Ambient Mashups

My most interesting souvenir from the ETech conference is a t-shirt from Yahoo! – “mashup or shutup” in says. They’re promoting new development tools they hope people will use to create interesting (and even useful) web applications by “mashing” one set of data with another.

There where several sessions at the conference with “ambient” in the title. It was used in so many ways I had to look it up to make sure I really knew what the word meant – “surrounding; encircling.” I was mostly right. And virtually everything at the conference was, in some way, a mashup or some application of one.

(As a point of reference: a mashup, as I’m currently understanding and defining it, is when you take one or more data sources or tools and “mash” them together to form a new use that may not have been anticipated by the originator). Mashups may be the “next big thing” on the internet… but not something your average user is going to be using — yet. (Microsoft is working on a universal web clipboard that might partially do this.)
The potential is huge. One of the most popular mashups so far is Google maps and Google earth. And now virtually every web 2.0 tool is offering some sort of API.

Mashups are new, but I really think the underlying concepts aren’t. What else is new is the business models (or attempts thereof) for these services offering themselves up for mashing. If I don’t have to come to your site to use your tool… how are you making money? And what about people who mashup a data source or tool that wasn’t intended by it’s author to be mashed up? Yet questions like these certainly aren’t new to the internet world.

Communities through Connecting Tissue

One of the more interesting seminars yesterday at the Emerging Technologies conference talked about new forms of community in the Web 2.0 world. Unlike previous iterations of online community, this new one is self-powered and independent. It can’t be shut off by a moderator representing a corporate interest. And it’s more human – each person is their own community node. That is, my community starts with me.

I studied earlier versions of online community where enabled by someone setting up a messaging system on a web site or, even earlier, a BBS. They could also be found on Usenet, IRC, and other places The new form of community is powered by “connective tissue” technologies such as RSS feeds, API’s, trackbacks, blogrolls, and link tracking.. Community now happens when you use these things together.

Here’s how I think it works in a practical sense: I link to a friend’s blog and –bam! – he’s now a part of my community. I also link to my Flickr gallery, my friend’s Flickr gallery, and then also to a Flickr group I belong to. (This is hypothetical; I don’t have any links on my blog yet. Working on it.) This decentralized network forms my community, and for better or worse more closely resembles my real life.

I’m working on a couple of different projects that have a community aspect to them. The guy at this seminar believes that rather than starting new communities, go to where they are. And, to paraphrase his words, you might be lucky enough they let you come visit. So I’m wondering if that’s true, how we pull it off? Bottom line, I think, the focus needs to on brining together the connective tissues.

A couple more take aways:

• Treat your community well. They can always go somewhere else, and the barrier to leaving is very low.
• There is a community affiliation lifecycle: grow up in your parents house (first community), move out on your own (join another), then buy your own house (start your own community.

The Attention Economy

The industrial economy. The information economy. And now, perhaps, the attention economy. That’s the theme for the Emerging Technologies conference I’ve been at the last day and a half.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” stated Herbert Simon, a Nobel Laureate Economist. I, for one, feel like I’m drowning in information. My e-mail box overflows, I’m subscribed to many RSS news feeds from different web sites – and concerned there’s still others I should be reading, but don’t have time for. Add in multiple other information sources (conversations, cable news, radio, and such) my attention is at a premium.

Now, my attention is a commodity. Buy it. Sell it. Trade it. The good news is, I stay in control – to the extent that I choose what to give my attention to.