Internet

Where is the geospatial web heading?
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I attended the Where 2.0 conference earlier this week. The topic as to address the new GeoWeb, which in short is simply mashup of content based on location. The conference highlighted strategies and different applications in this very interesting field. My thoughts and reflections on the conference are:

Lesson 1 You need data, data, data…
You can have the coolest application, but if you simple don’t have the data, the true potential is really lost. Data should be as freely available as possible, accurate and for the whole world. This is a tremendous task and my impression is that many of the big players at least partly are underestimating the necessity. In many ways most attempts are very US-focused, even though some players are starting to realize this. This is especially true for the big mapping projects, as you map is never better than the data you put into it, which is a well-known problem.

Lesson 2 Business models are the problem, not the technology.
I saw quite a few applications that some way or the other had a very cool and flashy appearance, but it was very unclear how this would produce a revenue share. Guy Kawasaki’s comment – “Okay, so you have a cool product, then what…” – is something that tends to gets lost in this hype.

The interesting analogy to the social web is thus very interesting. Before the social web matured the same problems were faced. I think the GeoWeb will pretty much face the same problems.

Lesson 3 Cellphone GPS applications are still not market ready.
This is very simple: There are not enough GPS-enabled handsets combined with the resistance from cellphone operators pretty much makes any attempt in this field highly questionable from a business perspective. If you would like to go into this field it is simple. Make sure you have a well-defined audience in which you can control their handsets and maybe even more important operators. There are some companies doing things right here and I would recommend to take a look at ULocate – http://www.ulocate.com.

Lesson 4 The privacy problem with location based.
Answer these questions: Do you really want everyone to know where you are, have been and also keep track of that. What stops your boss to install this on your cellphone? What are the long term consequences? Do we really want to live in a big brother society? Are there enough advantages to overlook the dangers?

I see this a broader debate on the web as whole. However, developers and solution architects need to start to think in these paths. The sense I got from talking to some developers at the conference and outside is that many developers tend to hide from addressing these issues. I think of a quote from the one of the managers at Google Earth (commenting something else though): “Just because you can do it, does not mean that you should do it…” Unfortunately there are a lot of developers that do this big mistake.

Lesson 5 Cellphone operators are still the main obstacle for any.
You are using someone else’s network and thus you need to ask for permission. I see very little big potential in only mashing up locations, without providing the customers with a mobile solution. The network of interest thus is the cellphone network. All that have been doing anything in that field knows that you need their permission. I think that they definitely have bigger power than they should, and a lot of work needs to be done here. I will leave this discussion simply by saying the rather obvious: If you need GPS-data via your cellphone, you must have access to it. Otherwise the user experience will be too poor.

These are the lessons I learnt at the conference. To conclude I saw a lot of cool applications, yet with very unclear purpose. What is the need to have the applications? What is the market, if any?

I was amazed listening to the big players Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! who all are kind of fumbling around figuring this out. How they are going to take advantage of this opportunity. Interesting enough I think that Yahoo! has been more successful than the others. They linked their geospatial initiative to their social web initiative, which diminished the pressure of making money on the geospatial initiative itself.

It does make less sense to launch a location based service without any cellphone application. To really make cellphone applications to take off, there is a huge need for policy making on both national and international level to erode the monopolistic atmosphere on the market. For now many companies get stuck in partnership discussions and the further development of their products is halted. Initiatives like wireless phones and wireless enabled flash cards together with proper lobbying campaigns will force the market to open up, and it can really take off.

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Wikipedia is dead or not?
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I read The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr telling the story of the death of Wikipedia. I have as many know been critical about the Wikipedia, which is a great construct, yet surprisingly very few realise that any review systems will need hierachies within the community.

I guess I will settle with once again citing Clay Shirky from one of his speeches The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which by the way should be read by anyone that calls themselves experts or developers of social software.

Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

I guess very few people do their homework… My answer on whether the wikipedia is dead or not is yes, but might get another life when people start doing their homework on how to create cpommunity driven software.

The only “social software packages” I have seen so far that has created a community feeling yet does not fall into the pitfalls are developed by the organization Barnraiser. Why? Because it is built for real people by people, who have done their homework.

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The proper cellphone application in the emerging markets
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Cellphone applications today are often focused on, in some sense simplified, displaying the web page on the cellphone. The web pages are more or less exclusively designed only considering the restrains of a regular work station. This is perhaps one most important challenge in future cellphone solutions and in many ways this is a philosophical challenge rather than a technological challenge. Nevertheless, I will not try to fully address the challenge in this blog post, but indicate what I believe are the key elements of it and sketch the solution.

In the post I will focus on the restrictions on a cellphone application in an emerging market and/or developing country even though it might be applied to the developed markets. We start by looking at some of the differences between the two platforms.

Most cellphones have small screens. (Oh yes, they have.) That means that you have very limited space to present the content. Very few solutions so far have been able to present content in an adequate and appealing way on these screens. The difference in the (graphical) presentation the content between a cellphone and a normal workstation is therefore huge for most content.

For instance, considering the mouse/touchpad of a normal laptop makes the user interaction much simpler than on the cellphone, as the “keyboard” is small. Naturally the user interaction with a cellphone, i.e. texting, is very much linked to how used you are to it. Clearly, in Asia, Africa and Europe people are much more used to it than they are in for instance the US. Thus a clear distinction between possible cellphone applications in these regions has to be made.

Finally the cellular networks are still lagging in bandwidth and the data plans in cellular networks are continuing to be fairly expensive. Both these factors are limiting the amount of data that being sent to and from a cellphone.

What is the proper solution?
For me the obvious solution is to display an extract of information on the cellular platform, but combine that with the proper platform on the web where the full version can be seen. Think of either trailer or an article abstract. If you like the trailer, you want to see more. However in many cases an abstract of an article is enough.

What are the techniques to use?
For emerging countries the right choices are SMS and MMS. In some cases WAP might be an alternative, but in most cases the two first choices are enough. Those techniques fulfill the criteria as presented above. They are simple to use. They are already known to the user. They have a low entry barrier and exist in almost all cellphone out there. Even better, they are normally very cheap.

The available applications in this field usually lack the corresponding web application that completes the content delivered to the cellphone. You have to provide the user with the full version of the content, and this makes even better sense as it will boost the PC-market and need of bandwidth for workstations in those regions.

I think that in many cases these techniques, even though well-known, are underrated. Especially since the emphasis primarily have been to either deliver or submit content via these, but also lacking the proper backbone on the web to support them. Using these techniques to both send and retrieve data and combine them with a web application would be very powerful. Especially when combined with the proper business model and strategic partnerships.

The future cellphone applications in emerging markets and the developing world will need to or to be more direct should address this challenge.

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The Future of Blogging
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Blogging is changing the way we look on the content on the web and the media. It is more and more becoming a way to easy-publish to the web. Yet many blogs are lacking the fundamental design and architecture of a more conventional website. Where will this saga end?

Today everybody (or more honestly speaking an amazing large number of people) want to have a blog. Corporate blogging has turned into a personalized way for CEO:s and executives to release corporate news, and thereby bring the users closer to the company. The interaction is good as they will get direct feedback from the users, even though it is unlikely that they will ever tell you of any problems they face. However, the feeling of being a part or seen is central here and the social part of the blog software becomes obvious. Even though corporate blogging has some child deceases I am confident that the proper structure will emerge.

The true driving force of blogs has undisputable been the political arena, and I think the political arena has changed forever due to it. The debate in blogs during the last presidential election in the US, especially Howard Dean campaign, is a proof that bloggers is a new type of media that will change the political arena and is a true power to count on or fear. Everybody can be their own politician and speak their mind on almost anything. An amazing shift towards the power of the people on both good and bad. That discussion truly deserves an own post, so I will leave it there.

I am working on new ways to deliver news to the web during my time here at Stanford and I will shortly reveal some more details on the project. A question that is quite important when looking at this is what the news media really is, and in particular what a newspaper is. A drastic and maybe controversial approach is to consider a newspaper as nothing else than a well-reviewed group blog. Of course this is quite a simplification of reality, but still very much true in many ways. However, the payed (or unpayed) journalists that are assigned to write about a certain subject, reviewed by editors, approved by the chief editor and then published either on the net or in a paper edition. A blogger does all these steps at least subconsciously too before the blog item is created. A bit ironic, hey? The difference between a newspaper and a group blog then becomes were fuzzy. Therefore blogs cannot be discussed separately from conventional news media. (Conventional media might be a better word as podcasting is bringing both radio and television closer to the web.)

There is a great book “We the media…” by Dan Gilmor covering this topic and almost every aspects of it. If you have not read it, you really should. The book addresses the ongoing “battle” between the blogs and the conventional media.

The future challenges of the blogs are closely linked to the differences between blogs and conventional media. Blogs are uncensored, yet unreviewed (by others before publishing). The commenting system will be some kind of review system however. There is yet a need to address the trust of the content of a blog, which is one challenge for the future blogosphere. “Why? Just plug in a review system and there you go.” Well I am afraid it is not as easy as that. One of the true powers of blogs is the free form. You want to preserve the uncensored feeling of the blog, yet increase the trust of the content. A kind of paradox in itself and in there lies the challenge.

Another challenge of the blogosphere will be to find a way to solve the issue of the ever increasing number of blogs. More and more people start blogs and become active in them. The number of sites is increasing, and the volume of information is exploding. You will have to read more and more blogs whether you like it or not. Time is always limited. How many times have you not wished there were 48 hours per day instead of the always to few 24 hours… The time necessary(?) to read blogs can and will intrude on your work and personal life if nothing is done. Maybe the Darwinistic laws will solve it, but then again maybe not. RSS-feeds were created to solve this matter, but the growth of the blogosphere now really calls for some other approaches to decrease the workload of reading blogs.

On top of reading all these blogs you will have to write almost everyday on your own little blog to spread your message and preserve an active audience. Web traffic is funny. It is hard to obtain it, but it but so easy to loose when you have finally have it. Therefore many bloggers feel the need to constantly publish new posts. Some write many short posts, and some write a lot of “yada yada”. Nevertheless it still is not a sustainable solution. There are too many blog posts that comment with a few lines and linking to another blog post that is commenting on another that is commenting on another that is… Yes, you get the picture. It only contributes to the volume of content noise to be a bit harsh.

Design of the website might partly solve the problem of traffic, even though it is no full-proof way. Notably, I read a comment on this by Jacob Nielsen, who said that one of the most common errors of blogsites is that they hide their “highlights”. When you look at many blogs, the most read blog posts or highest graded blog posts are normally never listed so that the reader can easily retrieve those. Such a list can at least help some to keep the traffic alive and fairly high.

Is all you (Erik) talk about problems, problems, problems… Certainly not and I am not at all pessimistic about the future of blogs. Yet these features and challenges should/will be addressed and solved.

So what is likely to happen in the future? The way I see it the blogosphere and the conventional media will move closer to the each other, very much as Dan Gilmor predicts in his book. However, I do not fully envision the conventional media being “replaced” by the blogs as they fulfill different needs. The conventional media will in a more thorough way cover a story and have a more profound research before publishing the article. Normally blogs are like a tabloid version of a “story” and in many cases lack the proper proof of the content. However, blogs could be consider as an amazing control system of conventional media. Therefore it is likely that more softwares with built-in light versions of review systems to increase the trust of the content will be developed and released.

Group blogs or portals, like the http://www.corante.com, will be more common and will create a wrapper for people with similar topics. This will solve the issue of feeling the pressure of frequent posting as well as keeping the traffic high enough.

Well as the X-files says: The truth is out there…

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