Finally, The Internet As Intended.

I have to admit, I have not read the article yet - but Newsweek’s cover story is on Web 2.0.  I’ll post my reactions after a read.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Matt Mcalister, a Yahoo! insider, has more on the value of opening up your data, that underscores the thinking on my previous post - it’s now a fact, open APIs drive content usage, period:

If you operate your business like an island, that’s what you’ll be. That realization has been reinforced coming to Yahoo! where the explosion of publicly accessible APIs and content available via RSS have opened up a whole new world of opportunities.

The only thing keeping for-profit organizations from opening the flood gates entirely is that no one yet has a sure-fire business model to capitalize on the content usage explosion enabled by open sharing.

What does that mean for the government, policy institutions, and non-profits whose primary asset is information (most of the people I work with)? It means opening up is a no brainer - you don’t have to worry about finding a business model that will enable you to make money by providing free access to your information. Your objective is dissimination by itself, and open access drives dissimination.  So, once again I say, open up your data and information and let the innovators go to town with it.

Technorati tags: nptech, API, policy

(authored originally for my company’s blog influence.forumone.com)

A few days ago, Dan Cohen, the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, lamented the lack of non-commercial API’s:

one of my pet peeves as someone trying to develop software tools for scholars, teachers, and students is the lack of application programming interfaces (APIs) for educational resources.

If your policy or issue-focused organization is like most, you have great data locked away in databases, websites, and reports. You are distributing the information through your traditional communication channels - including the web - but consumers of your information have to come to you to get it, and its only available in formats that you provide. Why not set that data free and let users manipulate and consume it in their own innovative ways?

 

Empowered by freely available application programming interfaces (APIs), innovative developers can now grab data and tools from multiple sources and combine them to create new and innovative views of the information (check out ChicagoCrime.org for a great example). Commercial organizations are embracing the trend in a big way, and it has spawned a new wave of online applications called mashups.

These commercial organizations have realized that opening their data and tools expands the reach of their services and information well beyond the capacity of thier internal resources - and it lets its information assume new and powerful shapes.

However, non-commercial organizations have been slow to embrace the trend, and are noticably under-represented in this current list of over 200 freely available data and service APIs. There are thousands of motivated innovators out there - set your data free and let them innovate for you.

Technorati tags: nptech, mashups, API, policy

Yesterday was Einstein’s birthday. Some celebratory links:

• Photo series on slate.com
• Einstein’s digitized manuscripts

By the way. Yesterday was also Pi Day.

A great deal of Web 2.0’s hype, or the justification of its promise, is rooted in the fact that social application’s are engineered specifically to unleash the network effect. There’s a new social application being launched ever day now it seems. But You Mon Tsang, founder of Boxxet, makes a fantastic point in this post about bionic systems: with attention increasingly scarce, the web community simply will not support a large number of social applications - there isn’t enough participation to go around. His words:

…the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly.

So how do you get large-scale participation network-effect results when the reality is you’re social application will be competing for increasingly scarce attention? You seed it and feed it with automation - you make sure your application amplifies the small participation it does get. This is great thinking on the topic. I’d love to get an invite to Boxxet :-).