A Swing between Passion and Reality

Is Yahoo dying? A recent post by Michael Arrington has caused fierce debate among readers. Firm supporters such as Jason Kolb agreed that "Yahoo is now a dead company." Optimistic analysts such as Tim O'Reilly disagreed by accusing Michael to be too narrow-minded to having overemphasized the importance of Web search. I believe, however, that Yang's decision about dealing with Google or Microsoft is his tough swing between passion and reality.

Jerry Yang has his passion that has led him found Yahoo and also keeps him on the position of Chief Yahoo at present. Yahoo's mission statement tells the passion being to connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. This is what Yang wants Yahoo to be and he has done all he could to keep Yahoo on this direction. A very recent action on executing the passion is the announcement of SearchMonkey, the center of Yahoo's newest Y!OS effort. Surely, I have argued whether such a Y!OS effort is realistic enough on the basis of the current status of Web evolution. Unquestionably, however, the dream is beautiful and it is worth of trying.

In comparison, what is the passion of Microsoft? Bloody money. Bill Gates steps down and rumors tell that he would never come back to Microsoft administration again. After the leaving of its visionary founder, Microsoft has become a giant machine of money maker and only a money maker. It may not be a bad news for Microsoft stockholders. But it is a bad news for passionate Web innovators.

The deal with Yahoo and Microsoft would sentence the instant death of Yang's passion for the company from the beginning. It is something intolerable for long-sighted visionary leaders. Yang is willing to be the CEO of Yahoo with $1 annual salary because of his passion. Hence he will never allow the passion being a joke, at least not a joke when he still has the controlling power.

The Google-Yahoo deal is a different contract. By this deal, Yahoo reserves its right to continuously look for its dream (though for limited time period) by formally surrendering to Google on the current Web search market.

There are two critical keywords I emphasized in the previous sentence. The first one is surrendering. Michael Arrington has ceaselessly addressed that the difference between Microsoft-Yahoo deal and the Google-Yahoo deal is only the difference between instance death sentence and suspended death sentence, and he does have overemphasize the term "death" but forgotten the meaning of "suspended". To me, the suspended death sentence means more about "surrender" than about "death". By either "surrender" or "suspended", Yahoo still has its chance to come back. By "instance sentence", however, Yahoo will not have any more chances at all.

The second keyword I want to address is current. As I always advocate and I advocate it once again, the Web is evolving and it evolves faster than many of us think. Google may not be the leader of Web search forever. The SearchMonkey and Y!OS are Yahoo's announced strategy to come back. But Yahoo needs time to execute the strategy. The suspended sentence brought by the Google-Yahoo deal provides the time. Though we don't know whether the length of time might be long enough, at least the passion and dream of Yahoo have survived from the instant death at present.

Is Yang's passion unfair to Yahoo's shareholders, especially to Mr. Carl Icahn? In short term, definitely. In long term, we do not know. As I said before, "capital is near-sighted." The lack of short-term profits can easily kill a long-sighted visionary capitalist without a question. Jerry Yang is current taking this pressure. As a peer thinker, I sincerely wish him the best of his luck to be able to survive from the crudeness of capital.

In summary, Jerry Yang is taking a swing between his passion and the crude reality of capitalism. The swing is currently on the side of passion and Yang has done all he could to protect the dream of Yahoo. Be honest, it is also the dream of any free thinkers on the Web. Let's pray for Yahoo and Yang.

YokWay moves forward

Invited by Stephan Osmont, co-founder of YokWay, I did a try on this new service about collaborative bookmarking.

In the few months, we have seen several new services on bookmarking and online data management. The hottest buzz right now is Twine and FriendFeed. The less known YokWay, however, has the potential to be a serious competitor.

The YokWay service allows people to share their bookmarked items with friends. Yokway adopts the Digg fashion that requires users to post items one at a time instead of the fashion of FriendFeed that automatically pulls items for users through subscribed RSS services.

Once an item is posted, it is categorized into "What's Yoking?", which is similar to such as "What's dugg?" or "What's twined?" Users can conveniently switch the viewing perspective among the Yokings made by themselves, by their specified friends, or by the general public. YokWay allows users to add comments for an item and to vote for the items based on an scale up to five stars.

One thing that sets YokWay apart from Digg is to organize stored items with topics. YokWay calls them "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle". And anybody can choose to "subscribe" to an existing circle and/or "join" an existing circle. By "subscribe", readers choose to follow the topic without the privilege of posting on the topic. By "join", readers ask for the right of posting on this topic. The request of "subscribe" is granted immediately when it is asked. By contrast, the request of "join" must be approved by the owner of the circle.

The sharing circles in YokWay is semantically identical to the twines in Twine. But the implemented functions of sharing circles is weaker than those of twines. By using Twine, we can flexibly specific tags in various categories and easily share items among twines. YokWay has not provided such a strong flexibility. In fact, during my test it is even not straightforward for me to add an existing item to a newly created circle. YokWay must need to enhance the implementation of these functions in order to engage more users.

In the email, Stephan emphasizes to me that YokWay is "sharing information relies on a best of breed semantic engine that will make Yokway a potential leader in the Web 3.0 era." I am impressed by the claim but the beta service has not clearly illustrated how the new semantic technologies have been engaged in use. For example, tagging is weakly supported by YokWay. Automatic machine tagging is a particular demonstration of performing semantic technologies in a Web document management system. But I cannot find this demonstration in the current YokWay beta service, let it alone the other more complicated use of semantic technologies.

As what I have suggested for Twine, new service providers must think of innovative ways to illustrate the use of new technologies through creative user interface design. Otherwise, users can hardly be impressed by the new technologies when they cannot feel. Twine has this problem in this architecture. YokWay, however, has even more problems on this issue. It seems that YokWay tries to produce a better Web-resource-management service by mixing several of the good design issues made by Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed altogether. This type of mixing is a good strategy unless the designers themselves already have a unique vision over the topic. Otherwise, it is easier to be a compromise that the service itself loses its identity. Such a problem of losing identity is a deadly issue for any new service. Unfortunately, however, I feel that YokWay has this problem in serious.

Final Address

In summary, YokWay is a new service for managing data on the Web. It tries to integrate many handy existing Web services into a uniform platform so that users can get the best experiences on organizing their Web resources through the service. I must confess that the service is so far so good on its main goal and it actually provides several really impressive features such as the integration of Google Map service within comments.

Besides all the good things YokWay provides for users, the most severe problem of YokWay at this moment is the lack of identity. The service is not impressive in its architecture comparing to its direct competitors such as Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed. YokWay tries to include all the good features of its competitors but eventually it loses its own uniqueness. When I use YokWay, I can see that this feature likes Twine and another feature likes FriendFeed. But I would like to ask what the identity of YokWay is.

The most crucial thing for YokWay at this moment is to hire a truly visionary thinker to direct the design of a new architecture. Through my testing, I am certain that YokWay has good enough technology to support its growth. A visionary thinker may immediately leverage the service to a distinctive level by forming an impressive identity for the service.

Check out your Web influence by Q-value

QDOS is a new online service for people to briefly measure their influence on the Web. In short, the service asks users to specify their names on the Web as well as the profile locations of their subscribed popular Web services such as Facebook and Blogger. Then it computes the influence of a Web user in four categories, which are popularity (who you know and the extent of your online network), impact (how much people listen to what you say online), activity (what you do online e.g. shop, chat, blog), and individuality (how easy you are to find online according to your name, your age etc). Combining the values on the four aspects, the service calculates a final score starting with a "Q" (hence I call it Q-value) followed by a number. The number of Q-value thus shows the relative influence of the person with respect to the other people subscribed to this service.



The figure above shows my Q-value, which is Q4056 that ranks 5,436 out of 61,589 registered users up to the date. In comparison, James Simmons, my friend and blog partner at Semantic Focus, is reported to have Q3844. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of World Wide Web, has a convincible Q7292 that ranks No. 135 at the meantime. Another Semantic Web celebrity, James Hendler, however, only has Q2507, which is lower than my value. This result shows that we might not take the number too seriously.

No matter whatever, however, QDOS is an interesting application and the value is useful especially for people who want to brand themselves.

The Value of a Country Code

is about you.

The government of The Republic of Montenegro thinks of a new way to make money. The nation interprets its ISO-assigned country code to be about YOU!

As we know, ISO used to assign a unique two-character country code abbreviation for every nation. For example, United States is us and China is cn. The ISO 3165 Maintenance Agency assigned the country code me to Montenegro shortly after it gained its independence in June 2006. Then IANA approved it to be a top level Web domain, which represents the nation of Montenegro.

The government of Montenegro, however, made an interesting decision. It explains that .ME is not just about Montenegro, it is actually about YOU. By setting up an ordinary .ME site, you are not describing your relationship to The Republic of Montenegro. By contrast, you are declaring a site about yourself. By this strategy, the government of Montenegro wants to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro from this luckily-obtained country code.

Although Larry Dignan seems shrugging off this little trick, I think the decision is smart. The strategy helps not only "a little revenue generation" (Larry's words), but also the national security of Montenegro. The intensional ambiguous interpretations of .ME between the nation of Montenegro and ordinary YOU immediately bind every Web user who subscribes to the domain extension to the virtual nation of Montenegro on the Web. Considering that in the real world Montenegro is just a small nation with few people, this ambiguity strategically binds the national interest of Montenegro to the individual interest of many more people in the world. Through this implicit interest binding, Montenegro may gain more chances to speak louder in world politics. Hence it enhances the national security of Montenegro. This is indeed a great example of exploring the value of country code.

If Montenegro may utilize .ME, why can't United States utilize .US? If .ME is interpreted about individuals, .US can certainly be interpreted about groups. Or is United States too great to play this little trick?

Anyway, the following is the timeline for this .ME release.

       June 6 to June 26: Landrush. This is the first opportunity for the public at large to apply. Anyone who doesn’t have a trademark, but is interested in a specific .ME domain, can apply during this period. This is also when Sunrise challenges commence.

       June 26 to July 15: Quiet Period. During this time, the registry is closed to registrars. Names for which there was only one application during the Landrush Period are allocated. Landrush auctions will begin for names that received multiple applications.

       July 17: Open Registration. Domain names are registered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Great thought may not be a secret

Jason Kolb is a wise thinker. I often read his blog and today there is a wise quote that hits my heart. I have to share it with the readers of Thinking Space.

Don't worry about keeping your great idea a secret, if it's good enough you will have to beat people over the head with it.

Many times, I hear people saying that they want to keep their "brilliant" idea as secret so that no one else may steal it before they figure out how to make profit from the idea by themselves. Actually, an idea could not really be brilliant if somebody else may steal it by just hearing it once. In the other words, great idea never needs to be a secret because nobody can steal it without intensive thinking.

I was authoring about human mind in the past few days and so I have thought much about human mind. Human mind is such a beautiful thing that sharing only improves its quality. At the same time, mind embodiment is so difficult that nobody can do it well if the embodied mind is brilliant, i.e., with high quality. Without a well embodiment, how could a person steal a mind from another's brain? Speaking is simply not good enough for embodying a brilliant mind. Therefore, we may have only one conclusion. If somebody says that his "brilliant" mind is stolen by discussing it with another person, it only tells that the shared mind is actually shallow and inferior.

Jason said that he had many experiences of how sharing improves his mind, and so do I. I have authored many novel thoughts in this blog (Thinking Space) and I have never worried that somebody may steal them from me. There could be three consequences. One is that the reader cannot understand, and hence the idea is safe from being stolen. The second is that the reader reads and takes it, and hence the idea is shallow (I do not lose anything from a shallow thought). The last is that the reader reads and thinks and takes it. At this situation, the readers must have thought of this issue before and most often they have thought even more than what I have authored. Otherwise, it is impossible for them to grasp the spirit of a real brilliant thought. Hence to the end I still does not lose much, if I lose something. In any other cases, people must get to touch with me to consult about the thoughts because actually nobody can steal brilliant ideas.

I have just authored two posts about "we are in a new transition" in which I have discussed a phenomenon that mind is substituting the position of capital in our society. When I wrote the articles, I noticed that there is a fundamental difference between capital asset and mind asset. When someone shares capital asset, the amount of his asset decreases. It is similar to that if one has only a cup of water, the more he shares the less water in his own cup. By contrast, however, when one shares mind asset, the value of his asset will not decrease but often increase instead. It is like that if one has a can of air, the larger room he gets the greater space his air can fill.

I believe that this is why we often says that it is a beautiful mind.

We are in a new transition, part 2

By two parts, I response to the Harmonious Age suggested by Adam Lindemann. In the first part, I describe its philosophy by civilization evolution. In the second part, I explain the impact of this theory to Web industry. This is the second part of my response.

World Wide Web, the new-age Watt steam engine

At the end of the 20th century, an Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext. The invention is named World Wide Web. This invention is bringing human society to a new age.

Two centuries ago, another Englishman James Watt invented a machine called Watt steam engine. The machine made use of steam at a pressure just above atmospheric to drive the piston helped by a partial vacuum. This invention is more than another technological innovation. By contrast, the invention is a formal mark in history that capitalism had replaced feudalism. Because of Watt steam engine, industrial production was upgraded from the traditional, low-quantitative handicraft work to the modern mass production. Modern industry started emerging above the surface. Also due to this upgrade, capital (the base of modern industry) replaced land (the base of traditional agriculture) becoming the key asset in human society. Human civilization thus evolved from feudalism to capitalism.

World Wide Web is the modern-time Watt steam engine. Due to WWW, information industry is upgraded from handcraft, low quantitative production, elite-conducted work (by professional journalists, photographers, software programmers, etc.) to machine-powered, mass production, plebeian-conducted work (by every regular Web user). Information industry is evolving to its postmodern stage---Web industry. With this upgrade, mind, the base of information industry, is replacing capital, the base of traditional industry, to be the key asset of human society. Human civilization is evolving from capitalism to a new age.

Mind asset, the essential issue

Mind is always an asset. The potential productive power of human mind is known to be overwhelming. Nearly none production could be done without the participation of human mind. Furthermore, people has realized the power of mind for long time. Modern education is a typical effort that people are trying to make a product line of high-quality mind asset.

On the other hand, however, we often experience difficulties when trying to effectively use mind as asset. Unlike land or capital, individual mind is essentially intangible except for the owner of the mind. Presenting mind explicitly in formal ways is a long-time hard problem. Without explicit, formal presentation of mind asset, we cannot efficiently connect and compose varied mind asset and we cannot well measure the value of mind asset. The issue of mind aggregation is particularly critical because individual mind is often too shallow to be high quality.

Among all the others, the issue of mind-asset presentation is the central one. A formal, tangible presentation of mind asset is the key to let mind asset be circulating. Circulating mind asset is then the basis of the new civilizational transition.

Web resource, new presentation of mind asset

In tradition, we have developed varied forms of mind presentation. For example, books, tapes, drawing artifacts, buildings, etc. Through these forms, humans embody mind and preserve the embodied mind to be asset.

There are, however, at least four common problems in these traditional forms of mind asset.

(1) [cost] It is costly to produce mind asset in these presentations, and it is generally more expensive to share mind asset in these forms. In consequence, only the mind asset produced in superior quality (such as best books or artifacts) can be widely spread and shared.

(2) [strength] None of these presentations last long time. They can hardly survive from various natural or man-made disasters such as earthquake or war.

(3) [quality] By adopting these traditional presentations, we may embody mind in its static and passive aspects. But the forms are not good enough to embody the dynamic and active (which is the more valuable) aspect of human mind, let it alone some deeper implicit aspects of human mind such as self.

(4) [measurement] We do not have generic, objective methods to measure the value of mind asset in these traditional presentations.

If an asset is costly to present even in its low-quality form, with weak strength to survive longer, and unable to be measured objectively of its actual value, surely it is not a reliable asset for public to own and share. This problem is fundamental to information industry since mind asset is actually its base. The invention of World Wide Web solves the problem.

W3C defines World Wide Web to be "the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge." This specification expresses three facets of the Web. First, the Web is a place for people to embody their mind. Second, the Web is a network of embodied mind. Third, through the Web people may access each other's embodied mind.

In particular, the mind asset on the Web is presented by Web resources, which are independent pieces of embodied human mind that can be used for producing. Note that this definition of Web resource is not a common one. In common (such as the one in Wikipedia), a Web resource is any object on the Web that is referenced by an URI. Such a definition has not precisely described the essence of Web resources if we compare it to the W3C definition of World Wide Web. By contrast, my new specification is directly based on the W3C Web definition. A Web resource may be a collection of Web data, a Web service, a Web link, or a mixture of them. A Web resource could and should be referenced by an URI, but a Web object referenced by an URI might not immediately be a Web resource unless it may produce. (more descriptions of my interpretation of Web resource are at here.)

the issue of cost

Comparing to producing the traditional forms of mind asset, Web resource production is cheap. The Web is a free and open place for everyone to embody mind. Web resources are presented in digital form, and digital form consumes very few natural resources. Hence in total Web resources are inexpensive to produce. Moreover, sharing Web resources also costs little. In consequence, we can now afford spreading and sharing the embodied mind even if it is in inferior quality.

the issue of strength

Web resources can last long time. Due to the low cost of digital copy and the flexibility of resource transmission on the Web, we may ideally preserve any piece of embodied mind nearly forever. In addition, World Wide Web is a virtual world. Hence it has great strength to survive from most of the real-world disasters, either natural or man-made.

the issue of quality

The most important improvement Web resources have made beyond the traditional forms of mind asset is their presentational quality.

In the traditional forms such as books or video tapes, we can introduce a mind as well as how it works. For example, a stock-market expert may write a book about what stock is and the timing of buying and selling stocks. But the book would not (if ever possible) tell the mind-asset consumers (the ones who read the book about stocks) the exact judgment of stocking selling the author would do in real time cases. The book readers have learned from a book the general principles. But it does not mean that the readers can consume the mind asset as well as the author does in real life. There is a natural gap between the presented value of the mind asset in the book and the real value of the mind asset in real world. This gap of knowledge understanding is a typical difficulty of mind asset measurement.

To solve the problem, on the Web people can program their mind (a typical dynamic mind asset) so that the production of their embodied mind could be precisely predictable by adding real-time parameters. In our example, stock-market experts can program their thoughts so that the program always produces the identical decision in the same real time case no matter who use it. This type of mind asset thus has higher quality than the standard static mind asset because it is more productive in use.

Moreover, on the Web we may embody a special type of mind asset that we rarely have successfully expressed before. It is self.

Self, self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is "a personal understanding of the very core of one's own identity." Due to self everybody is unique. By self, different people may develop varied use of the same knowledge. We thus have the variety of human mind. Self is so unique that nobody can embody the self of the others. The embodiment of self shows the ultimate value of a person, and hence it represents the respect of humanity. As a typical mind asset, self plays a critical role in many fields of World Wide Web, such as the implicit Web and Web evolution.

the issue of measurement

By presenting mind in Web resources, we are able to objectively measure its value as if we measure the value of capital asset. As we know, though there is a large variety of capital asset (such as stocks, real estates, etc.), we can uniformly measure its value by testing the capital asset in free market. In the similar way, we may objectively measure the value of a mind asset presented by Web resources. On the free Web, the value of a Web resource can be arranged completely by the mutual consent of producers and users.

Web Industry, platform that mind flows

While World Wide Web is a network of embodied mind, Web industry is the platform that mind flows. In the real capital world, modern industry (represented by the manufacture industry) takes capital as input and produces capital with greater value. In the virtual mind world, postmodern industry (represented by the Web industry) takes mind as input and produces mind with greater value. This analogue tells the essence of Web industry.

Web companies are the factories that produce Web resources. They may primarily produce data resources such as Amazon, or service resources such as Facebook, or link resources such as Google. Discarding all the superficial distinctions between each other, all Web companies are taking a few mind assets as input and producing a few mind assets as output. Ideally, the value of the output mind asset must be greater than the value of the input mind asset. Mind is the blood flowing around the system of Web industry, which is similar to that capital is the blood flowing over the system of manufacturing industry.

Web companies also partition their work load and cooperate to each other the same way as the other industrial corporations do. Take the traditional manufacture industry as an example, some corporations (such as iron puddling factories) pretreat crude materials and produce refined materials or parts while some other corporations (such as automobile manufactures) take refined materials and parts to produce further manufactured products. In similar, some Web companies (such as Blogger) are to help people embody their mind into Web resources from scratch while some other Web companies (such as del.icio.us) are to take the already embodied mind as input (such as a blog post in Blogger) and to produce higher quality mind assets that can be consumed better by end users.

There is, however, a unique restriction of Web resource producing and consuming in Web industry. Due to Web evolution, neither the production nor the consumption of Web resources may beyond the evolutionary stage of World Wide Web at the meantime.

Web resources produced in quality higher than what can be efficiently consumed at the meantime is overqualified. Yahoo! Directory is a typical example. The quality of link resources produced by Yahoo! Directory was generally beyond what Web 1.0 users could efficiently consume. Hence the service became very expensive to maintain. Eventually, Google Search replaced Yahoo Search being the leader of Web search industry thought the actual quality of link resources produced by Google Search is lower than the quality of link resources produced by Yahoo! Directory. (This is, however, not necessarily the end of the story. Y!OS is the newest step Yahoo is taking for Semantic Web. Will Y!OS eventually tend to produce overqualified Web resources again? We have this concern.)

On the other hand, Web resources produced in quality lower than what can be efficiently consumed at the meantime is underqualified. The examples in this category are plenty. In the age of Web 2.0, many Web-1.0 companies have to update the quality of their produced Web resources to the level of 2.0 or otherwise their market share is quickly taken by their Web-2.0 startup competitors.

Because of Web evolution, mind asset production is so dynamic that no company (including Google) can stick to one product quality for long. Web companies have to upgrade the quality of their produced mind assets with the progress of the Web every few years in order to just survive. Hence Web industry is indeed a business type with high risk and high payback.

We are in a new transition

We are in a new transition. The widespread of World Wide Web is the trigger of the transition. Because of the Web, the first time in history human mind becomes a critical circulating asset in society that ordinary people can buy, sell, produce, and share. The rise of mind asset will eventually push the human civilization evolving from the age of capitalism to the next.

We are still at the early stage of this transition. In similar, the Web is still at an early stage of its evolution. The Web companies that lead the progress of Web evolution will simultaneously be the leaders of human civilization in this transition. Until now, we have seen a few of these leaders such as Google and Facebook. They have led not only new technologies, but also the change of culture in our society.

Based on what we have analyzed, to be a leader of Web evolution is actually less about doing business in a particular realm such as "Web search". By contrast, the success is primarily determined by whether the founders of company have (either actively or unconsciously) well foreseen the quality of Web resources (or mind asset) in the next generation. Google approaches the quality through Web search while Facebook approaches the same quality by social networking. Neither of the success is due to the path they choose to take because at the same time many other companies were taking the same path as they did. The key of their success is the distinction of the quality of Web resources the two companies produce.

Which companies may be the next in the list of success? Though we don't know the names, one thing is certain---the ones understanding the resource quality upgrade of Web evolution may get the better chance to be the winners. Such a successful company might be another Web search company, might be another social networking company, or might be a company with a brand new focus. As we have said and I emphasize it again, the particular path taken by a company is not the deterministic factor. Different founders may have their preferred realms of interest. To the end, the variety of human mind allow us to approach the same goal in various paths. The actual key to the success is whether the founders are capable of foreseeing the progress of Web evolution, especially the progress of Web resource (mind asset) quality upgrade. Neither over-qualification nor under-qualification may clinch a winner. It can only be a perfect hit of the right quality.

Obama looks for the help from Web developers for presidency

Obama for America is looking for exceptionally talented web developers who want to play a key role in a historic political campaign and help elect Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.

In my personal political viewpoint, I am pro-Hillary. I believe that Hillary Clinton would be a better president for America to solve the problems left by the Bush Administration. However, it does not avoid me from admiring Barack Obama, especially for his recognition of the power of World Wide Web and his ability of engaging the new Web-age generation around him. Isn't the Obama phenomenon another evidence that we are in a new transitional period of civilization? Yes, we are in a CHANGE! This is what Obama tells us.

Now the Obama campaign is looking for talented Web developers to help him towards the presidency. I would recommend any of the Thinking-Space readers that if you are good at Web design and have passion on leveraging the influence of World Wide Web in global politics, you need to apply for this oppotunity discarding your particular political bias at this moment. You may have the chance to let the world see the civilizational transition that is caused by the Web evolution.

For more details of the job requirement and how to apply, here is the link.