Chris just published some content about Google's acquisition of Metaweb that got me thinking.

It seems like Google is starting to really get behind the Linked Data (semantic Web) idea, and not the weird AI-neural network flavor that is almost completely unrelated.  They're getting behind the version that is actually about publishing marked-up data on the Web to increase the richness of the metadata surrounding the content.

Their recent rollout of Rich Snippets followed by this Metaweb acquisition clearly demonstrates that Google is focusing on rich content as a differentiator (a strategy I think is a very smart one).  Maybe FaceBook gave them the needed kick in the pants with their proprietary open graph markup.  After watching content producers' willingness to mark up their content from the sidelines, maybe Google decided they had better get in front of this if they want to stay on top of the search hill.

Whatever the reason, Google is still the 800 lb. gorilla in search with 62.6% of the market, and they direct most of the world's eyeballs.  If they begin rolling out Rich Snippets and RDFa support at a high level, it will immediately mean a HUGE leg up for any content publisher that keeps their rich markup well maintained.  You could potentially go from buried deep in the pile to rising to the first page of results solely because you properly mark up your content.

In the world of the Internet, more eyeballs means more money.  Especially when it's from Google, who is the biggest source of free search traffic.

I can easily see this turning into a gold rush of sorts where people race to mark up their data in order to get a quick pop up to the top of the search results and attract more traffic.

This is going to create an instant market for publishing tools that make it extremely easy to published rich content, marked up to the max.  It's going to be payday for content publishers that are first into the pool.  And as Chris notes, there are going to be some VERY interesting opportunities to analyze and mine this data.  Should make for an interesting period of time, I'm looking forward to that again :)

One of the first things I wanted to do post-Cisco is start a new blog.  Not a blog about myself, one geared more towards entrepreneurs.

However, in the process of planning this, I realized that the concept of a blog as it exists today is outdated.  The idea of a blog is firmly rooted in about the year 2000, and it's getting long in the tooth.

As a content producer I don't want a standalone site, an Island on the Internet, I want a site that participates on the social Web.  And more importantly, I want a site that is laser-focused on getting people to take the action that I want them to take, whether that's subscribing to the blog, download an e-book, clicking an affiliate link, whatever the goal of the site is.

In the process of sketching out what this sort of site would look like, I realized that there a bunch of ideas about what blogs are and how they operate that are completely outdated.  For example:

• RSS is not mainstream--never has been and probably never will be--and it is not an effective way to distribute information because of that.  Email is much more effective, and social networks are even more effective.  So why distract and confuse uninterested users with this highly geek-oriented technology?  Social Web-based distribution models (and even email) are much more effective.
• Coupling an information site with a customer management system such as a CRM system is a no-brainer.  Track visitors as much as you can until they identify themselves to you, and then pounce on that opportunity to make the experience as rich and meaningful to them as possible, and keep a history of your interaction with them.  There are no mainstream blogging products that are focusing on this.
• Why shouldn't a blog have its own identity online?  Ultimately a blog seeds an online conversation and then acts as the center/aggregator for responses to the post from around the Web.  While blogs have gotten slightly better at sucking responses in from around the Web, they suck at pushing responses back out.  A blog should connect conversations and people--it is in fact a community.  It took years of blogging to figure this bit out.
• Blogs are very un-realtime.  In this day and age collaboration is not just nice to have, it's a necessity.  Sometimes going back to a writing a blog post like this feels very old-fashioned, simply because I have to wait until it's done, published, distributed, and read before anyone can give me feedback on it.  Blogs need to catch up to the real-time conversation game, IMO this will function something like Google Wave, but look completely different.
• There is no awareness of what is inside the blog or the post.  Context-awareness is a requirement for any collaboration tool anymore (which blogs are a rudimentary form of).  When you have to tag posts yourself to give them any semblance of context, and then those don't update as the conversation evolves, that just doesn't cut it.

While some of these things can be cobbled together from various plugins and third parties, that does not result in a very cohesive platform.  And I've never seen a blog or site that I thought addressed all of these issues well.

I also do not like Javascript hack-ons.  They not only detract from the speed of the site and the user experience, add-ons like Disqus (what I'm using right now) deprive the site of Google juice from the comments.  Google has said that they're ranking sites higher that load faster, and yet Google Analytics itself is guilty of making pages take seconds longer to load.  Seems like it has to be baked into the platform if you want to avoid being penalized, no?

Thoughts?  Does anything that satisfies these requirements exist?

Yeah, I know I haven't blogged in a loooong time, I've just been too preoccupied getting things wrapped up here.  Lots of activity in Kolb-land.

Today I turned in my badge and left the Cisco office for the last time.  In about two weeks the family and I move back to Illinois.  The roads are too nice in New England and the politicians are too honest, it just didn't feel like home.

Anyway, I was pretty much forbidden to talk about anything at Cisco until it was all said & done, which killed just about any impetus I've had to blog as a side effect.  But I'm officially a free agent now, so the embargo has been lifted.

I can't believe it's already been two and a half years since we sold Latigent to Cisco, the time has flown incredibly fast.  The reason I left Cisco is purely selfish:  I wanted to move back to Chicago, and Cisco's development organization is very focused on keeping people in the same physical location, the two goals didn't mesh well. But I have nothing but good things to say about Cisco and the people who work there, they truly are world-class and there are some extremely exciting things in the pipeline, I look forward to watching them hit the market.

I suppose I should briefly touch on the question I've been getting incessantly over the past couple of weeks, which is "what am I doing next?"

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

I have a bunch of ideas which have been percolating for a long time, so I really need to sit down and figure it out.  I definitely intend to get back to blogging more often, and I'm really excited about having some time to code for fun again.  It's something I haven't done in a long time.

More to come as things progress, but don't expect much over the next couple of weeks as we'll be focusing on moving the family.

I'd just like to take one more opportunity to thank all the wonderful people I met at Cisco for the opportunities, help, and encouragement I've received over the past two and a half years, I'm incredibly blessed and thankful for everything.

Stumbled across this gem today, a team at the USC Institute for Creative Technology has prototyped a 3D teleconferencing system.  I really love using Cisco Telepresence but this takes things to a whole new level--instead of displaying video it actually projects the 3D map of a person's face into space.  And somehow it doesn't look unnatural, which surprised me.

 

They use real-time 3D face scanning along with eye tracking to achieve eye contact in 3D, which I would absolutely LOVE to try.

The display is projected onto a rotating mirror, so this is true 3D, not a Pepper's Ghost effect.  I wonder if this can ever be mass-produced in a reliable way, but either way it's a very creative way to achieve this effect.

Watch a video of this very cool project here:  http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DTeleconferencing/

P.S.  I wonder how large a display like this could practically get... I would imagine a television-size display is not unreasonable, which would mean that Star Wars-style displays are probably in the cards at some point.  I love technology.

I will be speaking at the Emerging Communications Conference at the San Francisco Airpot Marriott late next month (April 19-21).  I was originally scheduled to speak last year but scheduling conflicts prevented it, much to my disappointment.

This is a fantastic conference, Lee Dryburgh (the organizer) envisions it to be the TED conference for the communications industry, and the speakers he's lined up are the who's who of the industry.  Last year's conference turned out to be a fantastic event and I deeply regretted having to miss out on it.  I certainly feel privileged to be invited back this year to speak alongside luminaries from Intel, Google, Cisco, BitTorrent, Skype, and a host of other exciting organizations.

Go check out the event's site if you're interested, Lee has done a fantastic job of lining up a TON of interesting presentations.  I'll be presenting on the paradigm shifts headed our direction if XMPP and Wave gain traction, there's going to be quite a bit of new stuff that I've never talked or blogged about before.

As a speaker I have a free ticket to give away so if you'll be in the area during that time and want to attend please drop me a line--first come, first served.  If you're already attending, I'm looking forward to seeing you at the show!

Cheers,

Jason

I've been waiting a loooong time for someone to solve this problem.  Absolutely cannot wait for games to start coming out that leverage this technology.  Should shake up the data visualization industry a bit as well.

Using search algorithms to determine what needs to be displayed was a stroke of genius.  Major kudos.

Would you like some valuable free advice?  Let me share a chunk with you, something I had to learn the hard way.

There's a post making the rounds today from Mark Suster on "how to quit your job", the gist of which is that if he hires you he wants you to start within two weeks but your old employer will want you for more than two weeks, so you need to apply some salesmanship to get out of there on time.

To address this problem he gives his new hires a script straight out of a used-car salesman's handbook, and I left a comment to the effect that I thought the approach he outlined was shady and I would not only not ask my employees to follow this script but that I would walk out on an employer who asked me to use it.

Email and blog post subject lines are going to die and here's why: the first sentence or two works much better.

Back in December I decided I was going to run a little experiment and try moving my blogging entirely into Wave (wavelogging?).  It was an interesting experience but there is a deal-breaker that I just can't work around at the moment.  

I thought it would make for an interesting discussion to report back on where things are at right now.  What works, what doesn't, what's awesome, and what NEEDS to be fixed.

 When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.