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Written by Josh Catone / 

The “wisdom of crowds” is a popular web 2.0 buzzword, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book of the same name. At its most basic, the term means that two heads are better than one, and that still more heads will yield even better results.

The wisdom of crowds is all around us these days. Wikipedia is one of the best known examples of the concept at work. Thousands of Wikipedia users have created an encyclopedia that studies have shown is as accurate as traditional volumes like Britannica. Another well-known project is the Yahoo! Buzz Game, which is a prediction market for “high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” Their memetracker market, for example, has predicted the state of the market in line with Alexa data. Note: Read/WriteWeb covered a Yahoo! event about prediction markets here.

Perhaps the best exponent so far of Web ‘wisdom of crowds’ is Google, which organizes websites based on how they link to each other. Google sees links as votes for the relevance of a page. It is of course more complicated than that, but one can make the argument that Google works by utilizing the wisdom of crowds to determine which websites are the most relevant.

Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’s originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”

Crowdsourcing can be broken down in to three categories:

1. creation (like Wikipedia);
2. prediction (like Yahoo! Buzz); and
3. organization (like Google).

Let’s take a look at those…

Creation

Cambrian House

At Cambrian House, people submit ideas for software products and then vote on which ideas are the best, commenting on changes or improvements they would like to see made. Development of the most popular ideas is then sourced to members of the community, who earn “royalty points” that determines how much each contributor makes. Cambrian House can be looked at as a commercial spin on the classic site, halfbakery.

Out of over 4,400 ideas submitted, the site has so far launched three products:

1) Prezzle, which wraps online gift certificates to popular retailers in flash e-cards;
2) Robinhood Fund, at which people post their sob stories and readers vote on who needs the money the most. That person is then cut a check from an ad-supported fund;
3) Gwabs, a desktop-to-desktop online arcade game where animated characters destroy your actual Windows desktop.

It appears possible that people are actually making money from Cambrian House. Their website has a calculator that estimates that with “good” growth, a person with 100 royalty points (the amount you receive for coming up with an original idea) would make $153,600 over a three year period. Not sure exactly what constitutes “good growth” though…

Although Cambrian House crowdsources the conception and creation of its web products, ideas are subject to editorial review by a core team and actual production is subject to a set of quality guidelines. In the case of conflicting code or design contributions, the community decides which is the best.

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is a very ambitious project that aims to utilize crowdsourcing to develop and bring to market tangible, sub-$200 electronic devices (think MP3 players, digital cameras, or game controllers). Community members will decide what the product is, from concept to design to technical specification, by submitting and voting on product and design ideas. Winning ideas will then be funded by members of the community – and after prototyping and beta testing, the completed products will be delivered to market.

CrowdSpirit has a core team who, along with a select group of community members and distributors, have the final say on any community decision. The idea though is that because the ideas are coming directly from the people who will be using the products – and because the core team will be acting on polling data about those ideas – the resulting products will be very customer-centric. Further, because the research and development of the products will be funded by the community itself, the community will have a significant interest in getting things right.

One potential flaw in the model is that responsibility for support for the resulting products will fall to the community. While online forums have often given me the answer to computer problems, many consumers might balk at the lack of a reliable, trained tech support department (though that actually might be an oxymoron).

Other projects in this category: A Swarm of Angels (creating a movie), AMillionPenguins (creating a novel), We Are Smarter Than Me (creating a business book)

Prediction

PicksPal

PicksPal is a sporting event prediction site that allows users to vote on amateur and professional sporting events. The site is set up like a game, allowing you to spend points to try and beat the odds makers – you win or lose points depending on the accuracy of your picks and how ambitious you are. PicksPal awards weekly prizes, like sports tickets and flat screen televisions, to the top performing players. PicksPal says they have over 100,000 users.

Because the site mimics a professional sports book, you can bet on a lot more than just the outcome of the game. For example, you can place bets on things like who will be winning after the first quarter of a basketball game, which player will score the most points, or the final score of the game.

PicksPal sells “genius” picks, based on the picks of their top performing members, to people betting actual money. So far the site is doing pretty well. As I write this, they have a 52% win rate against the spread for their last 25 picks, and they report a 63% win rate overall.

Marketocracy

Marketocracy was launched in 2000 with the goal of finding the best investors and tapping their collective knowledge to create a superior mutual fund. Anyone can sign up for free and run a virtual fund, starting with $1 million. The site has attracted over 60,000 users to date. In November 2001 the company launched the Masters 100 Index, a real mutual fund based on the virtual investments of its 100 most successful members (as determined by a computer ranking).

The fund, which now has $44 million in assets, has outperformed the S&P 500 Index (generally considered a good gauge of the U.S. equities market) and has an average annual return of 11.4% since its inception. However it has managed just a 2-star rating from Morningstar. That equates to an above average risk and a below average return, according to the Morningstar rating system.

So does that mean Marketocracy is a success or a failure? In this case the wisdom of crowds has not turned out better than the wisdom of a single top investor. The m100 Index isn’t doing anything miraculous, like outperforming Warren Buffet, and it doesn’t stack up well against other, traditional mutual funds in the same category. But, neither have its investors lost their shirts – so it’s certainly not a failure. By utilizing the knowledge of thousands of investors, and culling the best data from the crowd, the fund has performed relatively well for 5 years.

Other projects in this category: Hollywood Stock Exchange (predicting the ups and downs of celebrity careers or entertainment properties), Foresight Exchange (predicting the likelihood of future results), Threadless (predicting which designs will sell well on a t-shirt), Yahoo! Suggestion Board (determining which issues are the most important), Dell IdeaStorm (predicting which ideas for new Dell products will sell), The Sim Exchange (predicting how well video games will sell).

Organization

digg

digg is not only a poster-child for Web 2.0 success, it is also an excellent example of using the wisdom of crowds to organize and highlight information. digg’s concept is simple: users submit links to websites, articles, news stories, photos, or videos, and other users vote on whether they are worth checking out. Depending on how many people, who, and how quickly links are “dugg” they may be promoted to the main page as a worthy link of the day.

digg has proved capable of consistently highlighting links that people find interesting, and drawing attention to news stories in a timely fashion. The large number of digg users and growing traffic (digg overtook Slashdot sometime last year according to Alexa) can attest to that. digg has, however, received criticism over its susceptibility to being “gamed”. Wired reported earlier this month that it is relatively easy to purchase votes on digg and get a story promoted to the main page (although it should be noted that Wired owns a competing product, reddit).

Another concern that people have expressed with digg, and one that is more relevant to this article, is the susceptibility to groupthink. As a story starts to become popular, users will often vote for it simply because it is popular, without really thinking whether this is something worth voting for in their own opinion. This is something that happened in the Wired article, in which at least half of the votes for the author’s sub par submission were unpaid – and likely made by users who were simply digging something that appeared popular because it appeared popular.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that allows users to rate and share web pages. The plugin is very straightforward: users vote thumbs up or thumbs down on pages and are served random pages based on their previous picks, specified topic areas of interest, and the picks of other like-minded users. The idea is that the sites with the most thumbs up votes, will be the most relevant. Further, users are fed sites that were voted up by others who share a similar vote history – i.e. the more you use StumbleUpon, the more it learns about what you like and the better recommendations it gives to everyone.

With over 2 million users, Stumble Upon has amassed an exceptional amount of data on websites, photos, and videos. While the data has so far only been used to enhance their ability to deliver random sites that match users’ interests, there is no reason why it couldn’t be used for other reasons – such as enhancing or augmenting traditional search engine rankings.

Other projects in this category: del.icio.us (organizing the web based on user tags), Techmeme (organizing the day’s buzz based on what people are linking to), Netscape (organizing information by popularity).

Conclusion

I would be remiss not to mention Kathy Sierra’s widely read blog post “The Dumbness of Crowds.” In it, Sierra argues that there is more to harnessing collective intelligence than just letting a group of people run wild with an idea. It is true that crowds are susceptible to “mania” – in which a less-than-stellar idea catches on and becomes popular. This is a well-documented and very old concept. One of my favorite books, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay, was first published in 1841 and documents various manias of the 17th and 18th century in which decidedly bad ideas became all the rage.

But can crowdsourcing be successful at creating products, predicting markets, or organizing data? In a post about crowdsourcing on my personal blog (which inspired this post), I came up with the following rules to help assure success in tapping the wisdom of crowds:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality. Encourage your group to disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it (even at Cambrian House, where the group collaborates to create the product, individuals are still creating each piece on their own and the group votes on whose implementation of an idea is best).

November 11, 2006

Web 2.0 is so over. First came the tepid reviews of the third annual 2.0 boondoggle. “If you were looking to learn something new,” sniffed GigaOm’s Liz Gannes, “this week’s Web 2.0 Summit was not the place to be.” Wrote a jaded Scott Karp, “there were few revelations, few moments where you had the exhilarating experience of seeing something that was about to change the world. Every conversation I had began with discussing the underwhelming nature of Web 2.0.” “I didn’t come away from the conference having learned much,” confessed Richard MacManus, who felt the highlight of the event “was seeing Lou Reed play live.” It was the Lou himself, though, who put it most bluntly, telling the Web 2.0ers, “You got 20 minutes.”

But the nail in the coffin comes in tomorrow’s New York Times, which features a big article by John Markoff on – yes! – Web 3.0. Formerly known as the semantic web, but now rebranded for mass consumption, Web 3.0 promises yet another Internet revolution. It would, Markoff writes, “provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion … In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”

Personally, I’m overjoyed that Web 3.0 is coming. When dogcrap 2.0 sites like PayPerPost and ReviewMe start getting a lot of attention, you know you’re seeing the butt end of a movement. (There’s a horrible metaphor trying to get out of that last sentence, but please ignore it.) Besides, the arrival of 3.0 kind of justifies the whole 2.0 ethos. After all, 2.0 was about escaping the old, slow upgrade cycle and moving into an age of quick, seamless rollouts of new feature sets. If we can speed up software generations, why not speed up entire web generations? It doesn’t matter if 3.0 is still in beta – that makes it all the better, in fact.

But, seriously, Markoff’s piece is a thought-provoking one. As he describes it, Web 3.0 will be about mining “meaning,” rather than just data, from the web by using software to discover associations among far-flung bits of information:

the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

Web 3.0 thus promises to be much more useful than 2.0 (not to mention 1.0) and to render today’s search engines more or less obsolete. But there’s also a creepy side to 3.0, which Markoff only hints at. While it will be easy for you to mine meaning about vacations and other stuff, it will also be easy for others to mine meaning about you. In fact, Web 3.0 promises to give marketers, among others, an uncanny ability to identify, understand and manipulate us – without our knowledge or awareness. If you’d like a preview, watch Dan Frankowski’s presentation You Are What You Say and Oren Etzioni’s presentation All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google, and then connect the dots. (Thanks to Greg Linden for those links.)

Markoff quotes artificial-intelligence-promoter Danny Hillis, who calls Web 3.0 technologies “spooky.” If Danny Hillis thinks they’re spooky, they’re spooky. But I’m looking on the bright side: At least I’ll have more material for the old blog.

One last thing: I’m claiming the trademarks on Web 3.0 Conference, Web 3.0 Summit, Web 3.0 Camp, Web 3.0 Uncamp, and Web 3.0 Olde Tyme Hoedown.

The Ten Truths of Branded Storytelling

By: Alain Thys

In our million channel world, its is the brands whose customers tell the best stories, that win.  Yet how often do we give them”real stories” to tell?  How many of the things we communicate make their conversations more interesting?   As I just got invited to the Ogilvy Brussels’ Summer Camp on Storytelling (aka. the best BBQ in town),  I thought this would be a good excuse to give it a shot.

So, … Once upon a time there where Ten Truths of Branded Storytelling …

Truth # 1: Seek the Story to Rule them All
Great brand stories stem from the reason a brand exists.  Apple wanted to free creative spirits while slaying the Microsoft dragon.  Coco Chanel set out to re-invent fashion and liberate women from tradition.   Pepsi wants to be a catalyst for change for every generation.   Dig into the history, people and promises of your brand to uncover its Unique Story Proposition (USP).  Make this the anchor for everything other story you tell.

Truth # 2: Great Stories Come To You, If You Listen
Once you have defined your USP, use every opportunity to listen for supporting stories from your staff, suppliers and customers.  Encourage people to bring these stories through competitions, blogging and more importantly actually listening to them.  In fact, merely guiding people’s attention towards your USP sets the storytelling wheels in motion.  All you have to do is watch the magic happen.

Truth # 3: Amplify Those Stories That Others Can Tell
The brands that win tomorrow are those whose customers tell the best stories.  As you discover stories that match your USP, select those that are simple enough to remember and fun to recite.   Minimise plot-twists and complex layers and highlight those aspects that re-enforce your overall brand message.  Test what sticks best, and when you’ve got it, put the weight of your media behind them so they can start living a life of their own.

Truth #4: Connect your Branding Efforts to Your USP
Each commercial, branded entertainment programme or promo is a “mini-story” within the overall framework of your brand.  It should always connect to your Unique Story Proposition.  Work with your agency to establish creative parameters and rigorously apply them to each idea.  And in case of protest from the imaginative classes, remind people that Shakespeare, Mozart and Da Vinci also had a heavy rulebook to consider.

Truth #5: Connect your Story Efforts to Your Bottom Line
A great story is nice, yet to make money, it has to press the “buy” button in the customer’s brain.  For this you need to ensure that your story “ticks” the age-old behavioural triggers like emotion, contrast, egocentricity, the power of beginnings, etc.  Use them, and people will respond.  Avoid them at your peril.   This book  is actually a good guide.

Truth #6: Know Your Classics (yet don’t get hung up on them)
Writers from Aristotle to Vogler have successfully captured the essence of storytelling into rules and recipes.  However, when taking their guidance, it’s easy to get intimidated by the need for story arches, archetypes, enemies, heroes, challenges.   Study and apply their teachings, yet don’t let them get in the way of actually telling the story (even if it’s not perfect).  What you say is infinitely more important than how you say it.

Truth #7: Storytelling is Not Just About Words
Reflect your USP in everything you do.  The way you design your product, the way you build your stores, the way your staff dresses and behaves, the way you deal with your customers.  Your brand’s actual behaviour is the loudest storyteller of them all and any dissonance will be noticed.  Look at every touchpoint and benchmark it against the story you aim to tell.  If there is a disconnect, fix it.  At some point it will blow up in your face.

Truth #8: You Don’t Need to Tell it All
If you want to promote word-of-mouth, leave the mystery.  People don’t want to know how the sausage it made.  People love to guess the end of the novel.  Telling all of your brand’s story at once is not only a waste of opportunity, it actually turns consumers off.  Use your story as a prelude or epilogue to the actual experience of using your product or service.  If you truly live your USP, people can fill in the blanks themselves.

Truth #9: Let Go of the Illusion of Control
In the old world, there was the comforting illusion that if you shot enough GRP’s at de-sensitized consumers, all would be well.   In story-world, this illusion is gone.  Good stories amplify themselves.  Bad stories die.  But astories also evolve as they travel from ear to mouth.  Resist the urge to intervene, and definitely never call in the lawyers if you run into internet versions which don’t fit the original creative brief.  After all, the fact that a customer talks about you, means she cares.

Truth #10: You Cannot Fake Authenticity
Last, but definitely not least, ensure your stories reflect the real behaviour of your brand.  In the age of consumer generated media any sign of insincerity will backfire.  Every claim you make will be investigated by someone, somewhere.  And in contrast to the old days where you could just “hush up” things with a bit of crisis PR, the footsteps you leave in Google-sand cannot be erased.

Written by Richard MacManus, Ebrahim Ezzy, Emre Sokullu, Alex Iskold and Rudy De Waele. Also John Milan wanted to contribute, but unfortunately got caught up in the Seattle storm – so best wishes to John and all our Seattle readers.

In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as the hyper-growth of social networks, the push of RSS into the mainstream, consumerization of the enterprise, and the continued rise of the read/write Web.

In this post we look forward to 2007 and ruminate on what trends will be important over the coming year.

RSS, Structured Data

- RSS will go mainstream in a big way next year – not only integrated into Microsoft’s new Vista OS, but also fully integrated into Yahoo Mail when it comes out of beta (the Ajax version). Plus we expect some of Google’s RSS experiments to come into play more in 2007 – especially Google Base, which uses an RSS variant called GData. In addition to all this, new and interesting (if not overly innovative) services will be built on top of RSS – e.g. the Techmeme RSS Ad-delivery.

- Related to the above, structured data will be a big trend next year – see our post on Google’s structured data play from September this year. What will be particularly interesting to watch is how microformats, the Web community’s open standards for structured data, will fare. At this point, it looks like Google is forging ahead with its own structured data standards – and largely ignoring microformats. Although both Microsoft and Yahoo have shown some support for microformats, is it enough to stop Google?

- Widgets exploded in 2006 but will continue rising in 2007 thanks to blogs and social networks like MySpace. MyBlogLog is an example of what we’ll see more of, but also look out for more e-commerce and multimedia widgets.

Enterprise

- Web Office continues to ramp up. Especially watch Google and Microsoft battle it out in this domain. The smaller startups (Zoho, Zimbra, ThinkFree et al) will continue to innovate and there may even be acquisitions by the big Internet companies.

- The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of web-based office apps and more collaborative systems. Virtual solutions (teams and offices) that deliver high productivity at lesser expenses, will be hugely popular – for example SKY-click. Corporate blogs will continue to proliferate, although there may be more controversy to come in this area (think sensitive information leaked on corporate blogs).

Web Development

- Rich Internet Apps will be a major force in 2007 (a continuation of the Hybrid web/desktop apps theme we focused on this year). In particular watch out for Adobe’s Apollo platform, but you can be sure that Microsoft will also be very active in this domain with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix will be Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform. The general trend going on here is that platforms that leverage both the desktop and the Web will be compelling next year, in terms of offering rich functionality that usually can’t be found on purely browser-based apps.

- On the other hand, Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps. Ajax is known to have its limitations, so some people have been wondering what will be next after Ajax? But also 2007 may be the year that rich web apps using vector graphics (VML/SVG)+AJAX make an impact.

- Semantic Web products will come of age in 2007. Make no mistake (to use presidential language), the Semantic web is coming – particularly with the work of companies like RadarNetworks and Metaweb. We think companies like that will come up with the plumbing to help generate RDF based on HTML.

- Amazon Web Services were a surprise hit in 2006 – and expect more big things from Amazon next year, to fill in the stack and to provide the foundation for a Web/Amazon WebServices-based OS. We also think there will be moves toward an Amazon-like web services stack from other players, particularly Google. For example Google may want to catch up with Amazon’s S3 – EC2 services. And where Google goes, you can expect Microsoft to go too.

Search and Online Advertising

- Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market next year. AdSense will have some competition, in the form of MSN AdCenter and Yahoo’s advertising platform.

- Also due to ongoing issues with (CPC/PPC) online advertising, there’s a real need for a better, more robust online ad model – perhaps something more than CPA. So watch out for developments in 2007 along those lines.

- 2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines. However don’t expect Google to lay down and do nothing – they will counter the verticals. Google Code and Health are two early examples of Google’s response. Also note that Google is moving towards being a more meaning-based search engine. For instance, when you enter a company name in Google, the first result not only returns the homepage of the company but also some semantic meaning extracted from the website. And the right bar of SearchMash (Google’s test search site) shows that Google is planning more features.

Microsoft vs Google

- Microsoft’s Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year, thanks to Vista and also Live services going out of beta and usurping their MSN counterparts (e.g. Windows Live Mail taking over Hotmail).

- WebOS /GoogleOS: To counter the Vista and Windows Live threat, Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS. This is contentious, but one theory is that if Vista’s default services (Live.com) can put pressure on Google, then we may see a Google optimized Linux .

- In line with this, Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in ’07. Red Hat and Novell will bring out new versions. Linux Desktops are getting more fun with 3D effects and KDE4 (Plasma) and AIGLX – Xgl and Beryl – Compiz technologies. But can they compete with new Vista and expected web operating systems?

Browsers

- Browser War II. In 2007 expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense. Perhaps we’ll even see a G-Browser? Stranger things have happened…. or will Google continue to utilize Firefox as its cover? The latter is more likely, as Google does not want to seem too distracted with operating systems and browsers; this would be a bad signal for the NASDAQ investors.

- Speaking of browsers, 2007 will see an increase in WebKits. Adobe’s Apollo will be WebKit based, enabling developers to ensure Safari compatibility as well as other browsers. We also think the Konqueror browser of Linux/KDE will drop its KHTML engine in favor of WebKit. So expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007.

Multimedia

- Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007, thanks to products like Brightcove and whatever Google does with YouTube/Google Video. Also we’ll see more of Interactive TV (iTV etc). On this theme, the Venice Project (from the founders of Skype) promises free TV all around the world.

- Mass adoption of IPTV technology in 2007 and Bittorrent will be an important part of the online video landscape too.

- P2P: With Azureus and BitTorrent, P2P got approximately $30M funding for 2007. So 2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P. It will get more accessible and we’ll probably see web based P2P interfaces. Bittorrent has already become a major part of most connected software. For instance, DemocracyPlayer – an IPTV client similar to Venice Project – had an embedded bittorrent client. Bittorrent will probably continue to be embedded in many new apps in ’07.

- Virtual worlds: SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking – as people and businesses figure out different uses for it. Also we think SecondLife will continue its expansion worldwide. Currently you can find Habbo and SecondLife cards in most supermarkets (Wallgreens, CVS) in the US, so this trend should continue in other parts of the world. In short, virtual worlds will become an integral part of the real world in 2007.

- Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we’re seeing more of it now – SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.

Consumer Apps

- The online real estate market will grow rapidly in ’07.

- The search for disruptive business models will continue! In other words, free consumer web apps still need to find a business model.

- While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn. Could social networks prove to be anti-social? At the same time, social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur, although MySpace will hold out. See also widgets above.

International Web

- International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media (or maybe this is wishful thinking). China in particular is a hot market right now, but as Keith Teare observed on R/WW recently, it is still early days and the revenues are not big at this point.

- OLPC: One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers (internet and web apps dependent) and Linux for the mainstream. See also Web Office above, which may find its true niche in non-traditional markets which can’t afford Microsoft Office.

- Broadband continues to grow: For example Fiber Connections in France. There will be similar baby steps towards faster internet all around the world. After all, the broadband revolution created web 2.0, Google and web apps. So it’s worth following this trend!

Mobile

- VoIP space will really hot up. Skype and a bunch of new competitors will compete and potentially disrupt the telecoms industry.

- Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007 – certainly in China, Korea and Japan; but perhaps even the US and other ‘behind the times’ places like New Zealand and Australia. Related to this is that online/offline mobile technologies like Smartpox may become more popular in the West (they already are in Asia).

- Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in ’07 (jajah mobile etc).

- Also watch for an emerging Webphone market – for example Apple’s rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.

Courtesy of mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele, here are 10 specific trends for mobile Web in ’07:

1. Flat fees will become more affordable bit by bit.
2. Thus, more user-generated content will become available to the phone; opening the way for mobile users to start using new web/mobile 2.0 services on their phones, such as podcasting, RSS feeds, more user-generated content to upload and use.
3. Big Media Youth Networks going mobile – MySpace, YouTube, MTV and many more players will resolutely go mobile; allowing users to upload pictures, videos and create/consume content straight from their mobile phones. And to share with friends (including mobile forwarding functionality).
4. Mobile search – the big players will start positioning seriously in the mobile market (watch out for deals with carriers/operators and device manufacturers)
5. Mobile ads – the market is growing at a rapid pace (just watch AdMob’s ad views ticker box daily)
6. QR codes will start to enter retail markets.
7. Mobile image recognition will pop up in mixed marketing campaigns.
8. Cell Phone memory card swapping – to exchange music/video files.
9. Multiple network download hotspots become available in urban zones – enabling ‘on the spot’ mobile download and internet access possibilities via wi-fi/wimax/bluetooth/nfc/etc…. (all build in or available immediately)
10. Rise of ‘smart client’ solutions, for convergence of content and application functionality on mobile devices in general.

Summary

Whew! There are a lot of predictions in this post, but of course we’ve probably just scratched the surface. We’d love to hear your own Web predictions for 2007. What have we missed? Please leave a comment and/or participate in our poll.

“The Internet outside the US is bigger than the inside and that trend is only accelerating. Google, eBay and Yahoo all know this and the fact that YouTube is already over 65% international in less than two years from launch shows that the US in no longer an island.

Against many important measures — broadband penetration, % online advertising spend and mobile phone adoption — the US is no longer the world’s most important market. This is not for one minute to say that the US shouldn’t part a major part of every ambitious startup’s plans but if for example you want to be in the market with the largest share of online advertising as part of the marketing mix, you want to be in the UK.”

I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.

Let’s quickly recap the terminology:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.

In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.

The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.

Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Continue reading “Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)” »

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Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

Published on KurzweilAI.net December 17, 2006.

The Web is entering a new phase of evolution. There has been much debate recently about what to call this new phase. Some would prefer to not name it all, while others suggest continuing to call it “Web 2.0.” However, this new phase of evolution has quite a different focus from what Web 2.0 has come to mean.

John Markoff of the New York Times recently suggested naming this third-generation of the Web, “Web 3.0.” This suggestion has led to quite a bit of debate within the industry. Those who are attached to the Web 2.0 moniker have reacted by claiming that such a term is not warranted while others have responded positively to the term, noting that there is indeed a characteristic difference between the coming new stage of the Web and what Web 2.0 has come to represent.

The term Web 2.0 was never clearly defined and even today if one asks ten people what it means one will likely get ten different definitions. However, most people in the Web industry would agree that Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web.

In fact, there is a lot more in store for the Web. We are starting to witness the convergence of several growing technology trends that are outside the scope of what Web 2.0 has come to mean. These trends have been gestating for a decade and will soon reach a tipping point. At this juncture the third-generation of the Web will start.

More intelligent Web

The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

Because the focus of the third-generation Web is quite different from that of Web 2.0, this new generation of the Web probably does deserve its own name. In keeping with the naming convention established by labeling the second generation of the Web as Web 2.0, I agree with John Markoff that this third-generation of the Web could be called Web 3.0.

A more precise timeline and definition might go as follows:

Web 1.0. Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercializing it for the first time. Key areas of interest centered on protocols such as HTTP, open standard markup languages such as HTML and XML, Internet access through ISPs, the first Web browsers, Web development platforms and tools, Web-centric software languages such as Java and Javascript, the creation of Web sites, the commercialization of the Web and Web business models, and the growth of key portals on the Web.

Web 2.0. According to the Wikipedia, “Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004¹, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.” I would also add to this definition another trend that has been a major factor in Web 2.0—the emergence of the mobile Internet and mobile devices (including camera phones) as a major new platform driving the adoption and growth of the Web, particularly outside of the United States.

Web 3.0. Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, Web 3.0 could be defined as: “Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”

Web 3.0 Expanded Definition. I propose expanding the above definition of Web 3.0 to be a bit more inclusive. There are actually several major technology trends that are about to reach a new level of maturity at the same time. The simultaneous maturity of these trends is mutually reinforcing, and collectively they will drive the third-generation Web. From this broader perspective, Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends:

Ubiquitous Connectivity

• Broadband adoption
• Mobile Internet access
• Mobile devices

Network Computing

• Software-as-a-service business models
• Web services interoperability
• Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted “cloud computing” server farms such as Amazon S3)

Open Technologies

• Open APIs and protocols
• Open data formats
• Open-source software platforms
• Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)

Open Identity

• Open identity (OpenID)
• Open reputation
• Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)

The Intelligent Web

• Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)
• Distributed databases—or what I call “The World Wide Database” (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
• Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)

© 2006 Nova Spivack.

It’s the end of an era. Two of the most influential figures in American pop culture were fired this week: Tom Freston and Robert Christgau. Freston, who was head of Viacom’s cable networks, was one of the key executives behind the rise of MTV. Christgau is the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” the writer who redefined the rock canon away from the populism of the mainstream music press, and toward what he sometimes called “semipopular music.”

Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV’s web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by “Web 2.0″ social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist’s free classified ads.

The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop’s presumed market of scarcity – only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars – is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions – and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it’s the community they’ve built that brings eyeballs to Paris’s page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.

The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels’ sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial’s shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. “The Long Tail” grows ever longer.

Which explains not only Freston’s departure, but perhaps Christgau’s, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there’s no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?

Christgau himself was never an indie snob – he’s always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I’m sure he’ll land on his feet – some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I’m not so sure about, although I’m confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau’s. But the real question is what comes next.

Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it’s so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it’s all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they’re sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each – all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.

That doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way. I’m sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop’s top tastemaker. But I doubt we’ll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There’s just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau’s the one who taught me that. And now everybody’s figuring it out.