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Web 2.0’s wilderness of names

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Mike Arrington is the lawyer-turned-blogger-and-entrepreneur whose TechCrunch has become the Web site of choice for people attempting to keep up with the cornucopia of startup companies pouring onto the Internet under the Web 2.0 banner.

The amazing thing to me about Arrington is this: He somehow keeps the names of these companies straight.

A post a little while back, for instance, contains this sentence:

“Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo.”

Skobee? Renkoo? Is Mr. Mxyzptlk in the house?

Joyent, Planzo, Trumba, Rojo,
Meebo, Goowy, Megite, Newroo —
Chuquet, Squidoo, Zingee, Stickam?
Favoor, Zazzle, Kiko, Simpy!

Chant them urgently, and you might find yourself conjuring a Morgul spell. [All names verbatim from the last couple months of TechCrunch.]

I remember when Yahoo launched (yes, I’m becoming a Net codger), thinking, “Boy, that’s an odd name to try to build a company around.” What I saw over the ensuing years was that it doesn’t much matter what you name a company as long as the brand is strong enough — people will just project the qualities they associate with you onto the name.

For that to work, however, you need users — a lot of users — so that you can fill the random syllables with meaning. That’s much harder in today’s overpopulated Web 2.0 scrum, full of hard-to-distinguish competitors featuring similar two-syllable names, curvy cornered designs, and rounded fonts.

I realize that many of these names are chosen out of desperation, since all domain names that actually communicate meaning have been squatted upon by speculators. And if your business is really all about adding a feature or two to the Great Big Web Application In the Sky (or, I guess one should say, Cloud), then your end-game plan is to be acquired by some large company that already has a meaningful brand and intends to toss yours in the garbage anyway — so why waste too much thought on your name?

Still, Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy.

UPDATE: I had somehow missed this brilliant quiz, “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?” [Thanks to Oscar for the tip, in comments]

Communities of interest

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Other stuff at that was interesting:

Brian Dear of EVDB and Eventful, a site for posting and finding event information, introduced Eventful Demand, which allows people to band together and ask for “speakers” — musical performers, authors, anyone who might have a fan base or interested crowd — to come make an appearance, put on a show, give a talk in their area. Dear hopes that creating a common space for this sort of demand-side networking will reduce the reliance on middlemen and allow artists and other “speakers” to connect directly with their audiences. For instance, a band that had a good number of people asking for an appearance in their town could then take that info to a club as evidence of ticket-sales draw — or, more ambitiously, the “demanders” could organize the event themselves. You’ve heard of the “wisdom of crowds”; this is more like the “wishlist of crowds.” At the moment, the hottest “Demand” on Eventful is for “The impeachment of George W. Bush – Washington metro area.” Other than that, an awful lot of people seem to want Wil Wheaton to come to their towns.

Derek Powazek provided an update of the principles he expounded five years ago in his book Design for Community. “Web 1.0”-style communities, were, he said “company towns.” As examples, he included Salon’s Table Talk, which I think is reasonable; his own Fray.com similarly qualifies. In the “Web 2.0” world, he says, we’re more like individual homesteaders, and that gives us potentially much more power and control. He’s right, but I think he may, just a little bit, underplay the downside: once you own the house, you’re stuck dealing with the insurance and taxes, the leaks, the grafitti and the natural disasters. Still, given the choice, most people — at least most Americans — seem to prefer the homeowner model. Derek’s slides are here.

Other interesting talks at Etech about community, much-blogged elsewhere, included Clay Shirky’s chronicle of “patterns” in online moderation, “Shut Up! No, You Shut Up!” (summary here). Shirky has set up a wiki to record these patterns, modeled on Ward Cunningham’s original Pattern Language wiki for software developers.

Meanwhile, Danah Boyd offered a sociological perspective on recent models of successful communities — Craigslist, Flickr and Myspace. My decade at Salon certainly made this passage ring true:

  Passionate designers are hard to come by. The people in charge of Craigslist, Flickr and MySpace breathe their sites. They don’t go home at night and forget about the site. They are online at 4AM because something went wrong. They are talking to users at midnight just because. You cannot force this kind of passion – it’s not just a job, it’s a belief system.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that even the most passionate people can keep doing it forever. This type of true embeddedness is utterly exhausting. It plays a heavy toll on the lives of the designers. Even in smaller communities, creators grow tired.

Attention traders

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I’ve got some random loose end posts from my time at last week’s conference that I really should post before they get any older. Here’s one…

Seth Goldstein of Root.net introduced his company’s Vaults product, which aims to give individual consumers a place to bank their “attention data.” Today you can open a “vault” for free and stash your Amazon purchase history and your general clickstream data (derived from a browser plug-in); tomorrow, presumably, much more. Goldstein talked about “PPAs” (“promises to pay attention”) and “attention bonds” and drew a comparison with the way the mortgage industry’s adoption of mortgage bonds helped make housing more affordable.

Well, everyone needs a place to live; what problem is Root aiming to solve? The idea seems to be: Companies are already collecting and claiming large amounts of information about our financial lives and online behavior. That’s data that we ought, by rights, to control — and if it’s going to be exploited commercially, we should get our slice.

Fair enough. But the Root Vaults idea applies a Wall Street mentality to the “attention economy” concept, and when Goldstein unveiled the Vault home screen before the ETech crowd, it resembled nothing so much as a sort of Bloomberg screen for the mind. There’s something potentially dismal about this — are we going to convert every last remnant and scrap of our earthly existence into the margin-eking terms of financial markets?

On the one hand, I can imagine Root Vaults as offering a nifty way for us all to do what Howard Rheingold long ago advocated — pay attention to where we’re paying attention. On the other hand, I’m wary of letting the bond-trading worldview colonize my choices of entertainment and edification. I’m not looking to become the CEO of my own mind, fiddling with spreadsheet optimizations of my own personal satisfaction.

I mentioned this reaction to Goldstein, and he readily admitted that clickstream data has its limits: “You gotta start somewhere. Is it an accurate representation of a person? No. You don’t want to reduce people to data on a Bloomberg dashboard. But this is a natural resource that people are already producing.”

Ozzie at the clipboard, Stone at attention

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Tuesday here at began with Ray Ozzie, once of Groove and now of Microsoft, demoing the prototype for an absurdly simple yet marvelously useful little innovation: the ability to cut and paste events, using the Windows clipboard, such that they move from application to application (and Web app to Web app) with their structure and metadata intact. It’s a little thing, in one sense — but just the sort of little thing that stands in the way of the Web-based information realm being fully useful. That Microsoft is helping lead this change rather than fighting it to the last byte is remarkable. That Ozzie did his demo using Firefox was simply gracious. (He writes in detail about the project on his blog.)

Jeff Han showed his research into “multi-touch interaction” — giant touch-screens that respond to complex commands delivered via more than one point of touch. The interface hardly seemed as intuitive as Han promised (two fingers zooms in — or is it out?), and some of the demo resembled the manipulation of a virtual lava lamp. But when Han turned his interface into a giant light-table and showed how perfectly it was suited for the organization of large numbers of photos — and videos! — the value of the innovation became immediately apparent.

The ostensible theme of the conference this year is “The Attention Economy,” but most speakers barely addressed it. One notable exception was Linda Stone, the former Microsoft and Apple exec who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” back in 1998 and unpacked the term for us a bit here. (There are good notes from Nat Torkington on a similar talk she gave at Supernova last year.) She distinguished multitasking — where you’re switching between discrete goal-oriented processes — from the more diffuse and corrosive continuous partial attention, in which we are constantly “scanning for opportunities, optimizing for the best opportunity,” paying half a mind to what’s in front of us and keeping our peripheral vision peeled in hope of spotting something better. Stone says we’re driven by CPA out of a “desire to be a live node on the network,” to stay connected and to feel validated that we fit into a social web.

Stone placed CPA in a social-history timeline that falls into 20-year spans: a period from 1965 to 1985 in which we placed highest value on self-expression, creativity and personal productivity; then a period from 1985 to 2005 in which the network became paramount and we valued communication the most. I found this explanation so generalized as to be almost useless — “We played Battleship in the ’70s, we played Diplomacy in the ’90s,” she declared, but wait a minute, I played Diplomacy in the ’70s, and so did all my friends!

Nonetheless, Stone is onto something important here. Her description of our “overwhelmed, overstimulated and underfulfilled” technological existence wasn’t exactly what the technology-besotted ETech crowd wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it. Still, as I looked around at a sea of heads buried in laptops, sucking down the wi-fi, fingers darting to catch the latest email or Technorati result, I wondered how many had given Stone the attention she deserved.

Sterling language

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I loved the two Bloggercons I participated in, and I share the enthusiasm expressed by Dave Winer and the BarCamp people and the MashupCamp people for the whole “unconference” idea — the notion that great gatherings can happen when you put great people together in rooms without programming lots of speeches and panels and product demos.

Still, I’m not ready to give up on the occasional old-fashioned lecture, under the right circumstances, and there are some people in whose presence I will gladly say, “I am an audience member — you talk, I’ll shut up.” Bruce Sterling is one of them. He spoke tonight here at

I haven’t heard Sterling in several years, and I’d forgotten his peculiar cadence — a kind of incantatory precision that you first mistake for superciliousness and then realize, no, wait, those pauses and touches of drawl aren’t affectation, he’s just savoring those words, he loves them, he doesn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet.

Sterling’s ostensible subject was “The Internet of Things,” and he talked a bit about the stuff he’s been talking about for some time now: spimes, physical objects trackable in space and time, material things that are — like items on today’s Web — linkable, rankable, sortable and searchable. It’s a fascinating topic, even the second or third time around; but the heart of tonight’s talk was a series of observations on language and technology.

“Computer,” Sterling argued, was simply an awful name for these machines that arrived in the middle of last century. “Computer” led us straight to “artificial intelligence,” down the dead-end street that had us thinking the machines could become smart — that they were “thinking machines.” We should have picked a word more like what the French chose, “Ordinateur,” suggesting that the devices, uh, ordinate things. They are card shuffling tools. They do what we see the Google-ized Web doing so well today — link, rank, sort and search. “I think we could have done better words,” Sterling said — and if we had, we might have gotten Google 20 years sooner.

He went on to parse some Web 2.0-speak, first decoding Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the phrase, then dissecting scholar Alan Liu‘s critique of the phenomenon, at every turn reminding this crowd of “alpha geeks” that the labels they pick for their innovations really do make a difference.

“You don’t want to freeze your language too early,” Sterling advised — that stops creativity in its tracks. Hype, he suggested, is underrated: “Hype is a system-call on your attention.” Buying into it blindly is a disaster, of course, but “if you soberly track its development, hype is revealing…. In politics, the opposite of hype is the truth, but in technology, the opposite of hype is argot, jargon” — language that has no traction in the real world. And “if no one is dismissing you as hype, you are not being loud enough.”

Sterling cited a recent interview with Adam Greenfield, the author of a new book called Everyware that’s also about a version of “the Internet of Things.” In the interview, Greenfield said he coined the term “Everyware” to describe his take on the concept others have labeled “ubiquitous computing” because “I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles.”

But wait, Sterling cried — “getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles” is exactly where we should be when we’re inventing new things. This is “the wetlands of language”, where we “use words to figure out what things mean.” The struggles count; they help us understand and shape what we’re doing. Choosing a label for a technology, he argued, “really matters — it’s like christening a baby.”

There was much more. If the good folks at ITConversations post the audio, or if Sterling posts a text, I’ll link so you can experience the whole thing — including the full shtick about Alan Turing’s head in a box, which I’m afraid I failed to take good notes on, since I was too busy laughing.

It would take a good video, though, to capture the funniest moment of the evening: Sterling was displaying examples of “receding tech” (“things that do not blog or link”) — a rusty engine block half-buried in desert sand, a mountain of discarded tires — when the projection screen flashed a warning window: YOU ARE NOW RUNNING ON RESERVE POWER. Then the laptop went to sleep. He was wrapping up, anyway.

Red alert — content generator overload

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Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal had a funny piece yesterday about the “content mills” that are, uh, repurposing — read, pirating (or, in the case of Wikipedia and the like, reusing what’s free) — other people’s writing, in order to create pages that can be festooned with Google text ads and turned into cash.

There are different shades of gray on this spectrum. Some companies are building honest businesses by paying all comers small sums for articles that they know, in advance, will generate a certain level of Google-word money. Mesothelioma, anyone? (This rare form of asbestos-caused cancer has long been one of the best-paying Google words, because lawyers who represent asbestos victims are willing to pay big for leads.) Other shyster-entrepreneurs are simply paying writers to massage other people’s words just enough to pretend that the work is original, then reposting it. Gomes hooked up with someone from the latter group, and his account of conscientiously trying to deliver actual original copy to a patron who couldn’t care less makes a diverting farce.

Gomes concludes that the real villain here is Google itself: He blames the search engine for inspiring a flood of bogus content.

  In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world’s “information.” Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations.

But Google the search engine is not the culprit; Google the ad machine is. The shysters wouldn’t be cranking out the HTML if it weren’t for AdSense, the Google text ads that publishers can plaster over their pseudocontent. Though AdWords — the keyword-based text ads that appear on Google’s own search results — are subject to a limited amount of gaming and manipulation (that Google is always trying to defeat or limit), the level of crap surrounding AdSense is far greater.

So blame Google — it deserves some. But keep the focus clear: A terrific search engine alone doesn’t make people publish acres of garbage.But put a few dollars in play and some “content providers” will do the most embarrassing things.

Yahoo: No shows

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Yahoo, having boldly proclaimed its intention to produce TV-style “Web shows” a la MSN circa 1996, thinks again. (Maybe they won’t be buying that movie studio after all.) That didn’t take long; six weeks ago Yahoo content guy Lloyd Braun was touting his shows to the Wall Street Journal.

Smart move. I guess the Webheads in the Valley gave the show-biz people in Santa Monica a crash course in how the Internet, you know, works.

Putting Google’s capitalization in its place

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Cory Doctorow is a brilliant science fiction writer and one of the most eloquent voices on the Net today arguing against corporate lock-downs of intellectual property. But in catching up on my RSS backlog recently I did trip over something of a whopper in the middle of an otherwise typically persuasive rant against an ill-advised digital rights management scheme (in this case, Google’s):

  Google’s really good at adapting to the Internet — that’s why it’s
capitalized at $100 billion while the whole of Hollywood only turns
over $60 billion a year.

This comparison is, as I’m sure Doctorow would admit, pure apples-and-oranges. “Capitalization” is a number you arrive at by taking a company’s current stock price — the last dollar amount that a buyer and seller agreed upon for a block of shares — and multiplying it by the “outstanding shares,” or total number of shares in the company known to exist.

Google is doing quite well, and its high stock price gives it all sorts of advantages, but there is no pile of $100 billion flowing through its coffers. Its revenue — what it “turns over” each year, the number of actual dollars flowing into its operations — is more like $4-5 billion. That’s impressive, but smaller by a factor of 10 than the number Doctorow cites for Hollywood’s gross revenues (I found $63 billion as the global revenue figure for American movie studios).

Capitalization is a purely theoretical number. In the case of companies like Google, much or most of the value of stock that adds up to $100 billion is not being traded. If all or most or even just some significant fraction of the holders of that value decided, “Hey, it’s time to cash in,” and sold at the same time, the share price would begin a quick slide, and the capitalization would evaporate. Revenue streams aren’t permanent either, of course, but they’re a lot more tangible.

Google’s high capitalization essentially means that investors believe its impressive profitability growth will continue. (Or maybe they just believe that it’s 1999 all over again and not buying would mean missing out on a new bubble.) One thing’s for sure: despite the company’s claim not to be focused on short-term results, its management must be acutely conscious of the need to keep that growth charging along.

Which, ironically, is probably why Google is beginning to lose its user-friendly footing and adopt the kind of unpleasant, user-hostile DRM schemes that inspired Doctorow’s wrath in the first place.

Crystal ball hazing

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Back around the New Year I flagged for future comment this passage from a Wall Street Journal piece about what to expect in the year ahead:

  “The first thing to expect in 2006 is Google or Yahoo will buy a major content company — such as a movie studio,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media, a division of an ad holding company that seeks out advertising opportunities in new media. “At the very least they will do some similar combo with a studio where they buy a 10% to 15% stake, much like the way [Google] has structured its deal with Time Warner” to buy a stake in AOL. “What Google and Yahoo need is
content.”

With all the respect due to anyone who bears the title Chief Innovation Officer, I must say I find this forecast incomprehensible.

Google and Yahoo have both built fantastic businesses by not assuming the costly burden of paying people to produce content but instead (in Google’s case) leveraging the information everyone else on the Web creates in building links or (in Yahoo’s case) leveraging the content provided by other companies and the attention of the people who use its services. Both Yahoo and Google have prospered by not paying for content. Why would they want to change that? Why should they? For their own egos? Because Hollywood needs an exit strategy?

Now, it may irk me that Yahoo News, which employs a skeleton crew of editors to repurpose the efforts of editors and writers at other outfits, has become the traffic-king of Web-based news — or that Google News, which employs an even cheaper crew of algorithms, is another contender for the crown. Those of us who’ve labored in the trenches trying to produce real original Web content may well feel some sense of pained injustice at that outcome. On the other hand, it’s undeniable that first Yahoo and then Google saw and savvily exploited a gigantic business opportunity that we old-media transplants, with the “content is king” mantra echoing in our ears, missed.

So, while Yahoo is indeed gently dipping its toes into original-content waters, I will be very, very surprised if it dives in head-first and buys a movie studio or other old-school content producer in 2006. And I think the odds are even more fantastically against Google doing so. Google looks like they’ll be very happy for everyone else to keep producing content; the prize their eyes are on is serving as a central broker for the advertising that supports said content.

2006 has a long way to go, but it will be worth checking back ten months from now to see where we came out.

Land rush

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Sure, you can revolutionize the real estate market by doing a mashup of data and maps to create a nifty tool that lets anyone find the market value (or a market value, anyway) of homes across the land.

Agents? We don’t need no stinking agents, do we? “There’s just one thing left,” Jeff Jarvis says — “scheduling visits and accompanying the buyers.”

But hold on a quick second with that revolution — before any of this can happen, your nifty, agent-disintermediating tool has to work.

Right now Zillow’s site has a big red notice that says “Site seems slow? Close your eyes and envision your perfect home — by then maybe the server can handle our zillions of visitors.”

The thing is, the site isn’t slow, it’s non-functional, as far as I can tell, a good two days after its unveiling. Every single search I’ve tried has resulted in a “We’re sorry. We encountered a problem performing this search” message.

Launching a complex new service isn’t easy, to be sure. Bt I’d have thought Zillow’s team would have known that every single home-owner within earshot of their URL would be pounding on their site the moment it went live (that’s in addition to all of the Web 2.0 geeks and the real estate pros).

Well, it may not work — but at least it’s still free!

UPDATE: Nick Carr, at least, appears to have gotten Zillow to work — but he doesn’t like the quality of the data he found there.