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The current set of Web app firms have valuations based on the generous contributions of users like you. The platforms, in and of themselves, aren’t worth the valuations that VCs, or acquiring firms, are attributing to them. It’s never about the software, it’s about the community, the audience, the users. In fact, the most interesting developments are the most simple. Think about blogging software, RSS, Twitter, podcatchers— it’s not the software it’s what is enabled for the users.

Audiences used to be aggregated so that you could sell their eyeballs to advertisers. Now, to a large extent, the audience creates the product. Jason Calacanis was criticized for wanting to pay the audience at Netscape. But if the user contributes to the value of a platform, shouldn’t the platform owner pass some of the revenue through? The economics of “user-generated” content will be similar to the economics of user attention data. The user will want to retain, or be compensated for, the value of both their raw attention and the content they’ve created.

Kills me I’m going to miss this. From what I hear, it’s sold out even though the run was extended two weeks. It’s the Wooster Group’s Hamlet at the Public Theater in New York. The piece was performed last year in Barcelona. Elizabeth LaCompte calls it an archeological excursion into the film version of Hamlet starring Richard Burton.

The Wooster Group’s Hamlet continues their experiment with what counts as a source text in the theater. They may have done this with other pieces, but the last performance I saw was “Poor Theater,” based on the work of Jerzy Grotowski. Generally plays are created based on scripts, the work of playwrights. The Wooster Group has created performance pieces based on movies, documentary film, a series of still photos or stories they’ve heard. This Hamlet is based on the film, not the playscript. To some extent performances are always based on previous performances, in addition to the script.

Hamlet holds a unique place in English language theater, it’s a difficult role, usually tackled by our finest actors. A constellation of images, sounds, faces, voices and souls orbit around the playscript. There’s no finer experience in the theater than watching the Wooster Group perform Hamlet, and showing us what we mean when we dream about Hamlet.

With Hulu entering beta the decentralization of television continues. Kara Swisher thinks it might actually work. Broadcast television can still create a mass audience around particular programs, but the model of showing a episode once at a fixed time is rapidly breaking down. Of course it started with multiple cable channels, but has been excelerated by services like “OnDemand,” iTunes downloads and soon, Hulu. The economics of the business are still based on aggregating an audience’s attention, selling that attention, and showing them commercial messages. Payment for downloads or views is still a secondary revenue stream.

The other side of the coin is the economy of the user’s attention— human beings don’t scale. Just because there are more and more programming and activities available doesn’t mean that an individual can consume them all. Google became important when the internet became too large to easily find what you were looking for. Look for the emergence of channel editors, this blog edits YouTube, and other video sites, and picks out a few interesting videos for your entertainment. I can see this happening at sites like Dogster and Catster, car enthusiast sites, and any community website. I need to be able to program my own channel, and view edited channels of content editors I like. Oh, and it’s about multiple media types, not just video.

“Play” by Samuel Beckett. I directed this play in college and must have read it a thousand times. This version is directed by Anthony Minghella, and is performed by Juliet Stevenson, Kristen Scott-Thomas and Alan Rickman.

It begins the trend toward minimal or no movement in Beckett’s plays. He imagined his performance pieces as living paintings. When he had a hand in them, they were specified very exactly. He didn’t view them as open to interpretation.

It’s a “love” triangle that plays out into eternity. Three souls tied together in pain and obsession. It’s the internal dialogue that stops time and space and supercedes the physical world. Some take the visuals to be literal, and therefore “absurd.” I view them as literal, or rather very exact, in their depiction of an emotional landscape.

Part 2

I’ve been listening to Raising Sand since I downloaded it. It was an impulse buy at 6 in the morning— looking for something to listen to during a day of writing html form code with jquery. Love T-Bone Burnett’s production and Marc Ribot’s guitar. You may remember Ribot’s stellar work on Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss‘s voices blend beautifully. Particularly impressed with Plant’s ability to sing harmony, and the rhythm work of bass player Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose.

Taking the torch from Xerox Parc, Apple has lead the field in taking the general computer user beyond the traditional input devices. Graphic User Interface, the mouse, the touchpad, and most recently multi-touch. The direction is a bias against the mechanical for human/computer interaction. Apple decided against a mechanical keyboard for the iPhone, and it looks like they’re continuing in that direction with this patent filing. Unwired View makes the filing a little more understandable.

The keyboard becomes a software environment, and that opens a world of possibilities. We’re very early in this game, and currently the mechanical keyboard is much more usable than the various virtual keyboards out there. We prefer the tactile feedback, but that’s the challenge Apple appears to be tackling. How do you put a beautiful simulation of the act of typing on the glass?

The current form of human / computer interaction via KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) has been an unnatural configuration from the start. It’s always been about the needs of the machine and the network. It’s only through the expansion of interaction modes that the current configuration of computing can be de-centered and distributed into a ubiquitous set of new devices. The iPhone is a tentative first step on that journey.

Listening to a Jon Udell podcast is a real pleasure. I usually listen while walking around downtown San Francisco on my lunch hour. Jon takes the most obscure corners of the technology world and makes them engaging. He’s very good at connecting things. His conversation with Stuart Weibel is a great example. He starts with metadata issues around catagorizing books and ends up with WorldCat, the best possible way to find a book in a library— and possibly my new favorite search engine.

Yes, I know. It’s easy to find any book on Amazon, but sometimes you don’t need to buy a book, you just need to read it. And with WorldCat you can find any book held in any participating library. And because we’re talking about libraries, most are participating. Unlike the world of commerce where incompatible proprietary standards are considered a competitive advantage, libraries just want to help people find books. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a side note, my favorite library doesn’t participate in WorldCat. It’s a membership library in Downtown San Francisco called The Mechanics’ Institute Library. It was established in 1854 and has one of the most beautiful chess rooms you’ll ever set eyes on.

Microsoft has launched “Healthvault,” a private archive for personal medical data. Google, sans Bosworth, is trying to figure out how to connect people searching for health information with quality results. Both of these are very serious approaches to a serious issue.

I’m wondering if it’s Mahalo that has the right approach. Calacanis is focusing on the top 20,000 searches— which fills the front page of Mahalo with celebrity gossip, gadgets, music, television, movies, etc. Stuff that’s obviously popular. It’s a little like the People Magazine of search. “People” started as a single page in Time Magazine, it was like dessert. Time realized some people like dessert all the time.

Mahalo does some nice “How to” pages, for instance How to speak French, or How to play the Guitar. Mahalo is mostly for searching and finding the fun part of the internet, elective studies. But what about serious things like health? Well there’s more in the Mahalo health category than I would have thought. The Cancer category has decent set of pages. Currently you can search and find information a large number of healthcare topics, from autism to West Nile Virus. The topic of healthcare is particularly suited to Calacanis’s idea of search results shaped by a smart person. When an individual searches for health information, they’re not looking for a list of links. They’re looking for answers.

Note to Jason: let’s see some more “How to” pages in your healthcare category. The concept and format of your SERPs gives you an order of magnitude advantage over Google’s method of delivering information. The key here is the emotional charge of the search. Of course there’s a charge when people search for gossip about their favorite celebrity, but there’s also a very serious emotional charge when you search for information when you, or someone you love, has an illness and you need guidance.

Travel and airports seem to show up on Twitter all the time. The in-between times that were private moments of boredom and pain become a kind of blues refrain echoing through Twitter and the other microblogging venues.

It’s Dave Winer stuck in the Lone Star State, Jeremy Keith boarding a plane to San Francisco, Hugh Macleod picking up his baggage, or Steve Gillmor interviewing someone walking through an airport terminal. We work in the off hours, and now we transcribe our private moments of boredom and wedge a conversation into walk to the security gate.

Perhaps it’s Ev Williams fault, asking us what we’re doing— when we’re doing something very boring. But because it’s boring, we need an outlet for our pain. Twitter beckons.

Paul Graham’s essay on “How to do Philosophy” deserves a serious response. And there have been some, here, here, and here. Like many who begin studying philosophy, he’s disappointed that he didn’t find any magical, universal truths. And in reaction plays “gotcha” philosophy, trying to show why the history of philosophy is filled with wrong ideas. He ends up with a combination of early Wittgenstein and Utilitariansim. But this is clearly a geek’s eye view of philosophy. It doesn’t conform, so it must be bent and shaped into a reasonable algorithm. I’d suggest that Graham read more widely in late Wittgenstein and the work of Richard Rorty on Utilitarianism. Philosophy is more often about deepening a question, than the kind of fixed answers he seems to be searching for.