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June 10, 2004
Microcasting and Political Campaigns
Spurred on by Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis is talking about why the conventional model of TV is exploding. A few data points I thought of immediately:
- Today Jon Udell had a write-up about a how-to clip that he watched online about fixing your printer.
- Robert Scoble's Channel 9 is just a couple of guys with a video camera showing us the inside of Microsoft.
- Doug Kaye's IT Conversations is already as good or better than any radio program I listen to.
Each of these is "microcasting." None of them expect to hit an audience of millions, although I'm sure that latter two, at least, wouldn't mind. Why do you care? Because you get content more specifically aimed at what you want. I don't know what the audience for IT Conversations is, but it doesn't have to be huge for Doug to make it work. That means he can afford to produce content for a niche market that is un(der)-served by traditional broadcast.
I just had an idea: why aren't any of the campaigns doing this? For very little money, a campaign, even one for Governor of a smaller Western state (hint, hint) could afford to broadcast their own TV program around their candidate. The trick isn't technical---heck, even I can figure that out---the trick is to make it interesting. But that's why campaigns have liberal arts majors working for them, right?
09:22 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Presence and the Enterprise
As I prepare for the Exploding the Enterprise panel at Supernova in two weeks, my reading is colored by the topic. Thus, this article on presence from Business Communications Review caught my attention. We're inclined to associate presence with IM since that's where its used most pervasively, but presence messages could be separated from the IM application and deployed as a general-purpose infrastructure that's usable by many apps, including IM. In this scenario, presence messages would flow between machines over an enterprise messaging infrastructure.
What generates these presence messages? Applications such as your calendar or word processing program. I'd like people to be able to tell I'm on the phone, in a meeting (although not necessarily with who), or even that I'm very focused on a task so that they can more effectively time their interruptions. That means these applications have to be able to send presence messages about what I'm doing. Some worry about the privacy concerns, but that's only a problem if you don't let the user control what's visible and what's not.
This doesn't get us to an answer to the question of the Exploding the Enterprise panel, however which is "does any of this make any difference?" I've got an open topic in the Ask Phil Forum for you to leave your questions and comments for the panel before the show.
06:27 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Google Considering RSS
Derrick Strumpf sent me a note about an article on Google and RSS. If you haven't followed this, Google owns Blogger. Blogger, at one point, supported RSS, albeit only for their paying subscribers. In April, Google dropped support for RSS in favor of Atom. Now it seems that maybe they're reconsidering:
According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.
"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.
As of June 4, it appeared no decision had yet been made on the issue. A Google representative declined to comment.From Google mulls RSS support
Referenced Thu Jun 10 2004 06:02:53 GMT-0600
Google's decision, of course, carries huge weight in the standards space, since Google's support for Atom counter-balances, in some respects, the dominance of RSS and gives it momentum. A neutral Google would make Atom suddenly less compelling to many people, such as the software developers working on feed readers.
Personally, I've not really taken sides in this debate, although I have to admit that I've been impressed with the design of Atom. I used the API in my class yesterday as an example of a RESTian Web service.