Innovation in Software

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

The manifesto for tags I published yesterday was quite popular. There were a few comments left over on reddit.com I thought I’d address here.

JW_00000 said:

”I’ve got one remark, on tags in general: it’s almost impossible to use them without computers. If you want to search similar items with the same tags, computers can do it very easy and quickly, but imagine having to do that without computers. You would have to make lists for each object with their tags, but also lists for each tag with their connected objects. And then you couldn’t even search objects with more than one tag, as you have to intersect two lists. For example, imagine you’re sorting your own home libary. Setting up a computer with a specialized database and connected application for the GUI wouldn’t be an option for most people. So, the only thing you can do is either organize alphabetically, but then related books could be far away from each other, or using a taxonomy. Maybe, you would have troubles organizing a book about hunting and cooking pigeons, but it would definitely be better than to have to manage a whole database (either on the computer or by hand) of all your books and their tags.”

Absolutely right of course. Without a computerised interface, tags are far more complicated than a taxonomy. That’s why Dewey was successful with a taxonomy where he would have failed with a tagging system: the best technology he had available was a set of draws to hold index cards. We don’t have that limitation.

However, in the main we’re not talking about tags as a way of being able to categorise real life, we’re talking about a way of being able to tag digital assets. Sometimes those digital assets (URLs, Photos, MP3s) will be the actual item we’re interested in itself. Other times we may just want the tags to refer to a record of a physical object holding metadata about its location and status. If I am in a library I may wish to search via the taxonomy, but at the same time it would be useful to have a computerised interface as my initial point of research to help find books I may be interested in, and on being told where the book is I can go and find the shelf. In such an interface, the optimal user experience is, for reasons I’ve explained already, tags.

Where JW is failing to see the application within the home library example he gives is on two fronts:

• He’s dealing entirely with physical objects
• He has a comparatively small selection of objects

For such a scenario, taxonmys are perfect. DCC scales to tens of thousand objects relatively painlessly, and it wouldn’t be too much work when producing the catalogue to put a pointer in the margin of the cookery section that there might be some books of interest in the hunting section.

However, when you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of objects, or millions, or tens of millions or even billions, the taxonomy breaks down. The Internet is bigger than even this.

Also, when you’re trying to search a catalogue of purely digital items, the interface we are limited to is the screen – it does not have the flexibility of an entire room staffed with librarians to help you. We know from past experience the optimal search method for users these days is the ‘keyword search’ which is effectively ‘tag search’ by another name.

Even if you’re not dealing with an entirely digital library, if you have many millions of physical items to keep track of, searching for them purely by way of a taxonomy isn’t an efficient storage method in terms of being able to help the researcher recover the information about that item. That’s why increasingly libraries have keyword search catalogues running on computers in their libraries – it is more efficient for a large collection than a taxonomy.

In the future however we may be dealing with a number of objects we can barely imagine. Already there are probably over several trillion photos, sound recordings, text documents and pointers to physical objects online. Organising these in a taxonomy as Yahoo! once did was always destined to fail. The keyword search, the tag, is the only way forward.

There is also this concern JW raises about ‘a dedicated application’ connected to a GUI to make all this happen. I don’t think this will happen. Already there are tools like The Kip which will allow a casual user to organise all the documents on their hard drive through tags. What would be better is if I could just right-click on a document or folder and add tags right there, and then easily search via a tag cloud or search box, so it wasn’t a separate tool. I agree we need to think about how people interact with these techniques as part of their daily life, but I don’t think in a few years from now we will be concerned with a ‘dedicated tool’ for this in your home library – you’ll just walk in, your phone will tell you a tag cloud for this catalogue is available, and you’re away searching.

Another question is, should the tag cloud should appear to the user? Is there utility in exploding this underlying mechanism into our user’s faces, or should we hide it all from them? Well, I say putting a tag cloud in front of a user is one of the greatest user interface components you can come up with for searching a catalogue of any form.

Firstly it allows us to immediately see what is popular right now. If I select ‘cookery’ and notice ‘vegetarian’ is in much larger type in the tag cloud than ‘game’ within this particular catalogue, I implicitly have an understanding of what this catalogue is likely to contain and its value to me right now. If I see a tag cloud on a blog that is dominant with ‘web 2.0’ and ‘rails’ I know to expect a very different style of writing and content than if ‘omg!!!’ and ‘ponies!!!!’ were the tags de jour.

In summary then:

• Tags are useful to us now more than before, because our primary method of research is likely to be through a keyword search, which experience has shown is more efficient than a drill-down search through a taxonomy.
• They are only worth the time if the tagging is something you can do at point of creation/adding to the system responsible for storing tags, unless you are dealing with a collection too large to manage via a taxonomy (e.g. the entire contents of the Internet).
• We do need to improve the interface, no doubt. We need to make tagging items easy and worthwhile, because the only thing worse than a catalogue with no classification system is one with a lousy classification system.
• Exposing the tags to the user can imply things it would be inefficient to explain via other means and therefore a tag cloud can be a useful component on a blog or web-page.

And yes, I know this blog doesn’t have a tag cloud right now, but there will be one here in the next week or so, and tags will be explicit at the bottom of each post. If you are still resistant, at least modify your templates so that tags appear as metadata ‘keywords’ in the <head> section of your pages.

Ask Skeptic’s Mom doesn’t get tags at all. I don’t blame her. I think it’s time for a… Manifesto. Or at least a way of trying to explain tagging to somebody who is new to this way of thinking.

In the beginning there was the librarian. Wise, unnoticed by members of the opposite sex and mostly under-paid, they did their Good Work. However come the end of the 19th-century there were many books that needed to be organised, and no agreed-upon way of organising them. Enter our hero for this introduction, Melivil Dewey, who invented The Dewey Decimal Classification system that we all know and our love from our fine public libraries today.

The DCC (as it’s known to its friends) is a specific form of something we like to call a Taxonomy, or if we’re feeling particularly philosophical, an Ontology. The purpose is simple: how can we take a large pile of books (or indeed any resource) and place them into some order such that when we need to recover an item we can do so easily. Further, would it not be easier for all items of a similar nature to be grouped together in the same place?

Without such a system, the public libraries would be even more chaotic, noisy and party-like than they are even today. We would be clambering over the beer kegs asking the jocks if they knew where that volume on architecture up to circa 300AD was. Do you think they’d know? They wouldn’t answer, as they do now, “Dude, 722 – don’t you even know your DCC codes, you doofus?!” whilst whipping us with a towel. No, they would merely look confused.

On meandering over to section 722, we would surely find the book we were looking for, but behold! We also find lots of other books on the same subject, that we didn’t even know we were looking for in the first place! We are in one place looking at the entire majesty of the resources the local library has managed to put before us in section 722 – all 2 books! OK, so public libraries are under-funded, but that’s not the point. Without DCC or some other taxonomy to replace it, the two books would never be near each other, we might find one, but never the other.

We know this is one reason the classification of resources is very important. It helps us not only find information we’re looking for, but it also helps group those items together to make ‘neighbours’ easily found.

Great, so what do we need tags for?

Well, the problem with any taxonomy or ontology is scope. How do you create a taxonomy that is so large it can takes absolutely anything humanity can come up with? The short answer is, generalise – don’t try and be too specific. If you have a book “How to Hunt & Cook Pigeons”, then that probably belongs in either 799 (hunting), 598 (birds) or 641 (Food & drink). But wait, you have one book – which one does it go in? Or do we create a new category specifcally about cooking hunted birds?

This is the problem with taxonomies – at some level you need them to be very basic so that they can be easily understood and referenced. However, too general and over-arching and you find that some things need to fit into multiple categories, or you need to create whole new categories every time something comes along that doesn’t quite fit. What’s more it can all be quite subjective: is shooting pigeons and cooking them hunting, or is it sport, or survivalism or is it just cruel and barbaric and not the sort of thing you should have in public libraries? Who decides?

The problem gets harder when you try and get information out so you can find the book later. You now need to navigate through possibly three different branches of the hiearachy to discover what you’re looking for, each time having to make choices down branches that might be wrong.

What’s more, whilst it’s nice to find neighbours, what if I want to find neighbours that don’t match the way the taxonomy was organised? What if I want a collection of books on cooking birds of all types, not just pigeons? I might need to go to several different places. What if I’m just interested in pigeons in general? Do I miss out by looking in the birds section by not knowing there is a book I might be interested in over in the hunting or cookery section?

It gets worse when you realise that you could be dealing with not just a few thousand items in a library, but the entire sum of human knowledge. Every document, photo, film, sound recording, computer program and physical object. Imagine trying to classify and then later find everything related to piegeons, cooking and hunting in that lot.

Enter our new much-hyped, but little-understood hero: tagging.

The purpose of tagging is to replace taxonomies. We want to do this for lots of reasons, including:

• We don’t want to have to worry about where we put stuff into the system. We want to mark the item up without having to spend an hour – or decade – debating which part of the taxonomy it belongs in.
• We want to know it can be easily retrieved by those who may be interested in finding it at a later date.
• We want to be able to easily find ‘neighbours’ even if they belong in a traditionally unrelated taxonomy.

Let’s look at the lifetime of a tagged object, our now familiar book on cooking pigeons. We have a book that we’re going to enter into our database with tags. We decide just a few tags will be sufficient:

cookery, birds, pigeon, hunting, book

If it’s a digital book, we would attach the file to this ‘record’ now, or we might just point to a shelf location if that’s where it belongs. Note, we have not referred to any taxonomy here, we’ve just put the data into the system, and we’ve now moved onto entering our book on architecture in the 2nd century. No debates, no discussions, no new classifications needed for a quirky book. It’s just been put in the system.

Now comes the important bit: getting the data back out.

Our first custodian stumbles in, scratching his beard and thinks about doing some shooting for dinner tonight. He walks to the console and types in ‘cookery’ and ‘hunting’ as tags to search for. We get a hit for hundreds of books, and he notices our book on pigeons. He selects it, looks around, and now asks for ‘cookery’ and ‘pigeon’ to swap the classification he’s looking for to see if there are any other useful guides in this library. Vegetarians the World over will be pleased to hear that there aren’t, but when he de-selects ‘cookery’ and has just ‘pigeon’ on screen, he is reminded that this is but a mere mortal beast worthy of his mercy thanks to the billions of pictures of cute pigeons he is exposed to.

Our second custodian is thinking of doing some game hunting this weekend, but has no idea what he might do with his catch. He selects ‘birds’ and ‘hunting’. Again, a selection of titles comes along, including this title he might otherwise have missed.

Our third custodian is an animal-rights protestor. She means business. On pushing our first custodian out of the way, she searches for ‘hunting’ and is bewildered by her choices until she notices in very small letters in the tag cloud ‘pigeon’. Mortified, she then discovers the option for ‘cookery’ and decides to create a list of all books tagged ‘cookery’ and ‘birds’ to include in her letter to the chief librarian.

The point, you see, is retrieval. We don’t all think in terms of a taxonomy. Creators will create things that don’t fit into a category, and people will be able to take advantage of finding items and their neighbours that don’t belong together in the scheme devised by Dewey (or any other scheme for that matter). This is particularly hard in taxonomies because ‘neighbours’ are really subjective based on the context of the person doing the looking, not the Dewey view that they are objectively determined at the point of classification.

This is particularly useful when you consider that if all content on the Internet is tagged (or maybe metadata ‘keyword’ tagged), we can create powerful search engines that help us devise something powerful and far more user-friendly than any taxonomy.

Google effectively does this for us. Google in fact beat the ‘taxonomy’ that Yahoo and others were pushing before Google arrived through ‘keyword search’ (which is just another way of saying ‘tag search’) – but we don’t realise or recognise it.

The fact we’re now bringing it into the foreground of the application in the Web 2.0 age should be something users rejoice over, rather than reject. Imagine how they would feel however if Google only allowed one word in its search box and if you wanted a particular cookery web page you had to select ‘cookery’ and then browse through all of them until you found the one you wanted.

The downside of course, is that most current interfaces for tags only allow the selection of one tag at a time. Very few allow for us to find inter-sections of tags. It is no good being able to find all books tagged ‘pigeon’ OR all items tagged ‘cookery’ – we need to find the cross-over. Current web applications have reached the first stage, but it is when they reach the next and all content on the net has been tagged that we will truly understand their power.

”I don’t really think, I just walk.” – Paris Hilton

It’s been knocked around the web a little bit now, but here is one take on why Paris Hilton is Marketing 2.0 compared to Madonna’s Marketing 1.0 (or whatever).

I have to say, I get the point. I don’t really know who Paris Hilton is, what she does, or why I should care about her. But I recognise the name. And now I know why. Actually, no, not true, I heard her name when that video was all over the web and in every spam inbox you could imagine, but I didn’t know if she was meant to be important or something.

The idea of trading attention is of course, the reason why the blogosphere works. If I point to chartreuse there in that link up top, that blog gets attention. If a story I post gets voted up on reddit, I get attention. As a result, we have all become keen to harness attention and make the most of it. I use it to help develop my reputation as a… well, whatever it is I am… other people use it because they want to make money, other people do it because they’re lonely. What Hilton has done is turn this into a real-World business game where designers and hairdressers and car manufacturers want her attention because like an A-list blogger, she can divert our attention to whatever she is talking about. It’s a brilliant business model, and she’s either very, very smart or the people using her are.

There are, as ever, drawbacks to all this though, ones that are pertinent for us web application developers and engineerscraftsman. As the article above points out, Paris has become a platform for marketing and therefore can never really market herself. She can sell designer clothes, she can sell cars, probably even burgers. But she can never sell herself (unless there’s another video I don’t want to see out there… ). She is trapped in a corner of audience expectation. If she were now to attempt to host a game show, say, it would fail. The audience doesn’t want her there. Nor, if you’re thinking of using her as a marketing vehicle, do they really want her on your video site because they have expectations of you as well as her.

Sometimes, this can be known as ‘captured by customer expectation’ and refers to the fact that when you’re successful for something, it is virtually impossible to transfer that success to something else. Think how hard it would be for McDonald’s to transfer their success into say, high-street banking, for Apple to buy out Wal-Mart or for your web development company to transfer success into the field of say, farming.

When you are a product/service company, you can always have a fall-back if you’re careful: facebook will always have college kids even if high school kids and corporate bods hate them; McDonald’s will always have the Bic Mac even if their next venture fails; you will always have the desire to move onto the next project if this one doesn’t pan out.

When you’re known for one thing and you can only have the resources to handle one market at a time though, things can fly back in your face. Whilst the article above is astute and funny, the ultimate truth about marketing like Paris Hilton is that when she fails she’ll fail for the same reasons we might: ignoring audience expectation because we want ‘growth’. And we will all make that mistake eventually as it will become a very miserable existence to be thought of as nothing else other than that person who makes other people famous.

Here we go again. A round-up of links for a Sunday spent in front of the PC, or if you’re a corporate slave, a way to pass Monday morning bunking off doing real work.

What is the Secret Behind Contagious Behaviour – This video from Stanford’s Always On summit has some fascinating discussion about contagious behaviour, implementing innovation and working out how to give up control of marketing and products to your customers. My favourite phrase from it probably has to be “fragile fires”. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla, Perry Klebhan – inventor of the modern snow shoe, and Gil Penchina of Wikia discuss how to get users doing the work for you. Moderated by Bob Sutton of Stanford and Diego Rodriguez of IDEO.

Collaboration doesn’t Work – if you’re afraid of the Kool Aid, this article from inc.com suggests teamwork and collaboration doesn’t work. I think the conclusions drawn here are all wrong (obviously) but for a simple reason: the author thinks that collaboration can be done by anybody, without training. It’s a skill that needs time to develop, much like the skill of being able to write software, write a PR release or do a cashflow forecast. Asking people to just walk in a room and start brain-storming without any prior training is asking them to behave in a business context using skills that to this point they had only learnt in social contexts, i.e. contexts where being polite is more important than being right.

Wikipedia Forks – It’s quite common within open source projects for groups within the project to reach disagreement and one set walks off with a copy of the project (which is legally OK for them to do), set up camp somewhere else and create a new project with the old code as a base. This is known as ‘forking’ and it happens a lot more than the media would have you believe. Now a group from Wikipedia believe it’s time to create a new project that has the good bits of Wikipedia but with the oversight of experts, and so off they march. Initially we as readers won’t see much difference, but the proof of the pudding will be in the long-term eating. I wish them well.

iPod users prefer CDs to iTunes – and who can blame them? The issue here of course is ‘DRM’ or ‘Digital Rights Management’. If you buy music through iTunes, Apple get to tell you which devices you can play that music on and how. If you buy a CD and rip it into iTunes you get a physical back-up, you can play the music where you want, and the ripped files can be copied to any device including ones not made by Apple. I genuinely think that within the next 3 years there will be a massive consumer revolt at DRM and the only way to deal with it will be to completely restructure the way music labels (and in the future, Hollywood studios) make their money.

8 Steps to better IT meetings – In fact, not just IT meetings, but any meeting. A nice round-up of how to keep meetings on track. Personally, I think meetings should be avoided completely – individual conversations work much better and if kept to the point can be a great deal quicker and more productive. Having everybody in the room really is as productive as having nobody in the room. However, if you insist on meetings, this is a great way to make them less brain-dead.

The 25 Worst web-sites in the World, ever – I remember most of these when they launched. Truly horrendous, and in my opinion the number one spot holder deserves it – utterly awful website (I won’t spoil the surprise for you though). That said, none of these were as bad as Microsoft Bob in the ‘I… don’t… believe… they… did this…’ stakes.

50 favourite design resources – for those of you who, like me, find design something that has to be worked on as a skill rather than something that comes naturally, here’s a crib sheet.

Social sites seem to be where all the growth is right now. Some define the term “Web 2.0” in terms of being able to help people connect and build knowledge together over the web.

What is strange, is that whilst everybody is running around screaming about how great Digg and Technorati and Facebook are, nobody seems to have realised the business models suck. They all seem to assume that if you have a user’s attention, you can monetize that somehow. The easiest way to do this (because it requires nothing more than inserting a code snippet into the layout of the page) is to put advertising on each page.

If you think about it, this is a terrible business model. It’s akin to building a really great bar, and instead of making money from selling drinks you interrupt everybody’s conversation every few minutes with a “message from our sponsor”, or perhaps if you’re running a CPM campaign as opposed to CPC, perhaps don’t have any music on the jukebox, just play ads.

What’s more, some applications really don’t suit this model. If I’m trying to read my mail, I don’t want gmail to try and ‘help me’ by showing ‘relevant’ adverts. I’m reading mail, not thinking about how to spend money. Likewise if I’m on a business networking site, I’m probably there looking for people who might be potential clients – nobody joins a site in the hope of spending money – and if you keep interrupting me, you’re a lousy site.

However, other business models cause problems if your aim is to build a social software application. If the purpose of the site is to get as many people as involved as possible, you can’t charge an entry fee and not lose out in terms of software function.

I keep on thinking through different ways of handling this. I think Wikipedia has a great approach – don’t run ads, beg for money when it’s needed, syndicate content to people who will run ads, keep costs low. But it only works because there are thousands of people who are passionate about the site itself, and because they all accept that ads on the main site would sully the purpose and cheapen the experience for everybody.

However, one day, their model will break. And eventually they’ll have to make a choice: charge for access, put ads next to content. It doesn’t matter which solution they choose, they’ll end up sacrficing something about what makes the site useable and worthy of their current praise.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the answer is to this, other than point out that at the moment we have just two revenue models, and they’re not enough: we need to build out more for the next set of social software to be a success.

A TechCrunch UK story on Companies House brought attention to the fact that, as you can see below, the UK civil service is not yet comfortable with the Internet period, never mind Web 2.0

So I thought I’d brainstorm what would happen if CH did ever go Web 2.0 – and after this lot you might think perhaps we’re better off where we are….

• Every company would get reviewed by customers/employees (“3/5 – amazon are cheaper”)
• You’d be able to find the other companies that people like you were snooping on
• Civil servants would only ever drink Stormhoek at lunch
• We’d get rid of the stupid company classification codes and go for tags (I’d love to tag BP)
• The civil servants working there would be able to pretend they were rich and feel loved
• Paul Graham would offer Her Majesty’s Government $100k in round one funding
• All reports would be free, but contextual ads for competitors would be embedded in them
• Small companies would be hacked off that the big companies got all the attention
• why the lucky stiff would write a guide to company formations involving badgers and cheese, whilst releasing a toolkit for formenting communist revolution
• A company’s value would no longer be dependent on turnover, but instead the number of ‘friends’ they had.
• An obscure company selling Refrigerated Apes would hit the FTSE 100 within a fortnight
• Google would immediately start work on a “CH killer” and the DTI would take a look at selling the whole department on eBay. Google’s system would suck, but still get raved about
• Civil servants would start to wear button-up shirts, but wish they could afford English Cut
• Company formations on video would be the most popular category on YouTube
• We might actually get usable online forms, rather than the mess directors currently have to go through
• When company formation numbers went up, thousands of other people would start offering the same services with no idea of what they were doing
• We’d all complain that the CH developer’s program sucked
• 37signals would complain that we all sucked for not using their product ‘RoundTable’, a company formation system with just one single button marked “Make me rich please”
• Instead of listing Director’s home addresses, there’d just be a bunch of skype/msn login names listed
• Directors would hold exclusive parties where they would talk about nothing else other than how many hits their reports got on the CH website
• Apple would sell downloadable companies that cost 50% more, but had a nice font and logo on the artwork

Any more people can think of?

The above cartoon is by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com – warning, these days he talks about a particular brand of wine a lot, but his cartoons are often cool. I’d quite like this one on my business card. Thanks to his nice licensing terms, I might be able to do that.

When he published this, he pointed to a story by Scoble about the bubble people are now seeing. There are some important things to note about this bubble:

1. It’s only being seen by those of us inside the industry. If I talk to most people outside of the industry about social sites, Web 2.0, Ajax, whatever, they haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.
2. There is a long, long way to go before this one bursts, but I don’t think the web in 12 months time will look close to what we have right now – it won’t burst, it’ll just look more sensible.

Let me give some background to where I’m thinking here, and start by making a controversial point: Technorati sucks from a social software perspective. So does Google.

I think they suck because to be part of the network, to add to the community, you have to be a publisher. Most people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to become a one-person publishing band, or the money to become a 10-person publishing house. Nor do they want to make videos to put on YouTube or podcast their thoughts. Some people think publishing is something attention-seekers do, and they don’t want to be called attention-seekers. They’re not going to participate.

Of course blogging is attention-seeking, but it’s not a given that this is a bad thing. I want to draw attention to all sorts of things, and I’d rather get your attention by talking and educating you about Ruby on Rails or new technology, or innovation, rather than just put up a big billboard and take out radio ads saying “We Rock the Kazbar – Vagueware Ltd”, because I respect your attention way more than that.

So am I an attention seeker? Sure, of course I am. But I’m seeking attention for something I’m passionate about: my business, technology, innovation. I want to share it. You might not give two hoots about my business, technology or innovation, but you’ll be passionate about something else. People who realise that become bloggers.

However, as a result of a relatively small set of attention-seekers having all the kung fu right now, looking at the A-list of blogs – the ultimate list of passionate attention-seekers – is a pointless exercise. The only thing that is being used as a metric is how many attention-seekers like this group a bit more than a different group by way of the number of linked articles. This is a terrible metric to use.

Ultimately, it could be Google’s downfall as well. PageRank – whilst better than previous systems for ranking content on the Web – uses the worst metric possible: what publishers think is relevant, as opposed to what searchers and readers think is relevant (although they have taken measures to improve this).

What could be more useful is to find out what people of all persuasions – non-publishers included – like across the board. That’s why social bookmarking sites have got traction – it doesn’t take much to digg, reddit or del.icio.us something, you’re not some being publisher, you’re just some dude who clicked on ‘digg this’. That metric – people who were prepared to go ‘Yo! This guy has funk!’ – is a lot more useful. It means that people who are only a bit passionate get to play with less effort.

Except it’s still not great.

For starters, game theory gets all over this model, and sites like Alexa’s Top 500 can so easily be manipulated, all you end up doing is creating a whole new form of spam. As the social bookmark sites get attention from other niches outside tech – particularly porn – they’re going to have to deal with this problem.

The other problem is that it’s still not frictionless. Alexa tracks people who bother to install their toolbar, which most people really can’t be bothered to do. Digg and Reddit are contributed to only by people who can be bothered to click on a little button they remembered to save to their bookmarks bar, write up a few words and some tags and hit submit. It’s not as bad as publishing a blog, but it’s still effort.

All the Web 2.0/community sites are going to face this problem: social communities take work to build and you can’t build them, they have to build themselves. And once people realise they’re there, they are going to start spamming the heck out of them and game theory becomes game-on.

The potential though is huge. Reddit is doing something very interesting with niche sites – joel.reddit.com and so on – which has the potential not to just change the way we think about publishing, but how we think about search.

I’m not interested in what the Internet at large as a group of publishers thinks is the best result for ‘Ruby on Rails’, I’m interested in what a community I respect thinks is the best hit. It’s a better metric for me. If they get the sweetspot just right, the social bookmark sites can take market share away from mainstream search. Right now Joel has his own bookmarking site, but what if every community, every blog, what if they all had social bookmarking communities? Every blog becomes a search engine built by people you share a passion with – a niche community with value.

Even better, because this is so niche, you don’t care about scaling, you don’t care about game theory, you just care about trying to reduce the traction of participation. It needs no money, just passion. Passion is the steam engine of the next industrial revolution.

That’s where the Web 2.0 crowd need to head. This bubble is wrong because we think it’s about Ajax and Rails and reflecing logos. Technology and shiny buttons aren’t what is making the net different in the next 10 years. It’s the people, stupid!

The rumour is that a new blog is started every second. Such is the uptake of the new medium, the hype, the hope, the possibilities, everybody seems to be doing it. So here’s the one for this second, this moment, right now.

Instead of offering a traditional small business website, I – Paul Robinson, founder of Vagueware Limited – made the decision to offer a blog here. I want everything the company does to be in the spirit of openness, so if I learn something interesting or new, develop something of note, spot a competitor doing something interesting, I want to share it. That’ll happen here.

Vagueware is at heart, a software company. However the core purpose is to innovate and inspire.

The best way to innovate is to show, not tell, but telling you about it can help you mimic. That’s where the inspiration comes in: this isn’t a one-way street. I think the Internet is one of the most amazing technological developments in the history of mankind because of what is possible when the entire global population is cheaply interconnected. I want everybody to realise that and do something amazing with it.

So yes, sometimes I’ll talk about interesting pieces of code – developers will find things here of interest, sure – but I want to make it all accessible to a lay audience and inspire those who don’t “get” Web 2.0, and the new wave of amazing applications yet.

Meanwhile if you want a project done, you’d like some consultancy, or you’d just like to say “Hi”, the contact details are accessible through the link below.

Vagueware Ltd is registered in England, no. 5700421

The Registered address for the company is currently:

16 Shearway Business Park
Folkestone
CT19 4RH

However, all correspondence should be sent instead to:

55 Velvet Court
Granby Row
Manchester
M1 7AB

You can also e-mail us and we’ll give you a call right back.