I've seen Yochai Benkler mentioned twice in the past few weeks in blogs I read semi-regularly. It seems that he recently tangled with Jason Calacanis over his attempt to pay top contributors of social bookmarking sites like Digg to using his service. Jason Calacanis documents their encounter in his post entitled Calacanis vs. Benkler Round One. Yochai Benkler also posted a comment in Nick Carr's post which was then elevated to a post by Carr entitled . Below is an excerpt from Yochai Benkler's comment.

The reason is that the power of the major sites comes from combining large-scale contributions from heterogeneous participants, with heterogeneous motivations. Pointing to the 80/20 rule on contributions misses the dynamic that comes from being part of a large community and a recognized leader or major contributors in it, for those at the top, and misses the importance of framing this as a non-priced social process. Adding money alters the overall relationship. It makes some people "professionals," and renders other participants, "suckers." It is not impossible to mix paid and unpaid participants, as we see in free and open source software and even to a very limited extent in Wikipedia. It is just hard, and requires a cultural form that is definitely not "now at long last we can tell who's worth something and pay them, while everyone else is just worthelss." What Calacanis is doing now with his posts about the top contributors to Digg is trying to alter the cultural interpretation of what they are doing: from leaders in an engaged community, to suckers who are being taken for a ride by Ross.Maybe he will succeed in raining on Digg's parade, though I doubt it, but that does not mean that he will succeed in building an alternative sustained social process of peer production, or in replacing peer production with a purely paid service. Once you frame the people who aren't getting paid as poor sods being taken for a ride, for example, the best you can hope for is that some of the "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees (after all, what is $1,000 a month relative to the millions Calacanis would make if his plan in fact succeeds? At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking.)

I'm quite surprised to see Benkler mention and dismiss the example of Open Source software since what is happening between Calacanis and Digg seems to be history repeating itself. Back in the day, Open Source software like Linux was primarily built by hobbyists who worked on such projects in their free time without intention of getting financially rewarded. Later on, companies showed up that wanted to make money from Open Source software and there was a similar kind of angst to what we are seeing today about social bookmarking. If you want to take a trip down memory lane, go back and read all the comments on the various stories about the Redhat IPO on Slashdot to see the same kind of arguments and hurt feelings that you see in the arguments made by Benkler and from people such as the Backstabbed by Netscape blogger.

The fact is that since we are human, the 80/20 rule still applies when it comes to the value of the contributions by individuals. This means that it is beneficial to the 'community' if those that contribute the most value to the system are given as much incentive as possible to contribute. After all, I doubt that there is anyone who would argue that the fact that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are paid to work on Linux or that Miguel De Icaza is paid to work on Mono is harmful to the communities around these projects or that it makes the unpaid contributors to these projects "suckers".

I think where people are getting confused is that they are mixing up giving the most valuable contributors to the system more incentive with trying to incentivize the entire community with financial reward. They are not the same thing. Open Source projects wouldn't be successful if everyone contributing to a project did so with the expectation of being paid. On the flip side, Open Source projects benefit the most when the top contributors to the project can dedicate their 100% of their efforts on the project without having to worry about a day job. That's the difference.

Also it seems that Benkler seems to think that Whuffie (aka respect from the community) is a better incentive than money when it comes to influencing top contributors. I think that's a pipe dream that will only occur when we live in a world where money can't buy you anything such as the one in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

 

Jason Fried over at the Signal vs. Noise blog has an entry entitled Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math where he writes

This week’s BusinessWeek cover story features a beaming Kevin Rose from Digg. Across his chest it says “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Wow, now that sounds like a great success story.

Too bad it’s a blatent lie. BusinessWeek knows it. They prove it themselves in the article:

So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.

$3 million in revenues and they’re breaking even. That means no meaningful profits. That’s the first hint no one has made $60,000,000. Their gross revenues aren’t even anywhere close to that number. And let’s leave out the “people in the know say it’s easily worth” fantasy numbers. And certainly don’t use those numbers to do the math that makes the cover (we’ll get to that in a minute).

I can't believe BusinessWeek ran such a misleading cover story. I guess sensational, fact-less headlines aren't just for the supermarket tabloids these days.

 

Earlier this week I was showing off the new Windows Live Spaces to my girlfriend in an attempt to try and explain what I do at Microsoft all day. When I showed her the Friends list feature she was surprised that the site had morphed from a blogging service into a social networking service and wondered whether our users wouldn't react negatively to the change. Actually that's paraphrasing what she said. What she said was

If I was using your site to post my blog and my pictures for people I know, I'd be really annoyed if I started having to deal with strangers asking me to be their friend. If I wanted to deal with that shit crap I'd have just gone to MySpace.

That's valid criticism and is something the people who worked on the design of this feature (i.e. me, Mike, Neel, Matt, John and a bunch of others) took into account. One of the key themes of Windows Live is that it puts users in control of their Web experience. Getting repeated email requests to be some stranger's "friend" without a way to stop them doesn't meet that requirement. This is why there is a communications preferences feature in Windows Live Spaces which can be reached by clicking on http://[yourspacename].spaces.live.com/Settings/Communication/

Below is a screenshot of the page

Don't like getting friend requests as email? Disable this by unchecking 'Also send invitations and e-mails to my email address'. Don't want to deal with requests from total strangers wanting to be on your friend's list? Then move the setting on 'These people can request to be on your friends list' to something more restrictive like 'Messenger buddies' so that you only get friend requests from people on your IM buddy list who you already know.You hang out a virtual DoNotDisturb sign and we'll honor it.

Making sure that our users have total control over who they communicate and share information with is key to how we approach building social software for Windows Live. Thanks to all the users of Windows Live Spaces who have made it the most popular blogging service in the world. 

 

I've gotten some reports from people that they've had problems using their blogging tool of choice to post to Windows Live Spaces using the MetaWeblog API. I haven't had any problems posting using W.Bloggar but have had some issues using Blogjet recently. I'd appreciate it if anyone else who's having issues posting to their blog responds with a comment to this blog post with information about which blogging tool you are using and what error message the tool reports.

Thanks.

 

A couple of days ago, I wrote that based on my experiences with Kuro5hin I wouldn't be surprised by small sets of users dominating the content and focus of Digg since it is practically the same kind of site. Duggtrends has a blog post entitled Digg user statisitcs & trends which confirms these suspicions. It states

From our database, for the period of 6/19/2006 9:31:28 PM to 7/30/2006 4:41:34 PM a total of 6013 stories were promoted to front page of these

• top 10 users contributed 1792 i.e 29.8%
• top 100 contributed 3324 stories i.e 55.28% (which is again what exactly SEOMOZ reported)
  

This clearly shows the shift from the Kevin Rose reported numbers from 26.8% to 55.28%; top users are contributing more & more to digg

As per Jason Martinez (and Calacanis points in his blog) 60% of Digg’s front page is the top 0.03% users and provides this graph.

It looks like the 1% rule is in full effect. This has always been the nature of online communication from mailing lists and newsgroups to Web-based message boards and social bookmarking sites. Human nature will always shine through at the end.

PS: Has anyone else seen that the Digg REST API has now been documented? Thanks to Michael Brundage for the tip.

 

I just read the rather brief Feed Access Control RSS and ATOM specification from the Bloglines team. It defines the access:control element as

<access:restriction> element
Sub element of <rss> or <feed>. Used to indicate the re-distribution restrictions for a feed. The 'relationship' attribute is used to indicate whether a feed will 'allow' or 'deny' access.

To 'allow' access means a feed may be redistributed to other public sources, including search. To allow access, for example:

    <access:restriction relationship="allow" />

To 'deny' access means a feed should not be redistributed to other public sources, including search. To deny access, for example:

    <access:restriction relationship="deny" />

The default relationship is to allow access. However, if a feed is currently set to 'deny', the relationship must be explicitly set back to 'allow' for it to be registered (Simply ommiting it from the feed is not sufficient to turn access back on).

The problem with this 'specification' is that it says nothing about its goals, scenarios or expected use cases. Without these it is hard to tell whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. Danny Ayers points out that this mimics the behavior of the Robots META tag that can be placed in HTML pages. I guess this means it prevents search engines from indexing your page and showing it in search results which makes sense in certain limited scenarios. For example, it makes sense to exclude a search engine from indexing the search results page of another search engine or the RSS feed of some search results. Hints like the Robots META tag and robots.txt are good ways to prevent this from happening for HTML pages. I guess this proposal does the same for RSS and Atom feeds.

On the other hand, it is definitely not an access control mechanism. You wouldn't want your bank to tell you that the way that they prevent anyone from viewing your bank account details is via robots.txt would you?

 

Windows Live Spaces is live. This is pretty sweet since the most visible feature I've worked on while at Microsoft is now available to the general public. On the Windows Live Spaces team blog we get the post Windows Live Spaces - It’s Here! which states

1. Set-up your friends list.  Simply add the new Friends Module to your space, or click here to automatically add it to your space, and start inviting your friends.  Once your friends accept your invitation, they will appear to visitors of your space. You can also explore your contacts’ friends (and their friends too) directly from Windows Live Messenger.  Simply click on your contact’s Messenger icon to view their contact card, and then click on the “View this contact’s Friends list” icon on the bottom right hand corner of the contact card.  This will launch the cool new Friends Explorer feature that will allow you to easily navigate through lists of friends. 

2. Add gadgets.  Jazz up your space by adding cool new gadgets.  All you need to do is click on the “Customize” link in your Space when you are in the editor mode, and then click on the link titled “Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery” to be taken to the Windows Live Gallery where you can select gadgets you want to add to your space. Check out the “Updated Spaces” gadget we just added to The Spacecraft!  You can add this gadget automatically to your space too by simply clicking here.

The platform behind the Friend's List was one of my features and I'm glad to see it rolling out to the hundreds of millions of Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Messenger users. You can check out my friend's list to browse my social network which currently consists of Microsoft employees.

Since most features in Windows Live Spaces are integrated with Windows Live Messenger, so also is the Friends List feature. Users of Windows Live Messenger will have three integration points for interacting with the Friends List. The first is that one can right-click on Messenger contacts and select "View->Friends List" to browse their Friends List. Another integration point is that one can respond to pending requests from people to add them to your Friends List directly from Messenger client (this is also the case with other features like Live Contacts). Finally, one can also browse the Friends List from their Contact Card. Below is a screenshot of what happens when a Windows Live Messenger user right-clicks on one of their Messenger contacts and selects "View->Friends List".

However it is the announcement about support for gadgets in Windows Live Spaces which I find even cooler than the fact that my feature is finally shipping. With this release, one can add almost any gadget from the Windows Live Gallery to one's space. You'll find some screenshots of gadgets on a space in Mike Arrington's post entitled Windows Live Spaces Launches, Replaces MSN Spaces.

If you are a developer who'd like to build gadgets for Windows Live Spaces you should check out the post in the Windows Live Spaces developer platform blog Gadget devs, come out and play! which provides the following information for developers interested in building gadgets

How do I get started?

1.  Build a Windows Live web gadget according to the SDK available at the Windows Live Dev site. 

 

2.  If your gadget has any settings/edit UI that visitors shouldn't see, then use the following code to detect whether Spaces is running the gadget in author mode and show/hide the UI accordingly.  There is a p_args argument outlined in the gadgets SDK and we've added a new method off of that called getMode().  You can do a simple comparison of the value returned from that method call to determine author vs. visitor mode.  

Something like the following:

          

         foo = function(p_elSource, p_args, p_namespace)

         p_args.module.getMode() == Web.Gadget.Mode.author

3.  Add the gadget to your own space using the following Spaces API: 

http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=URLEncodedPathToYourH ostedGadgetManifestURL

 

Switch between "Edit your space" and "View your space" to see how it behaves in both author and visitor modes.  If your manifest file, Javascript, and CSS are hosted anywhere but Windows Live Gallery (gallery.live.com), the gadget can only be added for editing/viewing by the space owner.  It will be hidden to visitors.    

4.  Zip up your manifest file and supporting Javascript/CSS files and submit that gadget package to the Windows Live Gallery so other visitors can add it to their space by going to Customize --> Modules --> "Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery".

Now that Windows Live Spaces has shipped, I can now write that article I've been talking about for a while on building Windows Live gadgets powered by RSS for XML.com. You can expect a bunch of gadgets from me over the next few weeks.

 

I have some bad news and some good news. RSS Bandit is built using user interface controls that are not provided by default by the .NET Framework to enhance it's look and feel. A common practice among vendors of such user interface controls is to offer them for free to developers to gain mindshare and once these developers are 'hooked on their product' they withdraw the free version. This means that developers of applications that use these user interface controls will end up having to pay the vendors if they want to use newer versions of these controls. This has happened twice to me with RSS Bandit. The first time was when DotNetMagic went from free to being only available for purchase. The second time happened a few months ago when Divelements cancelled the free version of their controls which are used extensively in current versions of RSS Bandit.

We were in a lurch and just as I thought that I'd have to start some sort of blog fundraiser so we could pay for these controls and keep RSS Bandit free to use, Torsten was contacted by the good folks at Infragistics who've donated use of their controls to our project. This means that we'll be replacing some of the user interface controls used by RSS Bandit and adding some new functionality to the UI. See the screenshot below for some of these visual enhancements.

I'd also like to take this time to welcome Ariel Selig to the RSS Bandit development team. He's already made some decent contributions in replacing our old UI components with the new ones.

 

User interfaces for computers in general and web sites in particular seem to be getting on my nerves these days. It's really hard to browse for what you are looking for on a number of buzzword-complaint websites today. Most of them seem to throw a tag cloud and/or search box at you and call it a day.

Search boxes suck as a navigation interface because they assume I already know what I'm looking for. I went to the Google Code - Project Hosting website and wanted to see the kinds of projects hosted there. Below is a screenshot of the website from a few minutes ago.

Notice that the list of project labels (aka tags) shown below the search box are just 'sample labels' as opposed to a complete classification scheme or hierarchy. They don't even list fairly common programming topics like VisualBasic, Javascript or FreeBSD. If I want to browse any of these project labels, I have to resort to poring over search results pages with minimal information about the projects.

Using tag clouds as a navigation mechanism is even more annoying. I recently visited Yahoo! Gallery to see what the experience was like when downloading new plugins for Yahoo! Messenger. On the main page, there is a link that says Browse Applications which takes me to a page that has the following panel on the right side. So far so good.

I click on the Messenger link and then was taken to the following page.

What I dislike about this page is how much space is taken up by useless crap (i.e. the tag cloud full of uninformative tags) while the actual useful choices for browsing such as 'most popular' and 'highest rated' are given so little screen real estate and actually don't even show up on some screens without scrolling down. The tag cloud provides little to no value on this page except to point out that whoever designed is hip to all the 'Web 2.0' buzzwords.

PS: Before anyone bothers to point this out, I realize a number of Microsoft sites also have similar issues.

 

Instead of seeing Clerks II last week, I ended up seeing My Super Ex-Girlfriend which turned out to have been a bad choice. I wanted to go catch Clerks II this past weekend but my girlfriend decided that it was her turn to pick movies after My Super Ex-Girlfriend was such a disappointment. So we saw Miami Vice instead. Below are some brief thoughts on both movies

Miami Vice

This was nothing like the TV show. It was more like a darker, grittier version of Bad Boys 2 complete with trips to exotic South American locales to cavort with drug dealers. There wasn't a lot of action but whenever the guns did blaze the scenes were pretty intense.

My only complaint was that Colin Farrell's acting seemed pretty wooden at times.

Rating: **** out of *****

My Super Ex-Girlfriend
The core premise of the movie, what if your crazy ex-girlfriend had super powers, seemed like an interesting premise and I expected good things from a movie starring Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman. The movie started off well enough with a number of funny scenes including a few about sex with super heroes. However the movie peaked somewhere around the halfway mark in the scene where Uma Thurman spies on Luke Wilson and Ana Faris (the girl from the Scary Movie movies) having sex and throws a shark at them through the bedroom window.

It goes downhill pretty fast from there, it's as if the writers only had a few gags involving super-powered revenge pranks without any thought of how to conclude the movie. The last couple of scenes such as the super heroine cat fight and the over-the top obnoxiousness of Rainn Wilson's character left a foul taste in my mouth. It was a promising movie which failed to live up to its promise. 

Another problem I had with the movie was failing to believe that anyone would pick a ditzy Ana Faris over a super-powered Uma Thurman regardless of how 'psycho' of a girlfriend she was. That was a bad casting choice in my book.

Rating: *** out of *****