Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web

My recent talk from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which I retitled “Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web” instead of ‘Better Media Plumbing…”. I include the notes that I prepared, with minor tweaks.


My topic is not new — in the sense that I started writing about it a year ago. But I think it is of growing importance.

The basic premises that underlie social media — the fundamental relationships that link authors to the community of readers — are changing in the face of new and different social tools. In a sense, I am chasing the elusive question about where community resides, once again.

In this presentation, I plan to explore the root causes of today’s social media plumbling — the stuff that makes it social — and to outline the stresses that new social metaphors are creating. Lastly, I wave my hand at where it might all be headed.


I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it) at /Message and other blogs at www.stoweboyd.com. I have been involved with the development of various interesting ideas, like social tools, flow applications, workstreaming, web culture, edglings, microblogging, and new localism. I have spoken at dozens of conferences in the past ten years, like Lift, Reboot, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Defrag, Supernova, Under The Radar, Mesh, Next, and many, many others.

I work with a lot of start-ups building social tools, and larger companies trying to make sense of them.

Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.

My work is social tools, but my goals lie beyond.


We have inherited the Web 1.0 vision of the Web as a giant network of documents, linked to each other, where you can wander forever.

Where are the people? Oh. It’s the authors. They are people. They create links, but there are not in the immediate foreground. It’s documents, all the way down.

So in the Web of Pages — Web 1.0 — pages are more important than people.

And why are we here? “I must be here to read about things and follow links” since that’s what is the most natural thing to do, not to interact with people.


The Web of Pages wants us to be hunter/gatherers. We search, find a link, click it, see if it’s want we want, if not, we keep following leads.

It exploits the spatial sense in our minds.

People create the links that connect pages, asserting relationships between the info on the pages, and by extension, relationships between the people reading and writing the various pages. But it all seems pretty far away from human conversation. You write something, I find it, and write my own thing, and point at yours…. Its more like sending letters than conversing.

Yes, Google builds its page rank based on people’s actions — creating links and the identity of who created them — but all that seems way down in the subbasement, far far away.


Links are obliquely social, but direct conversation — through chat, social networking messages, and (most central to our subject today) blog comments — is where web media really become social media.

Asynchronous in nature, but can be near real time.

A blog is a long-lived repository of discourse, a place to ask questions, contend, agree, make suggestions, enlist support, and offer counterpoint. Nearly every possible sort of conversational interaction can be shoehorned into the lowly comment thread.

This is one of the reasons that the blogosphere has gone from a fringe phenomenon in 1999 to mainstream in 2009, where the leading print media outlets of the pre-web world have embraced the blogging paradigm at a fundamental level.


Social media is distinct from pre-social media in many ways — web based, individual voice dominates, etc. — but it is the social dimension that defines the difference. Social media is contrived (at least the best instances are) around the premises of open discourse between individuals.



While the publishers of blogs retain (in general) the ability to moderate comments, largely the model seems open. And the authorship — based on the identities of the bloggers and the commenters — makes the relationships that seemed so oblique in web 1.0 much more obvious and direct.

The heart of social tools is the individual, which is why I say social = me first. In the world of blogging that translates — not too well, actually — into ‘bloggers first, commenters second.’


The current baseline of blog technology puts very strong controls into the hands of the blogger, and hardly any in the hands of the commenters.

What sort of sociality is going on in a comment exchange? It’s a strangely unequal forum, where the blogger has nearly absolute controls, and the commenters — even in some sort of collective fashion — have no power. The blogger can delete any comment, or mark it as spam, while the commenters can’t change a single comma in the blog posts they comment on. (Of course, some commenters become bloggers themselves, and then the comment exchange becomes slower and distant, cross-linked by trackbacks or URLs, but pulled out of the comment stream.)

This asymmetry in control and ownership — who gets the revenue from the blog ads? — has ramifications throughout the web. For example, the page rank for a blog is attributed to the writing skills of the blogger, but it is the links that make the rank, not what is on the page. What is on the blog — the posts and the comments — are what lead to strong reputation for a blog, and that is due to the commenting — the sociality at the blog — but the author claims all the benefits, including all the revenue.

It’s interesting that social media is often heralded as proof that companies have lost control of their ‘message’ but at the same time that blogging keeps so much control in the hands of the blog publisher.

And there is the ‘comment dispersal’ problem, where very active commenters wind up with their participation spread all over the web, and no collation of their contributions.

This is one of the reasons that solutions like Co-comment and Disqus have been making ground, because an individual’s stream of contributions can be pulled together somewhere, and in a sense ‘owned’ by the participants and not just the blog publisher.


The seed for the change in the blogosphere was a seemingly small advance.

RSS feeds are a way to receive the posts from blogs without visiting them. Instead, using an RSS reader, a webhead can instead have posts from any number of blogs deposited into an RSS tool, like Google reader. This is a sort of out of body experience, since the user doesn’t hunt and gather anymore, wandering around looking for new information by search and following links. Instead, a steady diet of bite sized morsels simply appear. And generally without the comments.

So the shift to RSS by the most technically hip websters meant that

  1. they were seeing posts out of social context, without the conversational interaction that made the blogosphere a third place, and not just forty million people standing on soapboxes, and
  2. over in the RSS reader the former participant — now a reader — is at least one and maybe more clicks away from adding comments. And of course there is a subtle devaluation of comments because they are read less often and harder to get to.

So, people find it easier to take other actions using tools outside the blogs, rather than comment. For example, creating shared bookmarks a la Delicious may seem of higher value for the individual and that individual’s network of friends than writing blog comments.

And right on the heels of RSS feeds, we began to see the rise of other social tools where conversation was the centerpiece, not the sidebar.

And these tools rely on our sense of timing, not a spatial sense. We are not wandering around looking for things to read: instead, things to read just show up in some regular timeframe.


Tools like Digg and Techmeme share a few key characteristics, and define two ends of a continuum. There is a stream of new information that finds its way to the pages of the website: in the case of Digg this arises from individuals recommending pages for others’ attention, and in the case of Techmeme an algorithm looks are the clustering of a short list of A list bloggers to see what is getting the attention of many. In both cases, the user is presented a stream of information, ordered by the observed actions of others.

Here we find the key attribute of all important social tools going forward: the collective actions of some group of people shape — order, filter, embellish — a stream of information. One sort of embellishment is a comment, like the comments traditionally left on blog posts or in bookmarks. But these comments never find their way back to the blogs, if they were sparked there.

Also, the way the sites work feature emergent properties from the community, collectively, that can’t happen on a single blog all alone. On Digg things rise (or fall) relative to others; and on Techmeme stories rise and fall by clustering of authors. In this regard, the evaluation of the value of a single blog post is one of the outputs of Digg and Techmeme.

As a result, participants’ behavior can change when exposed to these tools. It becomes more fun to Digg a blog post than to comment on it. As a reader of Techmeme, you find it unprofitable to comment on blog posts — even of posts currently active on Techmeme — since a/ comments don’t show there, and b/ the comments have no influence on the Techmeme algorithm.


So, there are now dozens of streaming applications — Digg, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Social|Media, Threads, Friendfeed, and more — where the social dimension is people interaction in (potentially large scale) open discourse via the ‘follower|following’ model, and without recourse necessarily to blogs.

Once a person begins to experience the dissociation of blogs and commentary — once commentary moves to these streams away from blog comments — it seems odd to go back. Like using a computer that is not connected to the web.

My hypothesis is that people will find it most natural to have the most active conversation where the flow feels fastest: meaning, where there are many people so that any given topic or link creates a great deal of commentary in relatively short order. However, this is an added incentive to comment directly in the streaming app like Digg, friendfeed or Twitter.

There is a cost to leaving behind the community of commenters on a blog, but if a core group defect en masse to some flow app, that community can remain largely entact, with even the blogger coming along.

For example, someone I follow on Twitter posts a Tweet with a link “someone Wrote a new post on XYZ topic. See www.tinyurl.com/y78YD889Ww.” My natural reaction is to click it, and then write a comment in Twitter to @someone, like ‘@someone have you considered the writing of Borges?”

And from the point of view of Twitter use, I am keeping the covenant: I received the message there, so I respond there. But from the blog-centric view, I am breaking faith, since I read the post that was published there, but I am merely treating the blog as a repository for posts, not a centerpoint for community.

So we are seeing a second wave of defection that defines a new era in social media. We defected from traditional mainstream media, where they broadcasted to us as passive members of an audience. And now we are defecting from the Web 1.0 model of social media, where the blog publisher hold all the power, and the world is a feudal patchwork of blog-based communities. We are moving into a era of flow, where blog posts will just another bit of conversation streaming in the flow.


Since there are dozens — and perhaps soon hundreds — of these streaming apps, each with different although overlapping communities, what can we expect in the near, medium and long term?

Near term — tower of Babel as more people find value in one or more streaming conversational tools, the conversation — the third space — will be subdivided ten times over. And less and less conversation will happen on blogs.

Medium term — Comment tools — like Disqus and IntenseDebate — provide a way to pull the commentary from streaming apps back onto the blog posts. I write a blog post, and a handful of people comment on it at Social|Medium (for example), and my future commenting solution would display those comments as if they had been made on my blog, along with comments from other streaming tools and native one from my blog. This fills a gap in the plumbing, but doesn’t really change the experience of people in each of the streams, since they will only see a subset of the total comments.

How does this feel from the perspective of the individual at the micro level?

Once you adopt the flow attention model, things change.

Here’s my desktop, or one part of it. I usually work with my laptop plugged into a 30” monitor, and I do my ‘work’ — blog posts, email, writing, reading — on the 30” monitor. I keep the laptop screen for flow apps. Here, from left to right I have Snackr (an RSS newsticker app), Twhirl (a twitter client), Friendfeed’s RealTime Beta, and Flickr’s new Activity Stream. Another stream I use is Backpack’s Journal.

I am not saying that everyone is going to become me, but the flow model — where pertinent information is filtered by my contacts and finds its way to me instead of me finding it — is simply better, simpler, and less time consuming, so long as you can make the shift from manual to automatic transmission.


In the long term the static inequalities in blogging make it hard to fit into the coming web of flow. We need a world in which comments, posts, bookmarks, and recommendations are really different aspects of the same thing. Why have we devised a web where posts and comments are so different? Or so different from a bookmark?

All of these ideas share core principles: a person authors a post, comment or bookmark. It is created in some context, probably represented by other open windows on the screen or selections on those screens. (For example, a ‘bookmark’ is the storing of a URL for a page, plus a title, a note, and some tags. The same information could be created as a blog post, right? Or a comment is based on some open post or comment, and has a link to the post or comment. And so on.)

In today’s world, the URL associated with anything created on the web is in effect it’s unique ID, but it is a physical location not just a logical handle. Imagine a web in which the physical location of things was simply an archive, a place to access the definitive data and metadata, but otherwise was used principally as a unique identifier. Imagine all these sorts of conversational particles bouncing around the world through a gazillion streaming apps that use various sorts of social and algorithmic models to order, filter, and aggregate the particles in various ways. These bits could flit from one streaming app to another, or users could create a post in one, a comment in another, and see them come together in a post+comment form in a third. In this world, the bits float around and are experienced in the flow apps, and people might never go back to the original URL associated with the bits.

Also in this world, the bits might be owned by the author, no matter where they are streamed. So if I want to, I can put an ad in every post, bookmark, and comment I make. Likewise, when a service creates new value from aggregation, algorithm, or emergent property of some social sling, they should be able to have their own ads in that context, but they should also honor the ads embedded in the bits. Basically, it’s a fractal world, where ownership is associated with the smallest bits, and larger aggregates. But these can travel — even the aggregates — from one streaming context to another. We will need standards for this, of course, but they will arise to meet demands.

So imagine the following scenario: I post an observation about, say, the future of Web 2.0. A few others see this floating past in various streams and create comments linking to my post, or Digg it — which means it shows up in the Digg stream and several others, like a future friendfeed or social|medium. All of these people add their own ads, and when Digg streams voting results (with associated comments) that has Digg ads embedded. A future version of Techmeme notices that my post is collecting a lot of heat, so it creates a story ‘cluster’ around my post and other posts and comments linking to my post (including in the future, the digg object pointing at my post), and Techmeme drops that into its stream, with an embedded ad, too.

While it might be possible to go down, down, down to the URLs associated with these objects, who ever would? Why leave the flow, where the live things are, to look at the river bottom, where all the dead things fall?


“The Internet doesn’t know what it is doing” - Clay Shirky. It isn’t build to push just one sort of thing around, but all sorts of things.

I think this generation of flow apps will move past a static and deterministic model of what sorts of conversational particles exist, how they should be related to each other, and what apps can show which ones — to a much more fluid model, where all sorts of new associations can be made.

We need to agree on the metaphor of the web of flow — of the bloodstream — and then people can create all sorts of particles that can be streamed through it, and we can get to a more egalitarian social medium that we have now, one that is firmly in the Web of Flow, past the Web of Pages.

There have been a few posts by various folks who heard the talk (here, here, and here), and I think a recording will be posted at http://dogearnation.com/ on Monday or Tuesday. The slideshare.net version can be accessed, and the comments at the Web 2.0 Expo site, too.

First Look: Blinksale 2.0

I had some advance warning that a new version of Blinksale, the Web 2.0 invoicing app, was in the works (see here). Today, I took a look. Basically, the team has added the complement of invoicing, which is receiving invoices from others, which they refer to as “Purchasing”:

The caption in the screenshot tells the story. You might receive an invoice from another Blinksale user. Then you could choose to pay it via… yes, you bet, I can imagine a time in the near future where Blinksale might step in and be the bank intermediary for transfer of the funds. And in the near future, they certainly could inform me that my invoice had been clicked “paid” at a client’s account, so long as the client had determined to let me see that action took place. A whole new sort of social interaction, through shared business processes.

Note also that Blinksale seems to be making the right steps to avoid the lack of federation that has started to bother me in Basecamp (see here), where I now have six or seven Basecamp identities, and no central dashboard. Blinksale could have gone down the wrong fork in the road, but they have avoided it.

Also note that this model — with both invoices and purchases — leads to a greater degree of virality. Someone receiving an invoice from Blinksale will probably have some option in the emailed invoice, asking “Would you like to manage all your invoices and purchases in Blinksale?” or the like.

Blinksale also supports the use of tags as an organization approach. Invoices (and purchases, too, although I don’t have any of those yet) can be tagged, and then filtered. Very cool.

They mentioned a few weeks ago that an integration with Basecamp was in the works, and thet it would likely be coming a few weeks after this new version rolled. Stay tuned. I bet it will support direct creation of invoices from Basecamp project timesheets.

The Big Giant Head doesn’t know anything

Ajit at Open Gardens makes what seems like a small observation (see Open Gardens: A web 2.0 FAQ), that the principle that should take precedence in Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 features is the second: harnessing collective intelligence.

This has led to a number of folks agreeing, along with Tim himself, that all the other stuff is just machinery to support people interacting, and the emergent value that springs from that.

I have to make the point that I have been howling for years about this, that people are the center of the universe. I reprint a post from July 2005, that makes a similar case:

[from Starting From Scratch: Social Design Is Hard]

I am smack in the middle of an experience I have thought about a lot over the past few years. I am getting the opportunity to work with an impassioned group of entrepreneurs who are trying to design a new social application — details omitted to protect my liabilities under NDA — and unlike my usual technology consulting, this is really, really early stage.

We have been talking about various well-known solutions that incorporate social elements — like friends, groups, collaborative filtering, tagging, and so on — and stargazing about what the hypothetical users will want and care about (we even flew in a few to get their insights and thoughts). And what I have realized, after the first day, is how hard this is. I mean, I have designed lots of software in the past, and used a lot of different approaches to doing it, but this is somehow more complex: exactly because it is all about the social aspect.

I feel that we don’t know enough about social tools to have the necessary design patterns defined to construct the social architecture that will surround all future successful social applications. Based on the events of the past day, I am offering a few — perhaps obvious and overgeneralized — observations:

  • People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe — Those folks that I know and form my social reality are the center of my universe. Therefore, activities involving interacting with them, learning about them, and perceiving the world through their eyes should be the centerpoint of social applications. I am strongly biased toward the instant messaging buddy list metaphor as a central motif around which social interaction can swirl, but it’s not essential, I guess. The motif of an address book can serve, I suppose, or the network models that underlie social networking apps, but seems to me less helpful than buddy list aggregation into groups. (See Nerdvana posts, for more on this.)
  • Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us — People create and leave a trail of their social activities, like creating blog posts, comments, tags, links, ratings, posting pictures, even the path that they have taken through a series of pages on a service. These artifacts are actually a more interesting way to characterize people than simply written stuff in a profile. More importantly, some of these artifacts — links to people and posts, ratings, testimonials, and so on — represent the social glue that links us, and is a reflection of emergent value in social networks. When dozens of people link to a book review I post in a hypothetical service, and rate it highly, they are — in essence — suggesting that my post matters, that it should be read, that others would find it helpful, and, by extension, that I, as the author, have made a contribution that is valued. This accretion of meaning through the tens of thousands of individual activities within a social application is larger than the ‘content’ generated: the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
  • Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else — Features like tags, user defined groups, arbitrary user-defined relationships, and user defined categories make sense and work because social context is very personal and local, not universal and general. All fans of what I think of as downtempo music will not use that term, and even if they did, they may still not agree with my characterization of a specific album as downtempo. But when you surrender to the bottom-up nature of social applications, that ceases to matter. Over the long haul, those that care about downtempo-ish music will converge toward a more-or-less consistent use of the term, at least consistent enough for the term to be useful in an approximate sense. Which is really all we can hope for in a subjective universe, anyway.
  • Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff — Imagine a social application dedicated to the love of wine (I’d join!). There is a natural information schema in the world of wine, based on things like country of origin, regions, vintners, vintage, kinds of grapes, and so on. That information structures an intuitive schema that we all adopt regarding wine. The same holds in other areas, like music, books, blogs, and nearly anything that people can obsess about. But you shouldn’t imagine that this domain schema should the primary axis for people’s interaction. That just leads to a giant catalog experience, which basically sucks. The primary axis of user interaction in social applications is human interaction — people communicating, or individual looking at what others say about their obsessions, or finding new potential friends based on shared obsessions, or finding new wines, books, or music based on the recommendations of friends. The natural schemas of the world should be leveraged in the social sphere, but should be subsumed by it. People will want to live in a coffeeshop, talking to people about books, not in the stacks at the library or the warehouse at Amazon.

Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some “innovative” take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point. Like a social bookstore that forces us to stare, endlessly, at the stacks, and makes it hard to find out what your friends are reading, or to connect with other people that quote Tolstoy in their blogs. Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.

Which is just a long-winded way to say that getting the social interactions between people right is more important than everything else, and is the characteristic of what is going on in Web 2.0 that dominates all the others.

Because of my bias toward to the instant messaging motif for online interation, I favor the expression the buddylist is the center of the universe 2.0, which metaphorically carries the same message.

Blogs Multiply. Our Heads Explode

Dave Sifry has posted new news about the Blogosphere: It continues to grow, and the rate of growth continues to increase:

[from Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth]

  • Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
  • The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
  • It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
  • On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
  • 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
  • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Where is the end of this growth? Surely we cannot get to the point where everyone on Earth has a blog or two going, can we? Can we?

Perhaps we can.

Maybe more and more young people will adopt the MySpace/LiveJournal/Mobblogging ethos, and use blogs as a means of self-expression: every one of them. Perhaps every student in every English class will create a blog for their homework, and why not Chemistry, too? Maybe every aspiring chef will post recipes with pictures, and every restaurant will update their daily specials online. Every company will have one for every product in every product line. Every civic group, every non-profit, every band, every town government, every art gallery, every massage parlor. Why not?

So where is the end? And how will we make sense of the immense flood of writing, insight, photos, video, and cross-connections?

Obviously, Technorati is trying gamely to keep up with the flood, but I already see the need for specialization intruding. Memetrackers like tech.memorandum and Tailrank are one alternative to the search/link analysis models that Google and Technorati employ. Human agency — like digg, Squidoo, Top Ten Sources, and Corante Hubs — offer an alternate path, based on human filtering.

But I would rather see and use a social tool, one that makes sense of who I am, what I like, and who I know.

Why isn’t there a solution that is equivalent to Last.fm for blogs, for example? It would require a small plug-in, that would track what I read, anywhere, and would build up a list of my favorite ‘artists’ (bloggers, not musicians) just like the Audioscrobbler plugin does based on iTunes play. I would then — after an appropriate time — be provided with a collection of blog reading neighbors whose preferences are somewhat like mine, and then I could roam around in this virtual neighborhood, looking at what they have been reading, and their commentary on it. People could rate their favorite posts, tag anything, and create a stream of their favorite stuff for others to tap into, like a Last.fm radio station. These virtual neighbors could become my friends, in fact, since we could contact each other, link to each other’s comments, and so on.

That’s the solution to the immensity of the Web. Just like the wide, wide world, we can accomodate the Web only a neighborhood at a time. So we need tools that carve neighborhoods out of the web where they don’t really exist, yet, or if they do, they are so virtual as to be invisible. We need tools to bring these neighborhoods into the light, and make it easy to make sense of the exploding blogosphere by bringing it back down into human scale.

I am sure that I will get all sorts of email from various vendors saying, “Stowe, check out our site… That’s what we do.” Well, so far I haven’t seen it. Maybe the guys at Last.fm should repurpose their current technology to support this. Felix?

Invitation-Only Conferences: Necessity, Or Social Ill?

Lee Wilkins, a friend based in London, pinged me via Gtalk Sunday, asking if I could wheedle an invitation for him to the upcoming Web 2.0 conference in November. “Huh? You mean getting comped? I don’t think so” I responded. He clarified that the conference — wildly successful and over-crowded last year — had gone over to invitation-only:

[from Web 2.0 Conference 2006]

Save the Date for the 2006 Web 2.0 Conference! It’s happening November 7-9, 2006 at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Registration for the 2006 Web 2.0 Conference will be by invitation only. [emphasis mine]

I haven’t asked the organizers, yet, their thinking about making this move, but I have a few off the cuff observations:

The demand for Web 2.0 conference tickets is likely to be high, so it’s possible that going “invitation only” is a way to counter the negative consequences of market dynamics. Imagine what might happen when the registration would open for the conference, in the absense of other controls, in a laissez-faire model:

  1. Insiders, knowing about the timing, or becoming alerted to it, would buy blocks of tickets, and hoard them for themselves. For example, PR firms might buy dozens, and allocate them to their clients.

  2. A secondary market might arise, given the scarcity of tickets, enabling high tech scalpers to make money on reselling.



The result? Only connected insiders or the very wealthy will get into the show.

On the other hand, what happens when it is “invitation only”?

  1. The organizers decide what sort of blend of people leads to the desired conference experience, which hopefully could include all sorts of people, but is certain to include well-connected insiders.
  2. Instead of a land grab by intermediaries, such as PR firms or scalpers, the organizers maintain control of prices, and access.

But in both cases, there is little chance for random outsiders to show up.

My recommendation is to take at least some percentage of the tickets, say 10%, and put them aside for distribution — at full price, mind you — via lottery. This ensures that at least some random DNA will get in and infect the show. This may also counter the likely backlash to the “walled garden” feeling that the “invitation only” model radiates.

Prominent invitation-only events in the recent past, like Tim O’Reilly’s Friends Of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp, have led to spontaneous reactions against the closed-circle, elitist mindset and society that they appear to represent. The entire Bar Camp movement, which has led to unconferences around the world, is the outgrowth of this anti-elitist sentiment: a reaction far grander, and in fact, more interesting, than a bunch of folks acting out because they weren’t invited to FOO Camp, or perhaps — to give them more credit — because they disliked the gated community vibe.

So, in the final analysis, I think that moving to an “invitation-only” basis for hot-demand events like Web 2.0 is actually beneficial for all attendees, and the greater community, and will likely lead to a better event that a purely laissez-faire market would.

Now the only trick is to get an invitation.

[Update - 8:33am : Dave Winer informs me that it has always been invitation only. My bad. But my analysis still holds, I think.

First Look: Basecamp Integration in Blinksale

I had an email exchange with Josh Williams of Blinksale following the recent post on Blicksale 2.0 coming down the pike.

Stowe: Integration with Basecamp?

Josh: While the BC integration is not public knowledge, it also does not take a rocket-scientist to speculate that we’re working on that. So, if you want to blog that you’ve heard from us that BC API integration is on the way, I don’t have a problem with that.

Posted. But he also said it would follow the release of Blinksale 2.0 by a few weeks, so the Basecamp integration is not the super unnamed feature set soming in 2.0. Hmmm. Must be an extension into the accounting side of things. One of the big empty holes in the web 2.0 solar system, and an obvious place to head.

Also, on the Basecamp/37 Signals front, Jason Fried had this to say about my review of Getting Real:

Dude, I LOVE IT. You nailed it. Great review. Thank you.

First Look: Blinksale 2.0

[from email]

After several months of planning, design, and development Blinksale 2.0 will be released to the general public in less than two weeks. You read right: Less than two weeks.

Blinksale 2.0 is no small upgrade, and we believe you’ll be thrilled with the improvements. Here are just a handful of the new features in store:

  • Recurring auto-billing (great for web hosts!)
  • Invoice filtering (by date-range, client, tag, etc.)
  • Invoice tracking (when sent, to whom, etc.)
  • Invoice printing
  • Improved support for international tax regulations
  • Full PayPal IPN support
  • Blinksale API

There are, in fact, a few other large features being added to Blinksale, but we’re not going to talk about them now. You’ll just have to wait and see when the upgrade is rolled out. That said, we believe Blinksale 2.0 might just change your entire mindset about online billing.

Well, it won’t change my mind about online billing, because I am so there already. And not just because I have been using Blinksale for my tiny, tiny invoicing at A Working Model. But because I have been working with a company that is planning to do some truly revolutionary things in this are over the next few months: more to follow.

But there seems to be a hint of big things in the Blinksale announcement: are they being coy, or just unsure how much they can get finished before they roll it out?

London 2.0

Umair Haque is trying to get a London 2.0 group going.

Maybe DC 2.0 and the groups in other cities that are NOT San Francisco — like Toronto and NY — could affiliate somehow. For example, we are planning a 2 day event in the Fall — supposed to have write up in hand in a few weeks — where day 1 is a camp-like event (the Camp) and day 2 (the Summit) is a more or less traditional conference. The top four talks from the DC Camp — voted by the campers — will form a session in the Summit, and the one voted by the room as the best will receive a prize. Well, the prixe might be an all expense paid trip to one of the other outlying cities, to present at a Toronto, NY, or London event.

I’d be perfectly happy to share the schematic for the two day event with others, if anyone wants to model something on it.

mesh program goes live…finally!

The folks organizing the mesh conference in Toronto have finalized the program, and introduced the mesh class of 2006.

I am happy to attend, and I will be speaking in a session called “Is Web 2.0 Changing the Software Industry?” led by Mike McDerment, with Chris Messina of Flock.com, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and me.

In the spirit of Canadianism, I went online yesterday and investigated emigrating to Canada. No kidding. Things are crazy down here, and maybe getting worse. I have family in Canada, which helps in the Canadian government’s assessment, it seems. Here’s the resulots of the self-assessment for skilled workers (includes journalists, IT consultants, and a number of other jobs I had in the past ten years). Similar tests exist for entrepreneurs and the self-employed, both which characterize my interests.

I can’t really emigrate right now — two sons in high school — but I am bringing Keenan, my eldest, up to Toronto to look at colleges there in May, the weekend before the conference. Maybe 3 years from now, when Conrad graduates. We’ll see.

I am half-serious, despite the recent swing in Canada toward a slightly more conservative government. More research to follow, at the conference.