Chris Messina

Introducing the Coworking blog

As if there wasn’t enough already for you to read, I’ve gone and setup a Coworking blog. Anyone who wants to author it (and is involved in the coworking movement), let me know as I won’t have time to post much personally.

A fresh face in people search, care of Sweden

This isn’t new news, per se, but it’s still interesting to see that Riya 1.0 has some new competition (how’d’ya like that? Retroactive competition… heh!).

If you’ve been playing along, you’d know that Riya has moved towards general image search and away from exclusively focusing on cute-baby-face-image-indexing (I kid, I kid!). In fact, Munjal says it best:

As we announced in May we are heading in a different direction because users just didn’t want face recognition in their own photos as much as they wanted smarter web search. Starting next week and continuing for the next month or so we’ll post the gradual release of our new product that reluanches our efforts.

Contrary to Polar Rose founder Jan Erik Solem’s bombastic claim that their search engine … will be the first of its kind in the world, I am more optimistic about their approach of using a simple browser plugin to enable folks to casually point out faces in the images that they come across, effectively decentralizing the task and providing a much needed instant-incentive for folks who are specifically interested in this kind of information. I still wonder whether such efforts can ever really boil the web-wide ocean, but with similar efforts underway at Google, sooner or later, we are going to get to a better way to discover, explore and search rich media based on their content, not just where they were taken or when.

In the meantime, screenshots of the Polar Rose plugin are available for download.

Via Digg via Alex Hillman.

GoogTube it is

I don’t have anything useful to say about Google’s acquisition of YouTube, but it is interesting to look at their site’s information outlets moments after Mike made the announcement… Nate Anderson at Ars Technica picked these up too:

First, the YouTube blog is silent on the acquisition.
Second, the press room has scant details on the Google deal but covers these other deals, also from today:

So anyway, there you go. Google acquires yet another piece of my life (though I do feel more cum-bah-ya with the folks at Blip.tv (and maybe Revver too)).

And I should add that those last deals from the press page are the one to watch out for. Not the Google deal. After all, Google has no content. YouTube has some, but Sony, Universal and CBS are the ones with the goods. Google’s purchase only helps YouTube weather the lawsuits and help it scale. After that, it comes down to content and community (oh, and DRM: how convenient it is for YouTube to ink deals with pro-DRM folks the same day as Teh GOOG. Suddenly they’ve bought into one of the more successful pipes of unlicensed content out there. With Google backing the service, you can imagine that this puppy will scale, too).

Don’t forget, too, that Google and Apple are all chummy-chummy, so expect to see some iTunes-cum-Gplayer synergies emerging… where you upload your iMixes to YouTube and Google churns them out with newly minted ads making the stockholders oh-so-proud.

Gotta love this new user-generated-economy.

Throwing punches from the future at the past

Photo by Mr. Wright. Some rights reserved.

It’s interesting to watch the brouhaha over Arrington vs the Old Media from the sidelines. I mean, personally I could care less who “comes out on top” even if there is a top to be had anymore (see my post on starfish and you’ll see why self-referenced A-listers and the Old Guard are threatened — or, as Tara has pointed out, that the New Guard behaves frightening like the Old (and should be routed around, like any efficient system should)).

As Jarvis says the way to win is to commit better journalism than [journalists] do.

Amen. Back to the ol’ meritocracy we’re all so fond of. Oh.. and that the old hegemonic guard despises.

You could stop reading there, but there are some juicy quotes that I think are worth pulling out, if only for posterity and for those of you without time to read a bunch of white men arguing amongst themselves in public:

From Jarvis:

The stinky-cheese irony of this is, of course, that even as [Arrington] tried to cast aspersions on The Times, he only succeeded in shooting his own credibility — and with it, likely, the credibility of fellow bloggers — in the foot.

Whoa-ho-ho…! By suggesting impropriety on the part of the Times, he shot down his and other bloggers’ credibility?? Ree-hee-healy! Starting to sound a little Bushian there, are we not? You’re either with us or against us and anything in between is treason?

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but the whole journalism-is-beyond-reproach thing is inherently part of the problem. Somehow the chain of command and fact-checking that journalists are supposed to do somehow gives them, prima facie, more credibility than bloggers … that out of that rigorous process, they have more ethics than bloggers … which basics ignores the entire history of human reportage (hell, even the few times I’ve been quoted in the MSM, I’ve been misrepresented).

When any medium of dissent becomes a pipe of flailing echolalia, you better believe that those on the receiving end, fed up with circular Newspeak abuse, will come up with a better means of communicating amongst one another, that’s both more local, more direct and subverts the existing hierarchy (or disintermediates them, as is popular to say).

It’s natural evolution, man.

So in that vein, I love what Steve Gillmor has to say:

Forget superior for a second, and look at what happened when music rebooted in the Sixties. Were The Beatles superior to Sinatra? Coltrane to Armstrong? Dylan to Guthrie? Did they boo Dylan? Yes they did. Now we see that as the watershed of the era. Was this a problem? Listen to the newly-discovered tape of Dylan with Butterfield’s band at Newport and it’s stunning in its obvious power. They were booing because they were insulted, scared, angry, moved.

I am moved by Arrington’s story. God knows I could care less about all this page view Web 2.0 shit that he’s leading, but when he doubts himself and suggests even briefly that he should prepare better for a next time, I say no fucking way. Prepare better for what? It’s like Hendrix dialing back the funk or Miles apologizing for standing with his back to the audience or any of you out there settling for the pathetic crap that floods the blogosphere or the so-called mainstream media. It’s hard to cut through the noise; it’s simple but dangerous to make enemies. In an interrupt-driven media world, where “bloggers” and “journalists” compete head to head on every story, it’s one big race for class president going on here.

The New York Times is a great publication on its good days, a lying pack of self-protective weasels on others. Same for every one of us in the blogosphere. When I see Arrington filibuster on the floor of the Senate, I see one of us out there making a fool, and us proud, of himself. Suck it up, mainstream media. Next time it’s your turn. Something is going on here and we do know what it is.

Blah blah blah — we talk a lot!

Heh. Two videos (tag:microformatstshirt) from our trip to Europe taken during our final night in Paris.

The wine must’ve made us loquacious. Or inebriated. Or both.

Quotes: “Embrace chaos.” “Fail early and fail often.” “Nichefication of media.” “Architecture of collaboration.” “I can’t get enough fois gras.” “I’m Joe, the man of the ice cream.”

Oh, and don’t forget to get your own Nabaztag.

The origins of DevHouse

Following SHDH12, Jeff offers the origin story of teh DevHouse:

Let me tell you how I saw DevHouse get started.

He goes on to describe his hope for future events:

My vision, if any, is to have a whole ecology of specialized and general purpose DevHouse events that are self-organizing and take place wherever there are hackers. : )

So, we’ll see. I’m going to make an effort to make this happen when I can. I want to first try to work with CocoaDevHouse better, and figure out what kind of relationship works. I also want to try starting another specialized event for indie game development. And we’ve been talking and working a bit to make some software to help with the network infrastructure of these kinds of events. I’ve been talking with some people about writing some software to help complement the wiki-based way of promoting and organizing these events.

Nice.

So don’t miss SHDH13, coming up Nov 4-5 in Los Gatos.

Soundflavor launches — a new way to discover the music you already own

Peter Merholz has blogged the release of Soundflavor, the first product released from Adaptive Path’s New Ventures project.

Lane’s written up a case study describing the process that was used to develop the app, notably using an iterative, design-and-build process, as opposed to using a documentation-design-implement method (kind of like the waterfall method).

Of course, I know quite a bit about this process, since this was also the first product that I helped design after leaving Flock (I, too, can claim that i made this, along with Dan Saffer and others, including Tim from Big Empty and the great folks at Soundflavor). In fact, I helped out with the initial spec, product development and design process and facilitating the brainstorming that lead to the soon-to-revealed relationship between the app and the website. Unfortunately, early into the development cycle, travel and other commitments precluded me from seeing out the implementation of the product, even though the final result is very much in line with my original concepts.

So what’s so great about Soundflavor?

Well, unlike other streaming services like Pandora (of which I’m a huge fan), it actually pulls music from your existing music collection and music shared on your local network with Bonjour, creating interactive playlists that vary in “flavor”, or similarity, helping you to rediscover the music that you already own or that the people around you own.

Of course, in addition to that, Soundflavor will recommend new music similar to what you already own or are listening to for purchasing and building out your library.

And, with the Playlist Creator, you can take Soundflavor’s work with you — simply pick a track, artist or album as a “flavor” and Soundflavor will generate a playlist with as many “flavored” tracks as you want (more feature details can be found on the download page).

Reviews so far seem good, and I’m eager to see their playlist-cum-mixtape sharing community launch (think deviantART meets iMix) — and hopefully, someday, Lucas Gonze will have his way (I rallied for ya, man!).

Anyway, I’m dying for the Mac version to come out — as the subset of tracks I listen to from my 22,000 track library is starting to go stale (as evidenced by my Last.fm account). Give it a shot and let me know what you think — since I can’t try it yet and would like to know, in terms of iTunes controllers, how this one stacks up given its pretty sweet featureset.

Starfish and censorship

I’ve started reading Ori Brafman’s excellent The Spider and the Starfish and came across an article in the New York Times relating the use of services like Googlebait YouTube to post uncensored video from conflicts around the world, primarily from Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are a few key quotes that I think are telling, and sets up rather well the contrast that Ori illuminates in his book. On the side of the decentralized starfish:

Russell K. Terry, a Vietnam veteran who founded the Iraq War Veterans Organization, said he had mixed feelings about the videos.

“It’s unfortunate there’s no way to stop it,” Mr. Terry said, even though “this is what these guys are over there fighting for: freedom of speech.”

Emphasis mine.
On the opposing side, illustrating what Brafman describes as the second principle of decentralization: “it’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders”:

Geoffrey D. W. Wawro, director of the Center for the Study of Military History at the University of North Texas and a former instructor at the United States Naval War College, said the erosion of the command structure of terrorist and insurgent groups had led them to increase their reliance on the Internet and videos to gain recruits.

Emphasis, again, mine.

That a military person would suggest that terrorist and insurgent groups actually ever had a centralized, or coercive, chain of command smacks at being ludicrous, given recent experience. You’ll note, for example, that even with terrorist “leader” Al Zarqawi snubbed out, the terrorist threat is as potent as ever. Taking him out wasn’t taking out the head of the spider, as Wawro would probably argue; rather, according to Brafman, we succeeded only in chopping off a leg of the starfish:

Cut off a spider’s leg, and you’ll have a seven-legged cripple. Cut off its head, and you’ll kill the spider. But cut off the starfish’s arm, and not only will it regenerate, but the severed arm will actually grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this remarkable feat because, unlike spiders, they lack central control—their organs are replicated across each arm. Starfish are decentralized.

Just like in nature, there are also starfish on the battlefield. Starfish forces don’t have a leader, clear structure, or defined hierarchy. These seemingly chaotic qualities make Starfish unexpectedly resilient.

So, for one thing, censorship, on the part of YouTube and/or Google is a losing battle (no pun intended) and one that makes matter worse, since it keeps the US citizenry ill-informed and naive to what’s really going on overseas. It strikes me that not all “graphic violence”, is created equally, as Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, seems to think:

In an e-mail message, Ms. Supan said that among the videos removed were those that “display graphic depictions of violence in addition to any war footage (U.S. or other) displayed with intent to shock or disgust, or graphic war footage with implied death (of U.S. troops or otherwise).”

Perhaps the argument is that graphic violence masquerading as entertainment should be censored — well, in private media collections, okay, sure; but, when the same kind of information is also more informative than what our media is allowed to show, does it take on a purpose that should invoke the protections of journalism?

Hard to say, but the lesson Ori offers to the military is one that YouTube and others should also heed: Our military is discovering what happens when a spider takes on a starfish.

Revver releases API, bets on nichenomics

25 days ago, I asked where Revver’s API was, citing a post by Micki Krimmel. Well, she’s responded and I found a post with more details on their blog discussing the newly-minted Revver API.

I have to admit, this could be a pretty significant development (digg it). For one thing, Revver dot com is built upon their own API — and by releasing the API, have made it possible for anyone to build their own custom white-labeled Revver site. As sumbry reports in the comments:

Using our API is easy. If you’re a PHP guy, download the PHP Whitelabel SDK.
…
Go into your browser and punch in the URL to where you’ve unzipped the files and viola, you’ve got a brand new PHP site using our API.

To start changing the look, just go into the skins directory and copy everything under default into a new directory name. Then go inside that new directory and start messing around w/all the css and image files to change the look.

(Emphasis mine.)

Now if they built this on top of WordPress and its theming system, I would have been extremely impressed… but alas, one can’t have everything.

What’s so interesting about this is that their business model and viability as a company is actually contingent upon the adoption of their API and the building out of niche white label sites… Micki puts it pretty clearly:

Our API is a way for web developers to create their own video-sharing communities using our technology. We like to call it a “video portal in a box.” And of course, Revver shares any ad revenue from uploaded and syndicated videos with the creators of the portal and with its community members.

…

The release of the Revver API is central to our business model of wide syndication and free sharing of content. The goal is to build the network across the open web, disseminating Revver videos as widely as possible, always holding strong to our pro-artist ethos.

So, suffice it to say, this is pretty exciting. And an excellent model for others to follow or mirror.

More and more we’re going to see the equivalent of “indie data labels” offering up their wares in the form of socially networked harddrives while the big players continue to try to consolidate and drive everything to their web properties. I think that in the long term, the starfish model will prevail, and will continued work on services like Revver, who make it possible for individuals to start their own fully enabled website using remote data, we’ll begin to see the promise of the loosely joined, socially networked revolution.

Socially networked harddrives

This isn’t necessarily a new idea, but it helps to have a visual metaphor to get past the API-geekspeak and look at where we’re really going.

I know that OmniDrive (“The Universal Web Storage Platform”) is already planning on integrating with Flickr as a “storage device”… so what happens when you literally can hook up to remove stores of data, media and so on, that aren’t restricted to FTP and SAMBA and so on, but typical web APIs? What happens when you can access event data on Upcoming.org not using an XML API, but by simply consuming the microformatted XHTML pages?

Essentially, any webpage or website becomes a data store and an application, all rolled into one.

It’s curious that when I first started creating this graphic, I wanted to illustrate the idea of networked harddrives — but that get their data from web services. Looking at it now, if each name had “.app” on the end, these would be a collection of desktop executables. So, with the line blurring further between representing applications and data, we start to glimpse just what a desktop-enabled web service access interface might actually look like…