Deviant Abstraction

This is a follow up to my last post on GData. A link to an interesting article on GData. The author goes further in his thought than me and summarize the view of the blogosphere.
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You can hear it. You can feel it but nobody know really what it is.
Yahoo!, Google, MS have all identified mobile as a growth relay.

And now the MIT and Nokia has partnered to explore convergence. To define it to be more accurate.

We definitely live interesting times…
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Now Web 2.0 is taking off. Now XML is taking off.

Now it is easy to create content and set it up for mobile and PC browsing. Yahoo! is doing it. Google is doing it. Microsoft is doing it.

We keep hearing the mobile is poised to be the dominant Internet browsing platform. Ipsos thinks so with interesting data in this article (the data is taken from the Face of the Web study which I have not read and would like to.)

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In its original vision by Tim Bray and others, one of the goal of XML was to ease format creation and management.

The blogosphere is all rushing about microformats and some tools such as Edgeio have started to appear to make sense of them (aggregate, filter, manage, create). A microformat is a set of tags (defined within a DTD or a XML Schema) with a specific semantic associated (defined in the application software). The computer world has been using them since the birth of XML (think of J2EE configuration files for instance). XML was defined to help create them. Now and with the help of RSS, they are on the edge to become mainstream.

Source: Carlo_71

RSS helped XML to become accepted as a general purpose format. RSS and blogs showed how much decoupling data from its presentation could improve our life. (By the way, this is close to the Semantic Web vision.)

Microsoft, Google and eventually Yahoo! are all jumping into the wagon by adding new usages to RSS (and therefore microformats).

XML is finally taking up.

After Microsoft’s LiveClipboard and Simple Sharing Extension for RSS, Google is adding their own: GData. GData turns RSS into a full fledged interactive XML flux: authentication, queries, update and concurrency.

One of the advantage of RSS was in its name: really simple syndication. Atom has been (and currently still is) designed as a publishing protocol and a syndication format. It was designed to replace RSS with only for now partial success.

It is unsure if one of these extensions will take off, however XML is eventually taking off in the mainstream world.

After doing a quick search on Flickr to find some relevant visuals, here is an article on the same subject.

“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Warhol

“In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” Momus (found on as Fast Company blog entry).

Don Doge thinks blogging is helpful to your career. I firmly believe it is totally true and it is one reason for the creation of this blog.

Professional/Corporate blogging is simply the next logical steps of those two quotes upper. You are now putting your “famousity” in use. There is nothing new under the Sun.

It points out also how much we are moving from a knowledge economy to a creation economy. Your wealth is becoming more and more proportional to your ability to create (using of course knowledge).

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Have you missed your old scientific calculator?

Here is a cool web-based softare to plat any graphs. Quite useful, quite cool!

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We are told all content will be stored online. Consumers will be able to choose what they really want instead of what there is available due to the small operating cost of an Internet shop. Is this good for content? Is this really the case? Is this just an illusion?

The Long Tail
Everybody speaks of the long tail these days. It comes from an article from Cris Anderson explaining the end of the blockbuster era.

Here is the long tail, as seen by Cris Anderson:

The Long Tail (source http://www.wired.com/)

In a physical space such as a shop, you need to manage stock and manage shelf space. You need to pay for set up and support for each item you put in. Therefore, you put in only relevant items. This means only items with a certain threshold of sales. There is no scale in effect.

On the Internet, after setting up an ecommerce shop, adding new reference of pure virtual goods is cheap. There is only a set-up cost, for instance to encode a song into a mp3. Keeping it in the shop is cheap or free.

We can find the same idea in the difference between software versus hardware.

Content on Internet
Most statistic distribution on Internet follows a power law. For instance, you can find them with weblogs : most weblogs have a few visits and only a handul of them really have a lot.

Example of a Power Law (source http://www.kottke.org/)

This also means there are a lot of Search Engines but only one Google or Amazon.

These two views are not contradictory. It means most content will be distributed only to a few people but enough to achieve rentability.

Amplifying Effect of Internet
However, Peer to Peer architectures offer a different view. With P2P protocol such as Bittorrent, consumers share content to achieve lower latency. This can be seen as “smart caching”: only content near you will be cheaper to get. As a consumer, I want content fast so I will tend to get only content a lot of users already share or are downloading. This is the amplifying effect of the Internet and it is huge.

For instance, the takeover of Slashdot by Digg is interesting because this amplifying effect can be seen. Anecdoctically, I have to point out that both websites are amplifyers, which make them even more interesting.

I will update more on the subject in another post later. There can be a tautology in my thoughts.

I have been thinking about Google’s strategy as everyone is doing, and I found this excellent post from an excellent blog to be somewhere in-between:

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By definition, an entrepreneur will try something no others have and might succeed. If so, how can we define a specific profile for one except the will to create something new?

One common definition for entrepreneur is deviant (in the not in the norm sense). There is a lot of way to “deviate”. For instance,”I want to work in the afternoon” or “I want to get rich”. And with no common points between them.

Something is really interesting in this notion: the social construct and the bias à l’oeuvre. We can find patterns to define common caracteristics between VC backed and successful entrepreneur but nothing more.

What do you think?

Link to Ben Barren’s blog

Link to a VC blog

All markets are supposed to shrink if certain factors are met. Economists call it pure and perfect competition. If you are into this kind of market, you are theoritically not able to land profit. Your competitors will prevent it.

Of course, it is a theoritical idea: both competitor would have to be exactly the same (offer, product, support,…). This is why all 101 entrepreneur classes call for differenciation.

This is what open-source is doing to system software. This is what virtualization and distributed computing is doing to high-end hardware providers.

This process is well described in Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm. It is also what Schumpeter calls creative destruction.

This blog entry explains it from a Venture Capitalist point of view. Quite an interesting reading.

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