A belated Happy Australia Day to everyone! (for those who don't know it was actually on the 26th of January)
With beautiful summer weather, Bondi Beach sea temperatures back up from the ridiculous 14C of last weekend to a reasonable 22C, OK surf conditions, 2 one-day international cricket games, the Australian Open Tennis Finals and a trip down the South Coast, I haven't really had the time or desire to keep up to date with my readings and posts.
But it's back to work today, so I'll see what interesting things I can find to make up for the silence.
Monday 29 January 2007
Monday 22 January 2007
How DuggSpace/The Rival Project Could Be The Bellwether For An Innovation Revolution
There was a recent, seemingly innocuous, post over at Digg where a reader suggested that if Digg could be created for $200 then maybe the Digg community could work together to create their own version of MySpace. The working name is 'DuggSpace' although for obvious legal reasons, it won't stay like that.
Mashable thinks it’s destined to fail. I think that's being short-sighted. There are obvious issues with the ambiguity of many aspects at the moment, but it must be said that it is VERY early stages and this stuff can still be sorted out. In any case, Duggspaces's success or failure is relatively inconsequential in comparison to the importance of the fact that it was started at all.
Let me explain…
Digg is a loosely collaborative site, whose function is not inherently social but, rather, to aggregate and filter “news”. Despite this, people are starting to organise themselves, within the comments section of the above mentioned post, into a group with the aim of creating a new and better version of MySpace.
Yep, that’s the same, 6th most visited site on the whole Internet (according to Alexa), MySpace you probably thought I was talking about.
Why is this so important?
Firstly, because what happened was never meant to happen on Digg. There wasn’t even a proper means for these people to organise themselves, so they innovated and used the comments to a post. This tells me that if you nurture collaboration, even in a loose sense, then there is the potential for emergent groups to arise and take that collaboration to new depths in the pursuit of common innovative interests.
Secondly, this group of largely unknown-to-each-other digg users want to work together to improve on one of the most popular websites on the Internet. This tells me that if companies don’t start engaging with their customers effectively in an attempt to promote and benefit from outside innovation then either those customers will bypass the company and create the stuff they want by themselves, or forward thinking competitors will engage with the customers and take them away from you. In each scenario the end-result for the incumbent is the same – 1 or more customers less.
Thirdly, because this happened on Digg. Sure, collaborative software development has been happening for years all over the net, but these people chose to use Digg rather than SourceForge or one of those other sites to kick things off. Digg (74th most visited) and Sourceforge (83rd most visited) are about as popular as each other in terms of visits, but sourceforge is a very specific software development collaboration site and Digg is, while having a strong technology focus at the moment, more generalist in appeal. This tells me that if you give people of different backgrounds and interests a place to hang out and some basic tools, innovation will emerge. Now, if you give them more than just a place to hang out and more than just basic tools, imagine what they might come up with…
This is not a joke. Emergent groups and outside innovation are coming up in a big way and faster than you probably think. The question is how many companies are ready for what’s about to happen?
EDIT: looks like DuggSpace may have changed its name to 'The Rival Project' for now.
Mashable thinks it’s destined to fail. I think that's being short-sighted. There are obvious issues with the ambiguity of many aspects at the moment, but it must be said that it is VERY early stages and this stuff can still be sorted out. In any case, Duggspaces's success or failure is relatively inconsequential in comparison to the importance of the fact that it was started at all.
Let me explain…
Digg is a loosely collaborative site, whose function is not inherently social but, rather, to aggregate and filter “news”. Despite this, people are starting to organise themselves, within the comments section of the above mentioned post, into a group with the aim of creating a new and better version of MySpace.
Yep, that’s the same, 6th most visited site on the whole Internet (according to Alexa), MySpace you probably thought I was talking about.
Why is this so important?
Firstly, because what happened was never meant to happen on Digg. There wasn’t even a proper means for these people to organise themselves, so they innovated and used the comments to a post. This tells me that if you nurture collaboration, even in a loose sense, then there is the potential for emergent groups to arise and take that collaboration to new depths in the pursuit of common innovative interests.
Secondly, this group of largely unknown-to-each-other digg users want to work together to improve on one of the most popular websites on the Internet. This tells me that if companies don’t start engaging with their customers effectively in an attempt to promote and benefit from outside innovation then either those customers will bypass the company and create the stuff they want by themselves, or forward thinking competitors will engage with the customers and take them away from you. In each scenario the end-result for the incumbent is the same – 1 or more customers less.
Thirdly, because this happened on Digg. Sure, collaborative software development has been happening for years all over the net, but these people chose to use Digg rather than SourceForge or one of those other sites to kick things off. Digg (74th most visited) and Sourceforge (83rd most visited) are about as popular as each other in terms of visits, but sourceforge is a very specific software development collaboration site and Digg is, while having a strong technology focus at the moment, more generalist in appeal. This tells me that if you give people of different backgrounds and interests a place to hang out and some basic tools, innovation will emerge. Now, if you give them more than just a place to hang out and more than just basic tools, imagine what they might come up with…
This is not a joke. Emergent groups and outside innovation are coming up in a big way and faster than you probably think. The question is how many companies are ready for what’s about to happen?
EDIT: looks like DuggSpace may have changed its name to 'The Rival Project' for now.
Monday 15 January 2007
Where's Umair???
Anyone know where Umair Haque from Bubble Generation is these days?
It's officially been one month since his last post and I find myself going back to his site, day after day, and being confronted with the same Pay(Pain)Pal story I've now read about 30 times.
Throw us a freakin' bone Umair... :)
It's officially been one month since his last post and I find myself going back to his site, day after day, and being confronted with the same Pay(Pain)Pal story I've now read about 30 times.
Throw us a freakin' bone Umair... :)
Saturday 13 January 2007
Vertical Search - I still don't get it!
The idea of vertical search is not new. For those who have never heard of it here's the wikipedia definition.
For those who have heard of it, you'll know that the hype has been around for a while. Om Malik wrote an article about it in March of 2005 - almost 2 years ago. That's an absolute eternity in terms of the new web app world but a quick search will find a plethora of reputable sources still claiming it to be a Google-killer and the next "biggest thing ever in the history of mankind".
Now, don't get me wrong, I get the concept - after all, more targeted search results is something that everyone would probably be interested in. That's not my issue.
What I don't get is why it is being touted as revolutionary.
If vertical search becomes popular, this is what I believe will happen: -
1. So many entrants will flood the market that search will become hugely fragmented. As a result, people will have to use horizontal search engines, like google, to find possible vertical search engines to use.
2. This will result in new entrants creating search aggregators that allow you to search groups of vertical search engines - essentially creating a kind of personalised search page based on your interests etc.
3. As people start to personalise these aggregators they will add more and more vertical search engines. To understand why this would happen think of how many different things you have searched for recently and how many different vertical search engines you would have to include on your "personal page" to cover them all. The alternative would be to just pick and choose particular search engines for each different search, but honestly, who could be bothered except in the rarest of cases?
The end result is that, while sometimes producing less relevant results, horizontal search engines will remain the easiest way to find stuff. From my experience, human nature dictates that people will gravitate towards that rather than seeking the diminishing returns associated with the effort needed to get more and more specific search results out of the many decentralised vertical search engines.
There are also some arguments that vertical search is better for advertisers, but last time I checked, advertisers went to where the people are, not the other way round. The whole "advertiser-preferred" vertical search concept is predicated on the notion that people will change their current behaviour and overcome the inertia of familiarity for an arguably better solution. If i was in the search or advertising game, that's not something I would be betting the farm on.
Also, vertical search advocates seem to conveniently forget the fact that the current horizontal search engines will not simply lay down and die in the face of competition. As an example, technorati has been super-successful in the blog search category, so what did google do? Introduced Google Blog Search. The idea of a popular horizontal search engine that can be made more vertical-like when required seems like a far simpler solution for the average user than the fragmented vertical search model.
If/when a google killer does appear it will be based on a new type of search paradigm, something as revolutionary, and maybe as simple, as page rank but not on a collection of niche players.
Time will tell if I've gotten it completely wrong, but i suspect the chances are greater that 2 further years down the track people will still be talking about the potential of vertical search rather than using vertical search engines as their main source of information
For those who have heard of it, you'll know that the hype has been around for a while. Om Malik wrote an article about it in March of 2005 - almost 2 years ago. That's an absolute eternity in terms of the new web app world but a quick search will find a plethora of reputable sources still claiming it to be a Google-killer and the next "biggest thing ever in the history of mankind".
Now, don't get me wrong, I get the concept - after all, more targeted search results is something that everyone would probably be interested in. That's not my issue.
What I don't get is why it is being touted as revolutionary.
If vertical search becomes popular, this is what I believe will happen: -
1. So many entrants will flood the market that search will become hugely fragmented. As a result, people will have to use horizontal search engines, like google, to find possible vertical search engines to use.
2. This will result in new entrants creating search aggregators that allow you to search groups of vertical search engines - essentially creating a kind of personalised search page based on your interests etc.
3. As people start to personalise these aggregators they will add more and more vertical search engines. To understand why this would happen think of how many different things you have searched for recently and how many different vertical search engines you would have to include on your "personal page" to cover them all. The alternative would be to just pick and choose particular search engines for each different search, but honestly, who could be bothered except in the rarest of cases?
The end result is that, while sometimes producing less relevant results, horizontal search engines will remain the easiest way to find stuff. From my experience, human nature dictates that people will gravitate towards that rather than seeking the diminishing returns associated with the effort needed to get more and more specific search results out of the many decentralised vertical search engines.
There are also some arguments that vertical search is better for advertisers, but last time I checked, advertisers went to where the people are, not the other way round. The whole "advertiser-preferred" vertical search concept is predicated on the notion that people will change their current behaviour and overcome the inertia of familiarity for an arguably better solution. If i was in the search or advertising game, that's not something I would be betting the farm on.
Also, vertical search advocates seem to conveniently forget the fact that the current horizontal search engines will not simply lay down and die in the face of competition. As an example, technorati has been super-successful in the blog search category, so what did google do? Introduced Google Blog Search. The idea of a popular horizontal search engine that can be made more vertical-like when required seems like a far simpler solution for the average user than the fragmented vertical search model.
If/when a google killer does appear it will be based on a new type of search paradigm, something as revolutionary, and maybe as simple, as page rank but not on a collection of niche players.
Time will tell if I've gotten it completely wrong, but i suspect the chances are greater that 2 further years down the track people will still be talking about the potential of vertical search rather than using vertical search engines as their main source of information
Friday 12 January 2007
Visualising Data - 2007's big thing?
There's a great post over at Guy Kawasaki's blog about data visualisation.
This is something I've been looking at for a while and I'm suprised that it's never reached the magical Tipping Point. It's definitely something we're going to be using at One Eye Deer and with all the data that's flying around these days, I feel it will soon be an important feature of many other innovative sites.
The good news about that is the more people there are that are mucking around with data visualisation, the more likely it is that the field will advance rapidly from one that is highly specialised into one that is understood by, and relevant to, my mum and most other people in the general, non-techcrunch reading, public.
I also expect that in-line with the increased use will come better tools to make the process of representing all types of data/text etc. visually much, much easier. (If anyone knows of any easy to use data visulation tools - please let me know)
I've got some pretty good links on this stuff - but I can't remember where I've put them (Note to self - need to get into the whole del.icio.us thing so my bookmarks aren't spread over 3 computers). Once I find them I'll put them up for anyone who may be interested.
I know it's only the 2nd week of 2007 and that labelling data visulalisation as one of 2007's big things is a massive call, but when people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki are starting to focus on a topic, you know that it's close to tipping.
Keep an eye on this one...
EDIT: Here's one site that has heaps of interesting visualisation links
This is something I've been looking at for a while and I'm suprised that it's never reached the magical Tipping Point. It's definitely something we're going to be using at One Eye Deer and with all the data that's flying around these days, I feel it will soon be an important feature of many other innovative sites.
The good news about that is the more people there are that are mucking around with data visualisation, the more likely it is that the field will advance rapidly from one that is highly specialised into one that is understood by, and relevant to, my mum and most other people in the general, non-techcrunch reading, public.
I also expect that in-line with the increased use will come better tools to make the process of representing all types of data/text etc. visually much, much easier. (If anyone knows of any easy to use data visulation tools - please let me know)
I've got some pretty good links on this stuff - but I can't remember where I've put them (Note to self - need to get into the whole del.icio.us thing so my bookmarks aren't spread over 3 computers). Once I find them I'll put them up for anyone who may be interested.
I know it's only the 2nd week of 2007 and that labelling data visulalisation as one of 2007's big things is a massive call, but when people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki are starting to focus on a topic, you know that it's close to tipping.
Keep an eye on this one...
EDIT: Here's one site that has heaps of interesting visualisation links
One Eye Deer Update
Well - we're several months into development and it looks like it will be one or two more until we have a product ready to release.
We're fans of lots of the principles in 37 Signals' excellent book "Getting Real" so we're trying to keep it as simple as possible for now, which is helping move things along.
As we move closer to launch it's great to see stories like Nic Brisbourne’s "The next generation of social networks will have a purpose" (thanks to Sam at Vecosys for highlighting it) which hint at the fact that we might be on the right track.
More updates to come, as long as the good surf and Sydney's summer weather don't distract us too much...
We're fans of lots of the principles in 37 Signals' excellent book "Getting Real" so we're trying to keep it as simple as possible for now, which is helping move things along.
As we move closer to launch it's great to see stories like Nic Brisbourne’s "The next generation of social networks will have a purpose" (thanks to Sam at Vecosys for highlighting it) which hint at the fact that we might be on the right track.
More updates to come, as long as the good surf and Sydney's summer weather don't distract us too much...
Thursday 11 January 2007
It Starts Here...
This has been some time in the making, so I'll keep in the intro short and hopefully let the posts speak for themselves.
One Eye Deer is a project we're working on that will hopefully lead to big changes in the way that innovation happens within organisations of all sizes.
I guess you could say it fits within the whole Web 2.0 thing, whatever your definition of that may be, so that will obviously be a focus of this blog...but not the only one.
The official journey starts here. We hope you enjoy the ride...
One Eye Deer is a project we're working on that will hopefully lead to big changes in the way that innovation happens within organisations of all sizes.
I guess you could say it fits within the whole Web 2.0 thing, whatever your definition of that may be, so that will obviously be a focus of this blog...but not the only one.
The official journey starts here. We hope you enjoy the ride...
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