Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web
There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”
I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.
HTML5
The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.
Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.
Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?
LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea
Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:
Journalism Business Models
Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight - O'Reilly Radar: “I’m sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off “content providers.” They…
- Why I dislike micropayments, don't mind charity, but really have a better idea Network(ed)News: What a fantastically simple idea for a journalism business model: charge for interaction with the content creator. Donate some money to the site, and the chances of your comments etc being responded…
- Walter Isaacson: You've got it all wrong | Musings of an Anonymous Geek: Theodor Nelson writes the equivalent of a very long blog post as a response to Walter Isaacson’s use of his name in his argument for micropayments for news. Essentially, Nelson wants to use a…
-
Interview: Wired's Chris Anderson on the 'free' business model | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: Chris Anderson, author of Long Tail, discusses the Freemium business model.
- Tech Tools Day 1: Tomorrow's Journalism and Journalists - The Next Newsroom Project: “Readers have never been willing to support this industry economically,” Fine said. “Her advice for anyone in the news biz was direct: ‘I know that not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur,’ Fine…
- DigiDave | Communication is Key: Journalism Beyond Newspapers - Don't Become Nonprofits - Work for Them: Dave Cohn makes a good point: journalists can market their services toward non-profits who need the press and often can’t get their message out there.
- Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content: Steve Outing endorses Kachingle, a micro-payment service for websites with one distinct caveat: paying is still optional. The user decides on how much they want to pay for their news, and all the…
- Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Good look at the failures of the Paid Content model: LAT, and the Albuquerque Journal. End with a reminder: just because Editors think that they are entitled to make money from content, it doesn’t…
- Op-Ed Contributor - You Can't Sell News by the Slice - NYTimes.com: A New York Times op-ed on why paid content won’t work. Oh, and that even if it did, the revenue wouldn’t “save newspapers.”
- What does engagement mean for newspapers? - Eat Sleep Publish: A good summary and batch of links on why engagement on sites is important.
Top 15 of 2008: The leading regional newspaper sites shuffle their ranks Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: The top regional newspapers have seen a significant increase in pageviews.
- lectroid.net Blog Archive Newspapers could actually try online: Really solid advice on how to evolve your print newsroom into a real, online newsorg. Topics include: Staffing, web design, and workflow.
- Reflections of a Newsosaur: How to charge for content. Theoretically.: Alan Mutter jumps on the micropayment bandwagon as the most “logical way” to make money online. He makes the wrong assumption that “Consumers might not like being micro-nickled and nano-dimed for…
Web Journalism
- The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, March 24, 2007: Fantastic list of things that newspapers should do on their websites to make them more relevant to users (read: user friendly)
- How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online: The ‘new’ interface is a great move for the Times. It does distinctly reminds me of http://newser.com and I think corrects one of the major flaws of current online newspaper design: the lack of…
