The Roads Less Travelled …

Reading the special survey of the Economist on new media, one will probably end up believing this. The above statement begs the question, what exactly is “New Media”? What does it change? And exactly why is it revolutionary?

For a moment let us look into media without distinguishing between “new” and “old”. The primary function of this entity is to filter and aggregate useful and interesting information and serve them to consumers. This is in effect a kind of a circular linking because any information is generated by the masses and not “media” and to them it is ultimately passed. In the past, however, technological limitations warranted a centralised structure (with the media companies sitting at the top) so that events distributed in time, space and domain are not missed out by others not subscribed to the same; every thing that was to be distributed became an industry - movies, news and music - dominated by few players.

The crux of the arguement presented in the survey is that due to technological advances and recent developments the existing structure of the media industry is under threat and that the existing players have to radically change or risk being outdated. Revolutions are a natural consequence of power getting centralized and concentrated in too few hands that hold all the cards. It is a disruption - sometimes gradual and peaceful and on other occasions violent and sudden, of the status quo, of the established norms, of the ingrained ways of being. While publishing managed to free the masses from the grip of the liturgy making education accessible and affordable, over centuries it has itself turned into a mafia (reading Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, will make this clearer than daylight), which has stodgidly refused to either improve or change the with the times. And they have been able to do this because the barriers to entry remain unscalable for new entrants.

What the so called new media - blogs, wikis and podcasts - has done is take a dig at the existing hierarchy using methods completely alien to them. They leverage the increasingly ubiquitous presence computers and broadband connections to sidestep the entrenched players. Internet with some help from companies like Google and Yahoo! (providing services like Blogger, del.icio.us and Flickr) has allowed them  to reach out to the masses without even investing an extra buck, revolutionizing both content publishing and delivery. Everyone today with a broadband connection can become a publisher (as I am being with this blog) and similarly anyone can become a consumer without relying on the media giants for distribution.

Another huge change in the “new media” is that pieces of information published rarely remains static; any information published is merely the starting thread for a conversation between the publisher and the subscriber. The content is in the truest sense dynamic, atleast for wikis and blogs.

Since everyone is now able to publish and each information snippet ensues a conversation the basic challenge of media companies change from information gathering to information sieving; separating the wheat from the chaff. Information changes from discrete entities to a continuum and search along this continuum becomes a task of primary importance. Another valid question is, how does one compare the wisdom of the masses to the wisdom of one known knowledgeable man? Does the name “Albert Einstein” at the end of an article entitled “Relativity” mean nothing and is rated equally with one written by a high school geek just learning about Relativity? While wisdom of the masses is all good, when the time of reckoning comes how many will stand by it? Good search techniques should ensure that the name “Albert Einstein” does indeed mean something.

And so we come to the question of what are media companies? Given the trend of search becoming so important are Google and Yahoo! media companies? Is MS with live.com trying to become one? Though each of them is trying to solve the problem of search in a different manner, this point of view is not without justification. Additionally Google and Yahoo! generate most of their revenues [>98% and ~85% respectively] from advertisements the standard revenue source for all media companies.

However as the new media marches on against the strongholds of the media strongmen, there is a chance that the flagbearers of the new wave, the Googles and the Yahoo!s themselves are in some danger of being overrun. Most of these companies rely on huge and costly infrastructure in the backend to drive their innovations. The availability of building such backend support is a barrier to entry for new players. However with the arrival of services such as Amazon’s S3 this might not remain true for a long time.

It is however again important to note that the aim of the new media and their publishers (not pushers) is rarely to generate commercial gains. These innovations reduce the entry levels for people trying to gain knowledge and give them atleast a flavour of the topic. That way they help increase the market base for the traditonal companies because somebody who becomes really interested in Programming will buy a boxed set of Art of Computer Programming rather than reading my rants on the same. Businesses are already maturing towards these synergies; we need to look no further than the record giants and Apple for the iTunes and the still in rumour phase linkup between Apple and Disney for examples.

Technorati Tags: media

X is a really smart computer geek. Dropping out of college he gets together with a bunch of like minded nerds and together they write the next generation search engine; an engine which can take audio clippings either directly from a mike or stored earlier and returns results text and media both from the web. Amazing innovation and a great leap on the existing technology done, X and friends think they can sit back and soak themselves in the ephemeral glory till it lasts and roll around in moolah till probably the end of their lives. Suddenly out of the blue comes a troll on their sylvan beaches and chases them out of it. They are back into the dreay world but only with broken dreams and empty pockets. They don’t even have a degree for backup. They now wish they had atleast finished them.

I know the above example is kind of an extreme scenario, but I think it elucidates why the patent system as it exists today has become a hindrance rather than a motivator for innovation. Recent court judgements in the Blackberry case and the earlier fracas created by Amazon in the 1-click case, have brought these unsavoury aspects of patents, as they exist today especially in the software industry, into limelight.

It is informative at this stage to recollect why patents exist in the first place. Patents are a barter that governments agree to allow faster dissemination of information and subsequent innovations; the inventor is allowed a restricted monopoly in the market and in return he makes the knowledge leading to the innovation public. So while the inventor gains in monetary, social and intellectual terms, the market gains by greater competition in the long run. To be granted a patent there are two established ground rules - the invention has to be new and it has to be non-obvious. It is the later term that is the cause of a great many problems todays, since there is a very thin (but distinct) line between non-obvious and simple.

Almost everybody except the so called patent trolls agree that a major revamp is needed. Paul Graham, Greg Blonder, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson are amongst the many who have called for such reforms. And then there are others who believe that patents should not exist in the first place though what motivation will somebody then have for taking risks I cannot understand (I can see allusions being made to the open source movement here but I have a different theory on that). Neither do I agree with Paul Graham’s view that small time innovators should not really worry about patent infringement, since they are just small fish. But their aim is to become a big fish one day and with the current system in place, they are just lambs being fattened for slaughter. I personally believe that the patent system is not without its merits but it does need a major revamp. Firstly granting of patents and their expiry should keep pace with the innovation in the field. Also their should be a clear distinction between a generic paradigm (threads for parallel processing) applied in a novel way and a new invention (a face detection algorithm that matches profile views). Also a patent before being awarded, must, like a IEEE paper, be rigorously peer reviewed.

While pointing out the inadequacies of the system, many restrict themselves to the preceding discussion. However there is a bigger problem. I read somewhere (cannot recollect the link or remember the breadcrumbs) that many of Google’s top innovations are infact not patented. They remain fairly sure that even if discovered otherwise, they only can get the full power out of those innovations; added to it the fact that they would not want facts about their super-parallel, super-fault tolerant and super-fast infrastructure to be made public and open for free use after some years. This is the basic problem that the patent system was designed to prevent. If we start having islands of knowledge then it will lead to a market with great knowledge divides; the knowing and the lesser mortals. The amount of innovation lost, not just in terms of standing on the shoulders of giants but also varied applications of common principles in different domains, would be truely staggering. And as for the X and his friends; they would never even take the plunge in the first place.

I can finally justify the shifting of my blog from blogger to wordpress - mainly for two major improvements in the wordpress offering.

One, the siderbar widgets allow me very easy customization of my blog. Though it is not anywhere close to full control, for majority of the bloggers it will be good enough. Also some new themes (including the one on my blog) have been added. Each theme seems to carry its own baggage of customization. Maybe the wordpress guys can look into some standardized way of publishing the data on the sidebar so that all theme creators can use them and create their themes.

The last and the truely awesome feature was import; basically allowing me to import the content from my older blog into wordpress. The service took care of importing all the posts and comments from the blogger account. From what I could glean, the import is basically HTML scraping from one’s older blog; convert the blog into a standard format, take information for each post out and then go to each post’s page and get the data alongwith the comments. The only thing missing here, seemed to be some kind of a bulk categorization tool for the newly imported posts. Also such an activity clearly shows the limitations of RSS as a publishing standard for huge content.

So now one can find whatever I have written or attempted to write in the last 2 years in this blog itself.

Technorati Tags: software, internet

The last 2 days of my uneventful life have been pretty eventful.

First, I got calls from all IIMs (Indian Institute for Managements). The process of waiting for the results was nothing less than excruciating and the final hours were downright nail biting. Ya ya I know, I make it sound like a Hitchcock thriller but the suspense was no less intense for me. It was made worse with the IIMs announcing that the results would be declared on the 12th of April. Hence started the watch from around 11 p.m. of the 11th. Calcutta was the first. Sharp midnight. Through and a sigh of relief. Something atleast. And then the ordeal started. It was made worse by the fact that IIM Bangalore had put a final calls link on their home page without really linking to anything. Refreshing IIMs homepage every 30 minutes while trying to work on bugs is not really my idea of fun. Finally gave up and saw “Baton Baton Main” for the second or third time on Zee Movies. And then devoid of sleep and hope of seeing results, started to work. Around 8 in the morning news comes that the results will come after 11. So went to sleep, instructing roomies to wake me up at the appointed time. And hardly had I slept for 45 minutes when I was rudely awakened with the words “abbe tera A main ho gaya”; and all I could say was “whatever”. And then the flurry started; B, L, K and I followed. Went to the office around noon. The news is yet to sink in.

The second does not have an happy ending. Hardly had I started to work when news reached that Dr. Rajkumar, the iconic Kannada actor was no more. Since his residence was right behind my office and at the minimum, thousands of people were expected in an outpouring of grief, we decided to close shop and head home. Had to madly scramble up energy to draw money and stack up the house with food for atleast the night and the next day. What has followed since then has shook my belief of Bangalore being a cosmopolitan haven. Bangalore has been turned into a ghost town with burnt vechiles and glass offices with broken windows with an unspoken curfew in place. Some semblance of life returned in late evening with people appearing again on the streets. In the afternoon as the body of the legendary actor was passing before my eyes towards its final resting spot, I saw for the first time in my life , a mob; and it was not like in the TV. From my balcony I could see the individuals, laughing all the way as they clashed with police and ransacked the In&Out store as well as the petrol bunk next to my house. Theirs was not a farewell of loving fans to a great actor. They were just lumpen elements out to have some fun, hiding behind the grieving masses. Grossly outnumbered the police shot teargas shells and barely managed to control them but not before they had done the damage. I find it hideous that such events mar the end of an era, the final journey of a person for whom humanity came before everthing else. A person who had fought for Kannada language and culture, but with dignity. The people of Karnataka could not have given their hero, their champion a final farewell any worse.

I generally stick to the software I get used to. For me the difficulty is the initial choice and not the fending off the claims of other products (free or otherwise) once a choice is made. I still use notepad as my primary text editing tool and shifted from IE to Firefox or Outlook to Thunderbird only when I started working on multiple environments after shifting to PI. Though the working on multiple environments did not continue too long I had become besotted with both. However tragically for me I have just spent an hour installing yet another feed reader for reading my feed subscriptions, shifting from the RSS reader which comes with Thunderbird to Omea Reader. Ironically I was in the meanwhile listening to the Talkcrunch’s latest episode on the battle of online feed readers.

I have a some requirements from any such application:

1. Speed. Once I click on a post item I really do not want to wait till it loads. Any feed reader is given enough idle time by me to use for downloading updates. Thunderbird failed on this count, it took like ages to get feeds and worst of it all it got it all in real time. Almost all online feed readers fail on this count as well. Plus opening a web page and login in is too much work to read a feed. Regardless of what they claim they do not really give a good enough user experience to overcome this inertia.
2. Priority of posts. I want to priotize feeds so that updates to those appear at the top of the list if unread. None of the feed readers I have used has this yet. Does not look like a great deal to develop. Also over a period of time, my feed reader seems to acculumate a list of quasi interesting feeds that i have stupidly added. Adding some minimal intelligence to these readers to identify what I would be interested in currently is needed.
3. Auto cleaning of posts. I really do not want to keep Slashdot posts of last week, while I do want to keep the Techcrunch posts or Paul Grahm essays for future reference.
4. Good HTML rendering. The guys who publish the blogs really put in some effort towards making their posts more readable for the users. The feed reader has no business of taking away this luxury from me.
5. Low CPU usage. I hated my first reader SharpReader for this reason. It used loads of CPU in the days when computing power for me was at a premium. And I hate freewheelers.
6. Ability to search and label important posts. Search through the existing posts in the reader as well as allow me to label (or tag) a particular post as being important or as pertaining to a certain topic. This information should not be lost even if the original post is deleted for reason.

With Vista coming in with an inbuilt framework for syndication with RSS and Atom, I believe that these demands are not unreasonable. But how long will the wait continue?

Technorati Tags: computers, feed readers

It must be maddening to be an Inter fan. Every season starts with the exit of some big names, the entry of others and a renewed hope that this is the year when Inter show the world what a great team they are. Sadly for Inter fans, they have to hope for the next year now after being dumped out by a plucky Villareal side inspired by the Argentine playmaker Juan Roman Riquelme.

After having lost out to Juventus in the Serie A race, Inter’s only hope of some credible silverware was in Europe. They probably had the easiest route (if there is anything like that in football) to semi-finals of Champions League facing a depleted Ajax and debutants Villareal in the knockout rounds. They dispatched the young Ajax team out of Europe with some authority, sparking genuine hopes in their fans that maybe there is still light at the end of tunnel. And yet again for them it was the headlights of an onrushing train which crushed a disjoint and underperforming Inter team at the El Madrigal today.

What is frustrating about Inter is the inconsistency of their star players. Adriano looks like the shadow of the player he was a year back when defenses fell apart with his charging runs. Figo, Stankovic, Veron, Martins, Recoba - all stars and matchwinners on their day were merely lumbering around the pitch today, seemingly with thoughts more important than the match occupying their heads. And the coach Roberto Mancini clearly had no plan B in case his first choice lineup failed to work. Compared to the compact Villareal team they looked pedestrian and had it not been for their goalie Toldo the margin of defeat would have been much heavier than the final 1 - 0.

So what should Inter do?

First and foremost build a team. One thing I see lacking in Italian football is a willingness to give a manager or coach the time and resources to build a team. This requires both the management and the fans to look beyond the next season. All the great teams who have made their marks were built over a period of 3-4 years before their greatest show. And the building block of a great team is a coach who believes in building one and not assembling one. Inter have to look no further than their own team in 1960s under the
legendary Hellenio Herrara (the coach who made catenaccio fashionable).
Today, one has to look over to England to see examples of such individuals - Mourinho, Benitez, Sir Alex, Arsene Wenger - they all have their own footballing philosophies but the common link is that they believe that a team is dish to be cooked and not a salad to be put together. In the continent, there are Paul Le Guen, erstwhile of Olympique Lyon and in future of Rangers or Frank Rijkaard leading the second Barcelona revolution.

Or maybe the easiest thing would be to take a lesson from Manuel Pellegrini, the coach of the current Villareal side - one of the smallest in Spain and now in the semis of CL in their maiden appearance. I think, there is no better example of a team being more than the sum of the individuals than Villareal.

Technorati Tags: soccer