It's Rishi

You’ve Opened the Gift. Now Give It a Review.

I sort of wish the reporter had followed up with us to let us know that we were going to be in the article because Andrew and I had some fairly significant UI changes that we were going to be pushing into production next week for both Dontbuyjunk.com and our community product, Turf. Had we known about the article, we would have cranked to get it out last week.

Nevertheless, even though it was just a couple sentences about what Dontbuyjunk offers, it was awesome that we were included in the article and compared to much more well-established competitors. Thanks Kate Murphy!

Out of all the RSS feeds that i subscribe to, Paul Graham’s Essays is my favorite. When I see a new item on his feed, I usually pause what I’m doing and read it. His latest essay this month is titled “How to Make Wealth” and it discusses the difference between money and wealth and how understanding this difference is fundamental to understanding entrepreneurship. Some of my favorite quotes:

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It’s that it tends not to happen at all. It’s only when you’re deliberately looking for hard problems, as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

Over the weekend I had dinner in the city with several friends. During our delicious meal, I was chatting with one of the friends about my recent blog post on Structured Blogging when something occurred to me. At the table was ten young 20-something successful professionals yet I was the only one there that had a blog. On the drive home, I realized that because I spend my days obsessing over the latest tech news/developments, my world is probably very skewed. In fact, a couple weeks ago at a poker game with some friends, I had a side conversation with a friend about Y!’s acquisiton of del.icio.us and nobody else in the room had heard of the news much less had even heard of a website called del.icio.us. When I get emails from friends sharing their recent photos, those emails are coming from old names like ImageStation and SnapFish not Flickr. Today, I had to spell out M-e-e-b-o several times to a friend who was looking for an IM solution to get around his company’s firewall. I could go on and on with examples…but you get my point.

Many of the techie bloggers in the blogosphere have a grossly skewed view of the world. We get so used to this community of early-adopters that focus is lost on the other 99% of the population. However, for a consumer application/service to achieve real success, it is crucial, of course, to capture the mainstream user which represents the overwhelming majority of the market. And, because “Web 2.0″ (I put that in quotes for a reason..heh) apps tend to be community-focused, attracting a wide audience of users is seemingly more important than ever.

One example of this skewed view is the recent talk about decentralized content and the power of self-publishing. The concept of Structured Blogging is built on this principle. As I mentioned in my post on the topic, if I’m going to write a movie review, I want to post it on my blog so I own it and it remains a part of my online identity. Similarly, posts like this predict the end of centralized sites (the author calls them “Walled Gardens”) like Craigslist and eBay because users will inevitably prefer to self-publish their classifieds ads on their own blogs.

The problem with these discussions is the reality that the number of Internet users who blog regularly is tiny. It’s hard to say exactly how many blogs there really are since I don’t trust most of the statistics on # of blogs because lots of people have blogs (sometimes several) but few actually post to it. According to this survey, only 7% of American adults read blogs regularly. If this is true, then Americans who actively publish via blogs has got to be no more than a couple %. Yet all this talk of self-publishing requires one fundamental thing: a place for the self to freely publish on the Web which for most people means having a blog. (Note: I say “freely” publish to exclude sites like MySpace which do limit the format of content that can be published by the user). And just a very small fraction of Americans blog.

From what I’m always reading about, the number of bloggers is rapidly rising so maybe, down the road, models involving decentralized content may become more and more of a reality. But, it does seem that we are not nearly as close as many tech bloggers make it seem.

In my prior post, I briefly noted how search-engines/aggregators profit off of content that publishers create for them. I shared my thoughts on this topic with a couple friends today and while nothing discussed was enlightening, I figured I might as well throw up a quick post. Since Google is the largest search engine, I’ll use them as an example.

Google is so profitable because they control lots of Web advertising space. They build control of advertising space 3 ways (listed in order of descending profitability):
Inherit – Google inherits ad space from every person who has ever published any sort of Web content and made it accessible. The easy way to think about it is that the more content there is on the Web, the more possible search result pages exist. Each search result page has advertising space. Cost: Developing and operating the search engine which is expensive. But, on a per (ad space) unit basis, the cost is very tiny fractions of a penny.
Create – Google creates ad space by building it’s own applications and sticking AdSense on it. The goal is to build applications/services which result in disproportionately large # of page views and whose pages would likely to contain content for which there would be advertising interest for. E.g. Search, GMail, Maps (for the purpose of Local info and advertising), Froogle. Cost: Same logic as above but the per unit cost is not quite as small because page view volume is not nearly as high compared to Search. Also AdSense ad space is not as lucrative as AdWords because it is less targeted.
Buy – Offering AdSense to publishers. Cost: % of ad revenue. Much less profitable compared to the prior two methods.

While each of these three methods have varying profit margins, they all share one thing in common: making ad space out of content that other people create. It’s the exact opposite of traditional media companies. It’s such a great business to be in and that’s why entrepreneurs get excited about the notion of structured data on the Web because it means they can build great aggregators and get rich. =)

Quick blabber about Google:
Google began life as a search company. Google built a fantastic rapport with its users by offering a tremendously useful, free service. Since then, they have evolved into an advertising company. When Google added advertising, they were able convince users that the ads actually helped the user because the ads were contextual. All advertising is contextual to some extent, but people aren’t thanking TV networks for airing pizza commercials during football games. The commercials help you figure out what to eat while watching the game… right? Google has become the only advertising company in the world that people love. It’s both brilliant and fascinating.

First of all, what is Structured Blogging? Right now, blog posts are physically just free-form text entries in plain english paragraphs. But logically speaking, a blog post might be a movie review, an editorial on a recent news bit, description of an upcoming event, etc. While plain old english prose is the optimal mode of comprehension for us humans, machines have a tough time figuring out what the heck you’re talking about unless the content of the entry is tagged or categorized in some way. Structured Blogging is all about incorporating microformats into blog posts in order to structure (aka. tag, but not tagging in the folksonomy sense but tagging in the tagged-data xml sense). Basically, let’s say I posted

“I saw Syriana last night and it was thrilling and though-provoking. Go see it this weekend.”

From these two sentences, you likely had no problem understanding that:
1) Syriana is a movie currently in theaters.
2) I saw Syriana and my review of it is: “thrilling and though-provoking”
3) I am recommending people to go see it.

For a machine to correctly recognize these exact two sentences as a review for a movie named Syriana is difficult. Furthermore, for the machine to find meaning in what I wrote is another problem in itself. Instead, if I published my post using the hReview microformat, a machine could easily recognize that my post is a review for an item – in this case this item is a movie named Syriana – and know what exactly my review is of the item – “thrilling and though-provoking”. Structured Blogging has partnered (it’s not clear how deep these partnerships really are) with all the major blogging tool companies to presumably integrate these formats into the popular blogging software so that the blogger need not know the exact syntax and tags of each format. Tagging your movie review post with the hReview format shouldn’t be more then a click of a few buttons.

Will bloggers use this? Let’s take a minute to understand the motivation of the blogger.

Currently bloggers publish their blogs as a medium for building and expressing their self identity on the Web. When you write something on your blog, it stays with you in one centralized place and becomes part of your e-identity. If I write a product review on Amazon, sure it will get read (in fact it would probably get way more readership than it would on my blog) but that’s not the point. I’m sort of giving away my content. The world doesn’t know who I am on Amazon. Right now, people’s online identities are so fragmented. Pieces of their online expression are happening on many different sites. They might publish some product reviews on Amazon, list some items for sale on Craiglist or eBay, write movie reviews on IMDB, regularly comment on news items on various blogs, chat on various message boards… the list goes on. Sure, all these forms of expression come from me, but because they are completely decentralized they do not form any sort of identity for me. Someone reading my Amazon review of a DVD I bought has no idea about the movie reviews that I’ve written on IMDB. Without a doubt, the ability to keep the content I create on the Web in one spot, published in the way I want is compelling. But blogging already offers this. Why do I need to adopt structured blogging?

The reason is so others can better find the content I produce. If someone is searching or reviews on Syriana, if I have properly tagged my review as such, then there’s a higher chance that a user will find my review. The reason is that the aggregators of the future, while sucking up my blog content, will be able to recognize and precisely record my post as a Syriana movie review. Without this tagging, the only way my content will be located is by search relevancy for the term ‘Syriana’. That’s pretty much hopeless. Besides, someone searching for ‘Syriana review’ won’t even be likely to be given my blog post because I didn’t even put the word ‘review’ anywhere in it. Okay, so if I use Structured Blogging, people will be able to better find my content. Sweet! Well it’s not really that perfect.

These aggregators of the future are going to want to aggregate the content they suck up. You can imagine a movie review aggregator that sucks up all the reviews in the blogosphere, and provides an uber MetaCritic. So users looking for reviews for Syriana will conveniently see “average 4 star rating based on 35 bloggers”. And then of course this aggregator will have advertising and sell movie tickets and essentially be making money off of my and others’ reviews. Is this aggregator compensating me? Nope. They’re just leeching my content and making a buck. The only thing the aggregator can possibly offer me is increased traffic if, in this case, the user wanted to actually read individual reviews of the movie. Is this a fair tradeoff? If I am posting something like a classified ad where it absolutely benefits me to increase its visibility, then there is real monetary value in it for me then the answer is yes. For other situations, the answer becomes tricky. Note: This discussion is very similar to the relationsihp between web publishers and web search engines.

Finally, this topic of structuring content was in the news recently thanks to our friends at Google. A few weeks back GoogleBase launched. Read my post about it. The concept with GoogleBase is very similar: Structure data so that it can be better aggregated. Right now, the only way to input into GoogleBase is directly via a web form (they have different forms for different data types) or via a feed. Either way its the content creator actively submitting it to Google. But, if structured blogging takes off, doesn’t it make a lot of sense for GoogleBase to suck up structured content from the blogosphere? Sure. If there’s structured content anywhere out on the Web, it makes tons of sense for Google to go fetch it. The problem is that right now there is little, if any.

Back in 1998, Google founders Page and Brin published The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine describing the fundamentals behind their new Web search engine. While I would certainly recommend everyone to read the paper, for the purpose of this post, Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives is particularly worth a read. The section describes how search engines who have a business model that relies on advertising revenue are likely to be conflicted. They describe some situations where search results might be altered to please advertisers. As a result, they write “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers”.

Fast forward a few years and as it turns out, Page and Brin’s Google dominates the search scene and is massively profitable. Wait..what was that? Profit? Where’s this money coming from? Oh that’s right: advertisers. Well, to Google’s credit, they have not (as far as we know) allowed advertisers to directly influence their search results. Instead, AdWords ads (paid results) show up off to the right side of the (organic) search results page, clearly marked under a “Sponsored Links” section. Google’s position on this is that the ads don’t interfere with organic search results, but if you do want to see the ads they are clearly marked and since the ads are targeted to your search, there’s a good chance that they may actually help your search. Fair enough.

As of last week, something changed. The font size used for AdWords advertisements on Google search results pages got larger. The size is now the same size that is used for organic search results. While many users may not even notice the change, I personally find it very dubious. The motivation for increasing font size is to make ads more noticeable and thus more likely to be clicked. This increase in overall CTR brings more advertising dollars to Google and that’s certainly good news for the business.

However, is this just one of the first moves of many to increase ad CTR? I doubt it. Shareholder pressure to maintain profit growth may force the company to employ more tactics to drive ad revenue. Furthermore, what is the message that Google is sending to web publishers? Until now, Google (and of course all the SEO guys) emphasize that most users click on the organic results and not paid results (statistics show that the ratio of organic clicks to paid clicks is about 4:1-5:1) and so to generate traffic to your site, the most effective approach is to produce relevant, quality content and effectively structure it. Google prides itself on rewarding publishers who create good content. But will Google succumb to advertisers over the long-term? I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Brin and Page’s comments back in 1998 hold true.

It’s approaching 3AM right now and I’m not asleep. In fact, over the past year, my sleeping time has gotten later and later and later. Why you ask? Partly it’s because I’ve been busy working on my startup Dontbuyjunk and I’m often working late into the night until I’m satisfied with the progress that I’ve made for the day. But, I’m increasingly finding that what really is preventing me from getting to bed is information overload courtesy of the Internet. Let me explain.

I’ve been spending hours per day on the Internet for several years now. The big difference though is that recently the time I spend is shifting away from entertainment (mindless chatting on message boards, gaming, etc.) to information exchange activities such as reading/writing in the blogosphere. Every night, after I’m done working, I do one last catch up with my RSS reader and almost without fail, I end up spending a couple hours bouncing from one blog to the next and then to aggregators like del.icio.us and memeorandum.

Today, publishing (via the Web) is essentially free. And when I say “free” I mean that it both has no cost and is without rules or barriers. Furthermore, the second you publish your content, it is instantly accessible to a billion people. Because of all this, the rate at which information id created and disseminated is astonishing. So this is a good thing right?

Well…sure. enabling people to express and share both knowledge and opinions is great for society in countless ways. The problem that develops is that with so much publishing going on, how can I keep track of that tiny subset of information that is relevant, unique (remember that the majority of content published everyday is either syndication or basically duplicate) and valuable in my world? It’s getting harder by the day. Further exacerbating my problem is the wanting to not just read the facts behind a topic/news bit, but also read the opinions and participate in the many insightful discussions that branch from it.

So what’s the solution to my problem? Lunesta? Maybe. The next-generation of aggregators? Bingo.
One big trend that we are starting to see develop and I believe will be a major area of focus in the years to come is in information filtering and aggregation. Search engines like Google and centralized information sources like ESPN and Wikipedia allow me to pull in specific pieces of information when I am actively seeking it. However, their limitation stems from the fact that most of the information I absorb on a daily basis is new and could not have been searched for. In other words, if I didn’t know the information existed, how could I have searched for it? Instead, I must rely on my set of trusted sources to push this new information to me. Information aggregations, either human-derived (digg, reddit, del.icio.us) or algorithmic (memeorandum, blogniscient, Google News), are a step in the right direction. But aggregators have a long way to go before they truly are accurate and encompassing tools for information.

Anyways, it’s now 4:30AM and I’m basically just blabbing. Aggregators is an area that I’m becoming increasingly interested in myself and I have some of my own ideas brewing in my head about what the perfect aggregator would be and how it would work. I’ll be thinking and blogging about it in the coming weeks.

For some more discussions on aggregators, check out a blog post on memeorandum I was reading earlier that I found insightful:

http://mashable.com/2005/11/08/hacking-memeorandum-more-proof-that-algorithms-dont-work/

Be sure to read the comments thread.

Up until now, I’ve been trying different web-based RSS readers and haven’t really fallen in love with any that I’ve tried. Currently, I use MS Outlook for e-mail and I was waiting for the next version of Office being under the assumption that it would bring RSS reader functionality. Well, it turns out, I won’t have to wait. Attensa has developed an RSS reader plugin for Outlook. I downloaded it today after reading this article about the company’s $9MM series B funding announcement.

I downloaded it today, added all my feed subscriptions, and let’s just say I think I have an RSS reader solution that I’ll be sticking with.

Last month, Microsoft acquired a file-synchronization software company called FolderShare. What’s so great about it? It’s a very simple tool to transparently synchronize files amongst many computers. Even though there are many software solutions out there that solve this problem (most which cost $$$) , still most people use relatively cumbersome ways to accomplish file transfer: e-mail, IM client, FTP, uploading to file-serving websites, etc. Furthermore, it’s always surprised me how much trouble most people (even myself on occasion) have just setting up file sharing between Windows PC’s at home. Clearly, a free and easy solution is needed by the masses.

I tried FolderShare out and it definitely worked as advertised. You just need to download their Satellite program which, once installed, runs in the background. Within a couple minutes of playing around with it I had sync’d up a folder between my laptop and desktop, shared my music folder with my sister, and can now securely access my hard drive via the web. The great thing is that it’s all peer-to-peer so the process is very efficient.

FolderShare used to charge $50/year for the service. The first thing Microsoft did after acquiring the company was to make it free. Very cool.
Microsoft has definitely been on a bit of a hot streak in the geek blogosphere with the debut of Live, releasing SSE under Creative Commons license, and now this.

About a month ago, I was watching an interview of Raymond Kurzweil on Charlie Rose. I had heard of him before but, to be honest, did not know much about his background. So, I searched my good pal Wikipedia and read about him. Kurzweil wrote an essay back in 2001 titled, “The Law of Accelerating Returns” in which he theorizes about how continuing exponential growth of technology will soon (read: in many of our lifetimes) lead to The Singularity:

It represents the nearly vertical phase of exponential growth where the rate of growth is so extreme that technology appears to be growing at infinite speed. Of course, from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and the growth rates remain finite, albeit extraordinarily large. But from our currently limited perspective, this imminent event appears to be an acute and abrupt break in the continuity of progress. However, I emphasize the word “currently,” because one of the salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in the nature of our ability to understand. In other words, we will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology.

Now I know that some of you are probably like “Wow, sounds like this Kurzweil guy’s been smoking a stash of some sweet chiba. You think I could get some off him?”. But what I really appreciate about the essay is his scientific approach using empirical data from many areas of technology and methodical analysis to support his theories.

I can in no way do this paper justice by summarizing it. I wanted to highlight some of the key points here but my list was getting too long and many of the points just don’t make sense out of context.

Like I said, I first read this paper about a month ago and ever since, I’ve mentioned it to almost everyone I know. Even if you have absolutely no curiosity about the future of technology and how it will change your life, how can you not read an essay which begins by stating:

“You will get $40 trillion just by reading this essay and understanding what it says.”

Over the next few weeks, I hope to read more from Kurzweil and other researchers to gain a broader perspective of this topic.