Month: September 2002

I’m blogging from the Open Source Content Management conference in Berkeley today. It’s clear that smart people are working hard to create the next generation of content management platforms–and publishers from bloggers to AOL/TW are going to benefit.
The speaker from Zope (an American based in Europe) raised the question: “Why is all the open source content management development based in Europe?”
A lot of people suggested it had to do with a more open-source-friendly environment or fear and loathing of Microsoft.
My own suggestion: There’s not a lot of venture capital to take these projects private. In the nineties, a lot of Europeans saw this as a detriment to the development of an IT or Internet industry. Now, the ability of VC’s to remove assets from the commons forever (even if the companies created ultimately fail) looks like a mixed blessing at best. Is our current intellectual property regime really the best way to foster innovation?

The Web has become the universal library that a lot of futurists have dreamed of, but one that is completely different from what they foresaw:

• Information can be added to the library without anyone’s permission.
• Its indexing system is networked, not hierarchical.
• A lot of the information is wrong, unsourced, out of date, incomplete, or misleading presented.
• The fundamental unit of organization is the page, not the book.
• The information is largely untagged for keywords, topics covered, taxonomy, bibliogrphy, ownership, or creation date.

This goes against the grain and the conventional wisdom of information theorists, librarians, academics, policy-makers, academics, futurists, censors, law enforcement officers, intellectual propery owners, technologists, anal retentives and other stake holders and authorities. It’s…anarchy.
This takes some getting used to. Efforts to create a semantic Web, sell content, impose digital rights management, control linking, limit access, and standardize markup each may be marginalized by the populism of dirt-simple HTML, crawled by spiders, and created by amateurs for their own entertainment and that of their current and future friends: A billion users, all typing (and linking) as fast as they can think.
The universal library is here today and it can answer most real questions faster than the fastest proprietary database or reference librarian or science fiction computer.
A lot of official sources obsess about the (staggering) amount of misinformation on the Web. I knew the tide was turning when the other day a journalist friend told me something he’d heard and then said to me, “I’m not sure if that’s true, I should verify it on the Internet.”
What makes this mountain of dross so astonishingly valuable is the links, the information in the spaces between the information. We all benefit from this network of links. Every site that points to you, every site that points to a site that points to you, increases the value of your information to you and to the Net as a whole. Everyone wins.
Anything that diminishes the value of these links (subscription-based sites, deep-linking policies, moving free information to paid databases after a couple of weeks, or simply allowing links to die with your old content management system) diminishes the value of the Web beyond the simple loss of the information removed from circulation.

There’s a must-read conversation about media synergy between Anne Kreamer and Kurt Andersen at Fast Company. Andersen, who will always be known as the founding editor of Spy, is probably the most insightful observer of the media business. Some highlights:

AK: At a dinner with a few senior AOL Time Warner executives this past summer, just before Bob Pittman left, I asked good-naturedly, What was the mission of the company? The best answer was, “Well, we have to be more aggressive about our marketing and ad-sales packages.”
KA: What’s incredible to me is that most moguls still believe in size as the ultimate imperative. … When I had dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the TED conference earlier this year, I was flabbergasted when he sincerely fretted that News Corp. wasn’t big enough to compete effectively.

The conversation concludes with a comparison of media ecology to urban planning: a media culture should be like a vibrant downtown, with unique, unplanned, unstructured choices within easy walking distance. As much as I love Jane Jacobs, A Pattern Language, and The Geography of Nowhere, I never made this analogy, which is dead-on and extremely useful.