I am currently reading We the Media by Dan Gillmor, and it has me thinking about the changing nature of how we get our news and the changing nature of journalism in general. I am a blogger, but I do not consider myself a journalist; I am a technologist, and have been working in various technology jobs for more than 10 years. Lately, I have been fascinated by how technology is changing our behavior. Young people seem to spend quite a bit of time communicating with friends on MySpace, IM, email, and cell phones … technologies that were not in existence when I was in high school.

More importantly for this discussion is how we get our news. I tend to read the blogs in the morning before I read traditional news sources, and even with the traditional news sources like the Wall Street Journal, I also read those online. The last time I read a paper newspaper was over the holidays at my mother’s house (she has dial-up and no television). I saw a study earlier this year (I cannot find it now) that showed how young people within certain age groups are getting more of their news online, instead of via traditional print media and television.

My reasons for getting news online and for actively reading the blogs are probably similar to why many people are shifting away from traditional print media. First, I get a much better variety of news. I can read articles in papers that I would never subscribe to, and I can read commentary from people that I might never meet in real life and have conversations about a topic via blog comments.

Second, the news is fresh. It did not sit around for hours waiting to hit the printing press. The news is newer, and lately the big stories have been hitting the blogs before they get to the traditional media. Scoble’s recent move from Microsoft to PodTech is a great example. It was covered in the blogs before the press picked up the story.

The New York Times coverage of Wikipedia this morning prompted me to write this blog entry. The article talks about Wikipedia’s policies to protect certain pages from vandalism. There was a flurry of activity in the blogosphere on this topic starting with Nicholas Carr predicting the Death of Wikipedia. I blogged about it along with many others around May 24 and May 25, so it is interesting to see essentially the same content in the New York Times on June 17.

I have been finding this delay more and more often when I read traditional media articles. The articles sometimes seem stale to me only because I already read about a topic elsewhere online before it reached the traditional media. Traditional journalists would be better served by more closely following the blogosphere. Some already do this, and these are the journalists who will survive in the new media world. Those that do not leverage the blogs and other non-traditional news sources will become the dinosaurs of the journalist world only to become extinct and die out over time as the fresh new stories get picked up by the new breed of journalist.

I just read a great post on social networking sites by Fred Stutzman of ClaimID. It got me thinking about how social networking sites seem to be more regional than other online communities. Open source software communities tend to be very diverse with contributions from around the world on the more popular open source products. Using Google Trends (highly unscientific), people from around the world search for Flickr with countries from Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia making up the top 10. It was also interesting to note that Singapore and Ireland topped the list with the United States as the number 6 region.

I mentioned a few days ago that MySpace seemed to be popular mostly in the US. Stutzman’s post highlighted a number of social networking sites that I was not very familiar with, and he talked about how many were popular in specific regions: Cyworld in South Korea, Bebo in the UK, Hi5 in India, and Faceparty in the UK.

Because of their nature, social networking sites seem to be regional. This could be due to cultural differences in the ways that people interact socially, or it could be something else entirely. The phenomenon is global with people around the world participating on social networking sites, and it would be interesting to see some better data on why the implementation seems to be at the regional level.

Tom Yager has an interesting article about Apple closing their OS X x86 source code and making it impossible to re-compile the kernel. Apple’s argument (according to Yager) is that only a fraction of a fraction of people ever re-compile an operating system kernel. The “but it is only a few people” argument is really easy trap for an organization to fall into; however, there are a number of issues with the argument.

First, I have spent many years working in open source and have learned that having the freedom to look at the source code and recompile it or otherwise manipulate it is something that many people want. The reality is that only a fraction of a fraction of people every actually look at the source code and even fewer modify it, but knowing that they could access the source if they ever needed to is a powerful and important feature for quite a few people.

Second, this fraction of a fraction of people who do recompile the source code tend to be a very vocal minority, and this minority usually includes the geeky types who have quite a bit of influence over others. These are the influencers, the bloggers, the ones who recommend computer gadgets to their friends and families because people trust their technical expertise.

According to Angela Gunn the Apple source code fiasco along with the iPod sweatshop controversy is creating a persecution complex for Apple. I do not have any experience with Macs; however, I do have geeky tendencies dating back to my time as a Unix sys admin, and I have experience with Linux. I am one of those people who has recompiled my Linux kernel just for fun.

eBay already has a thriving user community of buyers and sellers, and they have found yet another way to leverage this community. The eBay Wiki Beta is a place to share knowledge about any relevant eBay topic providing a way for users to share tips and tricks with other users. This is brilliant on eBay’s part. They have a devoted community made up of a combination of casual users and quite a few frequent sellers and buyers, including some people who make their living buying / selling on eBay. eBay has only 11,600 employees, but they have over 100 million buyers and sellers around the world. The eBay Wiki provides a great way to harness the combined knowledge of these users to help other users navigate eBay in an open, community environment. Richard MacManus also has a good review of the site including an interview with Joe Kraus of JotSpot, the company working jointly with eBay to provide the wiki technology.

Some of the articles already posted include how to efficiently manage images on eBay, ways to recognize fraudulent transactions, using the eBay toolbar, and many more. From a business perspective, this is a win-win for eBay. The wiki provides the information that new users need to succeed and become active community members, and at the same time, the community members who contribute to the wiki are spending more time on the eBay site.

Right now many of the articles are written by eBay employees; however, as the wiki gains traction, I would expect for more and more people to contribute. The community already exists, but the wiki provides a forum that allows the community to be more effective and more involved in eBay.

I am amazed by how popular MySpace has become in a very short period of time. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted some very interesting statistics about MySpace on his blog today. In just three years (MySpace was founded in July 2003), they have managed to reach “75 million users (see somewhat dated comparison stats here), 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that’s 10,593 page views per second).” (TechCrunch)

MySpace is the second most popular website in the US as measured by page views:

1. Yahoo!
2. MySpace.com
3. MSN-Microsoft
4. Time Warner Network
5. eBay
6. Google
7. Facebook.com
8. Viacom Online
9. Craigslist
10. Comcast

MySpace also leads the pack as the site with the top average page views per day per visitor in the US at 70 page views per day per visitor followed by 61 for Facebook, 56 for craigslist, and 35 for eBay.

Interestingly, MySpace does seem to be more of a US phenomenon than a worldwide one. On Google trends (a highly unscientific measure!), the vast majority of people searching for the term MySpace come from the US with a very small few from the UK, Canada, Australia, and France.

These numbers are amazing when you consider that most of this activity is occurring in one country (the US) and among a fairly young crowd. This young, US audience seems to go online in large numbers when a site appeals to them, and they spend a ton of time on the site viewing many different pages. Young consumers also tend to follow trends, which leads me to wonder about the future of MySpace. Is MySpace simply the latest fad to fade away over time? Or like Google for search engines, has MySpace become the de facto standard for social networking?

You may have just noticed that the Open Source Culture blog is now the Open Culture blog. Over time, my focus has been shifting from a narrow focus on open source software to a slightly broader focus on open communities in general, including other online communities. I expect to continue to blog about open source frequently … it has been my passion and area of expertise for a long time. Now, I will be adding some additional commentary on the new wave of online communities (web 2.0 if you want to call it by that name), and I will still be drawing on what these communities can learn from the experience gathered over the many years that open source communities have thrived online.

I resisted renaming this for quite a while, but as with most things that evolve over time, this blog needed to evolve with the times to align with my new focus and new interests.

Sharing knowledge, instead of hoarding it, is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the modern Internet communities (call it Web 2.0 if you like) and was the subject of a recent blog entry by Kathy Sierra titled “Mosh Pit as Innovation Model“. She offered this tidbit of wisdom:

‘Issac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” That was just fine in a world where knowledge doubled in half-centuries, not mere months. To make progress today, it’s more like, “If I have seen further, it is by being thrown up by the mosh pit of my peers.” And we all get a turn.’ (Kathy Sierra)

It has been about 15 years since my last visit to a mosh pit, and I woke up with a bruised face, so maybe my view of the mosh pit is not quote as idealistic as this; however, Sierra has exactly the right idea. Most of us have probably worked with an information hoarder at some point in our lives and know how counter productive it can be. These people act as a bottleneck preventing us from doing our jobs and slowing the pace of progress to a grinding halt. On the other hand, the information sharers facilitate progress and help make things happen.

The knowledge sharing model is one reason that open source software has been so successful. Innovation can happen more readily when people freely share their ideas and encourage their use. Sierra points out that it is the implementation, not the idea, that stimulates change. In open source people share ideas and share the implementation of those ideas. This knowledge sharing combined with a focus on implementation has helped open source projects like Firefox innovate ahead of their proprietary competitors.

This knowledge sharing also makes the blogosphere so powerful. We share our own ideas with others, read what others have to say, and react to the thoughts of others in a way that stimulates thinking and creativity. I blog about all sorts of topics that I would never have spent time thinking about if I had not read about the topic in another blog via my RSS feeds, TechMeme or some other random link. This sharing of knowledge makes each of a little bit better as we consume the knowledge of others and share our own wisdom.

Picture from Creating Passionate Users.

Nicholas Negroponte unveiled a working prototype of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) PC this week, and Dan Farber posted a great update on the project. The OLPC has also been called the $100 PC; however, this is not currently accurate, since the PC will cost $130 – $140 at launch and is not expected to hit the $100 mark until 2008. They plan to launch these Red Hat Fedora Linux-based systems in April of 2007.

These systems are not intended for consumer purchases, but they will be made available working with local governments. Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Argentina, China, India, Egypt. Russia, Mexico and Indonesia have all shown interest in these laptops according to Farber.

I admire the goal of getting computers in the hands of every child, and I like Negroponte’s approach of designing the systems with the specific needs of emerging nations in mind. Features like the hand crank for power, screens with good visibility in full sunlight, and rugged form factors to handle rough conditions match the unique needs of these users. I am still a bit skeptical, so I will be curious to see how well these work when they start getting them in the hands of the users. Will they use them? Will these computers create security problems (theft / bodily harm) for the children who receive one? Will these unique features really meet their needs?

I am anxiously waiting to see the results of this project.

Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla, was recently interviewed by the Telegraph, and she talked about how Mozilla is dealing with their millions of dollars in revenue. Mozilla is not trying to hide the fact that they are profitable; although, the exact figure is still unknown. Mozilla is reported to have revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, but slightly less than the $72 million rumor from March. Much of this revenue comes from their search partner, Google, who pays about 80% of the ad revenue generated from user searches back to Mozilla.

The fact that Mozilla is making money really irritates some people within the open source community who see Mozilla as a sell out who might become more focused on bringing in buckets of money instead of focusing on open source. This type of thinking is really unfortunate. Mozilla has done a fantastic job with Firefox, and we should give them the benefit of the doubt that the money earned will be well spent. In the Telegraph interview, Baker said that the money would be spent on product improvements, building their infrastructure, strengthening Mozilla’s ties with developers, and a rainy day fund. The reality is that Mozilla is still trying to figure out exactly how this money should be spent. This is also a good sign. An organization should take some time to plan how to best use their resources. A less mature and less responsible organization might have spent the money as it came in with little thought put into how the money can best benefit the organization.

Firefox has been growing at an incredible rate and is becoming a worthy competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Keeping up with a growth curve of this magnitude will be difficult for Mozilla, and having some money to support it may help.

I just read an interesting BBC piece by Bill Thompson, “Serendipity casts a very wide net“. Bill talks about how some people, like William McKeen, believe that our heavy use of the internet limits our ability to find information serendipitously. According to McKeen, we use highly efficient search engines to find exactly what we are looking for, which makes it unlikely that we will run across new and unexpected nuggets of information.

Bill Thompson disagrees with McKeen’s assessment as do I. The Internet makes it more likely, not less likely, that I will serendipitously run across unexpected information. I have a large number of RSS feeds that I look through every day, and I frequently read an article or a blog with an interesting title containing information I would never have searched for. It is also common for me to take a serendipitous trip down a chain of links to other interesting information starting from one of the blog entries found in my RSS feeds.

Internet communities, including open source communities, have been built on serendipity. With open source software, the mailing lists are used to share ideas and get feedback from other developers hoping that someone will add their input to improve the software in an unexpected way. Online communities, like Digg, have made an art form out of serendipity. Digg allows anyone to submit a technology news story, and people vote on the stories to push the most interesting stories to the home page. Those of us reading Digg will find a wide variety of stories with information that we would never have deliberately looked for.

Interestingly enough, Bill Thompson found McKeen’s article through a serendipitous journey from an RSS feed to a blog post to McKeen’s article in the St. Petersburg Times, a Tampa Bay newspaper that he never would have read without the Internet. Likewise, I do not regularly read Bill’s BBC column despite regularly listening to his contributions on the BBC Digital Planet Podcast; however, while reading Techmeme, I ran across Bill’s article and links to related stories, which I followed to McKeen’s original story. Sounds like serendipity to me.

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