WebProNews - Insider Reports

Google Hires XML Co-Inventor

Today, Tim Bray started working for Google, and had the search giant just put out a one-sentence press release stating this fact, the development would be worth reporting.  But what makes this move especially noteworthy is that Bray announced it in a 1,260-word blog post mentioning an absolute hatred of the iPhone.

Bray is a rather important person in a lot of tech circles.  Two interesting details regarding his accomplishments: he's the co-inventor of XML, and spent several years serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Here's what the respected developer had to say about the iPhone, though: "The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what.  It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger. . . .  I hate it."

In turn, Bray's a huge fan of Google's mobile operating system.  He wrote, "The reason I'm here is mostly Android.  Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now."

So it looks like the Android-iPhone war is about to get a lot more fierce.  Although for what it's worth, Bray was careful to say that his opinions don't necessarily reflect his new employer's stance on anything.

Google, China Edge Closer To Face-Off

The odds of Google keeping its Chinese search operation running are starting to seem quite small.  The Chinese government has started advising Google's partners to prepare contingency plans, and one anonymous person who's supposed to be close to Google even said the company is 99.9 percent likely to shut things down.

The "99.9 percent" comment, which we first mentioned over the weekend, comes courtesy of two Financial Times reporters.  One of them, Kathrin Hille, is even located in Beijing.  These details lend credence to its authenticity, even though it would of course be nicer to have a quote attributed to some executive or authority.

As for the information related to Google's partners, the situation's similar.  Sharon LaFraniere spoke to an "industry expert . . . . who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation by the government."

Then LaFraniere reported for the New York Times, "The Chinese government information authorities warned some of Google's biggest Web partners . . . that they should prepare backup plans in case Google ceases censoring the results of searches on its local Chinese-language search engine . . ."

The only thing that might prevent a showdown at this point is Google's concern for its employees in China, perhaps along with the company's desire to keep its advertising and mobile operations alive.

How the Crowd is Changing the News (SXSW)

Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.

I think it's pretty clear that citizen journalism, the real topic of this discussion, is changing and has already changed the face of media. There are varying opinions on if that is for better or for worse, but the very fact that these opinions are able to be voiced is a testament to the stength of the crowd.

On the panel were Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, Lila King from CNN.com, Jason Rzepka from MTV, and Joseph Kingsbury of Text100 Public relations.

Much of the conversation was centered around trust. Who can you trust? How do you know you can trust them? How do you know these citizen reporters don't have an agenda? Things of this nature.

Cashmore says brand still plays a role in trust, and that you should have some level of skepticism when a story comes from something like Twitter (assuming you are unfamiliar with the source). His point is accentuated by the fact that here at at SXSW, a massive Twitter hoax regarding Conan O'Brien was perpetrated from Digg's SXSW party the other night.

"People need to become more educated consumers of news" and "learn what you can trust and what you can't," says Cashmore. That is probably easier said than done, and possibly asking a lot of the average person that doesn't reside inside the news industry, but he's right. If people don't want to be misled or misinformed, they need to not only consider the source, but acknowledge multiple sources before totally abandoning the grain of salt.

This actually reminds me of something Andrew Lih said in another session I attended this past weekend about Wikipedia. His advice to journalists (as well as students) was that there is "no better starting point" than Wikipedia, and "no worse ending point."

Cashmore made a point about Wikipedia in that it is controlled by a few people, so it's not exactly the crowd like Twitter is the crowd, or like the Blogosphere is the crowd, but I think the point runs parallel. A tweet may be a great starting point for a piece of news, but it should not be the ending point in acceptance of fact.

The crowd is there for balance. The more viewpoints that are available, the more a reader is able to take away from a story. When points are debated, more info is revealed, and even if some of that doesn't sit well with you, you can use your own judgment to assess where you come down on the subject at hand. This comes back to Cashmore's statement about becoming a more educated consumer of news. Perhaps we only need to strive for a better educated public in general, and the quality of so-called citizen journalism will grow.

That should be easy.

For more from SXSW, check out our exclusive interviews at live.webpronews.com.

Liveblogging: SXSW Keynote: Valerie Casey

I'm sitting here in Exhibit Hall 1 waiting for the keynote to begin. I will be liveblogging/paraphrasing what is discussed (please excuse the inevitable typos).

Bio from the SXSW Booklet: Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services to transforming organizational processes and behaviors....She is the founder and executive director of Designers Accord.
 

Liveblogging starts:

2:05: Introduction begins...

2:07: Delighted to be here.....despite the fact the interactive community has been absent in conversation about sustainability...the commuinty will take the greatest leadership role moving forward...

Narrative

I find that a lot of the interaction designers are fixated on narrative and story telling ....you can take any story from film/literature/politics...and plot them on the axis of good fortune/ill fortune and time from beginnign to end

03:11: You can take any story from test to John Grishm, or Jennife Anniston...

Shows three different graphs.

Things you see in the news all the time - heart wrenchign pictures: child sitting in ewaste dumps

gives stats about these stories...horrific

Shows image of baby albatross, taken on midway where albatross mate...the finding of these babies...nothing has been done to them....the mothers were flyign out around the ocean to find food for their babies, and they mistook pieces of plastic for food and fed them to their children...grotesque...perverse to think about the effect we're having on bio diversity...

political corruption....

Why does a salad cost more than a big mac (slide)

it's because the usda - the food triangle supports one version of a recomendatino and the government does somthing entirely different...millions of dollrs through lobbyists going to meat and dairy....out of control agricultural indsutry...

Bizarre corruption between health and politics...

Burn pits in Iraq/Afghanistan....set up by gov. contractors like haliburton..

02:28: Shows picture of Haiti devastation - scientists linking natural disasters with climate change...

Talks about more political corruption....snowballing effect of sustainability

What are we supposed to do with all of that? "It turns out you don't have to kill yourself."

Designers Accord to respond to doom and gloom...

bringing the creative community together, we can look at sustainability ...bring optimism...there's no one of us that can make real change by ourselves.we have to depend on collective wisdom.

personal accountability to colletive accountability.

Share my stories about not only my successes. industry ishellbent on successes....talk also about failurs nd compromises...thats what collective action is about.

Not just  a digital network....we have town hall meetings....i want the ability to ask questions...

Each week in case studies in fast company - tell the story of sustainaiblity...not about a checklist its about a constant struggle...

try to educate product/interaction/communiation designers, and architects...

School by Design initiative (open source)

try to think about taking sustainabilit out of ghetttoized....

639 design firm adopters, 33 educational adopters, 32 corporate adopters, 100 countries, six continents, all design disciplines

despite fact that media still talks about sustainabiliy in very green terms...

the truth is that the converstions become much more complex and interesting....

someties miss the point.

even if you're in the interactive community...

02:26:  We have to recognize that there's a consequence for everything we do.

I believe its the interactive community thats going to lead this movement next. thinking about systems problems

A system is more than the sum of its parts.

02:30: We cannot just focus on one part...it has to do with environmental, cultural, economic, etc.

Feedback delays plus bounded rationality equals design traps

Bounded rationality - i can only make decisions based on the knowledge right in front of me. barely looks at other groups or teams.. a design trap is when you design for the symptom rather than the problem - looks at dell studio hybrid. - I am a supporter of what dell is trying to do, but it's a classic case. misses the point that we should not be designing another desktop computer...when will we stop thinking that less bad is good.

There is no such thing as a side effect.

Sometimes we arbitrarilly design what we're resposnible for...global taco shed - students went to a taco truck and decided that each one of them would be responsible for tracing origin of ingredients..all for one taco had traveled over sixty four thousand miles....there's this underlying movement that says local is better. global is bad....but what these students did is also discover that salt and cheese were local, avocados were from chile...they combatted the idea of the polarity between global and local by looking at embodied energy in each ingredient. they learned a lot when comparing them.

02:36 Creating the right measurement of success

The Gross National Product 

U.S. indicator of prosperity - but that indicator has nothing to do with health and wll being  and relationships. out of sync...all sorts of inconsistencies

 02:40 Selecting the correct lever for change

IN systems thinkng - people identify the wrong thing to change when theyr'e trying to change something.

mythology is all about lone inventor and silver bullet - they don't really exist....we continue that mythology and we need to change the rhetoric we use...

Talks about Naked Pizza...

02:44 The priority is to use the scale of concept to tackle people on their own turf...

what is the lever we use? the counter-intuitive one ?

Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior...

She says she'll tweet references for all the stuff she's talking about....probably a good idea to check those out if you're interested....(to understand her points better)

02:47 No difference between a structure and the behavior that comes from it. when a new president comes in and you have all these hopes for change, and nothign really changes...its because the structure hasn't really changed

02:48: Talks about HUB...

02:49 Issue - attention cycle : degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action

Rising of public awareness about a problem...when the public starts to get greata attention around an issue, there's actually a point where the degree of product action is inversely correlated...

When you get a couple of hundred thousand people interested in a topic it has a tranquilzing effect...people think i don't need to do anything because there's already so many people doing it...

people believe someone else is looking after it.

A system is a collection of elements and interconnections that ar e highly organized to achieve an overall goal or purpose

if you change the purpose of a system you can effect change....

the interactive community is the one to do it we are architects and product designers and communicators all wrapped into one.

How can we change the narrative? What would happe if your purpose was oriented toward cultural sustainability instead of commerce? 

What if social media was actually about social impact?

The interactive community is the connecting tissue...

SXSW: Some Options for Making Money From Your Online Videos

At SXSW, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan of the newly launched Dynamo Player talked about different routes online video producers can take to try and make a buck. While the discussion ultimately led up to the duo's demo of its new product, it was not above representing some different options fairly. The two talked about some of the pros and cons of advertising, such as:

Pros

- Fosters dramatic growth (financed first forty years of TV and last 15 years of Internet content)

- Blip.tv and YouTube define a stable market

- Reliable high quality programs...

Cons

- High value advertising demands high value programming (production). Costs a lot up front - higher costs to return

- Content can be unreliable, too hot to handle, or simply unappealing to advertisers. Short films, docs, r-rated or controversial content can't get high value CPM.

- Advertisers can't depend on a certain number of viewers

- Random advertising can damage brand while paying little to nothing

- Must have very, very large audience

- Can put a plane crash next to an ad for Delta or something to this effect

So the question is, will people pay for video online? They talked about how a lot of people are already doing just that through services like iTunes, which the pair say "changed the marketplace."

When deciding whether you want to ask people to pay for your content, you should ask yourself the following questions, according to Millis and Cohlan:

- What content do you pay for now?

- Have you ever quit halfway through a payment or subscription process arrangement?

- How often do you click away because of pre-roll ads?

- Are you willing to download software?

"Asking your audience to pay for your content is about eliminating these 'why bother' factors," they say.

Then ask yourself:

- How do you want to sell your content?

- Does it need to happen now or are you willing to wait for  approval?

- How much do you need to charge, and how soon do you need to get paid?

- How much info do you want to ask your viewers for?

- How technically savvy are you?

- How important is image quality?

- Do you want your viewers to go to your site to watch or somewhere else?

- Do you want to be able to embed your video?

- Do you want to allow your viewers to share?

- What kind of content do you have - serial, one off, short format, feature length?

- How much publicity do you want/need?

"Ask these questions before you commit to a solution," they say.

One option is what they refer to as the Ze Frank model. This is a show that used drop.io to package shows that are otherwise free, and sell them together, so viewers can take them and easily watch them on their iPods.

Another option is to work with a partner like re:frame or NewVideo, which will work with you on getting stuff into iTunes or Hulu.

Then there are sites like MyContent.com and IndieFlix. With MyContent.com, you get choices like free streaming, rental streaming, and selling through the site as a paid download. They are your partner, and they only pay you after costs are covered. They have a revenue share deal. MyContent.com will take 35% after costs, and they charge a small monthly processing fee, according to the Dynamo guys.

With Indieflix, you can upload content through them, and sell it as a DVD or make it available as a paid stream, but they're fairly selective about their content.

Another option they discussed was Amazon's Create Space. Advantages of this, they say, are that Amazon's a leader in cloud computing - they can store and serve content more efficiently, and at a lower cost, they are a well-recognized brand, and they're connected to a lot of TVs and living rooms. They'll list films on IMDB for you, and stream stuff to the XBox. However, they take 50% of royalties, and you can only suggest a price for your video.

Then there are YouTube rentals, a system Google introduced not too long ago, at Sundance. They let content creators set the price and viewing window, and they have the obvious huge advantage of social media for promotion. It doesn't hurt that YouTube is also the second largest search engine, behind Google itself.

YouTube lets you use Google Checkout, which is easy enough, and content streams quickly. You need to use an AdSense account, and as you may know, Google is not up front about how much revenue sharing they do, although it's supposed to be "the majority".

You can read about Dynamo's own option here.

Digital Web: What's New Headlines:

Digital Web Magazine closes its doors

As some of our regular readers have guessed, yes it is true. Digital Web Magazine has ceased publication. For the reasons cited in Time To Change, it was clear to us that what we had was no longer working.

We called upon both our staff and readers for ideas on what we could change. We received a lot of good feedback. One thing that resonated with me was that out of all of the ideas that had the most potential to solving our current problems, none of them were about insignificant changes to what we have.

It doesn’t make sense to take what we have here and try to change it into something it is not. It makes more sense to simply start something else that is new. For this reason I feel that Digital Web Magazine will always be what it is; an online publication about the web industry.

So, today, I am sad to say that Digital Web Magazine has officially ceased publication. The site will remain in place with all of its articles hopefully far longer than their value is recognized.

I will continue to curate the site, maintaining it so it remains online and fixing broken links and typos. Most of my effort and time, just like the rest of the former staff, will be put into other projects, other websites and other publications.

I want to take a moment to personally thank each and every staff member, editor, designer, photographer, illustrator, information architect, database developer, web developer, web programmer, contributing writer, columnist and last but perhaps most important, each and every reader who ever read our publication. We couldn’t have made it this far without you. I genuinely mean that.

If you want to respond with your thanks and appreciation, feel free to leave a comment here, post to twitter, post on Facebook, or you can always email me directly. If you prefer to say something in person, find me and the rest of the staff at SXSW Interactive. Thanks again everyone! Last one out turns off the lights.

Digital Web Magazine's 500th article

As 2009 comes to a close and we enter our annual winter hiatus I am proud to present our 500th article, Time To Change, written by yours truly. With every year that passes we look back at the year and all of the things we have accomplished and then we set goals for ourselves for the year to come. This article is not unlike that. Digital Web Magazine is about to undergo the most significant change in its ten-year history as a publication and we want your input. This is your chance to influence the future structure and focus of Digital Web. Please take a moment to read this week’s issue and weigh in with your thoughts. Thank you for a great year, and a magnificent past ten years.

Matthew steps down as Editor-in-Chief

After a great two years with the magazine, I’m afraid the time has come for me to step down as Editor-in-Chief here at Digital Web. It has been great fun and very rewarding, and I have met some fantastic people both online and in person, but I have decided that I want to spend more time next year on both personal projects and watching my children grow up. My thanks to Nick Finck for giving me this opportunity, and to Tiff, Walker, and the other staff for all their help — without our dedicated volunteers, the magazine would not be able to keep churning out such great content each week.

Keep an eye on this news feed for a special announcement from our founder, Nick Finck, on where Digital Web will be heading in 2009.

Thanksgiving Giveaway: Free hosting and domain for a year

We at Digital Web Magazine want to say thanks to our readers and authors for their dedicated patronage. As some of you may know, today in the U.S. is Thanksgiving day. To celebrate and say thank you to our readers and contributors we are going to be giving away a gift certificate for free hosting and domain name (you pick it if its available) for one year at Media Temple.

All you have to do is comment on this blog post, tell us how you first found out about our publication and why you feel its different than the other sites out there. We’ll hand select the best answer. This doesn’t need to be a book in length, a simple paragraph or two will do. Make sure you include your name, email address, and URL otherwise we won’t know how to contact you to send you the gift card.

New Issue: Digital Web Seeks a New Tune

Digital Web is headed into our winter break?we take December off to gather our resources and review the year past. But before we hibernate, we have a holiday season present for our readers. It’s a bit of a departure, but we’re thrilled to have Chris Wright join us to ask a light-hearted question, Is The Web Really Helping Us Find New Music?.

Naturally, we have our own motives?this article represents an op-ed piece. It’s not a how-to, or new trick, and it’s definitely not an adventurous CSS idea?we’re thick-skinned around here, but the flamewars around our recent CSS pieces have been a new hurdle in the history of the magazine. So let’s all take a new outlook for the holidays and enjoy what we have.

We’d like to hear your reaction to op-ed-style pieces, too?please leave a comment in response to the article, and in response to its style. Have a happy winter holiday!