NETWORK EFFECT

In the wake of the recent Lane Hartwell\Richter Scales dustup, I have found it useful to watch Lawrence Lessig’s TedTalk given earlier this year, which was mentioned in the above referenced article’s comments section.

My opinion: The internet is, and should always be, the public domain.

It’s not like the writing isn’t on the wall or anything, but NBC appears to have smartened up by leveraging their kick-ass content and putting it in the correct wrapper. The key praise for NBC here is that they provide the Flash embed code, a la YouTube, which other quality content providers like Comedy Central and HBO do not (not yet anyway). Embed code allows bloggers to host the videos on their site without taking on the infrastructure costs of bandwidth. So now, NBC’s potential business model looks a whole lot like YouTube now.

To improve their service, NBC should allow users to respond to TV shows with some ideas of their own, all in the world of Hulu. YouTube currently does this for its UGC (User Generated Content) by allowing community members to upload video responses, but if Hulu were to extend this offer to each of its TV shows’ fan base, every series could be a work in progress, reflecting the truly collaborative nature of TV production. NBC could plant all sorts of projects on its site and could see what happens, not forgetting to reward key members of the community, of course.

Now anyone can be a news service, and is. The beauty of microblogs is that no matter where feeds are published, you can use any IM client to get your favorite alerts. Younger folks who literally live in their IM client can easily get news, but even if you are of the old guard and use email as your dashboard, gmail’s built-in IM client allows anyone to get their news alerts without navigating away from email.

Dave Winer and Steve Rubel have noted that RSS feeds should be attended to individually, some as “a river(s) of news” and others requiring special prioritization in your reader. Because Twitter updates are sent out instantaneously, those river-like feeds that do not require constant attention can flow right by in IM, provided that they have a microblog feed you can subscribe to.

Back in May, Twitterfacts posted some news shops that have their own Twitter feeds. I have found that they are all not being updated with regularity, but I can only assume that as subscriptions to Twitter reach critical mass, these orgs will find their new path.

Looking for Web 3.0? Go no further. We are entering a third age in which the government and healthcare gets blown apart (in a good way) and rebuilt from scratch. Watch the video for details of one project that is breaking ground in congress. But, this is really just the beginning.

We really don’t need no steenkin’ badges!