david 's Bookmarks

In a 10th-floor office a few block south of New York's Union Square, gangly Janus Friis folds himself into an undersize chair. He's here from London for a couple of days, toting a ThinkPad with demo aboard. A little white sticker on the machine's lid reads in retro-shiny silver letters: THE VENICE PROJECT.

the wisdom found in that group CAN be smarter than the smartest individual in the group. But he never says the group itself becomes smarter when they work together to produce a result as a group.

. Clearly there IS wisdom in the many as long as you don't "poison" the crowd by forcing them to agree (voting doesn't mean agreeing). According to Surowiecki, even just sharing too much of your own specialized knowledge with others in the group is enough to taint the wisdom and dumb-down the group

s. Individuals whose independent knowledge (and "independent" is a key word in what makes the crowd "smart") is aggregated in some way, not smushed into one amorphous Consensus Result.

James Surowiecki says in the book of the same name. He opened a talk at ETech telling us that while ants become smarter as the number of collaborators increases, humans become dumber. In what is potentially the most misleading book/idea title in the history of the world, the "Crowds" in "The Wisdom of Crowds" was never meant to mean "mobs", "groups acting as one", "committees", "consensus" or even "high collaboration"

And if that's true about companies, why do we think consensus will work on an even larger scale with "users" in Web 2.0

1. The revenue growth that has characterized the Internet since 1994 will continue. But more and more of the revenue will be made in the foothills, not the mountains.

2. If the major destination sites want to participate in it they will need to find a way to be involved in the traffic that inhabits the foothills.

3. Widgets are a symptom of this need to embed yourself in the distributed traffic of the foothills.

4. Portals that try to widgetize the foothills will do less well than those who truly embrace distributed content, but better than those who ignore the trends.

5. Every pair of eyeballs in the foothills will have many competing advertisers looking to connect with them. Publishers will benefit from this.

6. Because of this competition the dollar value of the traffic that is in the foothills will be (already is) vastly more than a generic ad platform like Google Adsense or Yahoo’s Panama can realize. Techcrunch ($180,000 last month according to the SF Chronicle) is an example of how much more money a publisher who sells advertising and listings to target advertisers can make than when in the hands of an advertiser focused middleman like Google.

7. Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month.

8. Portals will need to evolve into platform companies in order to participate in a huge growth of Internet revenues. Service to publishers will be a huge part of this. Otherwise they will end up like Infospace, or maybe Infoseek. Relics of the past.

9. Search however will become more important as content becomes more distributed. Yet it will command less and less a proportion of the growing Internet traffic.

10. Smart companies will (a) help content find traffic by enabling its distribution. (b) help users find content that is widely dispersed by providing great search. (c) help the publishers in the rising foothills maximize the value of their publications.

Internet is moving away from big centralized portals, which have gathered the lions share of Internet traffic, towards a pattern where traffic is generally much flatter.

On a de-portalized web, it all starts with search.

Yahoo! needs to offer its users and customers (advertisers) the ability to get the same experience they get on Yahoo! all over the web

The other thing that Google did to foster this de-portalization was introduce a monetization system that existed off its own network

Today, we shop directly with the Internet merchants we like or we use a shopping search engine to find what we want. We can look for jobs on Indeed, meet people on MySpace or Facebook, find roomates on Craigslist, and use Meebo for instant messaging. It's rarely true that the best of breed service exists on a "portal"

don't have the data to prove it, but my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated each month, a much smaller portion exist on the top 10 properties today than in 2000, at the height of the first Internet era.

Today most consumers are comfortable with the web and all of its complexity

he first Internet era was at time when consumers weren't that comfortable with vastness of the web and they wanted a safe clean place where they could experience the web easily and comfortably.

De-Portalization of the Internet

A third form of convergence that could help determine the winners from the next phase of the web’s evolution is that of the internet and the TV.

access to a TV screen could become key.

A second convergence that could provide fertile ground for the next user-generated internet craze is the one that is starting to bring together the worlds of web-browsing and video games. The result: virtual worlds such as Second Life, where users are represented by fictional characters or avatars.

Sites such as MySpace and YouTube are bidding to become distribution arms for traditional media – to sell digital music to their burgeoning audiences, for instance, or to showcase television shows.

One is the convergence of user-generated and professional “content” on the internet

Next year, three forces in particular are likely to stand out and determine the next chapter of this evolving story.

Five years ago, who would have expected blogging and social networking to enter the mainstream?

It was the year when Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube, the site for amateur videos, less than 12 months after YouTube was launched; when MySpace attracted more page views in the US than Yahoo; when Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers, became one of the 10 most-visited websites; and when Time magazine made “You” (in praise of those who use websites like these for self-expression) its “Person of the Year”.

from consumption to participation.

Social networking sites with the highest traffic growth included Feedburner (385%), Digg.com (286%), MySpace (170%), Wikipedia (161%), and Facebook (134%).

But the Web is back and has triggered a shift toward the third wave of consumer marketing: one that puts consumers in control.

the power of consumer marketing shifted to mass retailers due largely to the deployment of universal product code (UPC) and electronic scanner technologies, which put consumer marketing intelligence into the hands of the retail trade

1980s

It was a period that radically altered marketing budgets, driving both consumer and trade promotion spending: consumer promotions to drive customers into stores and trade promotion to push brands within the stores. Marketers bent so far backward in their promotional support that for a while it looked like advertising might take a subordinate role in the marketing mix.

The first wave occurred after World War II, when pent-up consumer demand coupled with the most powerful media selling tool of all times - television - created mass marketing as we know it. It was a period in which the biggest brands and consumer marketing organizations were born.

Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over.

These firms manage environment not content

Once you’re able to add events to a basic calendar, you’ve created 80% of the value

You can use it right now. Everything else is nice to have, but adding events to a calendar is a must have. Without that, you don’t have a calendar.

But, what’s the epicenter? It’s the events themselves

You can have a calendar without color coding. You can have a calendar without alarms. You can have a calendar without dragging and dropping. You can have a calendar without displaying a mini calendar of the next three months. You can have a calendar without a lot of things. But you can’t have a calendar without being able to add events. That’s where you start.

We’re currently working on a calendar