Joi Ito posted this brilliant piece which I commented on - twice. This is everything an entreprenuer needs to know to develop cool, hot software today. It's certainly what we're doing....
Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends.
My investors, my readers and a variety of other people keep trying to get me to explain what I'm interested and why I'm interested in it. Here's a first shot at this. Thanks to Steph, Kevin Marks and others on #joiito for a first pass edit. I've put it on the wiki as well so we can continue to work on this.
Context instead of content
Attention is moving from commercially produced content to dynamic or contextual content. An example of this is the shift of Japanese youth spending from CD purchasing to karaoke to cell phone messaging. CDs let you passively consume content produced by companies. Karaoke is more interactive - you are part of the content. With Cell phone messaging, the customer creates the content. From a copyright viewpoint, CDs are strongly protected. Karaoke is less protected and usually licensed in bulk, and messaging has very few copyright issues. With 20 million camera phones in Japan alone, text messaging is adding photo sharing, making conversations look more and more like content publishing. Small morsels of content, created by users and shared is called micro-content, as opposed to expensive commercially produced and protected content.
Networked consumer electronics devices will make PCs less relevant
With each new wave of computing devices, from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to game consoles to consumer electronics devices, there is a huge increase in volume causing a dramatic decrease in cost. The users and application developers also shift to these new platforms for better performance and smaller sizes. We still have mainframes and mini-computers but they are less relevant. PCs will become less relevant as the number of consumer electronics devices with networking features increases. Eventually digital cameras, phones, TVs, PVRs and other devices will all be connected to the Internet. People will be publishing, sharing, viewing and hearing content from the Internet without having a PC. They will be as irrelevant to consumers as mainframes.
New open standards for micro-content and metadata
The third important trend is the blossoming of open standards built for creating, publishing, syndicating and viewing/hearing micro-content. Open standards have been around for a long time, but the weblog community is making them popular. These open standards are currently being tested and developed primarily for PCs, but many of the standards could be used in consumer electronics devices, allowing smaller developers to write applications and web services for consumer electronics devices. This is very similar to the way in which TCP/IP allowed the developer community to write software for communications leapfrogging the large telecommunications companies. There are many standards for consumer electronics devices, but they are complex and mired in committees, rather like CCITT's x.25 standard that TCP/IP quickly replaced in many applications.
Multimedia
As broadband becomes cheaper and computing power increases, everything we're learning and building around text micro-content and metadata will be useful in dealing with multimedia micro-content and metadata. Because it is more difficult to extract meaning from images and audio, metadata about this content will become vital.
So what's going to happen?
Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop, but it will become less relevant as consumer electronics companies embrace open standards and use Internet web services and applications to make consumer electronics devices rich with content. The content will be micro-content such as photos, audio clips, video, text, location information and presence information of friends. Digital rights management and copyright will become less relevant. Organizing your network of friends and your network of trust become more important, so that you publish to the people you wish to hear you and you are able to sort information which is relevant to you. These trust networks will require privacy and security as well as methods of managing and using the networks for a variety of applications.
As web services and metadata create a more and more decentralized and semantic web, searching will become more decentralized and contextual and less about html page scraping and one dimensional page rank.
In the future, you should always be able to see the status of your friends (if they choose to let you), create any kind of content you wish to share or communicate and publish it easily from any device. You should be able to find and view/hear any content you have access to, using your network of trust, location, keywords and timing to search for the information. The boundaries between email and web publishing will become blurred and you will be having conversations with the web.
Key Technologies:
- Creating and managing identities while protecting privacy
- Creating and managing networks of friends and trust
- Searching metadata and creating context for metadata
- Design and interface for publishing and viewing micro-content
- Syndication standards and technologies
- Network infrastructure to enable location and mobility
- Technologies to move and share micro-content, especially as it grows larger
- Web services that interact with micro-content and the physical world such as photo printing, purchasing of real world products, connecting people, etc.
The cutting edge:
Audio blogging (Audblog), mobile picture blogging with location information (Tokyo Tidbits), personal information and information about your friends in web pages (FOAF), machine readable copyright notices allowing micro-content aggregation and sharing (Creative Commons), Amazon book information and affiliate information embedded in blogging tools ( TypePad ), convergence of email and micro-content syndication (Newsgator), searching for micro-content based on context (Technorati)
Comments (4)
◊----»
On July 22, 2003 03:44 PM Kevin Marks said:
I just blogged this but I thought I'd share it here too:
It's a good summary, but it misses a key point. By emphasising the difference between commercially produced 'content' and user-created 'micro-content' he is ignoring the enormous area inbetween.
The current content publishing model is only efficient for large-runs of sales - sell under a few thousand books, a few hundred thousand CDs, or a few million cinema seats, and you won't be welcome in commercial publishing.
This gap is gradually being bridged by innovative companies, such as Cafepress and Customflix, but both of these are still creating physical goods.
I think there is a huge opportunity here to be the eBay of digital media, and I think mediAgora is the way to go about it.
◊----»
On July 22, 2003 07:40 PM Marc Canter said:
Of course the trick is getting this all to happen in a world of lots of broke programmers. Right now - unless you have a viable business model and your earning money already - you can't get anybody to invest in any of these key technologies.
Where are the investors who will help make all this happen?
◊----»
On July 22, 2003 11:32 PM Liz said:
Marc, I'm not so sure it's a bad thing to say that entrepreneurial programmers need to bootstrap themselves to some extent. Why is it a bad thing to have a "viable business model," with evidence of potential success, before you seek funding?
Obviously, Joi is one of the investors who will help make all this happen. The Movable Type example is a good one--the Trotts had a viable business model, and evidence of money-making potential.
Seems to me that investing in programmers with ideas, sans business models or demonstrated revenue potential, is part of what got us into the dot-com disaster to begin with.
(All of the above should be taken with a grain of salt, since I'm neither a programmer nor a successful investor. ;)
◊----»
On July 23, 2003 12:00 AM Marc Canter said:
Nothing wrong with viable business models - it's just that no where in Joi's thoughts does he bring that up. These thoughts are all about the technologies, the ideas and the raw, potential building blocks.
Those building blocks imply innovation, but in fact - the marketplace doesn't pay for innovation and what's getting funded are in fact - pretty traditional models: blogging tools, Wiki consulting companies, mating services. So if innovation and cool, key technologies are what Joi is interested in - does that mean he's investing in the technologies or the companies that implement and deploy those technologies?
In fact from where I'm sitting each of those key technologies is a part of a unified, digital lifestyle kind of product - that no one company or product can deliver. Only Apple and Microsoft can fund, develop and deliver products with that scope. And each of the key technologies Joi mentions can't stand alone as viable models.
What has to happen is that tools have to hook up with social networks, cell phones have to blend with blogging tools, micro-content has to be syndicated, meta-data and web services have to all be presented as an integrated solution. Probably the most important thing about ALL of what Joi says is that digital identity has to have CONTEXT? Who's gonna pay for JUST their Digital Identity?
So in other words - all these 'technologies' are pieces of the puzzle and they need to be united with the business models, management, leadership, compunction and zeal that makes an entreprenuer who she/he is and the startup successful.
And THAT combo of the elements is what needs to get funded. Without matching components, management, timing and funding - we'll never have the kind of results we all hope to see happen. THAT's what should get funded!
I certainly agree that viable models are important, but if you believe as much in what Joi seems to believe in - then perhaps a little faith and belief in the people who have to DO all the work is important too. You know - the people who build the companies.
Trackbacks (2) joi ito on what's interesting himExcerpt: Joi Ito's Web: Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends A nice roundup of why things are changing...
Weblog: the anti-mega outboard brain
Tracked: July 22, 2003 05:01 PM
what's wrong with coursewareExcerpt: Well, that's a grandiose title. Sorry. I am not going to try to provide a complete courseware critique here. I'm just thinking about one thing that bothers me about the courseware we use at RIT (and which is true of most courseware systems)--it's close...
Weblog: mamamusings
Tracked: July 23, 2003 03:26 AM
By Joichi Ito
jito@neoteny.com. [
Joi Ito's Web]
