TNL: so the rumors are true: Webjay acquired by Yahoo! You should post it on your blog.

Lucas Gonze: That’s right. It turns out that when they sign up new people, y! makes them put on this pointy hat that sorts them into “houses”. This makes no sense to me, but it turns out that I am “hufflepuff”

TNL: Hehe… stay away from Slitherins

Lucas Gonze: They’re over in the DRM group.

TNL: Tell me the reason for this acquisition.

Lucas Gonze: The point of it is playlists. It’s a sign that Y! takes playlists seriously. The point of playlists is that they are to internet media what RSS is to weblogs and HTML is to browsing. Playlists are the one vehicle for timed media; if it has an intrinsic sense of time, it’s a playlist, that’s an important category of functionality. Now, aside from Webjay and XSPF, the action is all over on the iPod.

TNL: So, if I understand you well, playlist + MediaRSS + content = new form of distribution channel?

Lucas Gonze: that’s about right. From the audio and video perspective, the meaning of playlists is that they’re the container format for the internet. CDs are over; mixtapes are only an analogy; Radio, television, movie theaters — not internet. So Webjay and my other playlist work is what Yahoo is about with this acquisition

TNL: If I understand well, playlists are somewhat of a reintegration item. Yahoo! is looking at them as a way to tie all the disparate bits that have come out of the breakout into podcasts, independent tunes, movies, shows, etc… to resort things into channels?

Lucas Gonze: That is beautifully said, Tristan. I agree with that, except that reality is not quite as elegant. The point of this work is to create a truly healthy and robust internet media industry but one which is not just a transplant of the old ways of doing things. The new industry is going to be native to the internet (the playlist is a native format).
Playlists do resort things into channels and they do make possible all the sort of goodness we’re used to with weblogs — like Technorati and Del.icio.us — with multimedia Examples of the kinds of goodness I’m talking about:

• Interactivity wide open; anybody on the internet is a full participant
• Implementation wide open; anybody with the chops can write programs which contribute to the ecosystem
• and interoperability; anybody should be able to author content which anybody can render

TNL: This sounds dangerously like a lightnet. You seem to be offering a world that is widely open, while all the big portals are looking at locking things up.

Lucas Gonze: I think that the place we’re going is to a media industry which is perfectly at home on the internet. Given that I’m here to make money for Yahoo, it’s fine to lock things up by doing such a great job that users would be crazy to use any other software.

TNL: You mentioned interactivity as a key feature of playlists. Do you think that playlists merge multimedia with social software? And, if yes, is that a direction Yahoo! plans to take it into?

Lucas Gonze: That’s exactly the value. Social software is not an empty trend. It’s central to the value of the internet. So the question with regard to media is how do you make social media? How do you make songs which anybody can get inside of and interact with on their own terms? To some extent that’s what playlists accomplish.
About whether that’s the direction Yahoo! plans to take it into, I can’t speak for Yahoo!, given that I’ve only been an employee for about 45 minutes.

TNL: So what are you going to be doing at Yahoo! ?

Lucas Gonze: There’s a spacecraft which crash landed in the desert. My job is to investigate the dead lifeforms and attempt to make contact with their homeworld. But that’s off the record. On the record I can only say that we’ll be building best-of-breed internet-native social-software with tags.

TNL: can you throw a couple more buzzwords in there?

Lucas Gonze: I can enable that.

Lucas then had to run off but I wish him much luck on this venture. The obvious value of something like WebJay to a company like Yahoo! is in the social aspect of sharing multimedia. I believe that the real value, beyond the core tools being acquired in the organization and sharing of digital media. Over the last year, Yahoo! has been acquiring companies that relied on the wisdom of crowds to organize content of various types (del.icio.us for bookmarks, flickr for pictures). WebJay nows fills that space for music and could probably easily be extended to support other media types. In that sense, Google is now taking an early step in terms of merging social software and multimedia.

There are many opportunities in that space: Much as Flickr has shown that user-generated and organized pictures are a good way for people to share this type of media, something like WebJay could extent from sharing your music collection and/or tastes to an eventual basis for sharing larger media files (like videos of the family).

The tool also allows for auto-discovery of content: point it to a URL and it will find any songs that’s linked from it and organize them into an easy to use playlist. This could have some great implications for podcasters as it provides and easy tool to create archive pages.

Beyond the sharing and auto-discovery is also the openness of WebJay. What is most astounding, when you look at it, is how open it is. The system gives you the direct URL of the files that are shared, even though the files themselves are not stored on WebJay itself.

Update:

It’s now official.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Yahoo! acquires WebJay. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It seems there are two clear camps here: the new media adopters and the traditional crowd. They can easily be identified based on whether they have laptops in front of them or not. It creates an immediate delineation line as the blog crowd obviously has a backchannel to use whereas the traditional media crowd does not. That’s another facet of WeMedia: always connected, enhanced knowledge through immediate sharing of data.

We News Panel

The AP showed a few familiar citizen generated clips of the Tsunami, the London bombing, the WTC bombing and said they started to use contributions as a way to get speed to market.

“Technology is fundamentally changing the business and if we don’t adapt, we will loose that audience” — Richard Sanbrook, BBC

Discussion of class disparity and availability of access to the internet channel. The United States are behind on this and it seems that there is little leadership in terms of moving forward on this.

Keynote: Al Gore

“TV dominates the flow of information in America… The most prominent casualty [of changes in the marketplace] is the marketplace of exchange of ideas…

It is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the strangeness of our times.”

He sees three basic tenet of the marketplace of ideas:
1. Open to every individidual with no barrier to entry
2. Depended on meritorcracy of ideas
3. Accepted rules of discourse presumed that all speakers were trying to find general agreement

Talks about how television is not a two way conversation (leading up to current.tv pitch, I’m assuming).

“News divisions are now seen as profit centers and used to pursue the agenda of the corporation they are owned by” He then goes on into media manipulation by the White House and current state of coverage (no real news but rather entertainment).

He now is talking about how private control of the TV airwaves is a problem for democracy (gives example of moveOn being shut out because advertising is the only way to get one’s voice on the air(because their ads were not accepted while the White House’s ones were).

Current.tv is about enabling a two way conversation in television.

He stills see TV as the dominant medium of the next few years and closes with a plea to ensure that Internet access remains free and open.

We, Inc.

Discussion of business and media. There is a lot of discussion about the potentials of the Internet as a new channel but, as Scott Rafer, of Feedster, points out, they are “on a higher socio-economic bracket… People aren’t able to find the tools to hear independent voices.”

Craig Forman, GM of Yahoo!, is asked by Jason wether Yahoo! is a media content creator or an area that content producers can work with. He talks about the hotzone, which is independent content and flickr (also owned by Yahoo!) and how the community self-organizes around new tags.

Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, sees it as organising information based on user-generated content. Sees it as “just the beginning”. Lots of talk about Google Video and how it makes video content more readily available. Google’s long term aspiration is to also facilitate video on demand and be able to charge for it (this seems reminiscent of the initial Microsoft model (circa 95–96) of trying to get a vig off every transaction on the Internet)

Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News still sees the Internet as not on par with TV right now. “There is no 60 minutes of the internet. There are very few stars, no compelling storytelling… ”

There’s discussion of a generational divide. According to Heyward, the main reason traditional media is slow to react is that they still have very large audiences, ie. the people who are over 40. He also believes that opinion from journalism on the blog is probably antithetical to the philosophy of CBS news. It’s not something he wants his journalists to engage in.

The most successful writers in the blogosphere, according to Rafer, are the people who are willing to come out and tell where they stand before covering a subject.

Citizen media revenue opportunities: Scott Rafer sees it on the same size as Ebay. Jason Calacanis sees it as 20% of traditional media. Craig Forman sees the revenue opportunities as a mediator between creators, advertisers, and audiences.

We, Invest

Brad Burnham, of Union Sq. ventures, sees the real money being in the coordinate of activity, not in the activities themselves.

Brad Feld, of Mobius Venture: “Computers and software suck… from a venture perspective, there doesn’t seem to be a foreseeable end to it… The challenge is… how to find out what people are interested in and how to organize all this. ” He talks about how Google has demonstrated the value of automation.

Brad Burham counters that Google (and also goes into Skype) is partly based on automation but also based on an underlying human network. The next question he has is whether you can sell a network.

Brad follows up in agreement that scalibility is essential to the model. User attention is an essential part of monetizing traffic.

Following on a view from Rafat Ali that content is not an investment play for VCs, Feld follows up that money is in things that are not easily reproducible.

Burnham: “It is so easy to get to market [for a media company] on the net… that is hard to find something that is monetizable.

A lot of the value within the tool is in the community. It’s getting to be very hard to see the difference between a media and a software co. As the cost come down, the price of delivering a service is so low that you can support it with adsense or another ad model. A media business paid for by the person who wants to have a conversation with the person receiving the service. ”

Feld: Pays credit to web 2.0 and the web 2.0 conference as a geek gathering; “On the east coast, we have a conference where people are talking about something that I, as a technologist, really don’t understand. You have a dynamic where you think they’re coming together but culturally, they’re diverging more than ever.”

We, Marketing

Rick Skentra, topix.net CEO, talks about the value of word of mouth and how the message for the blog world must be different than the message for other traditional media.

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, talks about how there is no more We in the WeMedia. There is now a personal relationship between bloggers and their audience. Marketing messages in that channel are counter-productive.

John Bell, creative director of Ogilvy PR, talks about the challenges of moving away from a control-focus message.“What we’re seeing is an opportunity for companies to be more transparent and there is still a great split within our customer-base… Some clients are nervous but at the same time, they’re seeing things change and want to get there…”

Fernando Espuela, CEO of Voy, is targeting the latino market with community empowerment tools and marketing it through a non-traditional approach by launching the brand before launching the product.

I asked a question on pushing messages instead of working within the message from the customer. Copeland mentioned how jobs are at risk. Skentra looks at using the people out there as a large focus group. Bell likes the idea of companies that will engage in such a way.

Discussion now goes to Dell-Hell and the Jarvis discussion. Skentra looks at it as an opportunity for companies to adopt a human face and responds to markets. Rubel ask whether companies are allergic to this. Bell says size has nothing to do with it. “… and it goes beyond blogs. For example, BP did a good job when they relaunched their brand as beyond petroleum but they made sure they were not only more transparent but were also walking the walk.”

In Us We Trust

This discussion is focusing on trust and how to get it.

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, has been talking about how levels of trust in institutions has fallen. However, one has to wonder whether this trust has eroded as a result of greater transparency which showed that the trust in those institutions was based on very thin ice to start with.

Collaboration Cafe

The goal of this session is to foster dialogue (think bloggercon for traditional media types) and discuss the concept of collaboration. Some of the ideas that were covered included active listening, discipline in caring, demonstration of passion, and general engagement, allowing for vulnerability.

Last Thoughts

The conference was very interesting and I got to meet a lot of fascinating people. The most interesting thing to me, sitting here as a media outsider, was that most of the people at the conference still believe they can have full control of the messages distributed online. This, in my view, is a major fallacy in their thinking as it is becoming clearer and clearer as time goes on that there is very little one can control on the Internet. The only way you can impact the direction of a discussion is engaging into it.

See Also

See also the Technorati Tag wemedia, the We Media tag wemedia and the WeMedia blog for more coverage of this conference.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title At WeMedia 2005. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

• On the shifted librarian, Jenny talks about changing behaviors when it comes to music. A 9-year-old thinking of music as something you burn, not a piece of plastic, represents one of the biggest challenges to date to the music industry. While peer-to-peer networks represented the beginning of a battle, that shift in behavior among kids represents a potentially disturbing trend: if this behavior doesn’t change, 5–6 years from now (when those kids are teenager) the music industry will see steep declines in the sales of music CDs. In other words, the medium no longer matters as an entity. Recurring revenues based on changes in format (as was the case with the move from LPs to tapes, and then from tapes to CDs) will no longer exist.
• In a somewhat related story, Martin Tobias talks about bands selling concert videos through iTunes. This represents threat number two to the music industry in that no record label was involved in this transaction. It could be because they didn’t want to be but that’s a source of revenue that is no longer available to a label. This lack of foresight could eventually lead to artists or bands dealing directly with the stores instead of using the labels as a go-between. As I predicted earlier, Apple is now starting to sell other media types than music (I expect movies will be next). I had predicted the rise of online music stores as a potential way for music labels to adapt to the new world of digital media but had not anticipated the possibility of “someone else” running the relationship between artists and consumers. This could have devastating effects on companies that do not adapt quickly enough

Between the change in behavior patterns among consumers and the threat represented by online music stores cutting their own deals with bands, music labels could find themselves squeezed out of existence, or at least out of growth potential (since they still do own copyrights to large collections they can still sell) within the next 5–10 years.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The changing musical landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The following basically tells us that we are dealing with an XML document.

It’s encoded in UTF-8, a format that allows to show the largest possible set of characters. This clearly shows that Apple intends the store to be something that they will use beyond the US as they might plan to use foreign characters in their XML definition.

Also of interest here is the note about standalone being no. This means that there is no interest in the document not being part of an application (ie. the store).

Next up is the page definition:

Of interest here is the fact that they differentiate the different pages. This one is the result of a search so the pageType is set to search. I haven’t yet fiddled with other pages but I suspect that they have other potential use for this.

Once you’ve got your document defined, they break it down into three elements:
Path, ScrollView and TrackList. Let’s look at those now.

The Path Element

The Path element basically provides information as to where the document resides. Under the tag, you find a sub-element called PathElement. It shows up as follows:

 /WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/21/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Morritz%20Discovers%20the%20Red%20Violin

Now what we have here is a page called “Search Results for: Morritz Discovers the Red Violin” which is located at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/21/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Morritz%20Discovers%20the%20Red%20Violin

Basically, what it gives is the location of the document. Nothing to find here.

The ScrollView Element

This one is a monster of information related to how to display things on the screen. Of interest here is the fact that they position everything using a new form of XML and using outside pointer files for font handling. It looks like Apple is using some WebObject syntax to position their elements on a page. Why they decided to do so is obvious when you realize the NeXT used to be Steve Jobs company and the Apple store is running WebObject.

However, it would have been much nicer if they were to do this as plain XHTML + CSS or XML + XSL. The syntax used in their file is bulky at best and, unfortunately, can only be parsed by using one of their tools right now.

The TrackList Element

This element describes metadata about the particular track (or tracks) you’re looking for. It’s using Apple’s Property List.

This is a great throve of data for anyone who might, in the future, want to develop a service that integrates with the Apple store. Let’s look at it in more details.

The first thing it does is tell you what type of list you’re dealing with:

listType
search

Basically, all it’s doing here is telling you that this is a list that was the result of a search.

priceFormat
$%0.2f

This tells you that the price format is in tenth of a cent. An interesting thing as it seems to open up the potential for microtransaction in the future. Based on the model they seem to be adopting, you could technically go much lower than that, which shows some potential for a future where you might end up paying less than a cent per track. Interesting.

The next key is items. This can list several item. For the purpose of this example, I actually looked for a search result that would return a single item but the same logic applies here whether you have one or many items. The string looks as follows:

Items

… and it is followed by an array that list each item.

So what info do we get about an item in the Apple store?

So here’s the real meat: What makes a track special. Everything here seems to be based on a key-value pair. I’m now building up a table that will show how each relates:

So Apple provides a lot of information in this. For starters, I’d like to compliment them on the breadth of metadata they provide on each track. This is clearly a great value add to anyone who wants properly tagged music. However, it seems that they could offer the tracks in other formats (MP3, or Ogg Vorbis, maybe? ).

The other interesting thing when reading this file is what it reveals as to future potential. It is pretty clear that they plan to offer the system worldwide. It is also interesting that they classify things like media types as it could open up the potential for the Apple movie store in the future. Also of interest was the choice in terms of how small the currency increments are as it could point to Apple eventually looking to sell things for less than a cent. Could we be looking at a rental system in the future? However, there is no information here yet as to what they get from us in terms of data. I’d still like to know that and, if anyone has pointers, would be interested in reading more about it.

Last but not least is why is it that Apple decided to create their own metadata when other solutions (such as the ID3 system used in MP3s) seem to provide similar info? Some of it points to the potential for a proprietary closed system but, by publishing this data in the open, it seems that Apple is willing to take a step in the right direction, that of openness.

My guess is that they will soon offer a web service interface to the store, similar to the one offered by Amazon. It makes sense as it would allow a whole new community of developers to create applications that would drive more money into Apple. However, without a clear understanding as to the DRM setup, it is difficult to estimate what benefit others might get from this.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Apple, XML, and the Music Store. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.