The Great Seduction

Apple defies economic gravity

As the global economic crisis shows little sign of relenting, it’s been another brutal week in tech. News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller fired MySpace’s two co-founders, CEO Chris DeWolfe and president Tom Anderson. A Swedish court sentenced the two founders of the Pirate Bay web service to a year in prison. Yahoo! announced plans to lay off another 5% of its staff and finally shut down GeoCities, the archaic web hosting company it bought for $3.6 billion in 1999. Joost, at one point the great hope of online video, is reportedly now up for sale. Even Microsoft announced a 6% annual drop in revenue, the first the Redmond, WA based company has reported since it went public in 1986.

Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell described the current business conditions as "the most difficult economic environment the company has faced in our 30-year history". But for Apple, Microsoft’s greatest rival over the last twenty five years, the most serious global economic crisis in a century has had little impact on the company’s remarkable growth.

Yes, in the midst of all the general economic carnage, a Steve Jobs-less Apple continues to defy economic gravity. Announcing its first quarter 2009 sales to Wall Street last Wednesday, Apple revealed a net profit of $1.2 billion on overall sales of over $8 billion. Leading the Apple miracle were 3.79 million iPhones sold in 81 countries, more than double the number from the same quarter last year. And last week Apple also celebrated the billionth download from its 9 month-old App Store which now features more than 35,000 different iPhone apps. 

The iPhone is more than just a successful hardware product. With its telephone and Internet access, the pocket-sized iPhone is driving the real-time communications revolution. Without the iPhone, fashionable real-time services like Twitter wouldn’t have taken off so meteorically. The iPhone has swept away the traditional boundaries between a mobile telephone, a web browser, a computer, a portable entertainment system, and even an e-book reader. It is now the critical vehicle of both old and new media.

So is the iPhone invulnerable? Palm certainly hope it isn’t. This once iconic Silicon Valley firm has bet everything on a new iPhone style device called the Pre which will be launched in the summer. Google’s promising Android telephone will also be out later this year, while Research in Motion’s popular BlackBerry family of devices (which I myself own & cherish) remains the iPhone’s primary competition amongst business users.

But my money is firmly on Apple. If the rumors that it will release a $99 third generation iPhone in early June at its World Developers Conference in San Francisco, expect sales to at least double again in the second half of 2009. Whatever happens to the world economy over the next eight months, 2009 will likely be remembered as the year that Apple overtook both Microsoft and Google as the critical engine of the new media economy.

Blogs are dead; long live the blog

Is blogging dead? Last year, questioning the future of the iconic weblog would have had me institutionalized. But today, in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services like Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.

It’s not just me questioning the blog. Last week, I was in Amsterdam, with a thousand of my closest new media friends, at The Next Web, one of Europe’s biggest and best tech conferences. And the words whispered in the Next Web hallways about the future of blogging weren’t always promising for the venerable digital institution. Some pundits at Next Web – such as Hermione Way, the London based founder of Newspepper and the presenter of Techfluff – have even begun to pen their obits to the blog. “Blogging as we know it is dead,” Way told me over dinner one evening at Amsterdam’s Loup restaurant. “It’s finished.”

Are these reports about the death of blogging exaggerated? At that same Loup dinner that Way announced the death of blogging, Matt Mullenweg, the San Francisco based co-founder of the open-source blog company WordPress, announced its resurrection.

“Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

I suspect that Mullenweg is right. When blogging was invented in the late Nineties by my dear Berkeley friend and neighbor Dave Winer, it represented an easy self-publishing tool, a simple way to publish dirty great lumps of one’s own static text. But just as the Internet has dramatically evolved over the last ten years from a self-publishing into a real-time broadcasting platform, so blogging is transforming itself with equally dramatic vigor.

With its 10 to 15 million users and blue chip media clients like the New York Times, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, Mullenweg’s WordPress epitomizes these changes. What distinguishes WordPress from some of its competitors is its open-source foundations. This open architecture has fostered an free ecosystem of 5,000 plug-ins that enable WordPress users to do everything from incorporate their Twitter feeds, videos and photos, to even managing their own independent record label.

And last week, WordPress released two new products – Buddy Press and P2 -- that underline Mullenweg’s vision of the blog as an aggregation point for all our media information. Mullenweg described Buddy Press to me as “Facebook in a box” – technology which enables WordPress users to create their own public or private social networks around their blog. While P2 is “Twitter in a box” which, according to Mullenweg, transforms the traditional WordPress blog into a real-time media experience. 

So who is right about the future of the blog, Hermione Way or Matt Mullenweg? They both are, of course. The old static blog is indeed dying. But it’s being resurrected by Wordpress as a real-time social media personal portal.  The blog is dead; long live the blog.

Friendfeed versus Twitter

Twitter might be the newest new thing for millions of Internet users but, for most of Silicon Valley’s hardcore geekerati, it is Friendfeed that remains the hottest social networking application. If Twitter is emerging as the Microsoft of the emerging real-time Web, then Friendfeed – which unveiled a major upgrade to its interface last week -- is akin to Apple in its ability to muster a noisy following of hardcore evangelists.

Friendfeed, which was founded in 2007 by a group of ex Google engineers, is a real-time aggregation service that automatically incorporates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any other online content published with an RSS feed. Dramatically more subtle and complex than Twitter, Friendfeed is currently the most ambitious social media application on the Internet, particularly in the ways in which it empowers real-time public and private conversation between its subscribers.

What is striking about Friendfeed is the remarkably passionate responses it elicits from normally sane people. For me and other mainstream web users who crave simplicity and ease-of-use from their Internet tools, it remains an irritatingly over-engineered and elliptical application, the Internet version of Rubik’s Cube. And this may explain why Friendfeed currently has less than 7% of Twitter subscribers and has fewer users now that it had six months ago. Yet, for highly credible Silicon Valley pundits like my fellow Gillmor Gang members Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor, Friendfeed represents the next big thing in social media.

In spite of my own admittedly rather irrational antipathy to Friendfeed, I certainly urge everyone to sign up with this free service and try it. Whatever one thinks of Friendfeed, this real-time application is, without question, a major technological achievement which, in some shape or form, represents the future of the real-time Internet. The most interesting way for non-geeks to try Friendfeed is to test-drive it alongside Twitter. The chances are that you’ll either love or hate it. Like a good Rorschach Test, your reaction to Friendfeed is probably an accurate indicator of your general attitude to the conversational value of real-time social media.

Given Twitter’s phenomenal popularity with mainstream Internet users, it’s hard now to imagine that Friendfeed can now effectively compete as a straightforward consumer application. As Techcrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote last week, “Friendfeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses”. But perhaps Friendfeed will emerge as a platform for third party social media developers who can add useful new features – such as real-time video or audio.

That said, I do think that it is unwise to ignore the significance of Friendfeed’s hardcore evangelists. A year or two ago, many people (including myself) were sneering at the value of Twitter. But early adopters like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor persevered with the service and now Twitter is growing by more than 30% a month and, according to the web metrics firm Comscore, had around 10 million unique visitors in February. Maybe it is Scoble, Laporte and Gillmor, and not me, who are right about Friendfeed. I hope so. Little would please me more than to be proved wrong about the value of Friendfeed.

Hats off to Mr Murdoch

Much cynicism greeted the Wall Street Journal's decision last month to begin a sports section. But the cynics were wrong. In a time of dramatic social and cultural upheaval in America, professional sports offers a valuable way for serious journalists to write about the human consequences of all this change. For example, today's piece about the demise of a baseball's independent press corps reveals how one of America's most vaunted icons -- the professional baseball journalist (seem above in Yankee Stadium on Sept 2, 1962) -- is "fading". While yesterday's wistful piece by James Tobin about the Larry Bird Magic Johnson rivalry written in the context of the deindustrialization of the Midwest represents American sports journalism at its finest.

What unites these two pieces is a sadness about the rapidly disintegrating world of local sports stars and sports journalists. The postindustrial crisis of the American Midwest and the digital crisis of newspapers are both direct casualties of capitalism's creative destruction. But what, I wonder, would Schumpeter make of Rupert Murdoch, historically one of 20th century capitalism's most destructive hoodlums, who last year sunk serious capital ($5 billion) into a print newspaper as archaic as The Wall Street Journal. I'm no great fan of News Corp, but this morning my hat is off to Mr Murdoch for taking on the Sisyphean task of maintaining the relevance of the Wall Street Journal in the digital age. Kudos also to Murdoch for squaring up to Google last week. For all his historical sins, the destructive old warrior is finally doing some creative good.

What's the point of instantaneous global communications?

The New York Times' David Brooks writes about the "intellectual hubris" of the financial community which created what he calls an "unconscious conformity". The problem, Brooks says, is that Wall Street's intellectual tools were "worse than useless":

To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.

Brook's "uniform conformity" isn't unique to Wall Street. I wonder if there's an inverse relationship between technological speed and intellectual diversity. The slower ideas flow around the world, the more viewpoints exist on them. Thus the most troubling consequence of our real-time communications revolution might be intellectual homogeneity.

Take, for example, today's mania for the latest version of Friendfeed, the uber micro-blogging platform. Twitter has been abuzz all morning with friends of Friendfeed eulogizing its new features. The only dissenting voice seems to be that of the eccentric Daily Telegraph blogger Milo Yiannopoulos. Today's speed of communications in products like Friendfeed lends itself to uniformity rather than nuanced debate. Everyone seems to be in such a rush to discover the newest new thing that they aren't able to stop and think hard about what it is they are supposed to be thinking about.

Yiannopoulos question of "what is the point of Friendfeed" might be broadened to "what is the point of instantaneous global communications?"

Digital Dutch masterpieces

“Are libraries old or new media?” I tweeted earlier this week, assuming that my opinionated Twitter buddies would tell me that libraries – with their crusty old gatekeepers, shelves of dusty books and strict “no talking” policies -- are quintessential old media.

As usual, I was wrong. Most of my Twitter friends responded that libraries are both old and new media. They are, of course, right. Libraries and librarians, like newspapers and journalists, don’t naturally fall into one or other media camp. It all depends on the kind of libraries in which you happen to find yourself.

Last week, I was lucky enough to find myself in the fair city of Amsterdam in the company of several hundred Dutch librarians.  I was addressing Bibliotheekplaza 2009, an annual convention of Dutch librarians focused on using the tools of the Web revolution to modernize libraries. Borrowing the wisdom of my Twitter buddies, I argued in my speech that while most libraries today do represent the most crusty and dusty of the ancien media regime, they also have a great opportunity to become the next-generation curators of digital information. 

My audience of Dutch librarians agreed with my argument that, in the midst of today’s chaotic digital revolution, we need reliably curatorial libraries and libraries more than ever now. Like in Britain, librarians in Holland are under tremendous pressure to reform. Unlike in Britain or America, however, the Dutch, with their trademark foresight, are actively investing in libraries of the future. The two most innovatively interactive libraries in Holland are the central public libraries in Amsterdam and Delft both of which have both radically reinvented themselves for the new digital age.

At Bibliotheekplaza, I chatted with Rob Visser, the guy who has been driving the remarkable digital revolution at the Amsterdam public library. Instead of the dustiness and crustiness of the typical 20th century library, visitors to Amsterdam’s central public library will find not only books, but a restaurant as well as a children’s theatre and a public radio and television studio. The library, which is open every day from 10.00 am to 10.00 pm, also holds a series of cultural festivals – such as the upcoming week of poetry – which it then broadcasts on the Internet.

Amsterdam library’s website epitomizes its innovative approach to the 21st curation of knowledge. The website features its own customized search engine, the “aquabrowser”, which has integrated the library’s books, CDs and DVDs as well as a rich archive of Amsterdam’s history and culture. Equally innovatively, the website provides those who use it within the walls of the library itself open access to all its digital content.

Amsterdam library’s return on investment is impressive. The upgraded library, built at a cost of 400,000 euros, was opened in July 2007 and within 7 months it already had welcomed over a million visitors. This truly 21st century library with its cutting-edge website proves that old media can be successfully upgraded. I urge all non Dutch librarians to make the trip over to Amsterdam to see the latest cultural miracle in this most miraculous of cities.

The new culture war

Give me Twitter or give me death says a skeptical Ian Brown in the Globe and Mail. But rather than death, Brown actually discovers a new culture war via Twitter:

Twitter is one more symptom of the culture war being fought right now between society's Engineers — smart, extroverted, optimistic people who believe technology can solve everything — and its Naturalists, equally smart people who tend to side with the private mind, in the sad, lonely beauty of its isolation.....Most Naturalists don't want to maintain control over the media or its message, as some Engineers and their marketing monkeys insist. But they do write to stay unavailable, to keep the world at bay until they have figured out what they think and what is true. There's nothing wrong with that methodology; it has produced the theory of evolution and Cézanne's paintings and the novel Lolita and Gandhi's political theories, to cite a few gems of quiet introspection. 

I thought of this new culture war between Engineers and Naturalists today in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum while I was gazing at Johannes Vermeer's 1662-63 painting "Woman reading a Letter". The museum catalogue describes the Vermeer's use of light and shadow and his use of muted blues and browns. But what it misses is the intense concentration on the face of Vermeer's woman in blue as her eyes, lips and hands cling to the letter. She is submerged in the text, gazing at it with undivided attention. This is reading as religion; her faith is her letter.

I'm a Naturalist, of course. But I think Ian Brown misunderstands my creed. Sure, I'm full of respect for Cezanne's paintings, Lolita, Gandhi's political theories etc etc. But my real awe is reserved for Vermeer's woman reading a letter. She is the best argument against the fragmented and distracted public facing self of the always-on digital age. This anonymous 17th century Dutch woman represents the sad, lonely beauty of the isolated private reader.