Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

So, here is what I love about Dave’s OPML editor:  the app is really  nice–clean, simple, powerful.  Everything I want–writing, saving, RSS and viewing in a tight little working window.  And of course, an outliner. I’ve been a dedicated outliner since the days of Thinktank and More, so I love this way  of working.

I started my blog, http://blogs.opml.org/jimmoore/

and wrote a post, and even  put in a image, and—hmmmm–the blog is up but I see no text or image when I view.

Ok, now the text is up.  I will put in an image later.  I wonder what the brief delay was?

Dave Winer’s new OPML editor (that does not use a browser) is available now, today!

Dave Winer’s new OPML editor (does not use a browser) is available now, today!

Jay McGinley wrote a poetic and sobering essay on day seven of his participation in the Lafayette Park White House hunger strike for Darfur.

I personally believe that Jay’s statement is one of the most
important that has emerged in the movement for Darfur, and deserves
wide circulation.  Please read it,
and if you agree, please help pass it on.  Email it to friends, and
most important, if you are a blogger, please link to it.  Here is the
permalink:

http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2005/07/jay_mcginley_hu.html

Thanks so very much!

Peace, Jim

Musical Man by Nathan Nelson

Thanks to Rebecca, Ethan, and of course Boris, the new site is excellent!

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/

MySpace.com has been one of the most interesting social sites on the
web, and has grown rapidly through courting rock bands and other music
groups, and made it easy for fans and bands to get together online. Here is the news excerpt:

Just discovered Steve Mallet’s site Fooworks.com, through my referrer log.  Thanks for the link, Steve. Nice site. I learned about Simpi,
and I agree that the social bookmark services have interfaces that
suck–which is perplexing, given that the functionality is really quite
simple…go figure.

Note: I have revised this post, made
some small edits, and   put “Cut Two” ahead of “Cut
One”–somehow the whole thing reads better to me now. 

Cut Two:

Remember Dave Weinberger’s “small pieces loosely joined“?  Well,
the new world features “large pieces loosely joined.” Or rather, “Pieces
large and small loosely joined.”

What is happening before our eyes are that certain web sites are
becoming “web superservices” and are irreversibly changing the
landscape of the web.  A new layer of innovation is here.

This general observation regarding changes in the landscape is being
nioted by more and more observers of the technology scene.  For
example, Jeff Jarvis has two important current posts, Feedthink and made for the distibuted world.  Both are must reads.  He quotes Fred Wilson in turn on new business models enabled as Microsoft promotes RSS, and a classic piece by Kevin Hale on The Importance of RSS.

Doc Searles in an astute and popular column published yesterday asks
for objective evaluation of search engines for the living web. He was inspired mostly by comments after  after “Robert Scoble posted this and this,” as well as Adam Penenberg’s piece on Technorati and the London bombings in Wired online, calling Technorati “a public utility on a global scale.” 

The
more  general version of what Doc is calling for is objective
evaluation of a variety of web services, compared to each other within classes (e.g. search,
filter, transport, ping, publish, etc.).  We need a J.D. Power for web
superservices.  (BTW if anyoneis passionate about this and thinks they
are qualilfied, send me a business plan.) 

An intelligent evaluation service is especially necessary in the new
world of web superservices because these new services emerge in an ad
hoc, creative and unpredictable manner.  By contrast, traditional
web services exist in a fixed framework (such as .net) and are much
more easily evaluated.

The new web superservices not only enter the landscape from many
directions, they routinely redefine the category in which they
nominally compete.  Is Technorati like Google?  No.  Is
PubSub like Technorati?  No.  Thus an evaluation service,
even of the seemingly simple class called search engines, will need to
evolve as fast as the services themselves. 

The objective criteria will need to be independent and trustworthy,
while being constantly adapted to keep up with how the web
superservices evolve within themselves and co-evolve with others.

Cut One:

But we can take this whole discussion up one Gödel level:

If any of you out there are as old as me, you may remember the coming
of the integrated circuit.  Here is a capsule history: 
Transistors were invented in the 1950s (I was a small boy).  They
were linked together into circuits with resistors, capacitors and so on
to make useful devices (my first transistor radio, used to listen
illicitly to KOMA Oklahoma City, from my bedroom in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa).  By the late 1960s they were being integrated into “op
amps”–that is, operational amplifiers and other quasi-integrated
circuits, usually a set of components soldered to a board and encased
in epoxy resin (I used these at Collins Radio company, where I was a
“test equipment expiditor”).  Then in the early 1970s the true
integrated circuit was invented, with the transistors and the wires
fused to an underlying material such as silicon (my first personal
computer was a Tandy Model I).  Later we saw the emergence of
ASICs–application specific integrated circuits–that could be created
by assembling licensed intellectual property modules within a design
tool such as Cadence.

The new global landscape of the web is now populated with the direct
analogue
of the pre-integrated circuit transistor–the above-mentioned web
superservices.  And we can imagine a landscape of thousands of web
superservices, developed in an ad hoc manner, able to be
scripted/linked together by end users.  Such a world necessitates
more than objective evaluation–it require a set of meta-services that
enable users to manage the discovery, evaluation, subscribing, linking,
testing, and stable deployment and monitoring of networks and clusters
of interoperating web superservices, all together providing new
interactive media, communication and information services.

So here for your consideration is an invention: integrated
superservices design and management tools.  Imagine the landscape
of the web is populated by thousands of web superservices. Users create
interactive media, communication, and information services by
manipulating libraries of superservice access subscriptions,  in
order to create on-the-fly integrations of superservices. These
services are automatically tested and deployed on both a local and–if
desired–global basis.

The web superservices solution stack may look like this:

Tim Bray has written several important pieces on Atom in the past few days,
including one announcing that Atom 1.0 is cooked and ready to serve, and a second comparing Atom 1.0
and RSS 2.0.  There are a number of fine features in Atom 1.0, and
a great deal of engineering work has been accomplished and the team
deserves congratulations and thanks from the RSS community.  I
think it worthwhile to consider three issues in regard to this event,
from the standpoint of an investor:

Deployment, stability and simplicity are virtues

In Bray’s comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 he starts with the following:

Deployment

2005/07/13: RSS 2 is widely deployed and Atom 1.0 not at all.

Specifications

The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard
University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made and it is
intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one
example of such work.

The Atom 1.0 specification (in the course of becoming an IETF standards track RFC) represents the consensus of the Atompub Working Group within the IETF, as reviewed and approved by the IETF community and the Internet Engineering Steering Group.
The specification is structured in such a way that the IETF could
conceivably issue further versions or revisions of this specification
without breaking existing deployments, although there is no commitment,
nor currently expressed interest, in doing so.

Bray thus grants RSS 2.0’s advantage in deployment, and after
acknowledging but criticizing its stability, Bray goes on to enumerate
a number of technical advantages implemented in the Atom 1.0 specification.

Unfortunately for Atom 1.0, from an investors’ standpoint, deployment
and stability are often what matter most  This is because a business
plan that depends on a standard that is stable and already widely used
in the market only carries with it the risk of its own business model
failing.  On the other hand a business plan that depends on a
standard that has not been deployed–and thus that is not really a
standard at all–carries with it the additional risk that that standard
will not be adopted.  This is a risk well outside of the control
of any given team of entrepreneurs, and outside of the control of an
investor. It adds greatly, therefor, to the risk to the whole business
plan.  Thus given the choice between a plan that depends only on
RSS 2.0 or that is neutral between RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, with one that
depends on Atom 1.0, most investors would be wise to go with the former.

In some cases investors are willing to bet on a nascent business
ecosystem as a whole. Even in these cases deployment, stability, and
simplicity are often more important than technical features,
as long as the simple standards that are deployed are workable.  Why is
this? Because they enable a business ecosystem to bring in the most
numbers of participants, and it is the participants that make the
business go. 

This is what happened in the establishment of the current RSS
ecosystem.  What enabled the RSS ecosystem to take off in the
first place was a shared
reliance on three minimalist, relatively stable, and ultimately
ubiquitous standards:  URLs and URIs, SOAP, and RSS 2.0. Because
these standards were simple, they were accessible to
entrepreneurs in small companies as well as large. The direct
cost of standards adoption by large companies–such as the New York
Times–was so
small as to be trivial, which encouraged rapid deployment and
experimentation. Because the standards were simple and the
tools were cheap, individuals experimented and some of their seeds took
root and spread. Podcasting started with Dave Winer
helping Chris Lydon record interviews with noted bloggers. Others
jumped in to help, and the podcasting movement took off on top of the
RSS movement.

Across the landscape small and large RSS experiments fed
on each other,
stimulating  the most rapid technological and business
co-evolution I’ve ever experienced. David Weinberger’s image of “small
pieces loosely connected” became the basis for a whole new approach to
applications.  Ad hoc web services became the norm, connected by
users manipulating dead simple standards, and solving problems
sometimes literally overnight.

Innovation has shifted to a new level of the RSS ecosystem

But there was a surprise in store for the RSS community.  Some of
the ad hoc web services  grew and revealed powerful
economies of scale and scope.  Small pieces with simple interfaces
grew up to become service giants if they were accessible to the
whole web and if they were operationally scalable,  Technorati,
Bloglines, Feedster
and Blogger became web superservices.  What now integrates
the RSS community is a new approach to information technology solutions
that involves scripting together ad
hoc global web superservices to create
powerful, flexible, focused solutions to problems.  Entrepreneurs
are
continuing to discover opportunities to innovate, inventing more and
more of such superservices and joining them together in new and
imaginative ways.

Now that the RSS ecosystem has taken off, the specifics of the
standards tying together the superservices may not matter as much as
before. Ironically, this may open an opportunity for Atom 1.0, because
most of the superservices can read and write multiple RSS-variants in
any case.  But on the other hand, it makes the introduction of
Atom 1.0 a kind of non-event for an investor and a company strategist:
Atom 1.0 becomes another standard that needs to be accomodated perhaps,
but one that is unlikely to presage much of a change in the landscape.

In business ecosystems, the collective innovation of the community is the most powerful force

I believe there will be important applications for Atom 1.0.  Some
of its specific functions will undoubtedly be useful  for
particular applicatons.  So I welcome it to the RSS
ecosystem.  But I am investing in the RSS ecosystem as a whole,
and the RSS approach to information technology services, and not a
specific standard.  The RSS ecosystem now has
millions of participants and is growing at an almost alarming
rate.  The scale, scope, and network effects within the ecosystem
are formidable. The large information technology and
media companies are playing, 
including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as well as essentially all of
the mainstream media companies. RSS is an ecology of ideas and
technologies, entrepreneurs and companies,
services, applications and communities that is based on the RSS
ideal–Really Simple Syndication. 

The most important thing now is not any particular idea or technology
or even company–the most important thing now is the worldwide
community of innovators that has been mobilized, capitalized, and has
momentum.  The most powerful thing about a business ecosystem is
millions of people accomplishing things together.

It is a muggy, cloudy summer day here in the woods west of
Boston.  This afternoon I invested some time Google searching.
Here are
direct screen copies of selected Google search results, July 17, 2005.
Even as a true believer in RSS, I was astounded:

Results 1 - 10 of about 9,540,000 for rss investment. (0.50 seconds)     [try it]  [see archived version]

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,310,000 for rss investors. (0.37 seconds)        [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,700 for “rss community“. (0.25 seconds)      [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 15,500 for “rss investment“. (0.30 seconds)      [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,700 for “rss ecosystem“. (0.08 seconds)       [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,500 for “rss investors”. (0.10 seconds)         [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,320 for “rss space“. (0.06 seconds)                  [try it]

Results 1 - 10 of about 307,000,000 for “”rss”“. (0.08 seconds)            [try it]  [see archived version]
Results 1 - 10 of about 69,300,000 for “rss feeds“. (0.42 seconds)        [try it]  [see archived version]

Since launching the RSS Investors fund, a number of insightful people (perhaps first, Paul Kedrosky) have
asked how we can expect to make a contribution investing in such a
narrow space.  Our answer (and that of others, such as Tom Foremski in a lead article that stimulated the Kedrosky critique, and in a reply
to Paul) is that we are investing in much more than a standard (RSS
writ small).  We are investing in a space that is defined by the RSS approach to
solutions,
services, companies, and innovation. 

We think the RSS space is
already huge and has almost unimaginable potential. The reality is not that we are big and
the space is too small.  Relative to the space, we are small, and
the RSS community is large,
inclusive, and growing, and the RSS investment space is
vast and expanding.  We think we have plenty to work on!

We didn’t name this investment space–the RSS community did.  Here again are
results from Google, pulled this afternoon, that show the
relevant comparison between the exact phrase “RSS investment” and two
possible alternatives, one more specific and almost completely unknown
to the general public (”Atom investment”) and one more vague but also
more general (”Web 2.0 investment”).  Neither of the
alternatives have gained any traction.  The results
are striking and impossible to dismiss:

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,500 for “rss investment“. (0.30 seconds)    [try it]  [see archived version]

Results 1 - 5 of about 7 for “atom investment“. (0.24 seconds)              [try it]  [see archived version]

Results 1 - 1 of about 5 for “web 2.0 investment“. (0.10 seconds)         [try it]  [see archived version]

The RSS community has been heralding its own relevance to investors for several years. What is amazing is how long it took for
investors to listen. For example, two years ago, June 23, 2003, in Tig’s Corner, Rahul wrote a prescient post.  Here is an excerpt:

Tim Bray has been writing about RSS [1 2 3].
He gives some examples about how RSS can be leveraged for banking,
sales tracking and weather, and also discusses the potential pitfalls.

I have been writing for some time about how RSS could be a
disruptive innovation going beyond blogs, with a specific focus on
enterprise events. (See my post on Information Refinery
from last July.) Thats where the focus should be. In fact, for all
practical purposes, the actual weblog pages are useless for me - I only
need the RSS to flow into my Info Aggregator.
I don’t need to access the blog pages to read what people are writing.
The RSS ecosystem is going to be more important than the blogging
ecosystem. Blogs will become by-products of the RSS ecosystem. Wait a while and we will make some RSS magic happen!

There is an old adage in venture capital, that we always overestimate
what will happen in the next 6 months, and underestimate what will
happen in the next six years. Well, this is the case with the RSS
approach. 

Welcome to the party!  The RSS ecosystem is a full-fledged
worldwide center of innovation. The RSS ecosystem
is comprised of entrepreneurs and activists daily inventing new ideas,
applications and communities, processes, services, systems and
components. Current accomplishments of RSS entrepreneurs and activists include podcasting,
a profound influence on Microsoft’s next operating system, Longhorn,
and the spread of the OPML standard for sharing outlines and thus knowledge. 
RSS syndication has turned the BBC and Boston.com (from the Boston Globe, where 42 columnists including prize-winning author James Carroll have their own feeds) and a host of other news
outlets into global content services open to all.  Sidelight:  RSS has enabled both the People’s Daily–the official news outlet of the Communist Party in China–and Ohmynews.com, a Korean-based citizen-contributor news service–to reach global audiences. And these are
only a few of the current accomplishments.  In short, the RSS
ecosystem is a vibrant “space” for RSS
investment and RSS investors.

The keystone species of the RSS ecosystem, the
Web Superservices, are disruptive innovations invading and colonizing (in the biological sense) the core businesses of other business
ecosystems.  To note just one example, Yahoo is now the world’s
largest news aggregator (see for example, Brian Livingston on this topic). If
you don’t think Yahoo is a threat to the traditional news business, ask
almost any senior executive of almost any of those organizations.  And stories on last week’s London bombings showed the power of bloggers and citizen journalism.  See Brian Braiker’s excellent summary “History’s New First Draft” on MSNBC of the ecology of newsgathering that emerged around the bombings, as well Adam Penenberg’s story in Wired on Michael Powell using superservice Technorati to keep track of blog stories.