AOP: Tim O’Reilly on “Publishing 2.0″

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 October 2006 at 11:42
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Craigslist, Google, Journalism, Mashups, Nature, Online, Second Life, UK AOP, Wikis, Yahoo

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media is now giving his keynote about “Publishing 2.0″. The title of his talk, like the title of this blog, is obviously a reference to “Web 2.0″, a term O’Reilly is credited with coining.

One thing that Web 2.0 companies have in common, O’Reilly says, is that they are making money from software, but not by selling software. They are using the Internet as a platform. It’s no longer an add-on to the PC.
The big change in the industry is about “harnessing collective intellignce” which is only possible on a network. That is the essesnce of Web 2.0.

Yahoo!, the orginal aggregator, let tried to create a catalogue of the best material on the web. Google, was the first search engine that didn’t just look at documents, but also what people were doing with documents, though PageRank. Google works and gets better every time someone creates a link to an online document.

EBay is people coming together. Amazon doesn’t have a clever breakthrough. They just work hard on it. They get their users to add value to the site over and over, making them better than their competitors.

Early map publisher Mapquest didn’t realise that users add value. They saw it as database publishing.

Web 2.0 is the era of asymmetric competition. Google plays by different rules. They are an advertising player. Previous models didn’t work, so now Yahoo has to compete on Google’s terms.

Craiglist is the best example of this. Craig Newmark recently boast that his company, with just 18 employees, is the seventh-biggest site on the interent, just below News Corp with 38,000 employees.
The biggest competition for O’Reilly technology books is people searching online. As a consequence the mix of books in the publishing business is changing. They are  oublishing far fewer reference books. Tutorial books, which can’t be done well online, now more important in their mix.

O’Reilly  shows a slide showing an IBM visualisation of the history of a single Wikipedia entry. Over time, more and more people contribute to an entry that originally was largely written by just one individual.

Then he shows an Alexa graph comparing the online Encyclopedia Britannica against Wikipedia. Britannica is a flat red line while Wikipedia is growing rapidly.

Sites can be either designed to get network effects like this, or they can be designed in a way that does not encourage such effects.

Flickr is a good example. He shows a Flickr tag cloud and compares it to Shutterfly, a “Web 1.0” photo uploading site. After uploading new photos, Shutterfly invites users to give friends access to them. On Flickr, by contrast, the default option is to make the uploaded photos public. Users have to chose to make them private. Think about the choice of defaults that encourage network behaviour.

We are seeing computer programming as journalism, commonly called Mashups. He mentions Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org web site (a favourite of this parish). Holovaty’s previous project was LJWorld at the Lawrence Journal-World, a small paper in Kansas, which gave local community groups the ability to create content. Both projects, says O’Reilly, are good examples of the power of seeing computer programming and user-generated content as journalism.

Digital rights management: you have to think about not having too much of it. The correct approach to DRM is like taking a cat to the vet: hold it loosely, or it will claw you. Apple defeated Sony in the music space by holding DRM loosely.

We have to be players in the workd of mashups and UGC. The web will continue with or with out us, more and more in a network world. “We have to figure out how to become players in that world, or we’ll be left behind,” he concludes.

In the Q&A, O’Reilly is asked who in traditional media “gets it”. He says Nature publishing group is doing some amazing work in this area, with open peer review and have figured out how to keep things behind the firewall while also exposing it to search engines. The BBC and Washington Post are also very good, he says.

Simon Waldman asks whether O’Reilly will shift more into an ad-funded model from paid-for books. He says the Safari service is subscriptions and is not the third-largest channel for sales. Thirty per cent of the pageview come from books that are not selling as books. It’s an example of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory and a huge shift to content that wasn’t being monetised at all previously.

Bill Murray asks about UGC as journalism. Much UGC is created by a tiny fraction of the user base. So what is the role of the traditional editor?

O’Reilly says Wikipedia is an example. They have traditional editors, but are just using a different set of tools, but there is an editorial role. Google, similarly, has supervisors for content, particularly to weed out spam.
We’re seeing the age of the computer-aided editor, and the function is that of the person who is doing the curation of content has much more powerful tools.
Will consumers become cynical about publishers’ self interest in soliciting their UGC?
O’Reilly says yes. Some will completely miss the boat and there will be lots of cynicism. Think back to the early days of the PC and all the companies that no longer exist. As a result of that, should we have discounted the personal computer?

“The companies are bubbles on the wave, they are not the wave,” he says. We’re moving towards a global platform and you have to figure out how to be part of it. Eventually, the industry will consolidate and innovation will move elsewhere. But we are just seeing the very beginning. Imagine when every divice you carry records its location all the time. Some insurance companies are using this data to set rates depending on where you drive. Somebody owns that data and needs to manage it.
The web is just a phase. It’s really about the “Internetisation of everything,” he says.

What will be Web 3.0? Two things are candidates for that moniker, says O’Reilly. Sensor-powered network, which contains devices rather than human-powered “bionic software”. These applications made humans components of the application.

Another candidate is virtual worlds, like Second Life. Electic Sheep is a company that only has offices in the virtual world. In the physical world they are scattered around North America and meet virtually only opn Sheep Island in Second Life.

That’s where the next AOP conference is going to be held, Torin Douglas jokes, closign the session.

Tags: BBC, Blogs, Craigslist, Google, Journalism, Mashups, Nature, Online, Second Life, UK AOP, Wikis, Yahoo