Damn Ferrari California Looks Fresh SideOn via Amaury AML on Flickr

Controlling yer Own Destiny

One core resultion I’ve made this year in business is to be less reliant on technology. Now this can be interpreted in a whole stack of ways, and I’m sure even I will evolve my thoughts on what it really means, but specifically I want to work on projects where I am in control of my own destiny. In one sense, this means is I need to be able to offer my services/brains and in the background use webbased tools that dont go down/cost huge amounts to maintain - that are cheap to freemium with pay4whatU_use costing models. But I still want to work on problems that matter and opportunities that are big, or else I may as well just get a job/consulting gigs. There has to be a bigger picture, and for me that means being in the middle of the blogosocialtwittersphere.

This is easier said than done and there are lots of hard lessons in doing this, but I’m going to keep trying to climb this mountain coz I keep hearing the same client needs, problems and opportunites, excuse the businesspeak for a second but it’s true; In the monitoring the blogosphere for clients for example (or getting their offer in front of the right influentials), there are alot of freemium tools that can be used to track people, company, product and brand mentions. However these tools won’t suddenly automatically classify blog posts or tweets according to location or popularity or category : or all of the above combined with identifying influential bloggers, twitterers, youtubettes, facebookers - within such parameters.

However what is important is that the heavy lifting can be partially done by the Googles and Amazons. Separate to the automagic algorithms and plain old fashioned research and analysis any startup wants to own itself, you can lessen your workoad and access other’s customers who have APIs from Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Apple + Friendfeed : Although as we’ve seen they can ban your service if they dont like what u do but that is the exception to the open will win rule.

Secondly, the internet infrastructure cloud tools which are the hardest to build if u ask me in a startup and that big companies will be better at are increasingly offered by the majors; Amazon Web Services EC2, Yahoo Boss, Google’s Custom Search Engine and it’s App Engine : which has just announced some new services which is a step in the right direction via RWW :

“Google today finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google’s App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure and, until today, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting today, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.. Google’s prices seem to be slightly cheaper and less complicated than Amazon’s pricing schemes for using its EC2 and S3 service. It should be noted, however, that Amazon offers a far larger feature set than App Engine. App Engine only supports the Python programming language, while EC2 gives you access to a complete, remotely hosted, on-demand operating system.”

Top of the Line Most Sporty Not Bad Looking eh Aston Martin DBS via Amaury AML on Flickr

Moving to the Social Edge

While many clients esp on this continent will take the approach of denial and head in the sand, when it comes to the importance/centrality/cost of technology, my resolution to become less tech centric does not mean I want to involve myself in less technical businesses. This is the internet circa 2009 and any venture to be a sustainable asset past time based earnings needs to have some type of technical advantage (or leverage great technical offerings eg wordpress) - that is unless it is already a huge aggregator of customers or has an especially addictive monopolistic type offering. Some business opportunities can only be leveraged if a range of parties coordinate in new ways, while still each being driven by their own self-interest not necessarily by sharing equity or earnings in one centralised venture.

For example, there have been countless small (each less than $250k in funding) attempts to aggregate the Aussie blogosphere and increasingly also the twitter_microblogosphere. Similarly there have been a range of smallish publishing ventures aimed at social media locally, clients using their PR companies to get onto Facebook, and so on. Being at the frontline of trying to aggregate this and speaking to others doing similar things, the same issues come up which need a new, dare I say it collaborative, hybridised open source/commercial approach to solving.

I’m thinking of some type of commonly owned local platform that multiple parties contribute to and individually commercialise. As simple as users authenticating their lifestreams once, which developers via open source API can mash into their own offering, and publishers/corporates can commercialise within GPL reason. Like a multi-headed Automattic/Wordpress or a freely useable Friendfeed Hyperlocal API meets Gnip with the ethos of Identica.

Hope this isnt making too much sense to any1. Bottom line is investors in Australia won’t punt on something like this as one standalone venture and scrappy individual startups cannot bootstrap the engineering cost; Esp due to the various R+Dish problems that still need to be solved to make clients happy.

Now that's how to roll in a Merc in Paris SL-63_AMG via Amaury AML on Flickr

The Moving Beyond Keyword Boolean Problems

Let’s say there was a opensource like up todate growing hyperlocal index of multiple social media types from tweets, blog posts, video, images etc. Tick Indexing issues. Then u get to the Algorithmic Real Time Web Issues Today, you can keyword query and add boolean strings to the local blogosphere to get down to a level where u r providing matches to a client’s need to understand what is being said about them or the topics they are interested in to identify influentials, trends, or content they wish to syndicate.

But if the blogosphere is an aggregation of it’s people’s psyche - good and bad - Rather than journalistic written edgy content as many media (would like to) imagine; Nor is it like many corporates hope a larger free’r market research focus group - The blogosphere is just a total mess of unstructured content. It’s why twitter is so powerful in that 140 character limit with #hashtags and a kick ass set of filters by the Summize now search.twitter team - means twitter even with a much smaller audience than facebook and blogs is providing better insights in monitoring the blogosphere than traditional blog monitoring or research companies. But twitter is too small a slice of the socialmediasphere to be enough for clients, esp those that want high reach and want to reach the mass of social networking influentials or video masses.

Damn the Lambo Gallardo Nero is one phat looking black mobile via Amaury AML on Flickr

Summize Started Broad pre-Twitter Search

Unfortunately it’s not an either/or scenario when it comes to Twitter vs Blog search/track. And while twitter may be relatively easier to monitor, the same fundamental issues still apply : There needs to be major improvements from keyword/boolean filtering of the blogosphere to monitor it, to one which can better break posts + tweets into the different categories clients want, and identify new ways to identify trends, relationships, signals etc. Which brings me back to having more (location based) aggregation and more (API) access points to the local blogotwittersphere, so more developers can try more algorithms, more mashups, more outputs and combinations, which create more chance of meaning being harvested by end users, which business can ultimately package.

In short 140 character exec summ : Currently the whole ecosystem of the local blogosphere doesnt exist/is broken.. and it’s important that something outside facebook/twitter/iphone API’s and google adsense exist. I think…

Maybe you prefer a larger Murcielago 640 model to park on the streets of Paris when popping out for some shopping, via Amaury AML on Flickr.

At Least this Blog Post has Charcoal Supercars in Paris

When you spend 4 years on limited resources trying to solve the same problem from many different angles, like a PHd that is simultaneously highly annoyed with their thesis/yet ultimately hopefully of solving the area of investigation, you accumulate alot of knowledge that makes very little sense to people outside of designated area of study. So apologies blog readers : Enjoy the supercars at least; I started and ended with the Ferrari California as it’s a very practical car to get around in:)

But even when u get down to the barest of resources, enough good things come in (customer leads in the area u r trying 2 solve, developers that tell u they experienced the exact same problem/hurdle/barrier) that u get enough energy to look at the same problem from a different perspective; There may not be an  algorithmic button that automatically identifies popular blog/tweet/video/image/news entries/individuals/sources in Australia/NSW/Suburb/Geo_location within designated categories/vertical/topic/issue/company. But new approaches - Open sourcing indexes, easily allowing consumers to portablise their lifestream and mostly providing developers total access to all the content possible, maybe they’ll come up with things that can be done with it that single entities with none to a few developers can’t. Until then I’ll use the old fashioned way of monitoring teh blogosphere; Via google reader, a blackberry and moleskine:)

OK I’m off to Gym and listen to Hamish and Andy get ready for their Tall Ship to Tasmania journey.

So the Ferrari California Convertible hardtop 0-100 in 4seconds or so damn is this the car or what ! Via Amaury AML