expectation is that journalist check and double-check before they publish, and then ship a "perfect" product. If a reader points out a mistake or contradiction, typically the journalist either doesn't respond at all, or responds in a defensive fashion. Jay explains it as tribalism.

Blogging seems to allow for a less defensive attitude. Blog posts are perceived as less finished or less perfect, and bloggers seem more willing to correct and update their copy, while acknowledging readers' feedback.

It's an interesting phenomenon to point out and certainly something that needs to be addressed in the "new news system".

The second connection Jay makes is about usability. Why are geeks not better at making things easy to use? Dave Winer says it's because it's so damn hard to do. And it requires a great sense of empathy – the ability to put oneself in the users' shoes. He mentions Martin Scorsese and Marlon Brando.

Jay sees a nice parallel in that journalism is about making it easy for users to user their own democracy, lowering barriers to participate without much prior knowledge. (This is so true and elegant!)

What else? The Church of the Savvy. That's Jay's description of the undeclared religion of the press. Above anything else, journalists will value, remain loyal to and defend their savvy-ness.

Jay's inspiration of the week is Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic, 'What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding'.

Note-to-self: action points:

  1. Check out Jay's tumblr blog – I didn't know he had one, and I was wondering why Google Reader hasn't served me any blog content from Jay lately (I've subscribed to PressThink);
  2. Check out blogtalkradio, which is what Dave is using for these podcasts. I need to figure out a way to produce podcasts easily and economically.

[REPEAT from June 1: Dave built a dedicated site for 'Rebooting the News', at http://rebootnews.com/. He also created an RSS feed of this podcast series, at http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml. And a package of the first ten episodes which he uploaded as a torrent to Mininova at http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891. He announced all of this here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/30/rebootingTheNews110.html]

And don't miss the FriendFeed room either!

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #7

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http://badhair.us/2009/08/07/00025.html

Just finished listening to Bad Hair 7. Five minutes before the end of the show, Dave asks for feedback from listeners as to whether Marshall and Dave should run the show just the two of them, or if they should invite guests to the show.

Well, as it happens, I referred to this point in my post 'Capturables from Bad Hair Day #3', where I wrote:

"(…) there has been more "positive tension" between Dave and Marshall [in the first two shows], and a
more dynamic "debate", than there was in this 3rd episode. Having two
people sparring perhaps just works better, is more interesting, than
having three people. It felt as if not everyone was sufficiently
engaged all the time, and sometimes the whole trio fell silent. (…)"

And in my post 'Capturables from Bad Hair Day #4', I remarked:

"(…) something in the dynamic of the conversation changed when the show's
format changed from having just Dave and Marshall (as in the first two
episodes) to having guests as well. But never mind; perhaps the
positive tension between the two wouldn't have lasted over a longer
series of shows anyway. (…)"

I think the two of them are just "awesome", to borrow one of Marshall's expressions. Yet I also agree with them that once in while, it's nice to have a guest or two. Plus I'm a bit concerned that if they never had any guests, the format might wear out a bit faster.

So what else is worth capturing from this show? Quite a bit of what Marshall and Dave talked about I had already read on their blogs or elswhere (podcast patent case; study on "too large social networks" hurting innovation; Breaking News Online, etc.).

Perhaps the "deeper" issue – and it has been mentioned in previous shows as well – is the fact that with rssCloud, Dave is taking the opportunity to improve RSS 2.0. For more on the topic, their discussion with Anil Dash about the Pushbutton Web in Bad Hair Day #6 fits right in.

Marshall talked about an interesting hyper-local news site, he called outside.in. Dave is involved in a local multi-blog, InBerkely.com. Both could serve as inspiration for hyperlocal (or should we say "hyperspecific"?) initiatives here in Finland. I'd love to get involved in something like that.

I had a quick look at InBerkely and created a Yahoo! Pipe, i.e. and RSS feed, to filter in only Dave's posts.

My previous posts on Bad Hair:

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

P.S.: I'm looking at recording a podcast over Skype this week. How do I do that on a PC running Vista, or a PC running Ubuntu, or an ASUS EeePC running Xandros, or a Nokia N97? (Sorry, that's all I have – no Mac).

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #6

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Every once in a while I review my blog hosting options. The first time I did this was in this post: 'Is it worth switching from TypePad to WordPress?' I was impressed with Anil Dash's swift comment. What prevented me from moving to another platform back then was Anil's point that I would loose "the ability to get professional support right within the application".

In 'If you were to start blogging today…', I tried to compare different platforms as systematically as I could.

The last time I compared blog platforms, in my post 'Hopes and fears of switching to WordPress', I again came to the conclusion to stick with TypePad. The main reason this time was that I haven't figured out how to export my blog's content from TypePad and import it into, say, WordPress, in such a way that the URLs of all my entries would remain the same after domain-mapping WordPress. I still don't know how to do this; if you do, please let me know.

Anyway, Anil was a guest at Marshall Kirkpatrick's and Dave Winer's Bad Hair Day podcast this week. He is SixApart's chief evangelist (the makers of TypePad) and has a keen eye for the latest social Internet technology.

The threesome talked about Anil's vision of the pushbutton web, on which he wrote an insightful post recently, how this relates to Dave's recent work on rssCloud, and to Google's PubSubHubBub.

From Anil's post, 'The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real':

"(…) Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or
Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to
repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can
optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to
come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and
resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a
lot of people. (…)

Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of
affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that
there's a new message, but the content of the message itself.
And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to
read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the
message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it. (…)

  1. You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
  2. Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
  3. The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you (…)"

The result is that updates happen within a second or two. The live streams can have powerful applications. One application Anil dreams about in the show is of a spreadsheet which' cells are populated with formulas and live RSS feeds, so that streaming data can be analyzed in realtime.

Interesting stuff!

My previous posts on Bad Hair:

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #5

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http://badhair.us/2009/07/23/00023.html

Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer talk with Steve Rubel, SVP for Insights at Edelman PR and Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun and GigaOM.

Kevin is a managing editor for publications covering mobile technology. So when I heard that in the podcast, I was hoping there would be talk about the prevailing mobile operating systems and advanced Internet-capable mobile handsets. That didn't happen. The foursome talked about netbooks, about being connected all the time, and about what their days look like.

Most of the stuff Marshall, Dave and Steve said I had already read on their blogs more than once. Never mind.

Steve is an interesting guy to follow because he constantly evaluates Internet services and applications, and he often writes about his work flows, and how to increase productivity in one's online work using innovative Internet tools. He truly is a connectivity junkie (as became evident in the podcast) and a data junkie, and he often presents interesting research on his blog.

One thing I'd like to pick up from the podcast is how Steve talked about small and innovative companies, saying how impressed he was by, in particular, FriendFeed, Posterous and Evernote.

I've looked into Evernote and FriendFeed before I remember Steve mentioning them. But I certainly started checking out Posterous because of Steve's enthusiasm. Posterous' main selling point is that you can email them anything and they'll put it online nicely, whether it's just text, or audio or video, or links; they'll embed it in your blog, distribute it to any other social media sites you're on, and make it look good.

I'm not sold. Perhaps because of Posterous, I've started using email to post blog entries, microblog posts and status updates, straight to Typepad and Ping.fm. Ironic in a way, since the email option of those services has been around for a while.

And just the other day, Facebook introduced their email posting feature as well. So I don't if this is all because of Posterous, but something is definitely moving in the email posting world. I guess it's also to do generally with the increasing popularity of the email capabilities on the Blackberries, Palm handsets and iPhones.

Do I dare mention Nokia anymore? I love the email and Internet integration in my new Nokia N97. That's exactly where I am using email now to post content online. I can email URLs straight from the browser onto my favorite services. I wish I could tag stuff I discover on my N97, and "Note in Reader" the way I do in Flock and Firefox.

In addition to ease of use, Steve's point that through email "everything gets backed up" is a very good one. And if you use an email provider with a good search capability, that's another great advantage.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that Steve boiled down the "small and innovative" to FriendFeed, Posterous and Evernote.

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #4

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http://badhair.us/2009/07/16/00021.html

Dave Winer and Marshall Kirkpatrick have two guests this time: Chris Saad and Doc Searls. As I mentioned in my notes from the 3rd episode, something in the dynamic of the conversation changed when the show's format changed from having just Dave and Marshall (as in the first two episodes) to having guests as well. But never mind; perhaps the positive tension between the two wouldn't have lasted over a longer series of shows anyway.

Two things I'd care to capture. First, it was funny that everyone but Dave mentioned using the Greasemonkey script for presenting Twitter search results on top of a Google search results page, which Marshall had just explained in the previous show. I'm figuring out how to start using it myself.

Secondly, it's always nice to read, listen to or look at Doc Searls. A show with Doc cannot fail, because he'll always spill a little gem of wisdom (or two, or a big one). This time what caught my ear was his reference to the ethical side of Twitter not being searchably archived.

I agree with the implication that there is a moral duty – I don't know on whose behalf, possibly Twitter, possibly the government – to enable the public to browse and search for what was published on Twitter at any time in the past.

Twitter is becoming a medium in its own right, a public news system. One could even see it as a utility (like the Internet itself). It's becoming so important that it will need to open up, be archived and searchable, and managed in a more transparent way, with more public involvement.

For now, Twitter is a silo, a walled garden, just like all the other social media and social networking services. The live web will be federated, one way or another. It's something Dave Winer has been campaigning for for a while. Unfortunately it doesn't really seem to be happening yet.

Okay, some people will object to my using the term walled garden, because all these systems do allow linking to and importing content from external sources. But that's not the point. The point is that as a user, I need to subscribe to all these services separately, and conversations are generally confined within those systems and according to the terms of service from the companies that run them.

Disqus, in my view, is an interesting example of a service which federates a specific type of communication (namely comments), across platforms and services. Still, even discuss is not an open standard. Email is perhaps a better example: it's ubiquitous and there is no lock-in of any kind, because it runs on technical conventions (standard and protocols) which are supported by numerous providers.

Final thought: I happen to have close links to some ambitious digital archiving initiatives in Finland. So I wonder what it would take, technically and in terms of resources, to build a searchable Twitter archive. And I wonder if there's a business model in there that would be worth exploring.

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.

Capturables from Bad Hair Day #3

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http://badhair.us/2009/07/09/00019.html

With Marshall buying a house and not attending episode 3 of the Bad Hair Day podcast, the experience is quite different. No disrespect to the substitute guests – Andrew Baron, producer of Rocketboom and Mag.ma, and analyst Michael Gartenberg -, but it just wasn't as captivating to me as the first two shows.

There are two things at play. First, I identify more with Marshall as he is a tech journalist. For example, when he talks about his editorial workflow, it's very relevant to what I do. Also, he takes a broader, perhaps more socio-political than purely technological perspective to social media, the live web and the Internet in general.

Second, there has been more "positive tension" between Dave and Marshall, and a more dynamic "debate", than there was in this 3rd episode. Having two people sparring perhaps just works better, is more interesting, than having three people. It felt as if not everyone was sufficiently engaged all the time, and sometimes the whole trio fell silent.

Still, the topics where interesting. Mag.ma is certainly something worth checking out. There were 200 beta tickets for the site. I got there too late, so I'll be waiting for an invite later. Since Andrew mentioned not being impressed by Google Wave, I was wondering if Mag.ma is somehow operating in the same space. This will be interesting to learn.

Views on the "operating system of the future", i.e. Google's Chrome OS announcement triggering a media hype without substance and Dave having seen it all in the mid-1990s, definitely worth a listen.

What spoke to me as well was the discussion about the iPhone. It's really amazing how Apple is taking a march on Nokia, and how e.g. the Nokia N97 in comparison, IMHO doesn't nearly get the coverage it deserves. I do think that the N97 has pretty "deep integration" with the Internet, quite comparable to the iPhone.

I used to prefer the N95 over previous releases of the iPhone because the N95 had a superior camera, 3G connectivity, and longer battery life. (DISCLAIMER:) Plus, I was working at Nokia at the time, got to use the device for free, and was undoubtedly influenced by the Nokia-internal culture and propaganda.

Now I tend to favor the N97 over the iPhone. Granted, the iPhone has a huge developer base and a huge number of applications are available. And this is a real threat to Nokia.

However… back in 2004 when I started experimenting with mobile blogging, I wrote that moblogging requires QWERTY. Today I would add: …and tactile response.

I simply don't believe (yet) that I can learn to type as fast and conveniently on a touch-screen keyboard without physical buttons, as I can on a Nokia Communicator, or now on the Nokia N97 (which, admittedly, has a smaller and therefor somewhat slower keyboard).

See also the FriendFeed group at http://friendfeed.com/badhair.