I’m still in the early stages of testing the new version of Windows Messenger, so nothing to report yet other than I really like the interface. I do have a small number of beta invitations to pass out.
If you want one, email me at [myfirstname]atnewsome.org.
iMedia Connection has a post today about the five trends in consumer generated content from the last year that will have a profound impact on our internet experience in 2006 and beyond. Here are my thoughts on each:
1. Social networking comes of age
I have played around with Yahoo360 a little and have visited a couple of MySpace pages. I’m far too old and uninterested to care about Facebook. On the one hand, I tend to dismiss these pages as cyber-playgrounds for kids and young people. But the numbers indicate that a lot of people are using these sites. I suppose it will be a powerful trend, but I’d be surprised if much of the buzz is generated by the over-25 set. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love some sort of private internet space where I and my close friends and distant family could keep connected. But even if I found it or built it, no one else would use it. I just don’t think there’s enough desire and know-how to make these pages work for the parent and grandparent generations.
2. Wikipedia becomes the number one reference site.
I absolutely believe this. Wikipedia has been my first and nearly exclusive reference site for months. My prediction is that some of the current closed reference sites will become free, ad-supported sites in 2006 in an effort to stay relevant. Might work, but they better hurry.
3. Flickr and tagging take off.
Everyone who knows me knows I am deeply in love with Flickr. It should and will own the photo storage and community market. Tags are just a fancy word for keywords. I use tags on almost all my posts and I believe they will become an almost mandatory part of most web content. That’s a good thing. But keywords aren’t new- they’ve just been repackaged in a sexy package.
4. Blogs, blogs, blogs.
Yes, the move to the edge we’ve talked about is being driven primarily by blogs. This is a good trend that I believe took off in 2005 and will keep rising in 2006 and beyond.
5. Video search goes viral.
Maybe, but does anyone really search the net for videos? If there’s a good one (like the Narnia rap), I’ll find out about it via someone’s blog post. I’m just not sold on video search. If Thomas Hawk (who I predict will give me a link in 2006 if I keep applying blogger lie number 9) is right and Flickr does video, Flickr will own that market as well. Anyone else think Google knows about this and that’s why it’s falling all over itself to get out there first?
I guess Buzz Bruggeman was mighty happy on Sunday when his boy J.J. Reddick got to experience winning a game at Wake Forest for the first time ever. This loss won’t do much to increase the WFU hat quotient.
I’m going to explain that loss in three words. It’s about recruiting.
I’m not trashing Wake’s players. Wake has some great players that compare well to most other teams in the country. Teams that actually have to recruit players, that is.
If you follow college basketball recruiting you know that Duke can generally select the recruits it signs. Take a look at the recruting databases on Scout.Com or any major college sports network and you’ll see blue chip prospects with offers from tons of schools with a notation that the kid has “medium interest” in those schools. Then there’s Duke with a “no offer” notation and an indication that the player has “high interest” in the Blue Devils. Usually this means these kids are waiting to see if Duke will “select” them. Duke doesn’t recruit, it selects.
So think about it this way. Let’s say we decide to play basketball or soccer or croquet or red rover or whatever. And let’s say that rather than take turns picking our team, I get to pick my entire team first. In that case, I should win almost every game, right? In fact, if I don’t it’s the result of either a failure on my part to pick the right people or a tremendous effort on the part of you or your team.
When you think about it that way, it says a lot about Skip Prosser and the WFU team that J.J. Reddick took 4 years to win at Wake.
Here are my do and don’t links for 1/10/06:
One I Do:
Gapingvoid hits the nail on the head. Number 3 is my favorite, because bloggers are people and people generally want to talk more than they want to listen. We post with our mouths and we link with our ears.
One I Don’t:
If I got a write up in Wired or the NYT, you better believe you’d read about it here, so I am all over that, but Jason has been caught in the anaconda-like grip of the self-congratulatory hug.
Amy Gahran posted an interesting and well thought out response to my earlier post about the difficulty in growing a new blog. She sets forth her strategy for building a new blog and, in a comment to my post, asked if I have ever tried the things she suggests.
First, a little about her strategy for new blogs.
One of her core strategies is to find your focus and identify your target audience. That’s a very sound strategy. For example, if I really wanted to “own” an area, I’d find some narrow topic that I really understand and I’d write and write and write about it. Eventually, I might own the area, but it would be a small area tightly directed at one topic. We did that with ACCBoards.Com and it worked. My attempt at expansion into audio video message boards was a complete failure, to put it mildly. So I am a believer in keeping your focus.
The thing about blogs in general and my blog in particular, however, is that blogs are a reflection of their owners. If I want to own a space, whether for ego or monetary purposes, finding and directing my focus ought to be job one. On the other hand, if I simply want to write about and promote discussion about whatever interests me at the moment, focus becomes a little more challenging, since it will undoubtedly change as my interests change. I am interested in a lot of different stuff. Tech, gadgets, music, kids, and an ebb and flow of other stuff. And, as my wife will attest, whatever project intrigues me today may bore me to tears next month. Maybe an evolving focus works- a lot of the blogs I enjoy the most are sort of random like that, or maybe there is a built-in limitation inherent in my approach that will always send the rock rolling back down the hill.
On those days when I imagine Newsome.Org really taking off, it’s based on a three part process:
1) I actually do have a pretty unique combination of experiences, both tech related and non-tech related. And while I’m not going to paste my resume all over the place in some stomp my foot effort to convince people to listen to what I have to say, hopefully these experiences will allow me to write stuff that over time people find interesting and worthwhile. It’s more of a (hopefully) perspective advantage than a focus advantage. At least on my optimistic days.
2) If I keep writing consistently, at some point I will have been around a “long time” and more people will feel comfortable including me in the conversation by linking to me, and responding when I link to them. This sustained approach is exactly what Amy recommends in her comment to my post. My experience so far suggests that this approach will work to some extent. The big question is to what extent. While I get very discouraged when link post after link post (meaning a post that says “so and so has a post about xyz”) show up in the discussion links at Memeorandum, while my longer, more analytical posts get ignored (they used to show up regularly, but no more), I do have quite a few readers and my traffic has increased pretty consistently. But it’s hard. And it’s uphill. And sometimes I get tired.
3) I hope to find a group of other bloggers to engage in cross-blog conversations, like Amy talks about here. A virtual watercooler of cross-linking blogs can help build a critical mass. Richard Querin, Brad Kellet and I have started doing this a little. It really helps when you feel like you’re working with other people, as opposed to all by yourself in an isolated corner of cyberspace.
So, yes, I am at least trying to try the sustained effort. I can’t say for sure that it’s going to get me there, but I am making progress. What I don’t know is how long I can keep plugging away without some sort of psychological payoff- like a link here and there; getting on some blogrolls; that sort of thing. I guess as long as I’m having fun, I’ll keep doing it.
And now back upon my soapbox for another sermon on my favorite topic:
The fact remains that the people who believe they are somehow going to make a lot of money by doing a blog are guarding the door to the club too closely. I’m not trying to get rich by blogging, and, candidly, I think blogging to make money is sort of like playing hoops to get to the NBA- it takes the fun out of it and ultimately leads to disappointment. For me blogs are about conversations, hearing and being heard. An expanded, combined, evolved and more useful version of message boards and personal websites.
But there’s one thing I know: add the prospect of money to any equation and things get very complicated. Newsome’s Rule. Write it down.
Anyhow, Amy writes a great piece on blog building, and I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the discussion. Richard, Brad, anyone? What do you think?
This is the another installment in my series of favorite records.
After Eric Clapton toured with and later became a member of Delaney & Bonnie, he and some other former members of that band began touring as a new band and gathered in August of 1970, with Duane Allman sitting in, to make a record. The result was Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Many believe this is Clapton’s finest work, and I agree.
Everyone knows the title track, and it’s a great one. But to know this record only for that song is a mistake, because it contains several other masterpieces, including a blistering version of Have You Ever Loved a Woman and the wonderful Clapton penned Bell Bottom Blues.
Duane Allman’s unparalleled slide guitar sounds as great on this record as any Allman Brothers record.
The under-appreciated force on this record, however, is keyboardist Bobby Whitlock. He co-wrote five of the best songs on the record (including Anyday, the second best song on the record, behind Layla) and wrote one of the best assorted love songs, Thorn Tree in the Garden.
This record is an obvious must-have for any music collection.
Here’s a little bonus full of awesome.
Technorati Tags:
top 50 albums, record reviews
Henry Blodget has a post about Google’s stock price that brings back some bad memories from the late nineties and early oughts.
Back in the nineties, I became a great investor like everyone else who bought tech stocks. I made some nutty (paper) returns for a few years, got quoted in a few investing articles, was selected for SmartMoney Magazine’s Investor Panel and got on the cover of Money Magazine. Then I lost all of the paper profit when the tech bubble burst. I also lost the deal to sell ACCBoards.Com for seven figures and a bunch of stock, but that’s another sad story.
I think Google rocks. I really do. But it’s about more than rocking; it’s about making money. And Google trades at a PE Ratio in the hundreds. Back in the day, I would have thought about taking a small position just to join the fun and see what happens. Not today. I learned my lesson.
Some of the stocks I can think of off the top of my head that I rode all the way to (or near) zero are Exodus, Enron, MCI, 360 Networks and JDS Uniphase. Yes, I made a lot of money on Cisco, Applied Materials and eBay (I still own those at a very low split-adjusted price), but it wasn’t all that long ago that my losses on the bad buys were greater than my profit on the good ones. Buying stocks is like playing golf: one bad pick won’t kill you, but three bad holes will. If you make a handful of triple bogies, it doesn’t really matter how you do on the rest of the holes.
I think Google rocks, but I’m sitting this one out.
I’ve started beta testing Windows Live Messenger, the forthcoming new edition of Windows Messenger.
I’ve never been more than an occasional user of instant messaging programs because nobody I know uses them. In theory, I like the idea of instant messaging as a way to keep in regular touch with family members across the country. Once again, I wish I could get my extended family to try it.
I’m going to give Windows Live Messenger a try for at least the next month or so and see how things go. I use jknpublic@hotmail.com as my email address for instant messaging purposes if you want to give me a shout.
Once I’ve played around with it, I’ll post my thoughts about the features and improvements.
I saw a note at PVR Wire that Jim Cramer, who I generally like, has said that he believes TIVO’s stock price will “flatline now.” While this should not be surprising to anyone who has watched DirecTV abandon TIVO and TIVO flail around wildly looking for a lifeline, it’s another sign that TIVO continues its march to the edge of the cliff.
TIVO has been forced to align itself with the cable companies who probably view this as a way to entice some current satellite users back to cable. This may keep TIVO alive for a while, until the cable companies either abandon TIVO and develop their own, probably inferior, box or wait for TIVO to be teetering on the edge of the cliff and buy it cheaply.
Someone will buy TIVO at some point, the only question is when and for how much.
Technorati Tags:
tivo
I was very happy to see this morning that I got another one of the presents on my Christmas List. John Perry Barlow has a new blog entry. Even better, he indicates he will write more blog posts and emails in 2006. That is great news.
Not only is John a brilliant songwriter, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one of the most intelligent and interesting (not a terribly common combination) writers I have ever read, he is a really nice guy. When Cassidy was born in 1998 and named after a song John co-wrote, I emailed him, told him about Cassidy and sent him a photo. He wrote Cassidy not one but 3 emails over the next year or so, just checking in to see how she was doing. Those emails will mean as much to Cassidy when she grows up as they do to me now.
I hope to read a lot of John’s writing in 2006. Welcome back, my friend!
The final count on my list seems to be 9 out of 10 (never made it on Dwight Silverman‘s blogroll). I’ll take those numbers any time. Especially if one of the 9 is more posts at BarlowFriendz.
Technorati Tags:
john perry barlow, blogs
Newsome.Org 