Jason Calacanis has a blog post entitled New views of Netscape Homepage/Hive where he writes

The Netscape homepage has been taken over by political stories. I hate politics, and seeing 1/3rd of the stories on the home page related to "Bush Sucks/Is Great" stories has really burned many of the users out.

You see, people vote 2-3x as much on political stories and they comment 10-30x a much on those same stories. So, we're gonna change the home page to be one of the two below (descriptions by CK from his post on the issue):

I remember the same thing happening to Kuro5hin during the 2000 U.S. elections and the site never recovered. The site went from a more democratic version of Slashdot to being the precursor to DailyKos. As Jason points out, the reason is that people are more likely to comment on or post stories about politics especially during an election year than they are to post about AJAX design patterns or which startup got flipped to Google this week.

Imposing a quota on how many stories from a particular topic/section can show up on the front page sounds like a good way to enforce diversity on the front page. However it is likely to hide the true culture of the site which may actually be heavily tilted to being a political news site than a technology or general news site despite Jason Calacanis's best efforts. Time will tell if this was a good move or not. Either way, it is clear that the community is going in a different direction from what Calacanis and his cohorts at AOL would like. Welcome to the world of user-generated content. ;) 

A couple of days ago Ross Mayfield started a blog post entitled Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging with the following

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

From this intro, he directs us to a blog post by David Hornik entitled Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance which contains the following excerpt

Continuing in his role as shirpa of the new economy, Chris has moved on from the Long Tail to a related but distinct idea that he is calling the Economy of Abundance. In a talk he just gave at the PopTech conference (a fantastic event in the unbelievably beautiful but remote town of Camden Maine), Chris described this new economy. The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) -- Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically

All this talk of Abundance being the new Economy misses the point that Scarcity is still what drives all economic endeavors. What has happened with the advent of the Web is that certain things that were traditionally considered scarce are now abundant (e.g. shelf space, editorial content, software, etc) which means that the new economic lords are those that can exploit scarcity along another axis.

Most successful Web companies today are exploiting the scarcity of attention and time that plagues all humans. In a world where there a hundred million websites the problem isn't lack of content, it is finding the right content. Similarly, in a world where there are competing media for people's attention from television and radio to the Web and print magazines, advertisers need to be able to find the right audience and medium for their sales pitches. Both of these are examples of scarcity that companies like Google have exploited in the 'new economy'. Scarcity of attention also points to how companies like eBay and Amazon have risen to the top not 'abundance of shelf space' because simply having infinite shelf space doesn't explain why eBay and Amazon have been more successful than Yahoo! Auctions and Barnes & Noble online.

Even the example of the iTunes Music Store is another story of the economics of scarcity. The key to its success has been the fact that it is tied to the iPod and is the only music store that is tied to the world's most successful portable music player. The economics of abundance is a good fairy tale to scare people in traditional bricks & mortar businesses like Tower Records but at the end of the day simply moving online does not change the fact that you are always battling scarcity when you are engaging in business. Just ask the folks at MSN Music how the economy of abundance worked out for them.

I've been playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the past couple of days and its now my favorite super hero game of all time, just narrowly beating out Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. It's like someone picked out all my favorite qualities in a video game (button mashing beat 'em up, super heroes, interesting plot) and created a game just for me.

You get the use all the members of the Fantastic Four, Wolverine, Spidey, Captain America, Thor and even fricking Daredevil. Plus you get to fight in Mephisto's realm, Asgard and the Shi'ar empire. It's a Marvel comic book geek's dream game. Cop this game if you haven't already. 

PS: Can someone explain to me how Google knows to refine the search results for the query for 'Marvel Ultimate Alliance'. I'm guessing this has something to do with Google Co-op.

I'll be attending a number of conferences over the next few months and thought it'd be a good idea to post about them here just in case there are some folks who read my blog who'd like to meet up for a chat while we're in the same vicinity. The conferences are

• Widgets Live: November 6, 2006 (San Francisco, CA)

• CES: January 8 - 11, 2007 (Las Vegas, NV)

• ETech: March 26 - 29, 2007 (San Diego, CA)

• MIX '07: TBD, (Las Vegas, NV)

The Windows Live Search team has a blog post entitled Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box which states

Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a coo widget. 

When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating <DIV> on your page to display the search results. You can customize the query in the first tab to search your site, your macro or anything else, while the second tab will return general web search results. The floating <DIV> will position itself appropriately, whether you decide to place the box on the left, right, top, or bottom of your Web site.

The search box also comes in a pure-HTML flavor:

Just a few days ago I wrote about Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros and Yahoo! Search Builder. At the time I pointed out that although Windows Live was ahead of the game in enabling users to customize their personal search experience search macros, we didn't offer a good story for adding a custom search box to your website or building your own search engine on top of ours. Now we do.

I'm going to switch the search box on my weblog later today and give it a whirl. The built in search provided by dasBlog is quite slow and it would be great if I could offload this functionality to Live Search. Mad props to the Live Search folks for providing this functionality.

From the Microsoft Max team blog post entitled Thank you: the Max project has concluded we learn

Thank you for participating in the beta of Microsoft Codename Max. Over the past year, you’ve sent us tons of fantastic feedback that we’ve incorporated not only into Max, but into the platform layer with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Thanks to your participation, we were able to accomplish the goals of the Max project—to get customer feedback on new ways to approach software and services. If you’re interested in seeing where we go with these ideas, keep your eye on Windows Live.

Starting today, we will be disabling all downloads from our website. In the next week, we will be shutting down the Max services and our team forums. At that time, you will no longer be able to sign in to Max or share lists of photos with your friends.

The Max folks built some very cool user interfaces which received a number of favorable  reviews. They are now going to be pouring their efforts into Windows Live applications which means there are some beautiful looking Windows Live applications coming our way in the future.

Although this sounds backwards we've completed the UI integration for podcast download settings per feed but not for global podcast download settings for RSS Bandit. Below is what the "Attachments\Podcasts" tab on the properties dialog for a feed looks like currently

I decided that we would make the "Create a playlist for downloaded podcasts in iTunes" and "Create a playlist for downloaded podcasts in Windows Media Player" would only be global settings which can't be specified per feed. Are there any obvious settings that are missing from this tab that you'd like to see? 

I haven't really been blogging much about Windows Live over the past few weeks mainly because none of what I've wanted to write seems like it was worth an entire post. Below is a brain dump of most of the items I've wanted to blog about and haven't for whatever reasons.

• One of the ideas I'm dabbling with now is how reputation and trust play into social networks particularly in the context of Windows Live. A couple of the things I've been considering are how to define reputation in the varous contexts we have in Windows Live and then how to represent it to users. So far, I've been looking across the various Windows Live services and seeing what they have in place today. When I first looked at a user profile in Windows Live QnA, I thought it was kind of weird that people have 3 reputation values attached to them; their Reputation which is on a five star rating system, their QnA Score and their Level. I read the explanation of scoring and the reputation system which makes sense but seemed to me to be somewhat complicated. I brought this up with Betsy Aoki who works on the team and she pointed out that this isn't much different from the XBox gamer card and people seem to understand that. I dunno, that still feels fairly complicated to me. Also, I'm not sure if the paradigm that seems to work for a video game reputation system translates well to other contexts (e.g. buyer/seller reputation in Windows Live Expo). What do you think? 

• I heard we've released a beta of Windows Live Barcode which sounds like a pretty cool service. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work in either IE 7 (beta 3) or Firefox 1.5. I suspect that this wasn't ready to beta but was discovered by some clever sleuths. Unfortunate.
  

• I think I finally understand why the business folks would rather call the service Windows Live Local instead of Windows Live Maps. It's an attempt to indicate what the preferred user behavior should be. A maps website isn't very lucrative from a business perspective because when someone is looking for a map it means they know where they are going and ads won't be interesting to them. On the other hand, when someone goes to a local search website they are likely looking for a business near them and ads are very relevant at that point. Now I get it. However I still think we should rename the service to Windows Live Maps. :)

• Speaking of Windows Live Maps Local, the team is once again taking feature requests for the next version of the product. My #1 feature would be the ability to overlay movie theater locations and movie times on a map. My #2 feature would be simplifying the UI and making it easier to (a) get a permalink to a map and (b) navigate to my collections. Let the team know what you think. A lot of the improvements in this version of the product came out of direct user feedback.
  

• Mary Jo Foley has an article entitled Microsoft earns a mixed report card for its year-old Live initiative which gives some perspective from Microsoft outsiders on the entire "Live" initiative. As usual the #1 complaint seems to be that our consumer branding story is still very confusing with the existence of both MSN services and Windows Live services living side-by-side. Maybe we'll do better with regards to this on our second birthday.

• The Windows Live Expo team have posted some information updates to the Expo API. It looks like the API now allows you to do searches using any combination of City, State or Zip Code which fixes my main problem with the API. Thanks Samir. :)

• The Windows Live Messenger 8.1 beta is now available. Learn more about it in Nicole's post Messenger 8.1 Beta says: Hello World. Nothing major in this release, just a couple of nice touches such as improvements to the Contact Card and being able to use the same display picture across multiple machines instead of the picture being tied to your PC. The Messenger team continues to be my second favorite Windows Live team*. Keep on rocking.

Mark Cuban just posted an interesting take on the recent purchase of YouTube by Google by a media industry insider. Below are some excerpts from the post Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal, it is interesting reading and gives some insight on how business is conducted in Corporate America today.

> I'm an experienced veteran in the digital media business and thought
> I'd share my version of events that happened at Youtube. Some of this
> is based on talks with people involved and some is speculation based
> on my experience working in the industry, negotiating settlements and
> battling in court.
...
> In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from
> copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content
> owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see
> their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be
> disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but
> Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since
> Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube's traffic they quickly
> choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious
> interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous
> copyright infringement claims that were mounting.
...
> So the parties (including venture capital
> firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase
> price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims.
> Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being
> disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.
>
> While this seemed good on paper Google attorneys were still
> uncomfortable with the enormous possible legal claims and speculated
> that maybe even 500 million may not be enough -
...
> Google wasn't worried about
> the small guys, but the big guys were a significant impediment to a
> sale. They could swing settlement numbers widely in one direction or
> another. So the decision was made to negotiate settlements with some
> of the largest music and film companies. If they could get to a good
> place with these companies they could get confidence from attorneys
> and the ever important "fairness opinion" from the bankers involved
> that this was a sane purchase.
>
> Armed with this kitty of money Youtube approached the media companies
> with an open checkbook to buy peace.
...
> The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to
> get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the
> talent (musicians and actors)?
...
> It was decided the media companies would receive an equity
> position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them.
> This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by
> allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position.
...
> Since everyone was reaching into Google's wallet, the big G wants to
> make sure the Youtube purchase was a wise one.
...
> The media companies had 50 million reasons to want to help.
> Google needed a two pronged strategy which you see unfolding now.
>
> The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look
> the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement
> continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about
> building tools to help manage the content and track royalties,
...
> The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow
> them down and lock in Youtube's position. As Google looked at it they
> bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement.
> Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and
> Grouper. This has several effects. First, it puts enormous pressure on
> all the other video sites to clamp down on the laissez-faire content
> posting that is prevalent. If Google is agreeing to remove
> unauthorized content they want the rest of the industry doing the same
> thing. Secondly it shuts off the flow of venture capital investments
> into video firms. Without capital these firms can't build the data
> centers and pay for the bandwidth required for these upside down
> businesses.

This is very interesting reading and has a ring of truth to it. It definitely explains a lot that has happened with regards to the YouTube sale to Google for such a high price, the announcements of deals between YouTube and major copyright holders at the same time, as well as the fact that a number of video sharing sites got sued but not YouTube.

PS: This latest finaly convinced me to take the plunge and subscribe to Mark Cuban's blog. Great stuff.

In a blog post entitled Reinventing HTML Tim Berners-Lee writes

The perceived accountability of the HTML group has been an issue. Sometimes this was a departure from the W3C process, sometimes a sticking to it in principle, but not actually providing assurances to commenters. An issue was the formation of the breakaway WHAT WG, which attracted reviewers though it did not have a process or specific accountability measures itself.

There has been discussion in blogs where Daniel Glazman, Björn Hörmann, Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman and others have shared concerns about W3C works particularly in the HTML area. The validator and other subjects cropped up too, but let's focus on HTML now. We had a W3C retreat in which we discussed what to do about these things.

Some things are very clear. It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders, including users and user companies and makers of related products.

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

Wow. It's good to see the W3C reacting to all the negative criticism it has received on its stewardship of HTML in recent times. A few months ago I linked to a number of the complaints from the markup geek crowd that  Tim Berners-Lee references in my post entitled W3C Process is Broken? Film at 11. Although it was clear the writing was on the wall, I didn't expect the W3C to change its course anytime soon. The inertia within that  organization is just that massive. With browser makers and Web developers being disenchanted with the W3C, this is the only thing they could do if they planned to remain relevant in the world of Web standards. Kudos to TimBL and the rest of the W3C crew for making this course correction. 

PS: I really need a personalized meme tracker. The linked post didn't make it onto TechMeme but it did make it onto the meme tracker on Planet Interwingly. I suspect it would have made it onto my list of 'interesting posts' if I had a personalized meme tracker running over my feed list as well.