Martin Lamonica’s piece Making Web 2.0 Pay is indicative of the growing concern among Web watchers, venture capitalists, and other interested techies who are worried how to monetize the amazing innovative period we’re in. However, I think his piece, though illuminating, is exactly the type of thing that developers should run away from immediately because it focuses on the problem of making money at the industry level, and not the level that matters: the level of your individual users.

In his piece Martin discusses issues like making money via mashups, building to flip, and commodity office applications and points to several reasons for the new boom:

1. High-speed internet connections
2. Ajax
3. APIs
4. Cheap startup costs

So Lamonica’s point is that it is simply easier to create now. These seem like very reasonable factors for the new companies and products we’re seeing. However, simply having the means doesn’t really lead to innovation…but solving someone’s problem in a better way does. So in addition to technology-related reasons, I would add a couple more factors to Lamonica’s list, including two that can directly lead to solving people’s problems…

Continue Reading: Monetize This!

Alex Barnett, Adam Green, John Tropea and I recorded a podcast last week on OPML:

OPML podcast (58 min 13MB .mp3)

We talked about the new OPML 2.0 Draft, namespaces, and structured blogging. Adam talked at length about what the new spec means for the development community, while John spoke about the creative ways in which OPML is being used. I learned a lot about how OPML might be used as a container format for some of the interesting activity in and around other structured formats.

As always, Alex has written up a set of great notes.

Continue Reading: OPML Podcast

Clay Shirky via Nat Torkington:

“We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.”

I hope he’s right. It sometimes feels like we should be, but aren’t.

Clay’s pattern library is interesting, too, following closely on the heels of the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.

The interesting difference between the pattern libraries is that Yahoo’s is a library of interface elements, while Clay and Co’s is made up of social elements modeled in an interface. Both really great tools for discussion/inspection.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer of the 20th century, wrote of the Uruguayan Funes the Memorious, whose perception and memory became infallible after falling from a horse in the mid 1880s:

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day.

And thus Ireneo Funes lived like no other before or since, remembering all that had happened to him. And remembering that he remembered. This vicious cycle led not to the incalculable awakening of genius that one might expect. Instead, it led to the opposite: a painful sagacity of everything he wished to forget.

Continue Reading: The Digital Funes the Memorious

Doc Searls on his new idea: the Intention Economy:

“In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.”

The whole piece is excellent.

Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber makes a great point in his recent post: Familiarity Breeds a User Base

In referencing Joshua Micah Marshall’s two reasons for not using a Mac (despite admitting that he’s heard great things about them), Gruber suggests that we underestimate the power of familiarity. He says:

“But the reasons behind his (Marshall’s) reluctance to switch are eminently reasonable, or, if not quite reasonable, understandable. He’s a political nerd, not a computer nerd, but he’s cobbled together enough knowledge about Windows and PC hardware that he’s comfortable knowing he can get his work done with them, and that when things go wrong, that he can probably fix them.”

Continue Reading: Familiarity in the Recommendosphere

Robert Scoble on ugly design:

“We trust things more when they look like they were done for the love of it rather than the sheer commercial value of it.”

Yesterday I talked about liking the term transparent personalization.

But today I’m still mulling it over.

Does it mean that we completely see and comprehend the personalization that’s going on? I consider Amazon book recommendations transparent in this way. I can tell Amazon whether or not to include certain purchases in their recommendations, and I can tell them if I’m not interested in something they recommended.

Or does it mean, by including the word implicitly, that we don’t see how things are recommended to us, and that it’s simply done behind the scenes? I think that many new services are trying to get to this point, but I don’t think that it gives the user enough control, or more to the point, the illusion of control.

If something is transparent, then you don’t see it. However, we often use the term to mean that we see it for what it is, as in “his motives were transparent”.

In my talk about Leveraging the Network I made the mention that users want to be in control. Is there a piece of software that you love that doesn’t give you the feeling of control?

In addition, control is about action, and results of our actions. If we completely release people of their ability to make actionable changes in software, they’ll start to feel like they don’t have control. So let them change things, add things, vote on things. And take those changes into consideration when making recommendations. And then, most importantly, let the user know what you did, and they’ll still feel in control.

We don’t want the Web feeling like TV.

Greg Linden on Google’s plans for the future:

“And slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by the idea of “a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power.” They say that “the experience should really be instantaneous”. They say that they should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)” which leads to a world where “the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache”. And, they say that they want “transparent personalization” that uses user “data to transparently optimize the user’s experience … implicitly.”

Transparent Personalization.

What a *great* term.

I have personal evidence that news brands are dying.

Today I realized that the memetrackers (Tailrank, in this case) are my first choice for news now, even if it isn’t tech news. Up till now, I’ve still been relying on CNN to give me the latest, but I am now ready to stop site grazing for news headlines and go straight to a memetracker first. (for many tech-heads, this has already happened)

I realized this change had occurred when the top story was the 2nd part of the conversation between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell, which is the best writing on the Web at the moment, and the thing I am definitely most interested in.

Big change

Though seemingly small, I think this is a significant change (for me, at least), as the power of brand is all about top-of-mind. Which service do you turn to first? Is it CNN, or is it Tailrank? If you only had one site to look at, which would you choose? Which do you trust to give you the better information? The first answer that pops into your head is the stronger brand, as far as it matters to you.

So, even though we talk about the power of companies and the brands they portray, the real activity goes on in our heads each and every moment. What’s counter-intuitive to think about is that news brands survive because of millions of choices made every day, not because they have a monopoly on the news. It’s not that they have a physical lock on anything. Instead, they have a mental lock on us, simply because we think of them before we think of others.

This is all old-hat, of course. In no way is this a new, blazing insight into the minds of man. The insight for me was that I didn’t realize how strong the CNN brand was for me, until I actually thought about switching away from it. It also suggests that when designing things like memetrackers that compete with very strong brands, any mental associative devices you can add might be helpful. This is probably why so much time is spent on taglines…because when they work, they work to be the first thing recalled when a particular topic comes up.

Aggregators have an advantage

In a way, aggregators will always have advantages over systems that have their own agenda to push, even if that agenda is, in part, to provide the best and latest news. The Simmons/Gladwell story that I’m interested in is at ESPN, not on Sports Illustrated, which is affiliated with CNN. The memetrackers are simply being less biased than the news organizations who claim the same, and so have no problem showing me just most talked about memes.

So the thing I’m most interested in won’t be available on the CNN homepage any time soon. The switch has flipped.