The New Wisdom of the Web
Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.

By Steven Levy and Brad Stone
Newsweek

April 3, 2006 issue - A little over two years ago, even the most sensitive entrepreneurial radar could not pick out two pairs of people on opposite ends of the West Coast starting companies that would make plenty out of nothing. In Santa Monica, Calif., dot-com survivors Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson were hatching the idea of taking on biggies like AOL and Yahoo with a Web site consisting only of stuff that people would bring to it. And up in Vancouver, B.C., married collaborators Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were just figuring out that the online game they were developing might work better as a way for people to share their digital photos with each other.

Now both fledgling companies are leading a charge of innovators making hay out of the Internet's ability to empower citizens and enrich those who help with the empowerment. The southern California guys head MySpace, the prime hangout for 65 million (mostly young) people, and thousands of rock bands, movie stars and marketers begging for their attention. Canadian-born Flickr, by building a 2.5 million-member community solely around a passion for sharing photos, has become a poster child on how a well-executed Net effort can make big changes in people's habits. Welcome to the new tech boom.

Oh, and unlike the old boom, where entrepreneurs couldn't get to the IPO broker's office quick enough, these crafty duos have already taken the money and stayed. Yahoo has snapped up Flickr to bolster the portfolio of services it offers to its half-billion users. And the new owner of MySpace is that wild and crazy (like, um, a fox) digital punkster, Rupert Murdoch—hedging his bets on what might be the next Net-powered media upheaval.

The massive success of MySpace and the exemplary strategy of Flickr are milestones in a new high-tech wave reminiscent of the craziness of the early dot-com days. This rebooting owes everything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to the point where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the '90s. The generic term for this movement, especially among the hundreds of new companies jamming the waiting rooms of venture-capital offices, is Web 2.0, but that's misleading—some supposedly Web 1.0 companies like eBay and Google have been clueful about this all along. A more fitting description comes from Mary Hodder, the CEO of a social-video-sharing start-up called Dabble. (Since Dabble has not yet launched, I can't explain exactly what that means.) "This is the live Web," she says.

What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory. Thanks to our activity, the Web has replaced phone books, and is in the process of replacing phones. It's the place that answers our questions in four tenths of a second and ships us funny clips that mix the "Back to the Future" guys with the "Brokeback Mountain" soundtrack. It's the main news source for the non-arthritic population, and a megaphone for those who make their own media. As we keep offloading our activities to the Web and adding previously unmanageable or unthinkable new pursuits, it's fair to say that our everyday exist-ence is a network effect. That has made some splendid opportunities for smart, nimble new companies, and threatened the existence of old ones now afloat in the mainstream.

Have you seen the movie Network lately? It's so prescient - it makes you wonder if Sybil the Soothsayer was able to show the future to Paddy Chayefsky.

The film was made in 1976 (30 years ago) yet baked into the film are an endless number of referances to oil, the Saudi's, the the media's culpability in lulling us to sleep with a numbing stream of pointless headlines, violence, and out of context warnings of danger. Fearmongering has certainly come into its own in 30 years.

I couldn't help but think of Growing Up Gotti as i watched the William Morris agents and the Network business affairs lawyers negotiating ancelary rights. I wonder if anyone has pulled a gun a any of the reality show negotiations that are currently under way?

But perhaps most poignent - Howard Beale's varies rants about the state of the world.

for your reading pleasure (remember, 1976!)

"Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide. Admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened. I just ran out of bullshit."

"Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park!"

"We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell."

"You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal! You do! Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, we are the illusion."

"Right now, there is a whole generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America; there's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?"

"All human beings are becoming humanoids. All over the world, not just in America. We're just getting there faster since we're the most advanced country."

"I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

"All I know is, you've got to get mad! You've got to say: I'm a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!"

I went to see Chris Anderson from Wired interview Craig Venter.

Interesting - on a bunch of levels. First of all, I'm fascinated by the fact that I knew so little about Venter. Chris introduced him as the greatest living scientist... and a I sat up in my chair. I'd known he was the man behind the sequencing of the human genome. And I'd known he'd gotten into a wrestling match with the government over who would do it first. But that's about it.

First - a few headlines. The very first sequence was completed just 10 years ago - so this is all brand new science.

Second - Venter made the point that big science is slow... and that big leaps tend to put everyone's nose out of joint. I hadn't thought about it - but it makes sense.

and Third - that the complex questions about who owns genomics data was pushed to the fore by a government edict that NIH had to patent every discovery before it was published.

Venter is now embarking on two new projects, sequencing the seas, and sequencing the air. (he's collecting samples from a 40 story building in Manhattan - but wouldn't say which one).

this is his new non-profit research foundation

Overall - i found the complexity of his work staggering in it's importance, and equally staggering in how little coverage there has been about its potential impact. (yes, lots on his 'controversies' - they make good copy).

And then finally - back to media (the place I come from). I couldn't help but think about Anderson's Long Tail thesis, and the fact that this conversation was going on without any media capture devices recording it. If Venter will be looked back on as the father of genomics - and his musings about the challenges of getting the human genome sequenced will be of historic significance to medicine, science, energy, and the environment - then what is the long tail value of this kind of material.

I think it's significant - perhaps priceless. Since you can only suppose in the middle of a scientists career how history will treat him in retrospect. What would the value of conversations with Einstein be? Alexander Graham Bell? Louis Pasteur?

In a question and answer session after the talk, someone from the audience asked how Venter felt about the current state of High School Biology Education. He answered that his greatest concern was that recent polls suggest that 60% of American's don't believe in Evolution. He saw that as the ultimate expression of our willingness to ignore science.

Future of Citizen news... five years from now.

I've been reading all the posts about citizen news - and watching as folks like Dan Gilmore jump off the MSM train and begin to launch local blogs. There are some natural things going on - and a likely outcome that is worth considering.

Let's start with Podcasts. I don't own an Ipod (gasp) yes, I know - should. But I don't really have that much time when having ear buds in my head would work out. Anyway, not at this moment.

So it wasn't until I discovered libsyn.com that I figured out what is obvious in hindsight - you don't need an Ipod. Ok, I might get one, in part to get podcasts into my car - but I can listen to them on my laptop. So I did. A whole bunch. And there were three categories. Good ones (well done, interesting, with good voices and good ideas) Ok ones (actually bad, but trying to be good) and Goofs (bad and bad on purpose).

My discovery is that - once my blog reader can sort out podcasts. Once there is good search mechanism. Once the good ones are really good. I'll subscribe and make them part of my media diet.

Which brings me to local news. Right now - local news is pretty bad. Sorry to my friends who toil away at local stations - but it's bad. It doesn't tell me much of what I need to know. And it always leads with car accidents or murders (often in boroughs or towns miles away from where I live). Cable news is better.

But news is local. And local is geographic. And media is mass, and that's the rub. So along comes citizen journalism. Lots of disaffected writers - some of the escapees from mainstream journalism, some of them wane be journalists, some of them kooks. I'm fine with all of them having publishing tools. Just like they had a typewriter and and a mimeograph machine before the web.

But in a few years- once the tools are all in place, and my media diet has some sort of filter/reciever/organizer to get me stuff from lots of places (blogs, vlogs, tv, cable, iptv, podcasts, whatever).

I'm going to filter OUT the 'b' and 'c' level stuff. And I won't be alone. Folks will gravitate to content that is well made, interesting, thoughtful, funny, provocative, engaging, insightful, powerful, - words like that.

And - here's the prediction. Advertisers will PAY to put messages next to their content. And because these messages will be interesting to me (one hopes) I won't mind. I may even pay a fee to subscribe to these content makers.

My point is - citizen journalists are simply what journalists always used to be, distinctly engaged citizens who will... at some point... want to make a living so that they can be citizen journalists full time (rather than in the middle of the night).

This is by no means to say that enterprises like Ohmynews won't be important. Individuals will contribute certainly - but the practice of making content for people won't become an all volunteer affair (like the fire departments in small towns) it will simply evolve as the media ecology and the advertising community figure out how to fund effective, successful local media.

And now we mean local in the true sense of the word. Stories that effect my community. Both my geographic community and my intellectual community. Oh, and my community of hobbies and interests as well.

So the idea that news is facing a time of change is real - and certainly scary for the current keepers of the space. But the idea that allow a new generation of thinkers, storytellers, and even tabloid types to have a bit of bandwidth is going to turn all of us media consumers into mindless consumers of dreck gives far too much credit to the condition of local news as it exists. It can't get much worse.

This months issue of The Nation features a long piece about Al Gore and the launch of "Current". The article points the genisis of the network to Gore's initial interest in UnFiltered, which i think is partly true. Certainly there are a number of things happening in the world that drive media toward user-content, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and such.

But what i think all of the media enterprises trying to link up to user-content seem to miss is that the things that are fueling user-created content are the same things that are undermining mainstream media.

Mass distribution is fundamentally unsatisfying to creators. Would you rather give a speech (or read a poem) in a stadium with a white-hot spotlight blinding you from seeing a crowd of 60,000 or in a place like New York's Town Hall - an intimate room of 350 who can respond, cheer, and even ask questions.

Big media isn't good media.

So Current, or Kyou (san fran), or Adam Curry on Sirus all need to tell content creators why they aren't just fine building their brand, and their own economic future on an internet distribution platform.

Maybe they don't need to be embraced by mass media to feel meaningful.

article | Posted April 28, 2005
Al Gore Gets Down

During a town hall meeting on MTV in 2000, Al Gore dismissed a question about the rapper Mos Def. Throughout his career, Gore viewed hip-hop music, even when practiced by a politically conscious artist like Mos Def, as an undignified form of political expression. "Gandhi once said you must become the change you wish to see in the world," Gore said of hip-hop. "I don't think it's good enough to say, 'Well, we're just reflecting a reality.'"

Can Current be serious and dignified and appealing and popular? "On air, you're faced with the tyranny of the mass media," says Steve Rosenbaum, creator of MTV's UNfiltered, the inspiration for Current's initial vision. "Which is: If you do three pieces--one on the environment in Alaska, one on homeless people in New York and one on teenage girls getting breast implants, guess which one will do better than the others? People, especially those who watch TV, tend to be attracted to less intelligent, coarser, less thoughtful programming."

More

Glad to point you to a post by Dan Gilmore (and interesting discussion that follows) about the use of citizen video from the Republican National Convention and it's use to debunk charges that resulted in the arrest of protesters.

Gilmore's post is driven by a page 1 story in yesterday's NY Times.

interestingly, i was there - with a camera - and working with 8 other filmmakers covering the RNC. I thought that what we recorded was extraordinary. A huge police presence. Orange snow fencing used to net up people like a school of fish. And a lifting of liberties unlike anything i'd ever seen. But the media seemed uninterested. We had tape from inside protest groups, planning meetings, public protests, and what i thought was significant.

No one from either film or TV was the least bit interested. Said it was not interesting to see police doing their jobs and a few 'hairy protesters skin their knees' to quote one enlightened exec.

Now it seems that footage will come in useful - since it tells a very different story than the one the police were telling to back up the mass arrests.

interesting development.

Lots of good data and smart thinking in Merrill Brown's report for the Carnegie Corporation. As major news organizations look for new ways to fit into the increasinly diverse news ecology - execs are unsure how to plug into the new, opinionated, first-person tone that is defining the world of blogs.

LINK: Abandoning the News

CNN's new President of CNN/US - Jon Klein is profiled in today's LA times. The entire piece worth READING but the paragraph that i'll repeate hear should turn some heads:

Regarding Bloggers, says Klein: "Y'know, it's something we ought to embrace and investigate and shine a light on and wrap our arms around and welcome," says Klein, of the blogosphere. He's re-caffeinating in the midmorning, glancing at his computer screen and caller-ID panel as he jots notes, still talking. 'Cuz it ain't going away. It's all part of this wave of democratization … that began really with CNN.'"

The head of CNN saying that Blogging should be embraced is surprising, unless you known Jon. He was an innovator during his career at CBS, including exploring new ways to tell stories including a series "Before Your Eyes" that was perhaps the best prime-time docu series on the air. The series turned real life drama into serialized documentary. He then went to to Shepard the birth of CBS's short lived "Eye on People" channel, a terrific blend of CBS storytelling and first-person documentary exploration.

So if Jon thinks CNN should embrace Blogging - they will. The only question is how.