Clay Shirky on VoIP

The first bit, in true Clay style, is spot on, however there are two later points that are surely not correct.

“The incumbent local phone companies –Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and Qwest — have various degrees of interest in VoIP, but are loathe to embrace it quickly or completely, because doing so means admitting to everyone — shareholders, regulators, customers — that both monopoly control and artificially high voice revenues are going away.”

This is much the same as what happened with Netflix and Blockbuster. Netflix gets rid of late fees, and without late fees Blockbuster loses money, so Blockbuster is the incumbent that cannot adopt a more efficient model without actually losing money, something shareholders wouldn’t allow. Local phone operators are similarly challenged by VoIP, but like the music Industry they can use lawyers to prolong the inevitable.

Later on Clay writes:

“VoIP isn’t a service, it’s just a set of protocols, meaning that competitors don’t have to buy into Plan A to deploy it.”

It may be a detail, but isn’t this confusing VoIP with SIP or H323? VoIP isn’t a set of protocols, its just plain ‘Voice over IP’? The most popular VoIP client, Skype, uses largely proprietary protocols. VoIP is possible because Internet bandwidth availability is now largely good enough for voice.

“If Plan A is ‘Replace the phone system slowly and from within,’ Plan B is far more radical: ‘Replace the phone system. Period.’

Search Beyond Google outlines newer search engines’ challenges to Google and they all seem to be based upon different approaches from Pagerank.

Was Pagerank what really made Google or was it the fact that they had elegant usability and design, weren’t a ‘big bad company’ and were perceived to be cool for the people that matter when building a tech company - the techies, the early adopters who are the biggest users and potential evangelists?

Pagerank is arguably obsolete at this point, as weblogs and trackback and Tripadvisor.com demonstrate.

Surely the trophy collection of PhDs that work at Google are better used to optimize Adwords or tackle the physics of cooling fans in the server farms than all be tweaking Pagerank?

Is search a software problem or is Google an advertising company with great hardware hosting skills, that pretends to be focused on the arcana of search algorithms because it sounds cool if your PR needs to focus on what’s hip in the tech world?

BlogRolling:

“I’m writing this today to let you all know that Blogrolling has been acquired by the great folks at Tucows and this will be my last news posting.”

Congrats to Jason DeFillippo.

Om Malik has a great roundup of the tragedy of the information commons debate stimulated by Jeff Jarvis

What if an infomation economy is necessarily deflationary?

“for information, although the tragedy of the commons has been removed, it means that all ground might as well be common. In the short term this all sounds great, all the things that the US is famous for, from Rock and Roll to Software become cheap and plentiful. Software necessarily becomes open source, the radio spectrum open and music free. But if food and clothing can’t become free and if it only pays for western economies to outsource unsubsidized production to poorer countries, then how do the domestic proletariat earn money to feed and cloth themselves?”

John Battelle:

“the rumors are flying again about Jeeves being in play. CBS Marketwatch is fueling them, saying AOL might buy the company and drop Google. I don’t think so, but you never know”

Certainly if Ask Jeeves don’t get bought they look very lonely out there as a destination site powered by Google ads revenue. They are less vulnerable than Looksmart in that there is little incentive for Google to ditch them as a channel in the same way that MSN ditched Looksmart as a provider (although Google have leverage in terms of split on ad revenue).

I agree with John that they won’t get bought by AOL. They have traffic and a search product but their ad network is provided by Google. AOL have more traffic and search, despite the hype, is a commodity. AOL would be better off with an ad network.

Email marketers have a big problem. HTML email is a better marketing medium and is more trackable than text email. This is because remote content such as images can be loaded as the email is opened and used to monitor impressions. Even if payment is for clicks and these are tracked, the impressions to conversion ratio is a must have.

Unfortunately, email clients are soon going to block dynamic content in email making it impossible to track impressions directly. This, coupled with the fact that up to 40% of HTML email doesn’t get to its destination because of spam filters, has lead people to look to RSS as a possible savior for email marketing.

Aside from the fact that RSS (as implemented currently) is not as good a medium for ads. If RSS is to be successful it needs to be trackable. This means tracking clicks and impressions.

At first glance the article below seems to offer this:

IMN introduces trackable RSS

“When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it”

Clickthroughs are simple, however, I don’t believe that IMN offer real impressions tracking. The reason is that RSS clients are like search engine crawlers that offer cached results. You don’t know whether it is an unread feed pulled by a piece of software, that registers an RSS ‘pageview’ in your stats, or a genuine pageview by a human.

Weekly Read has one of the few articles which point out that people confuse RSS and push, although it stops short of the reality.

RSS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PUSH.

You go to a URL and pull something down. The reason why people are confused, is that when you use OTHER weblog inspired publishing methodologies in concert with RSS, such as alerting a ping server, then you can push things to a client. A ping server plus HTML and permalinks gives you much the same thing.

RSS gives you clean headlines (and on rare occasions, extra metadata) so in theory you do don’t have to scrape websites. The reality is that you do have to scrape websites (ask Google News) because the majority of RSS doesn’t contain full text for search engine indexing - but that is another story.

The Observer:

“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”

Funny how this kind of headline always crops up in the Sunday papers. I guess the Observer needs to boost its circulation.

“Digital dawn, functions as a traditional window blind with a reactive surface that is in constant flux, growing in luminosity in response to its surroundings.”

Jenny Levine points out that the new Yahoo search shows RSS URLs where available and has links to add sites automatically to MyYahoo.
As Jenny points out, this will drive adoption of RSS by professional news sources.