Sat, 2009-Jun-27 by nmw.

Do You Write New Media? Social Media? News Media?

What does any of that mean? It’s nonsense!

Saying that there is a difference between a blog and an email is like saying that the words “I love you” are different if written by hand with a pen or typed by hand with a typewriter.

All Online Media (Publishing Technologies) are More / Less the Same

Anything that is online is available to the entire world-wide web. There may be some cryptographers who may argue this point, but I do not care to argue about the 1 in a million case — I am talking about the vast majority of cases.

What matters

is whether people are participating in this topic, this context, this issue, this page, this site….

Are We on the Same Page? Are We Speaking the Same Language?

If so, then please go ahead and tell me what you think — what’s on your mind… right now: in this context (in this web space)…?

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Sat, 2009-Jun-20 by nmw.

OMG — WTF is a Browser?

Answers from Times Square + Rotterdam

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Sun, 2009-May-31 by nmw.

Wikipedia lets you choose from 26 Languages:

1. العربية
2. Català
3. Česky
4. Dansk
5. Deutsch
6. English
7. Español
8. Esperanto
9. Français
10. Bahasa Indonesia
11. Italiano
12. Magyar
13. Nederlands
14. 日本語
15. Norsk (bokmål)
16. Polski
17. Português
18. Română
19. Русский
20. Slovenčina
21. Suomi
22. Svenska
23. Türkçe
24. Українська
25. Volapük
26. 中文

But on the wikipedia.org homepage, only 10 versions of the encyclopedia are listed:

1. en.wikipedia.org ( 51.74% )
2. ja.wikipedia.org ( 9.36% )
3. de.wikipedia.org ( 8.06% )
4. es.wikipedia.org ( 5.57% )
5. fr.wikipedia.org ( 3.72% )
6. pl.wikipedia.org ( 2.74% )
7. it.wikipedia.org ( 2.68% )
8. pt.wikipedia.org ( 2.24% )
9. ru.wikipedia.org ( 1.42% )
10. nl.wikipedia.org ( 1.30% )

 And the newly launched Pope2You only lists 5 language options:

1. Italiano
2. English
3. Español
4. Français
5. Deutsch

Youtube is available in 17 languages:

1. Česky
2. Deutsch
3. English (US)
4. English (GB)
5. Español (España)
6. Español (Latinoamérica)
7. Français
8. Italiano
9. Nederlands
10. Polski
11. Português (Brasil)
12. Svenska
13. Русский
14. 中文（简体）
15. 中文（繁體）
16. 日本語
17. 한국어

 And Google is available in 124 languages:

1. Afrikaans
2. Albanian
3. Amharic
4. Arabic
5. Armenian
6. Azerbaijani
7. Basque
8. Belarusian
9. Bengali
10. Bihari
11. Bork, bork, bork!
12. Bosnian
13. Breton
14. Bulgarian
15. Cambodian
16. Catalan
17. Chinese (Simplified)
18. Chinese (Traditional)
19. Corsican
20. Croatian
21. Czech
22. Danish
23. Dutch
24. Elmer Fudd
25. English
26. Esperanto
27. Estonian
28. Faroese
29. Filipino
30. Finnish
31. French
32. Frisian
33. Galician
34. Georgian
35. German
36. Greek
37. Guarani
38. Gujarati
39. Hacker
40. Hausa
41. Hebrew
42. Hindi
43. Hungarian
44. Icelandic
45. Indonesian
46. Interlingua
47. Irish
48. Italian
49. Japanese
50. Javanese
51. Kannada
52. Kazakh
53. Kinyarwanda
54. Kirundi
55. Klingon
56. Korean
57. Kurdish
58. Kyrgyz
59. Laothian
60. Latin
61. Latvian
62. Lingala
63. Lithuanian
64. Macedonian
65. Malagasy
66. Malay
67. Malayalam
68. Maltese
69. Maori
70. Marathi
71. Moldavian
72. Mongolian
73. Montenegrin
74. Nepali
75. Norwegian
76. Norwegian (Nynorsk)
77. Occitan
78. Oriya
79. Oromo
80. Pashto
81. Persian
82. Pirate
83. Polish
84. Portuguese (Brazil)
85. Portuguese (Portugal)
86. Punjabi
87. Quechua
88. Romanian
89. Romansh
90. Russian
91. Scots Gaelic
92. Serbian
93. Serbo-Croatian
94. Sesotho
95. Shona
96. Sindhi
97. Sinhalese
98. Slovak
99. Slovenian
100. Somali
101. Spanish
102. Sundanese
103. Swahili
104. Swedish
105. Tajik
106. Tamil
107. Tatar
108. Telugu
109. Thai
110. Tigrinya
111. Tonga
112. Turkish
113. Turkmen
114. Twi
115. Uighur
116. Ukrainian
117. Urdu
118. Uzbek
119. Vietnamese
120. Welsh
121. Xhosa
122. Yiddish
123. Yoruba
124. Zulu

Weawy!

:) nmw

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Sat, 2009-Apr-18 by nmw.

Language is the Ultimate Social Medium

I wrote this down a little over 2 years ago in the “Wisdom of the Language“.

Other Articles Related to a “Share Economy”

This post is essentially my entry to FIR’s Next09 “Share Economy” Contest.

The above (”Wisdom of the Language“) article describes how language is essentially the marketplace for a share economy.  Other articles I have recently written related to this concept include:

• The Next Big Thing: Humans
• Small is More Efficient than Big or Large
• Online, Virtual “Shelf Space” Exists in the Vocabulary of Keywords Available to the User / Consumer / Searcher
• Language is a Zero-Sum Game (More or Less)
• You tell, You sell :: Selling Yourself Online

and perhaps most notably: On the Web, It’s Freedom 2, Publishing 0

Also noteworthy are discussions (e.g. about the definition of “social media”) posted at the Conversative.Net Blog, and also the article titled “World 2.0 :: Too Small to Fail“.

Finally, I recently posted my “opinion” about the meaning of “FaceBook” in a 12seconds.tv video — see: http://tvne.ws/oped/128408

Thank you for your interest!

:) nmw

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Tue, 2009-Mar-31 by nmw.

I am Totally Thrilled with

Elisabeth Gilbert’s talk at this year’s TED conference.

It’s also a very basic element of Twitter.COM’s Success

How so? Well, microblogging removed superfluous technology from blogging. Much like a high signal-to-noise ratio, microblogging removed applications and algorithms that got in the way of human interaction.

8-D is an EGO-Killer :)

Twitter.COM is focused on individuals - and more and more people are finding that problematical (i.e., placing too much emphasis on people and/or personal profiles and/or egos).

In contrast, 8-D focuses attention on topics and/or spheres of activity (such as “networking”, “organisations”, “business” or “commerce”). In other words: 8-D brings people togeher + promotes collaboration, rather than separating people from each other by compartmentalizing each person into an individual profile… — so with 8-D, there is no need to approve “friends” and/or block “non-friends”: All participants who share the same topics share the same topical space.

In future iterations, we’re planning to add features to allow the participating communities to evaluate and prioritize goals, goal setting and planning.

Feedback on these ideas + plans are appreciated!

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Thu, 2009-Mar-26 by nmw.

What Twitter.COM did

Twitter created a new stardard of conversation - not microblogging, but rather is completely destroyed the segregation of blog post space as “follow-space” vs. blog comment space as “nofollow-space”. Twitter was “one-space” — a level-playing-field community.

This may not always remain the case. Last year, profile URL links were moved into “nofollow-space”. Recently, Twitter has introduced sponsored links (note: although the fact that these sponsored links are neither identified as paid advertising nor are labeled with the “nofollow” tag [in other words: it appears as though these links violate Google’s webmaster guidelines regarding “paid links”], there is no indication that Twitter will be removed from Google’s index for this violation). And just the other day twitter announced that they will be rolling out “premium accounts”.

Is This Cause for Alarm?

Maybe not.

What’s this about 8-D.US?

At 8-D.US the approach is a little different. Here, community is not defined by becomig a fan of a celebrity (in other words: “following” people). Instead, the entire space is a level playing field, and it is segmented into 8 categories (or “dimensions”) — for example “business, “organisations” or “general chat”. And everybody can take part in any space they feel is relevant to their topic.

Will it work?

Maybe not. Then again: maybe yes!

:D nmw

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Fri, 2009-Mar-20 by nmw.

Today, 2 of the Biggest Brand Names on the Web are Google and Twitter

While Google is failing to remain relevant, Twitter is failing to have any kind of strategy whatsoever — but there is a bigger issue at twitter (and one that I have talked about for ages already… — and one that Kevin Rose + Digg Team addressed with their new “WeFollow” product): Twitter is not focused — and therefore twitter will be little more than a user-generated tabloid to replace all of the newsprint/newspaper tabloids that will inevitably go bust. And of course there is competeition between Digg and Twitter (they are both in the “user-generated tabloid headlines industry” ;)

Search is Different

Search means you are trying to find something specific, particular — it may be on the tip of your tongue or maybe the concept is just difficult to describe (and in any case computer algorithms will probably never be able to grasp the sometimes quite intricate and complex connections firing inside your head).

I Need to Talk to Someone Who Understands What I’m Talking About

… and that probably isn’t Britney Spears.

The Crux of Community is Topical

You have an idea? That’s a topic. You have a problem? That’s a topic. You have an issue? That’s a topic. You have a solution? That’s a topic.

The Answer is: People Don’t Matter — Unless they Care about a Topic

If you care about a topic, and another person cares about the same (or at least a somewhat similar) topic, then you have the beginning of a social network. For example: One such social network that has grown to immense proportions over the past two millenia is called “Christianity” (remember? Jesus said: “where two or three are gathered together in My name“).

One-Size Fits-All is Dead

Think about: One-Size Fits-All killed newspaper publishing — and it will kill Google, Yahoo, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc., too… unless the people running such media companies begin to realize that the Internet is killing off all one-size fits-all media.

We’ve Only Just Begun…

I predict that there are many more big media companies that will go bust soon — and the irony is one that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer poignantly brought to a point recently (”I’m going to relish that year” — i.e. when 2 competitors decide to merge and form an even larger company [33:00-34:40]).

Big Media + Large Companies don’t work

E.F. Schumacher was right after all: Small is Beautiful — and perhaps even more siginificant is that small is more efficient than big or large. SME: Small = More Efficient! ;D

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Tue, 2009-Mar-17 by nmw.

WOOHOO!!

Popup New Window ( or play in frameset below : )

But Why?!?

Actually, my question included “why?” (trying to get a “2-for-1″ deal ;)

Do the people who work at digg have to be in a specific geographic location — and if so, why?

I guess if he had answered that, the interview might have gone 3 hours instead of just 3 minutes….

So what do you think the reason is — or could be? Might be? …?

;D nmw

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Thu, 2009-Mar-5 by nmw.

Plain and Simple: Their Algorithms Inflate the Web with Useless Webpages

Search engines like Google index webpages — and they have chosen to only index “on page” content (with a rather limited view of what a webpage is and/or what “on page” means).

For Example

Take a “news” website that evaluates the weekly news and gives a weekly “top news of the week” report. If such a site (say the site’s name were: “topnewsoftheweek.com”) had frameset redirects to, say the top sports news story of the week (e.g. “topnewsoftheweek.com/sports”) and/or the top business news story of  the week (e.g. “topnewsoftheweek.com/business”), etc., then users could save this link and visit it whenever the want to know the top news story of the week.

However, search engines like Google commonly say that such framesets do not qualify as web pages. Instead, they will either throw away the valuable metadata (such as the fact that the link was featured on “topnewsoftheweek.com” under the category X — and possibly also additional metdata [e.g. “title”/”heading” tag]) or they will not index the frame and/or framed content at all. That sucks.

Why? Because what website developers do because of this limited view of web pages is the following: The will continue to write more and more web pages about things like “topnewsoftheweek/sports/2009/week01″,  “topnewsoftheweek/sports/2009/week02″,  “topnewsoftheweek/sports/2009/week03″ and so on. The result? At Google.COM, there are currently 114 million top sports news week web pages indexed.

Of course Google soon realized this wasn’t working very well. What did they do? They decided to create a subset of the entire web including only sites that qualify as “news” sites. Here are the current top results for sports — not much better, is it?

So then they let editors select stories and categorize these news stories by hand: http://news.google.com/news?topic=s — where did the search engine’s algorithm go? Out the window! Perhaps algorithmic search is  dead?!?

Why This Matters

Google is leading the web to develop pages in a nonsensical manner — another good example of this is: search.twitter.com/search?q=sports.

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Thu, 2009-Feb-12 by nmw.

My Response to Dave Winer’s Comment Was Posted @ http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/02/11/howIMadeOver2MillionWithTh.html?disqus_reply=6202806#comment-6202806 — Here’s a Copy:

Where records (written ideas) “belong” has been thought about by librarians and archivists for centuries.

With advances in information technology, people are slowly but surely becoming aware that such expressions do not need to be classified or pigeon-holed, but instead can be stored in an arbitrary location and accessed by appropriate indexing.

The indexing methods that are appropriate depend on such things as the “user” (e.g. language) and the “use case” (e.g. entertainment). Therefore, someone who speaks EN (and would normally view locations such as .US or .UK) might actually search for a vacation rental in Spain @ http://vacation-rentals.es (and such linguistic phenomena were probably also at play with your sale of weblogs.com).

Whether the code (the website) available at the location (the web site) is a blog or some other format (or genre) is (IMHO) secondary.

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