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500
May 9, 2007
Welcome to TNL.net. If you like this content, you may consider subscribing to the RSS feed.My statistics screen tells me that this is the 500th entry on this site. 500 entry: a milestone. 500,000 words, half a million words, that’s almost two books. And all over an etended period of time stretching back to the now seemingly distant 1990s.
Before I go into a recap of what I consider significant entries, I’d like to take the time to thank you, my readers. Without you, this probably would not have gone on and I wouldn’t have gotten to this milestone. 670 comments from over 400 different people. Not to mention the number of other comments made by other people on their own blogs, allowing a global conversation on things that were of interest to me and allowing me to refine, redefine, and sometimes even reverse my own views. You’ve made me smarter and that, ultimately, has been the goal of this blog. To work as a way for me to clarify my thoughts and get more input from other people.
So with this entry, let’s try to look at some of the things I wrote about over the last few years.
I’ve been very fortunate to find myself in the right place at the right time. I was a witness to the dotcom boom and its subsequent bust. I was also faced with the horrors of 9/11, which manifested themselves outside of my window. The Republican convention in New York was also an interesting place to visit to see the battle for free expression in action. I tried to write it fresh, tried to bring people to the scene, to help them experience what I experienced.
To this day, people still write to me about these. It appears that I touched a nerve in some way and managed to find kindred spirits in this. The 9/11 anniversaries became the first series on the blog: two years, three years, four years, five years. The years passed and while the rest of the country appeared to move on or to be trapped in the quagmire that Iraq is, the memory of 9/11 still lingers and still works as one of the defining moments of my short life. In a way, it was the closing bookend to the dotcom era.
That era, for me, started in 1988. But that wasn’t the case for most people. Opening up that terminal line on a vax system had something foreign, something undiscovered to it. And that world seemed wide open and to a 17 year old, that seemed to be the way the world went. Fast forward to 1993, when I’m out of college in what is considered one of the worst employment markets in a long time. The options were take a dead-end and low-paying job or try something new. So it was back to the Internet as a way to try to change the world. As I was in New York at the time, I managed to find other misfits who thought that the Internet was the next big thing. At the time, we were basically the bore of most parties as we were passionate about the unbound potential of the Internet at a time when no one had the faintest idea of what we were talking about.
It was also an exciting time in that we were trying to change the world and actually did. Our own sense of unbridled limits kept us free of the constraints that would have otherwise limited us in sticking to conventions. On the Internet, there were no conventions. There also were no limits. And so we experimented with different business models, we basically tried to reinvent the wheel. We were young and, to a large extent, we were stupid. However, in the process, we learned and we grew. Over the years, an understanding of what the rules of business were allowed the few who adopted them to survive. However, we also redefined the rules: centralization was gone, power to the edge and business experimentation as acceptable.
All that changed after the Netscape IPO. A lot of money had been made and all of a sudden, we were front and center: we had arrived, we had changed the world. The next few years, the scenario would play out: money comes in, people motivated by money follow, the cycle repeats. In the late 90s, many of the pioneers agreed, this would come to tears. The cycle was moving very fast and none of us dared to stop it. Besides, we didn’t know how.
The acquisition of Time-Warner by AOL made me wonder whether I was wrong. It seemed that maybe things were being changed, and our own view of how fast they were changing was out of steps with the times. Maybe we didn’t realize the magnitude of the change and thus had miscalculated the potentials. Maybe there were truly no bounds. A week later, the introduction of Transmeta’s approach gave me an interesting view into the future: hardware was becoming a commodity, software was the way of the future. In my view, it harbored a new era of software being enhanced by the Internet but not necessarily fully reliant on it, a new class of software that, in 2000, I called Hybrid Computing and which predicated much of today’s software. At the same time, it became a driver for my belief that the internet is a critical infrastructure which would eventually see the rise of business models we had implemented in the 90s with little success.
Boo.com crashed, but sooner than I had expected. Some of the issues that led to my leaving the company had sunk it but it still felt like an independent case. It just didn’t feel like a crash yet. The irony was that my dissection of what had happened became one of the first mainstream hit TNL.net produced. There was a hunger from the mainstream in trying to understand what had happened, what had made it all go so wrong. I was invited to talk about it around the world, which was convenient in that it helped me promote my own consulting business. There was somewhat of an irony that the crash was becoming a lucrative thing and explaining the crash to the mainstream was an interesting path to a new career. For a while, that was the way to promote myself.
The bust may have been a walk in the desert for some but there was so much activity happening on the edges of technology, around RSS, podcasting, VoIP, etc… that it felt like the pre-bubble days again. And it was comfortable. It was back to the sources in terms of ensuring that we were trying to build the next version of the web, to ensure that it would work out differently this time. New areas, like game boxes, were starting to appear, giving us a chance to target a new public starting in 2001 (a prediction that would turn out to be about 6 years too early) and companies like TellMe were offering services that tied the phone infrastructure to the internet (another prediction coming too early as I made it in 2000).
The blog developed an audience (unfortunately, most of the comments were lost on earlier entries due to a migration to a new software platform) and people started giving me feedback: my 2003 belief that the RIAA was fighting a losing battle could be generalized to most fights over content today.
But it wasn’t until 2004 that I actually found a good voice for the blog. Upon rethinking my approach to blogging I decided that less entries could yield to better results. From there came insight number 2 that less entries could also give me a chance to write longer pieces. In August 2004, I launched the modular by design series which, over the next few days would cover the music (and more specifically music downloads), Broadcast TV, cable TV, telephony, new gathering, and software sectors. I then tried to figure out the details of why this approach worked. The series got attention from some media outfits and my readership grew. The bet on longer, more analytical, types of blog entries seemed to have worked.
I followed suite with a quick overview of Google’s S-1 filing, which itself was followed by some projections as to how many computers Google had at the time (that entry, by the way, is still one of the more popular ones on the site as few other people have attempted to do the math again). Media attention grew further. In November 2004, I said that Apple should consider Intel and Windows: that entry was widely read in mac circles and a few people visiting from Apple also read it.
In 2005, I hit a good stride, writing about How DRM could and couldn’t work, and starting to turn an eye to blogger compensations while at the same time analyzing the output of A-list bloggers and how they were linked. The links got me to then consider how an engine like Technorati fared against the big three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The results revealed some interesting data and were (and are still) discussed for months. Because of all this activity, I also started noticing the value of archival content, around the same time as Chris Anderson started thinking about the long tail.All this data got me more interested in data, and particularly metrics both hard and soft as well as how one could possibly weight them.
None of this prepared me for the success of a simple entry: Doing the number on the AOL Weblogs Inc. deal. To this day, this entry is still the most popular entry on the site, now having single-handedly clocked over 8 million page views. The concept was simple: if links were the new currency of web 2.0, then how much were they worth? Someone developed a little applet that allowed you to then figure out the value of your own blog and people have been putting that applet (and copycats) on their own site. The interesting thing is that, in the process, they’ve provided me with a lot of data and I can now say, with a reasonable amount of confidence that the values I came to are off by a factor of about 100. At the same time, the excitement around this entry started to trouble me. It was feeling all too familiar and, in December 2005, I posted my first warning shot about signs of a new bubble coming. As is customary with TNL.net, this is probably early in the cycle but I am still worried that a bubble is heading our way and hope that this time, we will be able to manage it better. In October 2006, I set out to demonstrate how the numbers would show the rise of that bubble. Only one problem: they did not so I actually reported that, confusing people in the process as they thought that I had been anti-web 2.0 all along. Let me make this clear, I’m not anti-anything
2006 was a banner year on TNL.net. Traffic was up and so was a attention to what I wrote about, prompting some to grumble that I was getting too much link love considering how low my output was (to those critic I would just want to say that feel free to copy my style and actually write long analysis pieces, they’re not easy to do and thus it is impossible to really do a lot of them). In 2006, I looked at how the top 100 on Technorati were moving. If all claims about the A-list being rigid were right, the data would support it. It didn’t. I also followed wrote entries on subjects that I didn’t find anything on (for example, an overview of how the major portals were handling video on the net, worries about the echo effect in the blogosphere, How Buzz happens, or life after net neutrality). I also started to take an interest in virtual worlds and social networks, which in my view are related phenomenon (the former just being an instance of the later with a prettier interface). This lead to entries on economic activities in virtual worlds, demographic profiles of virtual world users, and an analysis of the Top 10 opportunities in virtual worlds (in 2007, I actually did some projections on the growth of Second Life, one of the more popular virtual world). In parallel, I examined opportunities in social networks, reasons for their success, and potential for failure. One of the issue I see as potentially arising is surrounding what happens when virtual and real world collide?
Along with all the other entries I listed here, I started to develop a new view of the future, which I highlighted into the “Future Tense” series. In my more recent view of the future, the net is always on, every device is IP addressable (even sensors), and humans are part of the applications. From there I tried to draw some conclusions as to what the future may look like.
All this activity has given me a lot to think about and I’m starting to worry about some of the darker sides of this world we’re creating: Are we optimising ourselves to death? Should we fear the rise of mob mentality (as examplified by the recent call for a blogger’s code of conduct). Those things weight on my mind and have been making me reconsider a lot of assumptions.
I’ve been feeling a little burned out in 2007. Writing long pieces may look easy but it isn’t and attempting to write something that someone else has not already written is probably a fool’s errand so I might get rid of that idea (the more I read, the less I’m inclined to write and with over 300 feeds subscribed to, it’s difficult to find an original idea to latch on). So I’ve taken a little more rest as it comes to writing this year (besides the looming #500 post was a little scary to me as I was planning on this entry for a while and had a hard time mustering the energy to actually write it).
So there you have it, the most significant portions of this blog in a single post. 70 entries that I think represent the best of TNL.net. 70 entries that represent somewhere around a book size worth of writing. Not bad out of 500 entries. Let’s see what the 500 next entries bring.
Congratulation! Keep on writing…
PS: Great anniversary-posting!
Tristan, you are a machine!! Keep up the great work, always love reading your stuff, wish I had more time to read more of it!
Tristan,
Congrats on this milestone!
Tristan,
Congratulations on your 500th entry.
I’m the “someone” that created the applet from your posts “Doing the number on the AOL Weblogs Inc. deal.”
I look forward to converting your new insights into traffic generating machines and sending you a few million more visitors!
Thanks for all of the great writing.
Dane
Congrats!