Socially Speaking

We had another great interactive experience at yesterday’s Waxxi ‘cast. Jimmy Wales, as you might expect, was a fascinating guest. We’re truly grateful that he took the time to join us, and share his thoughts and ideas on Wikipedia, Wikia, search, culture, the web, Google, and more.

It was interesting to see the level of interaction via IM vs. phone. This was the first Waxxi ‘cast where most all of the questions came in via chat or private IM vs. the phone (just two callers who ‘raised their hand’ to ask a quesion, one of whom we couldn’t hear because his headset’s mic was muted – woops!). Since most of the participants were true power-users/early adopters, IM is simply more natural a communications method than the phone.

We had a great showing of NYC’s ‘next generation of digital movers and shakers’ – otherwise known as nextNYers. One of them, David Evans of Civil Netizen, says of Waxxi:

If basic podcasting is like standing, then Waxxi’s interactive podcasts are like flying…

He also blogged about his experience yesterday:

The chat was moderated by Tracy Sheridan of Waxxi, who performed the job masterfully like a great conductor, bridging the worlds of phone callers, online chatters, studio guests, and staff into a fluid experience for both Jimmy and the guests. The event was reminscent of a good talk show where the host and guest interact with both a live studio audience as well as with phone in callers.
…

I’ve never felt so drawn in to an interactive online event like I was today. For an hour, I felt like I wasn’t even sitting at my desk, but rather as a part of a live studio audience. Suddenly, listening to TWiT on the train ride home just doesn’t sound as exciting as it used to…

Wow. We’re absolutely blushing! Thanks to David, to our guest Jimmy Wales, and each person who participated. We had a lot of fun. Till next time!

This is why we do what we do.

Yesterday’s mention (Thanks, Mike!) officially counts as the second time we’ve been TechCrunched. Even if on somewhat a smaller scale, what to say about it? Don’t let anyone fool you — it’s a whole lot of fun.

Here’s a geographical representation of some of the people who’ve signed up to participate in Waxxi’s interactive podcast with Jimmy Wales, on April 5th:

• Perth, Australia
• Reykjavik, Iceland (!)
• London, UK
• Dublin, Ireland
• Taipei, Taiwan
• Wellington, New Zealand

Canada: Montreal, Toronto

China: Beijing, Ningbo

India: Mangalore, Nepal

US: New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Seattle, WA; West Hollywood, CA; Ellington, CT; Artlington, VA; Menomonie, WI; Vista, CA; Belchertown, MA; West Lafayette, IN; Wilmington, DE; Stonemountain, FL; El Segundo, CA; Reston, VA; Potomac, MD; Greenwich, CT; University Heights, OH

If you’d like to register, go here (but we’re rapidly running out of space, so hurry!) And, thanks to everyone who signed up to be a part of the conversation. Talk to you soon.

In a report from Tokyo yesterday, Reuters declared, “the online collaboration responsible for Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of Google Inc. and Yahoo, Inc.”

Well, we could’ve told you that.

Jimmy Wales came out, fully loaded, with some fighting words — or about as peaceful as fighting words can get:

The idea that Google has some edge because they’ve got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now.

He went on to describe Google and Yahoo! as “black boxes” that won’t reveal how they rank search results. And, that collaborative search technology could transform the structure of the Internet.

What this translates to is Wikia, the for-profit sister site to Wikipedia, will take great lessons from the non-profit’s core. Wikia Search, then, is a place where:

…users could work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users had tweaked and rewritten articles on the sprawling encyclopedia.

Wikia as a whole hosts collaborative community publishing sites, and is supported by advertising. Examples of some of these communities include 24, the Muppet Wiki (one of Jimmy’s favorites), and the currently featured collaboration, Gears of War.

After having spent the majority of my time in NYC over the past months, I’ve experienced some impressive conferences, talks, Meetups and gatherings. One such gathering, held at a three story penthouse in Tribeca, was dubbed the Founder’s Club. Or,

…a group of NYC Internet founders and CEOs promoting the start-up spirit in Silicon Alley.

It was that, and more. I spotted Jeff Jarvis, and ran into some now-familiar faces, like CNET’s Caroline McCarthy, Civil Netizen’s Dave Evans, Brett Petersel and Socialight’s Dan Melinger.

It was nice meeting blip.tv’s Dina Kaplan, Fast Company’s Michael Prospero and artist Scott Draves, a highly regarded geek artiste whose work adorns the walls of Google’s Mountainview HQ. Scott recently moved his life from San Francisco to NYC to make it all happen. I told him that I could relate to that, firsthand (although I’m originally from the East coast, and he’s not).

A few other organizations, and their leaders/evangelists, I chatted up:

Ventbox’s Nate Westheimer
Ventbox is, as you might guess, a place to vent on the web. But it’s more than that – it’s social ranting, if you will. Nate, aka VentMan, sees many other applications for the service, particularly within corporations (don’t employees like to vent?). I told him it’s a pretty cool knowledge management tool he’s got on his hands. Nate wins best dressed founder of the evening, simply because he was the only 20-something (or any age, actually) that showed up in a bow tie. And, it worked.

Noel ‘NoNeck‘ Hidago
What to say about Noel Hidago, other than once you meet him, it’s not likely you’ll forget him. Filled with passion (and I mean cup-runneth-over filled not just to-the-brim filled), Noel will speak quite intelligently – yet not without flair – about technology and culture, politics and co-working, entrepreneurship and unconferencing. His latest project, called the Luck of Seven, is an “open source, around the world project” where:

…for seven months, he will traverse the seven continents, dive into the seven oceans, and attempt to visit the seven ancient wonders of the world. Using a wiki, noneck will harness the collective knowledge of the globe, and report weekly on seven topics of freedom. Before he leaves, he is fundraising US$11.11 from 700 global residents.

Trickle Up’s Jesse Greendyk
Trickle Up is a non-profit which has been around, for 27 years to be precise. Jesse explained the core focus of the organization, microfinancing the world’s lowest income, would-be entrepreneurs, giving them their ‘first steps out of poverty.’ They do this by

… providing conditional seed capital, business training, and relevant support services essential to the launch or expansion of a microenterprise. This proven social and economic empowerment model is implemented in partnership with local agencies.

You can catch an enlightening conversation with Trickle Up’s President Bill Abrahms, led by BusinessWeek’s Karen E. Klein, here. And, meet one of their entrepreneurs here.

What’s happening in the NY Tech sector is worth paying attention to. Observationally speaking, it’s a rumble of energy, passion and power that, I believe, is on the verge of erupting.

[originally blogged over here, thought it was worth repeating, here.]

Wikipedia founder and visionary Jimmy Wales has become one of the most prominent names on the web. As if helping create and grow what is now the single largest source of information in history — along with one of the world’s most influential brands — wasn’t a big enough challenge, there’s something even grander in store.

His for-profit endeavor, Wikia, basically takes the core of Wikipedia and expands upon it. If you imagine Wikipedia as an encylopedia, then think of Wikia as an entire library. It’s all of the collaborative media (books included) that people might create, together. If it can be done with an encyclopedia — that, Jimmy believes, is just the beginning.

Wikia Search, a ‘pillar’ of Wikia, is a very big idea. It’s all about making search participatory, transparent, and free (free in the sense of free speech, not free in the sense of free beer). Human-powered search.

We’re incredibly proud and excited to have Jimmy join us on April 5th. During the ‘cast, you’ll have the chance to ask Jimmy a question directly via phone and/or IM in the chat room. Here are the details:

WHAT: Interactive Podcast with Jimmy Wales

WHEN: Thursday, April 5, 2007, 1:30-2:30pm EST

HOW: Register here. But hurry! As always, it’s free but spaces are limited.

Forbes named Jimmy Wales as one of the Top 25 Web Celebrities for 2007, and he was the first person listed in the “Scientists & Thinkers: the lives and ideas of the world’s most influential people” in Time magazine’s May 8, 2006 issue.

Given that, he’s an incredibly comfortable and ‘real’ person to speak with. Please join us, if you can.

The Waxxi ‘cast with Cory Doctorow is up for your listening pleasure. There were more questions coming in via IM/email this time than via phone, which is an interesting dynamic. Cory really delivers an incredible amount of knowledge, thought and sharing in answering one question, never mind dozens. Have a listen.

For those who prefer text, here is another (great) question from the chat, by Diggal:

(1) Why do you think Boing Boing is so popular, and (2) do think online blogs will take over print, TV and other traditional media?

So, Boing Boing I think owes its success to a few factors. One is, we have good taste. I think we pick out neat stuff. That’s cool. I think, though, that there are lots of people who have good taste, and one of the things that we do that goes beyond having good taste, is we are very, very, very explicit in our headlines and our summaries. You can tell from reading a Boing Boing headline exactly what the Boing Boing story is about. You can tell from reading the first sentence, everything that’s in the story. You can tell from reading the whole post, everything you need to know about the link.

And that’s, I think, an enormous advantage over other blogs, which often post things like, “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Can’t describe it, just go look.” When you’re looking at 10,000 undifferentiated headlines in your RSS reader, it’s really hard to pay attention to those things. They don’t alphabetize well, they don’t make any sense, as compared to these very, very explicit headlines.

There are other reasons of course. Clay Shirky famously described the power law distribution of blogs. His thesis is that the rich get richer when it comes to inbound links and to attention and traffic. Which is to say, the more links you have pointing at your blog, the more chances there are that any given person will find your blog; the greater the chances that any given person will find your blog, the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog; the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog, the greater the chances that someone will find your blog. So, in other words, we’ve been around a long time, and that makes us popular, too.

Will blogs take over traditional media? I think the future composts the past. You know, opera wasn’t’ taken over by radio. It might have been overtaken by radio, but it wasn’t taken over by radio. By the same token, I don’t think traditional media will disappear, but I think that the role that it plays will be greatly shifted.

There are certain kinds of stories that you might want to tell, and certain kinds of messages you might want to convey that are just better suited to being discussed and conveyed in a distributed fashion by individual bloggers and small groups of bloggers who have this distributed conversation linked together by services like Technorati, Google Blog Search, trackbacks, and comments that just aren’t as well suited to being distributed and promulgated by big, monolithic broadcast media.

During our interactive podcast with Cory Doctorow, the first question asked of him was one we think he felt very comfortable answering. As for the conversation, we’ll be posting transcripts here, and of course the audio will be up on Waxxi shortly.

Question, (via email) from Karen in Chicago:

Will DRM die, and if it does, what will be the conduit?

Cory’s profoundly simple answer, was this:

I think, ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace — is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that three was a way that she could do less with her music.

Here’s his answer, in its entirety:

“Well, I think DRM is definitely reeling. I was just preparing some stuff for the class I teach tomorrow, and I was going through Siva Vaidhyanathan’s wonderful book, The Anarchist in the Library, and he reminded me of something I’d totally forgotten about.

There was a guy in Germany who bought this CD in 2003 or 2004, and it wouldn’t play on his computer because it had DRM on it. He wrote EMI a letter saying ‘I bought this CD and it won’t work!’ EMI sent him back this incredibly awful note saying, ‘Look, thief! You better get used to it, because within months every single CD sold in the entire world will have DRM on it, and there’s no going back now.’

Now, the interesting thing about this is that EMI has just announced that they’re planning to a make a huge portion of catalogue available without any DRM at all, just as mp3s. Not just taking DRM off their CDs but actually just selling mp3s on the Internet. So that’s pretty amazing.

And, I think ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace – is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that there a way that she could do less with her music. So, to the extent that these companies have shareholders, and these shareholders have got their eyes on the ball, they aren’t very happy about the fact that these companies aren’t making music available in the form that consumers want to buy it in.

Companies that are making music available in better forms are selling more, and ultimately all of these companies have to compete with the free market – the infringing market. iTunes has shown that people will buy stuff even if you can get it for free.

So, you can compete with free, but it seems pretty implausible to think that you can compete with free by making something that sucks. It’s really hard to compete with anything if you start with a product that sucks.”

The audio really brings Cory’s words to life, along with his passion and intense intellectualism. Next up: Boing Boing, Steve Jobs, Google Book Search, and more.

We’d like to thank everyone that attended Monday’s interactive podcast with Cory Doctorow, including of course, Mr. Doctorow himself. Some joined by IM, some by phone, and many – both. As expected, it was a fascinating, reeling conversation. Someone once said of Cory, quite accurately, that he was the ultimate interviewee. Fire off a question and what you get back is clear, concise, and brilliant mindshare; an explosion of thought, passion and analysis.

We discussed topics from Disney to DRM, the world of science fiction to the world of the copyfight, Google Book Search, Wikipedia, his upbringing, and (much) more. We’ll post some of the conversation here, and of course the podcast will be available on Waxxi, shortly.

Interestingly, during the recording we experience a slight technical glitch. Suffice to say, it felt more like twelve or so podcasts worth of technical difficulties all rolled into 10 minutes’ time. But what happened in the end is actually the fun part of the story. A participant named Rich (calling from the UK) swiftly took over the conversation, asked Cory questions, and took some from the crowd – like he had done it 1,000 times before. The crowd went wild! They loved it. And, after listening to this great banter for a bit, I came back in when the timing was just right, and continued on. Now that’s participatory.

We’ve always said at Waxxi, the Floor is Yours. We believe the interviewer should take a back seat, and the people should drive the conversation.

Our gratitude again goes out to Cory, as well as a few others:

* the dedicated, hard working, fun loving Waxxi team, which includes our partners-in-design, Inflatble3

* the participants, who included bloggers, students, entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and a fantastic on-the-fly-moderator, Rich (you’re hired!)