Find A Path

I’ve just been quoted by RWW again (Feb. 2008). Needless to say, I LOVE being part of the global conversation.
I thought I’d set up a special post (this one) to keep track of where I’ve been quoted, since that does not happen that often anyway.
This post will also compensate for the lack of recent entries, since I’m most involved in preparing something new these days/weeks. More on this at a later stage.

On ReadWriteWeb:

• Will Social Bookmarking Pay Dividends with Search Result Augmentation?
• 10 Future Web Trends

On PaidContent:

• Proposed French Law Could Cause Trouble For iTunes; More On French MPs And MP3s

On My Dog II (now Eisenblog, Marc Eisenstadt’s blog now that he left the KMI):

• Social bookmarks, interest profiles, bayesian filtering

And there might be some others out there that I’ll add as I find them.

I’m following SebPaquet’s del.icio.us feed since probably 2004. He recently posted a link to the site of a keyboard macro creation software. The site claims to “Expand abbreviations as you type them. For example, typing “btw” can automatically produce “by the way”.”
Well, nowadays they’d better consider revising their presentations. I’d rather have them to convert “by the way” into “btw” and find many more such acronyms, in order to help me keep it within this damn 140 characters limit.
We’re living in a tiny world, guys. And learning to speak English is not enough, we also need to learn lists and lists of acronyms. WHIDTDT?

I know little yet about microformats. I have always considered a severe limitation to microformats the fact that - at least to my limited knowledge - they are supposed to apply to public data. That is at least how it worked for the examples that I have been given (such as last.fm user data). And it looked like such a limitation to me that I did not spend much time looking further into what they could bring.

Now, the Oauth specification has been released, and it looks to me like it should have been a preliminary step for microformats rather than a follower.
OAuth allows a user to share private data between two web services without disclosing anything else (account info, other data not meant to be shared…).
Using OAuth, multiple services will be able to exchange user data (pictures, bookmarks, texts and so on), under the control of the user.
In order to be wildly adopted, this technology requires that web services know what kind of data is found at other services, how to get it and decipher it.
This is where microformats can really help, in providing a standard way of organizing the user data. No need for coders to develop one-to-one protocols, as oauth and microformats tied together seem to be able to do a good part of the job.

I’m really not an expert in this area, though, and will try to investigate a bit more in the times to come. Any comments on this subject are really welcome! Notably, has it already been envisioned to use microformats for private data? Any other suggestion for sharing data through OAuth?

Steve Rubel and Marshal Kirkpatrick both see Knol, Google’s latest project, as a game changer in the “shared knowledge” space, directly competing with Wikipedia.

The question at stake is whether, some time from now, people will tend to refer more to Knol than to Wikipedia.
There is an obvious advantage to Google here, since they are the ones driving most of the traffic on the web, and can thus make sure to drive it to their properties.
This is undoubtably a major threat to wikipedia.
Now, there is another point raised that I don’t agree with. Their point is that by providing fame (articles are signed and represent a person’s knowledge and opinions) through a mysterious “authority” system, and by providing shared advertisement revenues, Google will get more people on board than wikipedia.

Self-promotion makes for a huge bias

What I’d rather see here is that this is a new temptation for anyone with a specific knowledge to show up for self-promotion. Since you will be the only one authoring and editing the article, you can easily and will easily (that’s human nature) tweak it in a way that serves you most. And we’ll end with an encyclopedia equivalent of the numerous blogs out there that are just meant to promote their author, repeating ceaselessly the same memes in a very conventional way, adding nothing to the conversation
Serve this with advertisement, and you are sure to keep me away.

Completeness is achieved through peer review

Another reason why you may want to keep your distances with Knol, is that if articles are maintained by a single author, and the discussion happens elsewhere, getting a complete view on a given subject will rapidly become unmanageable, even if the additions or corrections are found in the comments of the article’s page. I really doubt that many people can be as clever as to reflect each and every relevant point of view on a given subject. I’d rather rely on the collaborative aspects of wikipedia for this to happen.

This is in fact what makes wikipedia’s strength: everyone’s fighting to get their ideas on one same page, where everything is condensed. In the end, it provides the readers with very complete articles that include all of the controversial aspects of the subject at stake.

Show-off culture vs collaborative knowledge sharing

One question remains. Perhaps most people will prefer to be driven to articles oriented towards their personal beliefs rather than get a complete view of a given subject. In this case, Google will have won, but culture will have lost a fight.

Of course, I don’t think that in the end Knol will replace wikipedia, there is room for multiple tools filling different needs here. And it’s just up to us to see Knol as a wikipedia competitor or a different product that may or may not fulfill some other needs.
But still, Google’s Knol is uncomfortably sitting somewhere between the encyclopedia model and the blog model, and I’m just not sure that it makes sense for anyone else but Google, the authors, and the advertisers.

No, Netvibes does not need to build the 2.000.000th social network around its features. It’s not its core business and would add little to existing social networks.

But Netvibes lacks some social aspects though, notably if you look at it from the point of view of the content publisher rather than that of the content consumer.
Netvibes is mostly based on RSS feeds, and somewhat suffers from the limitations of RSS: publishers do get very little feedback on who their readers are, and what they are interested in.

Since the beginning of times, Bloglines has had a great feature for this. In Bloglines, subscriptions to blogs and other contents can be made public, and shared with others. This allows for publishers to get a glimpse at who their readers are, and what other feeds they have subscribed to.
It would be easy for Netvibes to add a very small profile module where you can enter your own personal page’s URL and maybe provide a name and an avatar. Publishers would have access to this information so that they at least know a little better who reads them. An option for Netvibes users would also be to disclose their feed selections, so that lists of “similar” contents could be built.

The last step could be to include reading recommendations in the RSS widgets (people who are reading this also read…), or even targeted advertising (hoho, you subscribed to a car website’s feed??). Not that I would want to engage into hot monetization discussions, though.