What people fail to understand about RSS

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By Dominiek ter Heide | Published: September 23, 2010

About two weeks ago there has been a heated debate over the future of RSS – the standard for subscribing to news feeds. Like many technological concepts, RSS can mean many things and needs to be looked at from multiple angles.

RSS, The Consumption of Long-form Content

MG Siegler wrote in a recent TechCrunch article: “It’s a mass consumption tool, not consumption tool for the masses”. I think this is a great point, because one of the main problems with consuming information through for example Google Reader is that you need to go through so many piles of crap to find something interesting.

Consuming long-form content is important, but it needs to happen when there is a very high level of attention. To find that piece of long-form content, you want to go through many pieces of short-form content, not unnecessarily read piles of long-form content. It’s questionable whether headlines are good enough to do this, I think not. I think you need a lot of ‘activity’ around a certain piece of long-form content for it to reach a good attention level.

This long-form content can be much more than just an article or a book, it’s anything that takes up time (movie, song, event, interaction, game, talking with someone, traveling somewhere, etc). This time that is spend needs to somehow be in sync with the attention of that ‘consumer’.

The consumption of information is not going to happen either through an RSS reader interaction or a noisy social network interaction. It’s going to be something new, and attention and relevance is going to be key.

There have been several alarmists screaming that the internet is making us stupid. I do agree that the internet is changing our brain – sensing what’s happening and having a more ‘symphonic intelligence’ (like a orchestra conductor) are an increasingly important skill-set. But it’s not going to happen through the mass-consumption of shallow tweets, it’s going to be through zooming. Sensing what’s going on and digging deep into places that are relevant.

RSS, The Subscription Interaction

The adding of new feeds from a site is another way of piling on noise to your ‘reading list’. Browsers now all support RSS auto-discovery of feeds, but who’s really using that? I’d love to see some statistics. Do you add Twitter RSS feeds or Delicious Bookmark feeds to your Google Reader? Perhaps you do.

Google Reader allows you to search for blogs which eases the pain of adding new subscriptions, but it’s still a subscription to a website. Much better would be a client that learns based on your implicit interests (behavior, interaction) and explicit interests (users, keywords, companies). Basically, getting rid of the ‘containers’ and mixing up the data streams. Let the data flow to the right attention (Synaptically!).

RSS, The Data Standard

I’m a huge fan of open standards, but I’m an even bigger fan of getting shit done. One serious practical obstacle with RSS is that it’s built on XML. I used to love XML until I started using JSON and I think many developers will agree with me. To summarize a long list of benefits, JSON reduces the time it takes for developers to integrate.

RSS is also not very extendable, which is horrible in an era where we have a serious need for meta-data. Atom is much better in that respect and a great example of it is Atom Activity Extensions.

RSS, The Feed Technology

Feeds are passive, non-real time and non-event driven. This poses severe practical limitations to RSS as a technology. Real-time carriers as Twitter have appealed greatly to developers. Why is that?

Developers want to use JSON
They want to do a bazillion small requests
They want to keep many connections open and receive real-time events
They don’t want to poll for changes
They want meta-data
They want to be able to integrate directly from the client-side (JSONP)
They want OAuth integration to get private data (RSS never said anything about the authentication mechanisms, and many have resolved to ’secret hashes as URLs to hack around this’)
  • Developers want to use JSON
  • They want to do a bazillion small requests
  • They want to keep many connections open and receive real-time events
  • They don’t want to poll for changes
  • They want meta-data
  • They want to be able to integrate directly from the client-side (JSONP)
  • They want OAuth integration to get private data (RSS never said anything about the authentication mechanisms, and many have resolved to ’secret hashes as URLs to hack around this’)

Twitter is not solving all of these, but is already solving many of them. It’s time that we create an open version of the Twitter Stream API, one with a lot of meta-data and with the ability to really extend the protocol.

Pubhubsubbub is a nice attempt, but it’s not meeting all the above needs and the stuff that’s out there is very hard to set up. Also, it’s very content-centric. The standard talks about ‘content, subscriber and publisher’. What about data? Big pipes of data flowing everywhere? Is the temperature sensor in my fridge a publisher? Is the smart algorithm that’s processing that ‘content’ a consumer? It’s just too oldskool.

XMPP is also something I was very excited about a while back, but what happened to it? I thought it would propel us into the ‘active web’. Twitter completely ditched XMPP and so have other non-nerds. I’ve tried doing stuff with XMPP too, it was a horrible technology to work with if you’re not building an IM client.

I think there is a huge opportunity here to accommodate the needs described here (technology and business wise). Execution will be key there, this means getting over our infatuation with some of the standards out there that are practically undesired. XMPP and Pubhubsubbub look good on paper and the nerds love it, but we need real post-1999 open standards.

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Co-founder Wanted for Interest Intelligence Platform

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By Dominiek ter Heide | Published: July 15, 2010

For a while now, I’ve been toying with the concept of an attention profiling service. Over the course of 2010 I’ve started building a (pretty sophisticated) prototype and it has now taken the shape of a startup that has great potential. For the time being, it’s called Reccoon.

Reccoon in Short

Initially, Reccoon will be an Open API that can be used by third-parties to analyze a person’s interests. Send Reccoon a Twitter username or a Facebook ID, and Reccoon will return a comprehensive semantic attention profile – all based on a person’s online activity. These profiles can be used by third-parties to provide greater relevance and personalization.

As you might suspect, there is a lot of data-analysis going on to make this happen and scale is a central theme. To make the Reccoon infrastructure highly scalable and the profiling service unique, Reccoon has a few tricks up it’s sleeve. This makes it very interesting for third-parties and could result in the option of a lucrative ‘buyout exit’. More about all of this in person.

At a later stage, Reccoon can turn its focus on the consumers. In doing so, we will make sure that there is more user interaction around the tools provided by Reccoon. Consumers can control their interests and attention, they decide which third-party can look into their attention data. And ultimately, Reccoon will monetize stored attention.

Not convinced this could make us filthy rich? Talk to me, and I will convince you. Right now I’m keeping media exposure to a minimum, but once we start our correspondence, I will send along screencasts, a business overview and competitive analyses.

About Me

My name is Dominiek, I consider myself to be a hacker that can fly high and dive down deep when necessary. I have a passion for building web applications, integrating with data services and build out a cool service. My strong suit is technology strategy and technical tactics. I’m sure you can find out more about me by googling around.

About You

I hope that you have these characteristics:

  • You are highly analytical
  • You are disciplined and more organized than me
  • You are more perfectionistic than me, you want stretch the extra mile
  • You are fucking smart, but modest about it ;]

And this frame of mind:

  • Not scared of great ambition
  • Willing to take on big challenges
  • Flexible attitude (e.g. spend some time overseas, willing to go full-time at the right time)
  • Risk tolerant (but not suicidal)

And I expect you to be able to dive down deep. That is, actually write code and work on the prototype. Reccoon is a high-tech focussed startup and a lot of stuff needs to be build, and in a way the founding team is part of the IP that makes a buyout interesting.

Last, but not least. I’m looking for either of these two skill-sets: (The post-founding team can be adjusted to it)

Data Wizard / Intelligent System Mastermind: Solid computer-science skills, ability to write complex algorithms and recommender systems, interest in AI and statistical algorithms.

OR

User Experience Joker / Product Development King: Good product/web abstraction, concrete frontend skills and an interest in building interfaces that solve information overload problems.

OR

You think I’m full of shit and you will tell me why YOU are the perfect Co-founder.

Get in touch

Finding the right partner is not easy, and I will allocate a significant time frame to find the right match. I assume we will collaborate on something small first, and then start putting in more time later.

If interested, please contact me at cofound@dominiek.com!

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Technology Acceleration Economics 101

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By Dominiek ter Heide | Published: May 20, 2010

Recently, there was a talk at the Singularity University by John Mauldin that discussed some of the debt problems in the US and world economy. While I’m happy to see the Singularity community continue the debate across multiple disciplines, I still think there is a lot that needs to be addressed regarding the economics around informationization.

For this article I prefer using the term informationization which is slightly detached from the concepts used in the Singularity community and Ray Kurzweil’s ‘law of accelerating returns’. By informationization I want to refer to the world-changing phenomenon in which physical processes get replaced by informational processes. While abstract and detached from the Singularity, I think most technologists and non-technologists will agree that this informationization is something that is happening right now.

So far, typical discussion about the economic consequences around informationization have been about the falling price of physical goods, the cost of computing power per dollar and some have ventured into the areas of post-scarcity economics and human-level AI labour economics. In this article however, I am much more interested in how informationization affects us now and in the near future. What will be the new drivers of wealth? What industries will be born and which ones will perish? What government policies will work? What strategies will not work?

Extremistan

In a world where more and more activities are becoming informational, there is far greater variety in extremes. Our society has been very bad at dealing with this. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has described some of these fundamental issues in his book, the Black Swan (TBS). In TBS, two worlds are described: Mediocrestan, the physical world in which there is only limited variety; and Extremistan, the informational world in which there is a much greater variety. TBS doesn’t elaborate these concepts much, but as described in the book, they play key roles in the predictability of certain systems. Today the world is much more of an Extremistan in which it is hard to predict anything because of the sheer complexity. For the past years, among many things, mr Taleb has been very skeptical of the trust people have been putting in predicting systems that are not really predictable at all. Consequently, he has been betting against the status-quo and has reaped great returns from his investment portfolio.

Informationization could bring an increase of bubbles in the economy.
Informationization could bring an increase of bubbles in the economy.

So what’s so different in Extremistan?

  • There is a huge difference between the smallest and the biggest
  • Things are a lot more complex and harder to predict
  • Change happens fast, things that were tiny can become big in an instant
  • There is a lot more volatility which could result in less stability and sustainability

Macroeconomics

Over time more symbols get added onto the symbol stack, an example would be a stock option which is very far removed from something tangible. The ever increasing complexity of this symbol stack is making it very hard to accurately measure value creation by traditional means. With the growth of the symbol stack more currencies will be born and more transactions will happen beyond simple monetary transactions. Since this activity falls beyond the monetary radar thats used by governments and economists, a lot of the macroeconomic numbers are not just missing resolution, they are missing entire dimensions.

Having a single currency to exchange goods has given us tremendous benefits to deal with the administration of who owes who what. However, now that communication lines are exploding between businesses and people and now that most administration is done digitally, there is no longer a need for only a few currencies. In fact, there is a very strong need for more currencies! A lot of value thats done on ‘good faith’ by ‘amateurs’ for example is becoming digital, like for example the work done by some passionate Wikipedia contributors. These ‘volunteers’ are producing real value and can for example be paid by an increase in social capital, which in turn can be monetized by for example sponsorship and advertising. Alvin Toffler explains a lot more about these prosumers and the hidden economy behind it in his book Revolutionary Wealth.

To summarize this:

  • A lot of value-creation is done without the transaction of money. This in consequence means that huge assets are being build up which are only waiting to be monetized. Example: the social capital of influential bloggers.
  • Since digital value-creation is highly measurable, you can expect new currencies to arise. Example: the number of Twitter followers for a person that pay x amount of attention to that person.
  • A lot of the macroeconomic reports that are used by policy makers lack data-sources to paint an accurate picture of where value is created.
  • A perhaps dangerous consequence of this is that policy is created and predictions are made without an acknowledgement of the lack of data.

I’m not saying that its impossible to measure the gross of economic throughput, I’m just saying it is very challenging and we cannot count on simple measurable monetary transactions. I think it is very important that we figure out whether or not we can keep up with the explosion of transactions, currencies and value-creation ecosystems, as this could affect entire countries. For example, all government spending is based on taking tax on a percentage of a measurable transaction. What if governments can no longer keep up with the complexity of todays world? The tax agency of my home country, the Netherlands, for example, is neglecting revenue tax on all ‘digital services’ performed outside of Europe. (lucky me! :] )

Service Deficits
Source: OECD

When looking at some of the data thats used by macro-economists through an informationization lens, there are some very interesting observations we can make. Take for example the Trade in Service (TIS) by the OECD. These numbers (see above) reveal that some countries have a huge deficit when it comes to the trade of these more intangible items. For example, while the United States’ trade deficit is often contrasted against Germany’s healthy export, it turns out that post-industrially speaking, the US is far ahead of the other countries. Of course, there is a lot going on beneath these numbers and only by looking at the sub-service sector stocks we can really tell which countries have healthy knowledge economies.

The New Scarcities

Things that are abundant will become a commodity, which will greatly reduce the price and its value. These are core economic principles that are unlikely to change. Thanks to informationization many things are becoming more abundant, but where abundance is created, new scarcities are formed as well. Understanding these new scarcities will give us insights into where new economic value is created.

Thanks to the great copy machine called the internet, traditional ways of charging for a medium are failing. Many industries now have to deal with the reality that their content was always free and that they can no longer charge for the medium. The reality is that everything that can be copied is as abundant as air. Would you be able to charge money for the air you breathe?

So what is not copyable by the ‘great copy machine’? Kevin Kelly, in his ingenious essay, Beyond Free, lists out seven of these new scarcities that will rise in value and which people will pay for:

  • Immediacy
  • Personalization
  • Interpretation
  • Authenticity
  • Accessibility
  • Embodiment
  • Patronage

Even though these concepts are still very abstract, they hold the key to where new markets and businesses are created. Some of these, e.g. authenticity and patronage, can perhaps never be made abundant. Billions will flow however, to those that can commoditize these scarcities.

Industries
A list of potentially endangered industries.

Topics of Further Discussion

The essence of economics is supply and demand and at its core lies the attention of the agents that are conducting transactions. This attention is also central in the theory of the Attention Economy formulated first by economist Herbert Simon. In a society where information is becoming very abundant, the attention of the people consuming that information increases in value. An increasing group of (web) innovators agree that understanding ‘attention dynamics’ is crucial to creating next-gen businesses.

The financial crisis in 2008 was mainly due to the popularity of trade in ‘unstable and complex financial instruments’. Regulators often respond to this by banning such products either through blacklisting or whitelisting. The proper response however, should be an increase in the transparency of such environments. This leads to the greater question about the role Governments should play. Perhaps Governments should focus on creating an ecosystem where private entities thrive rather than participate in them.

The economic turmoil of 2008 also brought a large wave of unemployment, this was not only because costs had to be cut. The 2008 financial crisis was a perfect moment for many companies to finally let go those people that had been performing less or had been automated (NYT). Some Neo-Luddites claim that soon most jobs will be automated and that we will have to deal with a complete economic meltdown because of massive unemployment. Massive inequalities in income are definitely a characteristic of informationization: some people will become the next trillionaires while many others will fall into poverty. We should not forget however, that automation also reduces the cost of living for all and most labour in the development nations is no longer to satisfy the ‘survival need’.

It’s clear that the role of proper governance seems to rise in importance. Important questions are: How can Governments – the slowest organizational bodies in the world – keep up with all the change? How do we deal with massive inequalities? Is taxation sustainable when you have many unmeasurable streams of income flowing in and out in different currencies? If physical locations matter less, why can’t we create virtual privatized governmental entities and sovereignties?

Informationization’s effect on the economy, society and business is huge. We’re not playing a different game, we’re not in a different league: this is a completely different sport.

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An Innovator Leaving Japan

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By Dominiek ter Heide | Published: May 7, 2010

Deep-rooted Problems in the Japanese Knowledge Economy

I’ve been working on this report for quite some time, it is a deep analysis of the current economic and business climate mixed in with my experience as an IT developer and entrepreneur in Japan (8 pages): An Innovator Leaving Japan.pdf

Introduction

Most people learn about Japan for the first time in Junior high, the textbooks are probably still the same: earthquakes, volcanos, bullet trains, smoggy cities and state of the art technology. Almost everyone I meet outside of Japan still believes that technology is years ahead of its time here. In fact, it was one of the main reasons why I ended up spending a lot of my youthful years here. But I have news for you, Japan is no longer that country, in fact, it has been lagging behind for more than a decade now.

It’s not strange that people’s perception of Japan is so out of whack with reality, it’s mainly because this country is still very closed. Whenever a big earthquake happens here, my parents ask me a couple of days later about it and when I ask them for the details, I notice that most simple facts reported by Western media are simply erroneous. Let’s clear up a couple of things about innovation, business and economics in Japan.

Read full article: An Innovator Leaving Japan.pdf

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Rethinking Professionalism: The Meta-Expert

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By Dominiek ter Heide | Published: March 24, 2010
Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed by the use of the word ‘expert’ and ‘professional’. These words are used a lot, but I feel that they’ve been outdated for many reasons. In my own experience, I’ve had more negative than positive transactions with experts and professionals that advertise themselves as such.
Today, while watching the Bill Maher’s show, Real Time, I was quite annoyed by the attitude of economist Stephen Moore. Granted, he was heavily under fire during the debate, but to me he’s a stereotypical person who has become incompetent by the ‘expert’ label that he wears on his forehead. This ‘expert label’ makes you very comfortable, in fact, it makes you so comfortable, that you get addicted to your little comfort zone. It makes you so comfortable that you stop listening and, quite frankly, stop thinking. To borrow a Black Swan / NNT meme: I’d rather listen to Fat Tony!
So what do I consider to be professional? Well, first off:
instead of being a smooth talker with a firm handshake, he/she can listen
instead of being someone who wares a suit, he/she knows what to dress for
instead of being up and about at 8am every morning, he/she can stick to an agreed appointment and be very punctual about it
instead of being the expert in one field, he/she specializes across multiple disciplines
instead of denying and being stubborn, he/she can admit mistakes and move on
instead of being knowledgeable in one vertical, he/she has horizontal knowledge about how to acquire knowledge in many verticals
But I think this issue goes much deeper. A lot of the qualities of today’s ‘educated workers’ are either not relevant any more in this post-industrial era or they are simply insufficient. With the informational changes that are happening all around us, the lines between amateurs and professionals are blurring. Producers and consumers have become prosumers and knowledge that has been aquired during university becomes obsolete on graduation (Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth).
There are however some characteristics that will make a person thrive in this complex world. Perhaps a person that has obtained these characteristics, can be considered a new kind of expert. An expert that transcends conventional thinking and can escape the confines of expertise, the meta-expert.
This meta-expert:
will constantly improve by using new knowledge and technologies
will admit that a big part of his/her higher education has been unnecessary
understands that economics go beyond monetary transactions and understands that it’s fundamentals lie in creating value
can navigate the emotional storms of the short term, but can also drive a vision of the long-term with instinct and rationale
will engage in both introverted and extraverted activities, as challenging as this might be
has sought and will seek new horizons that lay beyond their comfort zone
will strive to make big dreams possible, through passion and commitment
These are just several characteristics I could think off, but I’m sure YOU, THE READER, can think of some more. If you do so, please add them to the comments section and I will add them.
In my own IT experience I know that some software developers outperform others many times over, but as technology and informationization starts impacting more domains, perhaps this will only increase. This ‘value generation inequality’ doesn’t have to be all that bad though. As systems and organizations get more complex, the ‘chance’ aspect becomes more important, One high return on a bet can overthrow all your previous losses. However, when you’re dealing with a small organization, like a startup, it is very important that your first hire will be one of those meta-experts that has the 10,000x-factor.
But at the end of the day, I’m not really an expert on this matter.

Neo-Expert would indeed a much much better meme to describe such a person. Thanks YC commenter :]

Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed by the use of the word ‘expert’ and ‘professional’. These words are used a lot, but I feel that they are outdated for many reasons. In my own experience, I’ve had more negative than positive transactions with experts and professionals that advertise themselves as such.

Today, while watching Bill Maher’s show, Real Time, I was quite annoyed by the attitude of economist Stephen Moore. Granted, he was heavily under fire during the debate, but to me he’s a stereotypical person who has become incompetent by the ‘expert’ label that he wears on his forehead. This ‘expert label’ makes you very comfortable, in fact, it makes you so comfortable, that you get addicted to your little comfort zone. It makes you so comfortable that you stop listening and, quite frankly, stop thinking. To borrow a Black Swan / NNT meme: I’d rather listen to Fat Tony!

So what do I consider to be professional? Well, first off:

  • instead of being a smooth talker with a firm handshake, he/she can listen
  • instead of being someone who wares a suit, he/she knows what to dress for
  • instead of being up and about at 8am every morning, he/she can stick to an agreed appointment and be very punctual about it
  • instead of being the expert in one field, he/she specializes across multiple disciplines
  • instead of denying and being stubborn, he/she can admit mistakes and move on
  • instead of being knowledgeable in one vertical, he/she has horizontal knowledge about how to acquire knowledge in many verticals

But I think this issue goes much deeper. A lot of the qualities of today’s ‘educated workers’ are either not relevant any more in this post-industrial era or they are simply insufficient. With the informational changes that are happening all around us, the lines between amateurs and professionals are blurring. Producers and consumers have become prosumers and knowledge that has been aquired during university becomes obsoledge on graduation (Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth).

There are however some characteristics that will make a person thrive in this complex world. Perhaps a person that has obtained these characteristics, can be considered a new kind of expert. An expert that transcends conventional thinking and can escape the confines of expertise, the meta-expert.

This meta-expert:

  • will constantly improve by using new knowledge and technologies
  • will admit that a big part of his/her higher education has been unnecessary
  • understands that economics go beyond monetary transactions and understands that it’s fundamentals lie in creating value
  • can navigate the emotional storms of the short term, but can also drive a vision of the long-term with instinct and rationale
  • will engage in both introverted and extraverted activities, as challenging as this might be
  • has sought and will seek new horizons that lay beyond their comfort zone
  • will strive to make big dreams possible, through passion and commitment

These are just several characteristics I could think off, but I’m sure YOU, THE READER, can think of some more. If you do so, please add them to the comments section and I will add them.

In my own information technology experience I know that some software developers outperform others many times over, but as technology and informationization starts impacting more domains, perhaps this will only increase. This ‘value generation inequality’ doesn’t have to be all that bad though. As systems and organizations get more complex, the ‘chance’ aspect becomes more important, One high return on a bet can overthrow all your previous losses. However, when you’re dealing with a small organization, like a startup, it is very important that your first hire will be one of those meta-experts that has the 10,000x-factor.

But at the end of the day, I’m not really an expert on this matter.

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments