All Things

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

Mashable and others have been reporting that the venerable Classmates.com site is now about to do an IPO (initial public offering), at a valuation of $125 million. Started in 1995, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says Classmates deserves credit for being the first social network, begun two years before the now-defunct Six Degrees.

While it may seem old, dull and boring to the digerati types (and it’s not Facebook), Classmates might still be pretty interesting to average users, if they are smart about making the right enhancements. I like Classmates; they continue to be slowly but steadily adding folks from my school classes. I’ve only communicated with a few, but think the site still fills a viable need (I’ve had virtually NO success locating anyone my age - 44 - on Facebook or other networks yet), and they’ve got the market share/critical mass to make it work.

As others have noted (generating considerable controversy), the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook appear to be attracting different sorts of users. While Facebook is now pulling in a lot of older technically-inclined users, the large bloc of non-technical older Americans is pretty much being left out. Obviously Classmates is too specialized to serve all their needs, but it’s the kind of simple and inviting format that would likely appeal to a lot of average folks.

My main complaints are with the pricing and the speed of the site. Classmates needs more functionality to be free and to get away from the True ads, which seem to be their main advertiser. I suspect if the site were faster to navigate and search, folks would spend more time there. Monetizing a site nowadays with AdSense, etc., generally isn’t too difficult, so I don’t see why they couldn’t offer more free functionality and still be viable.

Of course, any school-oriented site should have plenty of ways to generate well-performing ads (though even Facebook doesn’t seem to have succeeded at this, yet), but I suppose Classmates could also keep their paid subscriptions. In the several years I’ve used Classmates, I haven’t seen many people going this route, because you have to pay so much up front just to try it for a short time.

If sites like Classmates are going to have a paid subscription model, then they should by all means offer a less costly middle tier (above the free tier) and segment their market between those who don’t mind paying $20 or more to try out a site that may (likely) disappoint vs. those of us who aren’t willing to risk much until we know we’re going to get our money’s worth!

As with any social network, the key is users returning to the site on a regular basis (Facebook’s strength). Classmates is good about sending weekly emails announcing new members from your classes, but the site is slow to load and navigate, and when someone does try to communicate with you, you can’t even see it without paying a considerable amount for a subscription.

Obviously, basic communication features should be free. Maybe subscriptions could add the option of a blog page or other customization, the opportunity to have a page for that particular class, etc. There are so many possibilities, the site ought to be worth $125 million, considering the number of users (50 million) that they’ve signed up.

A few other ideas for added functionality (maybe some of this exists already but could be enhanced and made more visible):

• Stores for sale of school related merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.)
• Alumni association pages. My high school’s alumni association has become much more active and is now even conducting a campital campaign to raise money for improvements! With the internet, these activities are much easier to do, and a site like Classmates provides a key ingredient - finding and keeping in touch with people.
• As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s still VERY hard to locate your former teachers, and Classmates already offers this functionality (membership for teachers, etc.) but it’s almost completely ignored. They need to make a push to sign up teachers, which I suspect would stimulate a lot of other interest, and maybe a fair amount of free media coverage.

As I hinted at above, I find Classmates interesting in part because it’s so different from the sorts of things that the Silicon Valley crowd get excited about. The Valley folks have brought us a lot of good things, but also have some huge blind spots. A large part of the country is moving MUCH more slowly onto the internet, and there’s still not that much available on the net for for folks who didn’t grow up using it.

Classmates isn’t Facebook, but I really believe that there are still a lot of great business opportunities on the net for serving older folks (which, as far as the internet goes, is pretty much anyone over 35). Even though they have a lot of disposable income, many of these users are still fearful of doing too much, of making purchases online, etc. Sites that seem stable and “safe” have a certain appeal that a wild and woolly site like MySpace could never offer.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

I started out writing this as yet another comment to my earlier post about Twitter, but think I’ll make it a separate post. In any case, here are two good articles about serious uses of Twitter that I found from a post on the Setting Contexts blog:

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

What Twitter Means for Marketers

Regarding the 5 uses in the first article, I’d add:

1. Marketing & Communication: It’s interesting to just look at Twitter and quickly see what so much of the buzz is about. I do think there’s a good chance of picking up on tech or consumer trends much quicker, if you’re listening to the right folks. A good tool for finding those “right” folks is an obvious key add-on to the service.

2. Microblogging: Not everyone’s brain works this way, but for me there’s a lot of times I want to throw out a random thought, question or link that might be of some benefit or deserving of further investigation (e.g. by a journalist). I’ve added my Twitter account to my Technorati blog list, so now there’s a somewhat decent chance these thoughts might get discovered, though Twitter does need an automatic ping function.

3. Business Networking: I’m hopeful about this; I do well in one-on-one conversation but don’t stand out in a crowd. There’s a lot of folks I’d like to connect with that I’ve never had an immediately compelling enough reason to do it, though it would probably be beneficial for both sides.

4. Breaking News & Getting Scoops: I got this part as soon as I saw the CNN logo on Twitter. Unfortunately, I don’t think most news outlets have figured out how Twitter could drive traffic to their sites. As with RSS, the NY Times is at the forefront of this.

5. Streamlining Your Electronic Inboxes: I’m really hopeful that Twitter can help to reduce the email onslaught, since reading a Twitter update is so instant. I made a suggestion about this, for example, to Kristin at French Word a Day last week, as I thought it was an excellent example of a daily email service that could benefit from a Twitter update.

As I noted before, I expect we’ll see a whole lot of other uses emerge for Twitter, since in essence it’s a whole new basic form of communication. Here are a few more interesting examples of Twitter applications I’ve found recently:

Austin Weather

Kansai Train Announcements

French Practice

Interesting Links Forwarded by Robert Scoble

Twitter Timer

Also someone reportedly found some help after a car accident: Thoughts on Twitter.

Finally, with regard to the second article mentioned at the beginning, there’s this interesting assertion: If Markets Are Conversations, Then Twitter Is Money.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.

I’ve been reading about the Twitter instant-messaging/social networking site for a while, and decided to finally check it out. My screen name is aeroG, and you can go there to see some of my initial annoyances, some of which have been resolved. After a few hours of messing with it over the last couple of days, here’s my early assessment:

Twitter is asynchronous instant messaging for adults.

While my teenage daughter is glued to AIM, etc., much of the time, I can’t hardly get her to check the emails I send her. I guess email seems way too slow for her. Email seems just about the right speed for me, because I don’t have a boss who’s expecting instant answers all day long. In any case, there are some times where a faster pace is useful, but I’m usually juggling other stuff like most adults.

Twitter might well be a good answer for this need, and it seems to be growing in popularity, at least for the moment. After working with it a little while, I can see that it has a lot of potential for news alerts (BBC, CNET and CNN, for example). You’re also supposed to be able to get a weather forecast, but as you can see on my page I haven’t gotten that to work yet.

I don’t know for sure if these pages are run by the media sources themselves, or just somebody copying (plagiarizing?) their news, since the updates are spotty. BBC seems to be the most frequently updated, but none are working at anywhere near their potential.

I’m surprised media outlets aren’t jumping all over this; it seems like a great way to generate traffic to their news sites. It would sure be nice to have all the latest updates from both the news sources and people you want showing right there on your Twitter page, and it would go a long way toward ensuring that folks kept using Twitter themselves on a frequent/regular basis, which is the idea.

That said, I can’t help thinking that there are going to be some serious privacy issues with Twitter. For example, I didn’t expect to see my full name displayed on my page, after I had to choose a screen name. Worse, when I tried to edit it, their system wouldn’t allow it. Maybe I can live with that, but I don’t see why users shouldn’t have control over that as with all the other social networking sites.

Obviously, if someone wanted to stalk someone else, their Twitter page would be the first place a stalker would look. You can set it private, but there certainly needs to be much finer control over privacy aspects of the site.

Despite these weaknesses, Twitter seems to have enough capability (it works to/from phones and IM services as well) to have a great deal of potential usefulness. I wrote how Xanga quickly evolved from a writing platform (reportedly its intended use) to a social networking site, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some so-far unforeseen application becomes the primary use of Twitter as well.

Well, I just signed up for Socializr. I thought that maybe if I signed up right away, I could get a page with my first name for the URL. It turns out I was right, though it remains to be seen if the site will amount to anything.

Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, so I guess it’s sort of like Friendster 2.0. I haven’t been too impressed with Friendster 1.0 which, of course, was the big social networking site (along with LinkedIn) before MySpace came along.

It seems kind of late to be starting another social networking site, but then none of the ones so far are all that fantastic, with the exception of Xanga, which continues to improve steadily. Xanga’s problem is that it’s being abandoned by teens for MySpace and Facebook, and has yet to be discovered by most adults (its original target audience), to which it is really better-suited.

Of course, by the time Google came along, there were already a lot of search sites, and it wasn’t obvious there was any room for another. The main problem with these networking sites is that they need to find a way to allow folks to have a lot of connections, without being deluged by junk and redundant groups, etc. (I noted before on my Xanga site AeroGo that there are over 500 astronomy blogrings, for example).

If a site can actually help you connect to people with similar interests, who want to connect (rather than just show off or fool around), then it could prove valuable for personal or business use. They have to for sure move past the collecting friends paradigm, though.

I can’t really tell much about Socializr yet, but I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the social networking space, and it would be nice if they can move things to a higher level.

Years ago, Apple ran an ad with a bunch of lemmings all following each other off a cliff. After all, why think when it’s so easy to just NOT think? Well, here we go again. This year it seems like most all the major blogging/social networking services are one by one getting blinded in the headlights of MySpace.

As if we really need more of the lowest common denominator! There’s so much opportunity for innovation in this area, yet everyone wants to be the same. I’ve complained previously on my MSN (now Live) Spaces blog about Microsoft in this regard, and now the latest casualty apparently is Facebook.

With only 10 million users after two and a half years of operation, I guess Facebook just feels like a failure next to MySpace. Never mind the fact that they own the campus network space, they would rather throw out that distinctive so they can compete head-on with everybody. Usually these sorts of commoditization strategies don’t end up being as profitable as the competitors expect (the airline industry comes to mind).

Perhaps the Facebook users will again make a big fuss. Maybe management will listen, but chances are, based on the past history of fast-growing tech companies, they won’t. Most keep determinedly going in the wrong bone-headed direction until they go right off the cliff.

Xanga, which I use for my blog AeroGo and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is likewise feverishly adding multimedia features, to compete not only with MySpace I suppose but also Flickr and YouTube. So far these changes seem mostly positive, but if Xanga can add these features so readily, they will very likely end up as standard on all sites.

Hasn’t anybody (or at least any VCs) noticed that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like MySpace? I mean really, it’s pretty raunchy by and large. It’s as if there was a town full of nice, somewhat distinct neighborhoods, yet all the developers were racing to fill these places with trashy businesses and dumpy apartments.

So why don’t any of these sites carve out a unique identity for themselves? I think the only plausible answer is the dramatic, rapid growth of MySpace. Why have 5 or 10 million users when you can have 100 million? Of course, these users apparently are also spending a lot of time on MySpace and so, presumably, potentially a lot of dollars.

Nevertheless, it seems that money is best made on the net by tightly targeting customers, not with mass marketing, so I suspect sites that are oriented around specific topics, activities and user demographics will ultimately yield a superior return. As I’ve noted before, these social networking sites need to differentiate themselves and find niches where they can thrive, as Facebook has (even if they don’t grasp the value of this).

Let me use Facebook as an example, since it has done the best job of targeting a very large yet tightly-defined niche (high school and college campuses). College students in particular have so many things they have to (or want to) buy, that the marketing/advertising opportunities seem almost endless, both at the local and at the national or branding/name recognition level. Everyone from the local pizza restaurant to students selling used textbooks to Hollywood film studios will want to target their users.

I’m not in school so I don’t use Facebook and don’t know how good a job they’ve done of capitalizing on this opportunity, but the folks developing (and funding) these sites need to remember that traffic often, but not always, equates to sales. Ultimately, it boils down to trust. I suspect that MySpace, as many city centers did, will begin to collapse of its own weight as many head to the “suburbs” of seemingly safer sites like Xanga and others.

The planned growth ideal for urban development might in fact be a useful metaphor for these social networking sites, which may do best if they concentrate on growing at a sustainable pace with a clear demographic or interest group in mind. Users need to come to trust these sites and feel safe in them. Then they will end up spending a lot more time and money there, and for the long run.

I haven’t been blogging much this summer, been very busy with other stuff. What time I have had has been going mostly to AeroGo, which is slowly but steadily growing in traffic. In particular it’s been getting a lot of high-quality international traffic, so I’m hoping I’m on the right track with that. I’ve got a lot of ideas for AeroGo as well as many other things I want to do on the internet.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my blogs (four in total, so far) is that even though traffic is still modest, since early on they’ve gotten fairly good Google rankings. This makes me hopeful that I may in fact have a good sense for how to use the net to advantage, though it really took me several years to settle on a blogging approach. At first, when setting up and running a blog was more difficult, I figured I’d have to put everything into one blog, but I just never could see how that would work.

Though I don’t generally write about what I ate for breakfast, even in my personal blog Light Side, I thought it would be awfully presumptious to think folks would wade through personal stuff in order to find something they were interested in. The #1 issue in writing is to write to your audience, and with one blog it seemed impossible to define a target audience, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year that I resolved this dilemma of the one and the many, by deciding the solution was several, or possibly many, blogs, aimed at particular topics, with this blog All Things covering everything else.

I knew I was on the right track upon realizing that tightly-targeted blogs would get much better treatment by search engines. Moreover, several blogs linking to each other would raise the rankings of each, whereas one blog with many topics might actually hurt rankings

Right now this is how my blogs are targeted (maybe this will be helpful as an example):

• Light Side: Personal & Education
• AeroGo: Aerospace & Practical Engineering Management/Career Advice (targeted primarily at high school & college students)
• RealCurrents: Current Events/Issues/Politics
• All Things: My various other interests, especially Technology & Business, but also others that don’t fit elsewhere

Originally, I expected considerably more variation in the topics in All Things, but as it’s worked out, most posts are about technology and/or business. Perhaps this means there should be a separate blog for these topics, but I don’t have anything in mind for this yet.

Another thing I’ve noticed this summer, with my limited posting, has been that even when I wasn’t writing, traffic seemed to be slowly rising, except on my personal blog. While I actually cover quite a bit of stuff on Light Side, I haven’t really tried to drive traffic to it, at least yet (I still have some trepidations about that). Nevertheless, I’m contemplating starting a separate site to handle the type of personal/educational advice I occasionally write about there, which has garnered some interest but could be better organized on a separate site.

On the other sites, however, I wonder if I was starting to see a sort of slow-motion snowballing effect as traffic gradually grew even when not writing. The jury’s still out on this, since I was getting an increasing amount of comment spam until I made some changes, and so wonder if a lot of these hits are just spammers (though the large number of hits to my post about GM’s OnStar system - a prime spammer target - really declined after that).

I doubt much traffic growth would occur on its own for blogs filled with short entries, but when you write posts with a fair amount of depth (and several times as many resulting search words), it seems possible that a point of critical mass might be reached where links from other sites, search engine effects, etc., could combine to make traffic grow. It’s my hunch that’s the case for a well-targeted site, but even so it remains unclear whether the effect could be enough to be significant.

In my view the internet, at some level, is one big, giant, experiment. Actually it’s several: technical, business, and social experiments at least. As such, I’m trying to observe its behavior and learn how it works, insight that I’m sure will prove profitable in many ways. Of course, the internet is also a huge political experiment, as I expect we’ll discover, maybe not this time, but perhaps in two more years.

Owen Linzmayer got me thinking again about the Mac with two recent articles at informit.com, Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X and Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X. Some of the items on his lists don’t really affect me. Nevertheless, as a Mac user from the beginning, you can be assured that I’ve had time to come up with a list of my own. Maybe it will be helpful to actually write it down here. I don’t know if Apple will find my list, but since Linzmayer is a Mac author I hope they will at least take his suggestions to heart.

I’m sure some will find fault with what I write here, but hey, this is my list, and after suffering through the valley in the 1990s I’ve got a right to my opinion. If there is a crazy part, it’s that I still sort of hope Apple will take us to the personal computing mountaintop! Well, here are at least ten of my top peeves with the Mac, mainly OS X:

1. OK, I’m going to cut right to the chase. Without a doubt, my Number One Pet Peeve is that after 22 years, Apple still hasn’t delivered on its vision for making the Mac easy to program. Originally, there was a whole group of components/aspects to the Mac revolution. These included the Mac itself (as an information appliance), an automated factory in Fremont, California, which was to crank them out inexpensively (so they could be sold to the masses), a capable serial network - AppleTalk - with many possibilities for expandibility (even though the initial hardware wasn’t expandable), and Macintosh Basic.

Macintosh Basic?? Yes, that long-lost but highly-touted language, rumored to have been sold to Microsoft to get it to renew the Apple II Basic license, was a key piece of the original vision. I’ve long wondered if Visual Basic has its roots in Mac Basic. I really don’t know, but did read once that it just kind of emerged in Microsoft, and was a surprise success for them. In all the years of press coverage on Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices, I’ve never once seen Macintosh Basic mentioned. Since Microsoft is often criticized that it isn’t truly an innovator, it’s odd that they haven’t held up Visual Basic as an example of innovation.

Anyway, the vision for programming by the masses, a key part of the original Mac vision, didn’t die completely at Apple after Mac Basic disappeared. Bill Atkinson developed HyperCard, which was introduced in 1987 and was a huge success, probably the most popular thing Apple did between the Apple II and the iPod. Unfortunately, HyperCard languished, perhaps because Atkinson insisted it be given away for free. Eventually just the reader was given away, and the programming tool was priced around $100. It was obvious Apple management didn’t share the vision of programming for the masses, and HyperCard remained in limbo throughout the 1990s, until Steve Jobs pretty much killed it when Apple refused to carbonize it or let anyone else do it either (now that Apple is switching to Intel and Classic is being abandoned, HyperCard won’t run at all on the new hardware).

Around 1990, Dave Winer created a scripting language, Frontier, for the Mac. Apparently Frontier wasn’t visual or really all that simple (I don’t know what Winer’s vision for it was), but Apple management woke up long enough to scuttle Frontier by creating AppleScript, a supposedly easy-to-use scripting language for the Mac. Several years ago, after refusing to heed the pleas of HyperCard devotees, Jobs seemed to hold up AppleScript as an entry-level programming language for the Mac by creating AppleScript Studio.

This is just my bias, I suppose, but I’ve always been rather skeptical of AppleScript, and have never wanted to mess with it. Even Matt Neuberg, who wrote the book, has noted that “AppleScript is a curious language, to say the least. It’s a dinosaur, an almost unchanged survival of code written in 1993 to run on a slow computer with a mere speck of RAM. The language suffers from peculiarities of architecture and design, from a dearth of accurate documentation (which my book is intended to correct), and from the fact that all scriptable applications are utterly different from one another.”

Maybe AppleScript will somehow end up being a great language, but Apple still has AppleScript Studio hidden away from users, which hardly helps to make it a programming tool for the masses. On the other hand, with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) there is now Automator, a much more visible and simpler tool than Studio that some seem to like, so maybe this is progress. Nevertheless, I’m still waiting for Apple, as the vendor of choice for creative types, to exhibit a real devotion to the vision of programming by end users.

Well, moving right along …

2. Doesn’t run Windows apps. Need I say more? OK, I guess I ought to mention that now with Intel, perhaps a future version of Virtual PC (or just OS X?) might finally do this efficiently.

3. Wasted screen real estate. Screens are huge compared to the original Mac’s 512x342 monochrome display, yet as screens have grown, Apple seems to have wasted a lot of that space, with bigger icons, etc. It’s nice that you can have big icons and fonts, and some things are adjustable, but I wish Apple would put more thought into making the most of the screen, since it’s still a major limit to productivity.

4. Folder panes. This is related to #3. I don’t use Windows, but one of the things I notice is that folder panes, which are in my opinion a highly-productive interface, seem to be used more commonly, and the listings are smaller, so more can be seen at once. Entourage uses a folder pane, but I can never fit enough on the screen at once. When I was recently trying to decide between a new eMac or 17″ iMac, my choice was made once I realized the 17″ LCD (because of its different aspect ratio) actually would display less vertically. That would make the Entourage folder pane even less visible at once, and I can barely stand it as it is!

5. Drawers. This seems to have been Apple’s answer for a ubiquitous folder pane interface. When I first read about drawers, I thought I would love them, but as they’ve been implemented, I hate them, because they impact window positioning (see #6) and the listed items are too big (see #4). What would be better would be a reallocation of window real estate, rather than having to reposition to see the drawer, etc.

6. Sloppiness with window positioning. To be fair, this is mostly an application programming issue, but I wish Apple could find some way to get applications to always remember precisely how windows have been positioned and to return them when they are reopened. Dave Winer’s outlining program More, for example, offered a great deal of control over window positioning, which again is important in order to make the most of screen real estate. More also had a Resume file that would save the exact state of opened files, so when you restarted you were returned to just where you were. I know some programs have something like that, but it would be nice if Apple standardized it somehow.

With OS X, apps aren’t restarted as often, but I hate wasting time getting started on something, when the computer could easily do that for me. Besides, unlike Apple’s mostly visual types, I’m the kind of person who looks at the edge of things, so misaligned edges look messy and distracting to me. I know this will sound like a rather minor quibble to most folks, but to me it isn’t.

7. Small/clunky open/save dialogs. I agree with Linzmayer on this one. One of the most obvious things about using an old program such as More in Classic is the tiny size of the open/save dialog boxes. On the early Macs this was done both because the screen was small and also so if the program crashed you might be able to retrieve (by hand) some of what you just wrote (well, it worked for me a number of times). The new dialog boxes are a vast improvement, but as with window management, resizing them is an unnecessary recurring annoyance.

8. The spinning pizza/beachball. The pizza is cute for the first couple of times you see it, but it’s all downhill after that. One culprit behind this is Apple’s longstanding policy of not packing Macs with enough RAM (or even room to add enough RAM). This prompted the accusation that the Mac was underpowered and continues to feed that perception. The problem has persisted with the recent Mac Mini.

9. Inconsistent strategy for a low-end Mac. Here I’m not talking about Apple clones. That’s a separate debate and maybe Jobs was right on that one. In any case, Apple’s market share, and Apple’s user base, have both suffered tremendously over the years from Apple’s lack of commitment to having a competitive value-priced Mac in its product lineup. At times Apple has had a strong entry at the low end, such as the Mac Classic or the first-generation iMacs, and these have just about always sold well. At other times, there has been little or nothing for someone on a budget.

Right now we are unfortunately in the latter situation. To be fair, Apple is in a transition to Intel which is ostensibly going to lead to lower-cost hardware, but right now prices are going up. The Mac Mini was raised to $599, but this isn’t really the kind of computer that would appeal to a budget user. Its frame-rate benchmarks are pretty bad, so it wouldn’t appeal to kids, and it isn’t really suitable for a home office either.

I think the magic price point is somewhere around $649-699 for a full system. If Apple could hit that target with something that did well playing games, they could probably sell a ton of Macs (even the Mini sells for a lot more than this once you add in the memory, display, etc.). Even if they can’t reach it, a price void all the way to about $1000 is just too much. The iMac and eMac used to fill this void, but the iMac is now way above that range and the eMac has been discontinued.

This kind of thing would never happen in other industries. Can you imagine Honda discontinuing the Civic? As with the Mac, the Civic isn’t the cheapest small car, but in the same way Apple needs to stake a claim at the low end of its market and stick with it.

10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.

Bonus Peeve: Yes, Owen, those eternally-bouncing dock items are downright irritating! Like the pizza, the physics of computer-screen motion is fascinating for a brief while, but when you’re deep in concentration enough is enough. At least I was fortunate to discover recently that Entourage has a preference to turn that off. Now I don’t get that bouncing icon every 10 minutes when my email comes in.

Someone ought to design a widget to shoot those bouncing dock items, and provide some needed comic relief. Well, maybe you could make it an arcade game and shoot them all!

Now that even MSN Spaces has a book, Share Your Story by Katherine Murray and Mike Torres (due out March 15th), you’d think there would be several good WordPress books available, but a search of Amazon yields next to nothing.

There is Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith, but its Amazon reviews were very uneven, and only a third of the book is about WordPress, anyway. So, is there a good, take-it-from-the-beginning WordPress book in the works anywhere?

Apparently I’m not the first to ask this question. Judging from the many comments to this post, about half the folks think it’s pointless, everything is available in the WordPress Codex and other online sources. On the other hand, a substantial fraction think a book would nevertheless be helpful, either because they like having a printed reference, or they want someone to organize all this information in a straightforward package. As for myself, I’d like a book for both reasons.

I can’t help notice that the Spaces book is being published by Microsoft Press. Microsoft has had its own publishing arm for a long time, at least since the mid ’80s, and it seems like their software has done pretty well. My point is that a book is traditionally a basic component of marketing any sophisticated software. Maybe that time is passing, but I’m not sure it’s past yet.

There was a database package, Omnis, that was developed initially for the Mac, and stayed in development for many years. At one point a few years ago I looked into it, but couldn’t get past the fact that after all those years, as far as I could tell it still didn’t have a single substantial book published about it. I just didn’t feel comfortable making an investment in such an important type of software like that.

WordPress seems to be growing in popularity anyway, but it still might help to have a book on it. Considering all the arcane programming topics that get written about, the lack of a book is surprising. I’m going to try to get what I need out of the Codex, which does seem well organized.

In recent years, for most regular folks the standard way of starting to learn (or evaluate) sophisticated software has been to find a book about it, maybe one of the proliferating Dummies or O’Reilly titles, or some other publisher’s, to help get yourself down the initial learning curve. If we’re going to move to online-only documentation, which may be OK, then we need to make up for the marketing shortfall by initiating an appropriate way to point newcomers to the proper starting point.

I suggest the WordPress software have some kind of built-in link to the Codex Main Page that clearly indicates to anyone that lands upon a WordPress blog where they should go to get started. Of course, folks could modify this default setup if they want, but if most every blog pointed uniformly to the correct starting point, then folks would get to the Codex even before they ever start wondering about a book.

In this case, online documentation might actually be preferable to a book, from a marketing perspective. But every little extra difficulty that a potential “customer” has to overcome is so costly to a marketing effort, and every point of confusion or uncertainty presents such a difficulty. Right now, even the WordPress Development Blog, as good as it is, doesn’t make this plain enough.

Geeks will think I am totally nit-picking about this, but considering how fast blogging is growing, and how much work has already been put into WordPress, it would be a shame for people to pass it over for a less capable solution. Blogsome isn’t worried about overstating the obvious, and puts an ad to their starting point twice on each blog page, both prominently on the side and at the bottom. The link should be a distinct one, saying something like, “Get started blogging with WordPress right here.” If we all added that to our WordPress blogs, I bet WordPress would grow even faster.

It’s been a very busy month and I’ve got a lot of things to write about, mostly small items worth mentioning. Hopefully I can get to several of these over the next few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about is what effect the rapid growth in investor interest in MySpace is going to have on other social network and blogging sites.

When the business press writes about social networking, they usually identify three sites - MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga - as the big three. I’ve really only spent much time on Xanga, where I have my site AeroGo.

AeroGo is the site I’m most interested in driving traffic to, and so inevitably I’ve been wondering how much the increased investor interest is likely to impact Xanga. They seem like an obvious candidate for acquisition, considering the valuation MySpace got from News Corp.

Well, today when I looked on AeroGo, instead of the usual message asking me to upgrade to Xanga Premium, there’s this:

“WE’RE HIRING!

Xanga is looking for a few good programmers and systems people to join the Xanga Team. Click here to apply. ”

This is an encouraging sign, I guess, that the Xanga folks are looking to increase the offerings of their site. It seems to me that there’s certainly more potential there, especially with the Blogrings, though these need to be cleaned up and tended to some extent, to get the worst of the silly stuff out.

One thing that bothered me about Xanga was the seemingly exclusive nature of a social networking site, i.e., that it was only for casual/social and not more interest/topic-oriented interaction. I wanted to do something specific to aerospace, and at least to some extent network with people interested in this topic, but it seemed almost too “serious” for a social networking site.

So far, AeroGo seems to have been pretty well received by the members of various Xanga aerospace-related blogrings (see to the left of my page for some of the best). I’ve even had a few very nice and grateful comments, which were certainly encouraging.

As I’ve noted, I think there’s a lot more potential with sites like Xanga and MySpace. MySpace apparently is oriented mainly toward music and dating (though the latter may prove problematic, and the site is now in the news frequently over concerns in this area). Facebook is positioned around college, and now high school, communities. Xanga obviously needs its own particular niche as well.

In this regard, I was surprised to read that Xanga’s goal initially was to provide a place for writers to “publish their work on the Net.” Now I wonder if perhaps I had Xanga figured out right after all.

Of course, Xanga has limitations, and I’m now working on a more extensive hosted AeroGo site, though I’ll keep AeroGo Xanga as a way to connect with those who are interested. Nevertheless, I wonder if Xanga’s best focus would be as a topical networking site, for hobbies, education and careers, rather than music or school.

Another thing I’ve been suspecting, but don’t really know how to confirm, is that more folks beyond the college years are getting interested in social networking sites, and that many are feeling more comfortable with Xanga. This is something investors might want to consider, especially since the out-of-school population is a lot bigger and generally has more spending power.