Musings & Meanderings

It would appear, based on the types of social networks that have grown and flourished, that single purpose networks for intangibles are currently among the most successful. Intangibles junkies for music, photos, video, news, all-things-tech, and all-things-geek are achieving union and provide limited but powerful examples of how the sum can deliver more than the parts. Rating quality via popularity does deliver value, but mostly in a superficial manner.

Purely social interactive groups on the internet blossom and fade. RL connection oriented groups, whether for dating, or business, can achieve longer term stability. Smaller special interest groups can remain vigorous and survive providing they are led by dedicated and altruistic individuals who can put out flash fires (ie. personality clashes) and who don’t burn out. Each of these also has natural limits. Wikipedia is an interesting exception in the sub-set group of communal information sharing, with a substantial potential as yet not realized.

In which direction will the web grow? I see a couple of common goals being pursued by startups and serial entrepreneurs.

The first is joining lots of popular new things together. This sometimes includes improvements, but more commonly translates into creating coalitions of intangibles junkies. Some targets are user focused such as having your music, video, email and organizer all in one place, and others product-sorting focused like mashups or aggregators.

The second is quality focused, including human approved content. These efforts are usually welcome and lauded, but naturally limited. There remain plenty of niches to be commandeered in this area, but the gulf represented by costly man hours and recalcitrant tech advancement still imposes severe limits on growth.

Artificial intelligence applied to data, with the primary goal on the web being refinement of search functions, continues to occupy much effort with little result. It is highly likely that real advances in this area will be developed privately, and possibly by governments, where big investment can create insulated and long term development environments oblivious to annual returns.

The only big game in town that I’m seeing on the web, a game to which most of the ‘entrepreneurial’ efforts are aimed (whether intentionally or not), is media, which translates into advertising dollars. Certainly there are ecommerce startups, but the vast majority of these are imitations of what already exists. In the physical world, locations and traffic are fractured, so new competition is immediately visible to consumers. This is not the case on the web, where the endless re-inventions of eBay or Amazon have no way to obtain enough visibility to penetrate the primary traffic flow. New translation of a successful RL business into a web offering is showing, occasionally, the most creative efforts here.

The thing that strikes me about the current efforts is that they are so much focused on tech linked to the commodity of attention and so little on content creation. Creating new ways to use, apply, and put together the technology, make it a popular happening, and then translating traffic into dollar value seems to be the song of the day. Can this really be because there is no need or desire for more and higher quality content?

As long as the primary focus in web development remains on tech, with content being an almost tertiary byproduct of human involvement, there is relatively little new value being created for us individually or collectively. Finding the best of what there is more easily is a worthwhile endeavor, but is promoting quality really incompatible with the surge in quantity?

The single biggest phenomenon that I did not include above is blogging, which both spans and underlies a lot of the categories. MySpace is blogging. Digg is blogging. Search engines, such as Sphere, have evolved for blogging, and media is moving in determinedly on blogging. What these examples highlight, though, is the view that blogging is being valued as just one more collection of or connection to eyeballs in which the value, and therefore financial viability, is in the buying and selling of human attention.

Blogging itself, however, has as much in common with Wikipedia as it does with social networking. There have long been dedicated individuals on the web whose efforts to share knowledge, information, learning, and passions form a solid foundation for the very existence of this place. Blogging, by making it free and easy to publish, has multiplied their numbers. There is a fractured and scattered resource here that could and should be much further enabled.

They sound so idealistic and selfless, those sharers and bloggers, don’t they? …academics and socialists one would assume… wrongly.

Among their (our) numbers, are hundreds of thousands, a number which could become millions in a heartbeat, of experienced business people who are sophisticated consumers as well as lifelong students and de facto teachers. People are traders. We transact with each other through all our waking hours in one form or another. Exchanging useful information for like rather than financial consideration is a daily business practice as well.

We should be building a transactional web, where people can both offer and find value. Building flexible structures for financial consideration (when appropriate) into it on a micro-cosmic level is also essential. When individuals can freely and fully determine value for themselves in every human transaction we have the very definition of free enterprise and a solid foundation for community values. By characterizing web content as only free or paid, creating no online societal mechanisms for content valuation, we are doing ourselves a harm that will, perhaps, ultimately disable the full potential of this medium.

We all love getting something for nothing, but the vast majority of us also happily transact for whatever is of highest value to us. The power of this medium is in its scope. That scope can both create value, as in the item from the ancestor’s attic finding a 20x price via eBay, and lower price dramatically via plain old fashioned economies of scale. Much as I miss the learned and often delightfully eccentric small book shop owners of my youth, I also do not regret the translation of segments of the publishing industry into forms which offer access to an important works for a lower cost based on scale. Those people who owned those bookshops of yore …they’re unlikely to be techies… there should be more enablement and equivalent places on the web for such troves of interesting knowledge.

What about a public trust of knowledge? Even without financial means or access to the best education, I can still learn as much as I have the appetite for through access to libraries and museums. Successful people in a free society do give back, even many of the most materialistic of us. Creating a web focused on individual valuation of quality, I propose, would swiftly and greatly enhance the contributions and content of, for example, our wikis, by virtue of the attention it will attract. A business will use excess profits to grow itself whereas an individual will commonly use excess profits to benefit their community and those around them.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Web Development, Perspective, Internet Society, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.