I forget about Amazon’s Plog most of the time. I’m in a little roadside motel not far from family this morning… and while waiting for the rest of the family to wake up, I’m surfing the free wired and wireless Internet from my room (why do the cheapest hotels always have good free access — and the expensive places I stay for business cost me an arm and leg for crap?)

So in a more meandering mood, I followed a few of my Plog links… one of which that lead me to Gastronomica. Now, I have no idea how good the quarterly is, but if this article (warning–only comes as a PDF) is any indication, I going to be a subscriber very soon. Make That a Ristretto by Richard Reynolds has me wishing I was back home in front of my grinder and Chemex rather than dreading the first cup of the 4-cup prepackaged stuff I’ll wolf down in my motel room. Worse, Reynolds paints a beautiful picture of espresso, only to end in complete tragedy. These are provoking words. I applaud them. It’s time to make the coffee.

Happy Saturday.

I’ve been a Location-Based Services (LBS) enthusiast for a while—at least conceptually. I’m sure a lot of that enthusiasm starts with my history as a navigator in the navy. I used multiple forms of positioning – from “shooting” stars, sun lines, and moon lines to visual line of bearings to advancing dead reckoning lines to RADAR ranges to plotting coordinates from GPS. These positions were plotted on paper charts of varying scales and projections, grease penciled on to a RADAR scope, entered into the ship’s computer system to be transformed into data for all the necessary operational services, etc. Absolute and relative position (where relative can mean a host of things), along with time, are some of the most critical data points for any military unit. All the “services” units provide are beholden to this data.

The key in all of this, especially when it comes to mapping or visualizing location data, is the context of use. A GigaOM post started off this chain of thinking this morning. I think about context because all of the mapping services discussed in the post, including Google API’s, etc, are concentrating more on the data imposed on the maps, rather than the context of use. This same thinking is limiting LBS in the broader sense. While child finding, friend radar, and routing are interesting and useful services, they aren’t really context specific.

When I talk about context, however, I’m talking about it in a different way than Ferhenbacher. She states:

But set apart from those real-time mobile tracking applications, geotagging is a more subtle way to leverage location as a way to share content or connect with a community. Location is the context, not the end goal.

Location definitely provides a piece of context – but is far from BEING context. I’m not sure the killer LBS or apps are going to be about sharing content or connecting with a community. LBS of that ilk will be incremental at best. I think true innovation will be much more context specific.

I’ll lay out the elements of where that might go in the full post (follow the link below).
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Danah Boyd is right on in this post from a few weeks ago:

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

If you follow the comment trail from the post, you’ll see some Second Life backlash. I actually think Danah and those posters are actually agreeing on the important parts.

I messed around quite a bit with Second Life–(born 9/18/2005). I know, at that time, there had been much less hype on it. To me, if I had been 10 years younger, I would have been all over exploring and creating in it–just for the fact that it was a new playground. But, I think there is still plenty to do there. It is an environment that levels the playing field to many real world constraints… you have the freedom to design, test, build, code, and make things come alive. It is fascinating in so many ways.

However, what bothers me is how people see Second Life, reading the tea leaves and predicting the future. How do you interpret Second Life as a faint signal on the fringe? First — what is it really (what is it similar to now and in the past, how is it different)? Second — how big is its impact (scale–people and $ and time, growth–of those same variables)? And finally, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of all the time, money, and people involved?

But I don’t want to answer those questions in this post. What I want to do is loop back to the quote from Danah. The future is not about being virtual, online or offline, digital, etc. All of those descriptions are less meaningful. The future will be richer analog deepened by digital. Life will be augmented by technology. We won’t define going online or offline. The Web won’t be something we connect to. Those distinctions fade away. I will “see” hyperlinks in the real world. My social networks will exist on my phone, in space and time, at my backyard barbecue.

I think the deeper trends that portend this are things like presence, persistence, identity, privacy, high-speed wireless connection, unlimited bandwidth, cheap recording and production tools, etc.

Second Life is what it is because it enables actions and experiences that are more difficult or impossible in our analog life. But the same can be said for my analog life–it will be very difficult for Second Life to replicate some of my analog experiences. So rather than getting caught up in the “virtual” part of Second Life as a signal for the future, perhaps you can read it this way:

The best virtual environment is an analog one that enables me to do what I can’t do in the analog.

It’s a paradox of course. A koan. But that little riddle is the future.

Until I have enough for a second post, I’ll keep adding comments and more on this topic in the single post page.

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Web2.0’s value comes from the user. The engine of value is constructed through an architecture of participation. User generated content, mashups, social networking – when done right, get better and create more USER value at an exponential rate. This is nothing new. We’ve been saying this for the many years. And companies are starting and being sold based on generating this kind of value. But what hasn’t changed? The business model.

Back at The Future of Web Apps earlier this year it became obvious that the dichotomy of the web as a business model hasn’t been solved. There still is a huge chasm between user value and business value. There’s plenty of innovation around what the web is delivering – but very little innovation on how money is made.

I know. You’re thinking I’m completely ignorant of all the innovation regarding contextual advertising, search advertising, etc. But take a critical view of these models. They are just more targeted ways of delivering billboards and coupons. It’s better than it has been, for sure. More relevant advertising is better for a company and for the consumer. But this is incremental change.

BusinessWeek walks through the online ad models of Google, Yahoo, and niche players. And as TechCrunch states, it’s true, more competition should generate better pricing and innovation. But it’s still about inventory, views, and clicks.

Most simply, advertising is NOT user-centered. At its best, it is about companies that want to achieve certain business goals, agencies that can help create campaigns to achieve those goals, and media agencies that can help place the campaign in the most efficient (and sometimes most effective) places. It isn’t about solving consumer needs, creating more consumer value, and generating incremental profit from that value.

There is potential for true innovation of the radical variety. Imagine a model that transforms the strengths of advertising into a user-focused model. Imagine we coupled the power of an ad agency, a media agency, a Google or Yahoo, and a network of niche web developers that actually generated profit for clients rather than expenses? The product of the coupling would be new communication tools, products, services, or social glue that solved customer needs in way that the customers themselves would pay for it.

More to come on this topic for sure. If you’re up for answering the call to create this with me drop me an email. Let the user-centered revolution begin.

Maybe I’m way behind on this — but here’s an idea. Write very detailed blog posts about a topic or question you have. Something worth speculating on — but isn’t really out there in the blogosphere or media. Then just use a halfway decent traffic analysis tool and read the tea leaves.

I posted a clearly over the top post, “Apple Acquires Last.fm“, on 19 August of this year. It’s a provactive title that gets a little bit of search traffic my way. I didn’t write the post to get traffic. The web 2.0 acquisition market seemed so heady. I thought it’d be funny to package my iTunes wishlist as a critique of the silly enthusiatic part of the web2.0 lexicon (my GenreFolksonomies). I also have written another “wishlist” post to Apple — about wanting to switch to Mac. And in some weird sort of synchronicity, they addressed most of my needs by introducing the Mini.

But looping back to where I started this post. While my intention in writing the Apple/Last.fm post wasn’t to “bug the internet,” I’m learning that, in fact, I have. I don’t have that strong of a signal on this blog — I haven’t consistently written or made people aware that it exists. So any traffic bumps are caused by waves and ripples of the web. I just had a spike of searches like: “how many last.fm users, last.fm acquire, last.fm itunes.” Sure, it’s a lot of noise — but think of the potential for parsing the signal?

Yes, you say, of course that’s what Digg and Technorati and the hundreds, if not thousands, of sites have been trying to do with blogs. But I think those are more about parsing the signals through the existing “microphones” on the web. I’m talking about strategically placing the microphones — not for traffic — but to learn.

Had to take the picture through our dirty windows so it is pretty poor quality. Scaffolding obscures the right part of the photo. Our building is constantly under work (over 100 years old with history as a cookie factory and bookbinder… now converted residential lofts).