Xblog

Honestly, I’m of two minds on this. I kind of think the recording industry (I’ll be damned if I’m going to call them the music industry) deserves what will come their way if this bill doesn’t pass. On the other hand, I really like and support what the Pandora guys have done. I’d feel better if I could actually find the text. Could someone less lazy than me find a pointer?

I have to say I have an increasing dislike of the TV, and tend to prefer the Internet. I didn’t watch MSN’s broadcast either (bets as to whether it was Linux compatible? ;-), but I saw a few screenshots of the interface. It looked a lot like a TV. ;-)

Two things have become clear to me:

1. The Internet is going to kill TV.
2. TV will have the last laugh, because the Internet is going to look more and more like TV.

So who loses in all this? Well, I worry that the Internet might suffer, but I imagine it is a matter of perspective. I suspect search engines are going to have to work a bit harder to extract meaning from video content, but it hardly seems impossible. I’m thinking probably the biggest pain will be felt by satellite companies (I’m looking at you Rupert Murdoch with your DirecTV and SkyTV networks) followed up with any cable companies whose profit was largely the function of being a licensed monopoly.

Otherwise, it is probably going to be a Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose chose kind of thing. What is also becoming clear to me is that the Nielson ratings are becoming an increasingly irrelevant metric of what the younger generation is interested in, which hopefully explains why TV’s content is getting worse and worse in a way that doesn’t doom us all to extinction in like two generations.

I’m going to have to chat with some of my neighbours (who are overwhelmingly in the TV business) to get an idea as to how the industry is going to respond to this. I thought they were all focused on HDTV, which at this point seems likely to be stillborn. To get an idea just how far off target HDTV is, keep in mind that the younger generation seems more than happy to view TV content on 2.5” diagonal screens with 320x240 resolution. So much so that a good chunk of them will pay money for it. About the only aspect of HDTV that is following something resembling a trend is the focus on thin TV’s, which seems to be following the already so-overdone-it-may-be-losing-its-cool razor thin cell phone trend.

If you talk to the experts, this is not a case of the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. The primary reason that a search engine that provides highly relevant results might not do so when targetting an intranet is that intranets do not have the extensive cross linking that you find on the web. Without this, Google’s famous PageRank becomes mostly useless.

Basically, employees tend not to spend a lot of time generating web pages, and the pages that are generated tend to have limited cross-linking between groups/projects/etc. Consequently, a typical corporate intranet has very little meta data to help a search engine out.

Here is the crazy part: what if you took those same intranet pages and put them up publicly on the web. I’d bet you’d find some tiny fragment of the web would start linking to various pages and voila! suddenly search engines can start doing a great job of showing highly relevant pages.

Of course, companies don’t publish their intranets because there is all kinds of valuable proprietary content there that they don’t want to share with the rest of the world. That makes a lot of sense until you’ve spent some time working in a reasonably sized company. Then you discover something else: most of a company’s intranet is not made up of valuable proprietary content. Sure, the information is useful, but it doesn’t necessarily provide a competitive advantage. However, most companies (and particularly those in my line of work) work on the assumption that by default all internally generated information should be kept proprietary, because IP is so valuable and a secret, once shared, can never be a secret again.

That mentality makes a lot of sense, particularly once you involve lawyers and phrases like “fiduciary responsibility”. However, I think it is rooted in an old school mentality that fails to recognize that there are huge benefits to making said information available to the public. Just given my intranet example… how much more valuable would it be for a company’s intranet content to actually be searchable, with truly relevant results coming out on top? How much value would there be in seeing what the public finds most interesting about this data and what meta data they assign to it?

Open source software is probably the best example of this new reality. The vast majority of software out there doesn’t provide competitive advantages to companies, but merely helps them to get things done. A lot of it is written in house and therefore by default kept proprietary. Occassionally though, you see companies (out of wisdom or ignorance) make their code available to the rest of the world. The outcomes tend to be as follows: a) nobody else cares about this problem, so the code just lies there, b) someone else has built a better solution, and so nobody uses the code and it just lies there, or c) people start using the code, and magically the code becomes ported to multiple platforms, new features get added, bugs get fixed, etc. None of those outcomes leave you worse off than when you started, but the upside of option c) is huge.

A friend of mine put up a site a while ago that tried to fully explain a problem in the web server business. At some point he remarked to me that the best way to become an expert on a subject is to publish a web page on the subject along with some contact info, and then wait for the feedback to roll in. Pretty soon you’ll have all the relevant data on the subject sent to your inbox. Voila! Instant expert. This is basically what Wikipedia is today.

I am starting to suspect that just like innovations before it (the GUI, the personal computer, e-mail, etc.), the corporate world has embraced the Internet in the last decade, but needs another decade to really understand how it changes how business works, and this may be the critical realization: information becomes more valuable if you make it freely available without restriction. That flies in the face of decades of “silo” mentalities that you find in corporations, where sharing information even within the company is seen as exposing you to risk rather than providing you with a benefit. The notion of sharing data on an even wider basis is heresy.