Linking Local - The wikiDOMO Blog

Digital Media and the Status Quo!

Digital media has failed to deliver on its promise. We have worked so hard to create a “new media” industry, but we failed to realize that we simply digitized an old media model. For the most part the digital media industry has not been very innovative, not at its core. Yes, some of the peripheral aspects have been creative, but those innovations sit on top of a model that is a pure rip-off of a century old model - a model that won’t stand the test of time.

This reality struck me especially hard over the last week. I met up with a few more than usual number of friends and colleagues in the media industry, and it’s been a while since I have felt part of the industry (this comes from a decision that I made a couple of years ago). Now, as I meet up with them, it’s as if I’m seeing the industry with a new set of eyes.

All the insiders are doing what they have been doing all along, dealing with the ups and downs of the industry. Some are happy to see investment in their organization, others are dreading the amount of destruction that has happened and wondering how much more is yet to come. Others, are simply dealing with another cycle, another down slope in the rollercoaster that is media. It’s as if they’re stuck on an endless ride that loops and will never lead anywhere. That is except for the brutal ejections that happen so frequently that they have become part of what is acceptable.

Those of you who are not in media might have a tough time understanding what the media industry is. It’s probably not what you think it is. For the most part it has little to do with content. It’s about advertising. Well, the selling of adverting.  Then you have all the support organizations that help make that happen, the audience measurement, sales organizations and technology companies. It’s a highly integrated industry. The digital part of the industry, the one I’m most familiar with, modeled itself on the traditional offline industries of print, television and radio, so it’s not much of a surprise that things are as they are.

So what does this all mean? That’s the 64 thousand dollar question.  To me, it means that as the fundamentals of what works changes, the models based on those fundamentals will fail. And, whether the model is analogue or digital if it is based on a principle that is no longer true, then it will fail.

The fundamental principle of media has been the aggregation of audience and the selling of access to that audience to advertisers. That worked when there were huge barriers to entry in media. When only the few had the power to publish or broadcast. That has all changed, and yet we cling to the model.

Today, anyone can publish something. In fact, individuals publish billions of times more than the media does. That will continue to make traditional media less important and therefore reduce their ability to profit from their exclusive powers of reach. I’m not the first to point this out, but its impact is lost on most of us, especially, those inside the machine. I hate to see what will be the horrible impact on the people in the industry that I played a small role in building.

I don’t know the solution. I’m working on what I think is a model that will evolve to replace media, but that’s not going to solve this problem. The problem being, we created an industry on a failing model and all those involved are going to end up paying for it.

 

2011 wikiDOMO Awards at Hamilton Food and Drink Fest

What a great event we were able to participate in last weekend! For the third year in a row, wikiDOMO has been the proud sponsor of the wikiDOMO Awards at the Hamilton Food and Drink Fest.

The event was fantastic! This was the second year the show was held at Copps Coliseum and they seemed to have ironed out the kinks. More space, better layout and overall a very successful event. The crowds loved it - we interacted with so many people and got a real feel for how they enjoyed the show - and it was a huge success.

As in past years, we had visitors vote for their favourite Wine, Beer, Food and Overall experience.  Once again, we had hundreds of ballots completed and we were able to present the Awards on the last day of the three day event. It still amazes me how passionate some attendees are about the awards; many took the time to go back and confirm the name of their favourite exhibitors. After  several hours at an event , that says a lot! 

 

The Wine Category was highly contested this year with a number of exhibitors coming in very close to the winners. But, Treasury Wine Estates was able to pull off the win. The folks at Treasury seemed quite surprised and were quite happy to accept the certificate on behalf of the firm. They have some excellent Wolf Blass wines that I had the pleasure of tasting – though not as much as I would have liked since I was working and had to limit myself. 

 

The story in the Beer Category is quite different. The new Molson M beer was the runaway winner. It might have had something to do with the spirit of their very enthusiastic team. I must say, I also thought it was one of the better displays at the show. Awesome job guys!

 

Unlike many other food and drink shows, food plays a huge role at the Food & Drink Fest. The local restaurants fight for the hearts and taste buds of the attendees. And what a fight it was. A number of restaurants had excellent results in the Best Food Category. A standout, but not the winner was Acclamation - they lost by the thinnest of margins - and had quite the buzz going.  The winner of the Best Food Award was My Thai, a previous winner from two years ago in 2009. Once again, they did an amazing job with presentation  - the carved fruit and vegetables on display - and their tasty and generous portions. 

 

Last, but certainly not least, was the Best Overall Experience - which went to the exhibitor that offered the best experience. And this year, it was truly an experience. First time exhibitors, Motts Clamato won by a very wide margin. It seems that the Caesar School was a total hit. They were completely packed all through the show, so much so that even though some of the Mott’s team wanted to join us on stage they couldn’t because of how busy they were. It was left to their fearless leader to represent them.

I hope that the folks at Beau Monde Productions continue to provide us with the opportunity to sponsor the awards - and most importantly - to be a part of this excellent event. I’m looking forward to seeing both the exhibitors and many of the repeat attendees at next year’s show.

Lastly, I would like to thank all the wonderful folks that helped us at the show. We would not have been able to do it without you.

By Jose Leal and Vesi Leal

‘The Master Switch’ an absolute must read!

We’ve never blogged about a book here on Linking Local, but The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu is so powerful a book, that it has caused me to want to write this. The book does an amazing job of analyzing what Wu calls ‘The Cycle’ - a predictable pattern that many of the early information industries followed. In reading the patterns of the cycle on the telephone, film, radio and television industries, I started to equate it to the cycle of human life; astonishing birth, precarious infancy, wild adolescence, steady adulthood, possible midlife crisis, relaxed retirement and ultimately untimely death. Though this pattern doesn't always map directly to the histories as laid out by Wu, I can’t help but relate them in this way, making it - in my mind at least - much more poignant.

 

Though the book covers the often perceived distinct industries of telecommunications, entertainment and media industries of the last century,  Wu wonderfully describes the entanglement of empires that constituted the dawn of the information age.  Starting with Bell and the telephone and continuing through to Google, Wu works his magic by tracing a critical involvement of AT&T in the existence of many, if not all, aspects of the information age.

 

Wu concludes his analysis of the information industries by calling for what he calls the Separation Principles.  Though I can’t do it justice here, I understand it as a call for creating a strong separation between content and distribution.  Much like the separation of the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. Government, he suggests that though a single central command system may be more efficient, it does not provide the essential protections we need in terms of rights and freedoms.

 

The lessons learned from this book made me reflect as to what might be the next period of the information age; the Communal Information Age or what we see today in its infancy as Open-Data and the Semantic Web. An era when not only is access to information ubiquitous through the use of the Internet, but where public ownership, aggregation and curation of many types of information becomes vital to how we interact with data/information in the future. Essentially, applying to many categories of information the principles that modern cities have applied to public water and other public utilities for centuries. What will happen when not only the transmission, but much of what is transmitted is seen as a public good? The concerns that the Separation Principles attempt to address will be even greater and the risks even greater.

 

By Jose A. Leal

Twitter:  @jaleal

City of Vancouver First to Release Budget as Open-Data

For the first time ever a major city will be making their capital budget available to the public as Open-Data. Some details of the $300 million plus budget have already been posted to the vancouver.ca website. But, the City Council has committed to publish the full 2011 Capital Budget to the data.vancouver.ca website by April.

It will be very interesting to see the level of detail in the released budget. In general, this is a great step forward for Open-Data, but those of us who are passionate about openness will always want to see more granularity in the data.

On another point, the most interesting of the data releases has been the Vancouver Business License data. It seems to be getting updated on the nightly basis and currently has about 50,000 records. It provides very interesting insights into the number of new business registrations, as well as in what part of the city and business categories.

Keep up the good work City of Vancouver. You’re leading governments into a place that will make our democracy that much better.

By Jose A. Leal

Twitter: @jaleal

 

The emergence of Linked Open Data!

Linked Data as a concept is rather difficult to comprehend, much less explain. It gets even more complicated when you combine it with open-data into what is known as Linked Open Data (LOD). As open-data becomes more common there will be an even greater need to link the information contained in those datasets to other bits of information in other datasets. For years now academia has been researching the concept of linked-data. As usual the need for such research has not been readily apparent to those of us in industry. It’s not until recently that we’re starting to understand the real need for information to be connected.

As proponents of open-data we understand that the way open-data is currently made available is not as it should be. We’re in the early stages of a data revolution, one that will change the way just about every piece of data is dealt with. As more and more data becomes openly available we need ways to manage the flood. Currently, most open-data is published in databases and in many cases it’s not current – this is because they’re constructed as copies of live databases a snapshot of a moment in time. This means that the data more often than not, is out-of-date.

Another issue with open-data is how it is structured and related. For example, many records found in a city’s open-data database refer to locations and street addresses. Events that take place at the same location also have an address. And those addresses are probably not formatted the same. It makes sense, because they most likely come from different databases that are managed by different departments and people.

For open-data to succeed we need to get rid of structure inaccuracies, discrepancies and duplication. Imagine for example, that there was a single LOD point for each street address of a location/place and that the address information was maintained by the municipality. As information about organizations, events and just about anything else becomes linked to that authoritative point, the information does not need to be duplicated, nor would it be mangled by different database structures. Not only city data could link to it, but any data that referred to that address.

This is but one simple example of how linked open-data will solve the real issues of open-data. It’s time the public, industry and governments come together to create the future of data, what we will call for a short time, Linked Open Data. After all, once all kinds of data, including open-data become linked we won’t think of it as anything else, but just data.

LOD dataset diagram thanks to:  Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch

By Jose Leal

 

Canadian Politicians Slow to Back Open-Data

Unlike the UK and the United States, the Canadian government has been slow to create a policy on open-data. I’m talking about providing access to data that taxpayers have funded. This means getting access to databases like the stimulus spending with breakdowns by regions and project type – something the U.S. government did but the Canadian government continues to resist.

It’s not all bad news. Federal bureaucrats have been drafting an open data plan for nearly 8 months and are working to launch an open-data portal. But they’re most likely being held back by the parliamentary committee, which after nearly a year has failed to come up with a recommendation. Put simply, the federal government is slowing things down, possibly hoping that the current demand for open-data will somehow subside.

This is happening as more and more cities in Canada and across the world are opening up their databases. Paris is the latest major city to launch its portal. The site is called ParisData and is currently listing about 20 different datasets, ranging from lists of concessions in parks to planning applications.

But, the movement is not limited to large cities or city governments, The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), has released a flood of open-data that has sparked a number of websites and mobile applications.

Our focus here at wikiDOMO is on creating and maintaining quality Open Marketplace data, but we strongly support the opening of government databases. Ultimately, all data is marketplace data. Our goal is to support and encourage those releasing open-data as well as those who create innovative solutions with that data.

Image credit: justgrimes' 

By Jose Leal

 

British Columbia Liberals promise Open-Data!

Liberal candidates promise to create an open-data website, both Christy Clark and George Abbott promise to create website where citizens can download government data for free.

If the Liberals win and fulfill their promise, it would make BC the first Canadian province to release government information under open-data standards. The provincial government would be following in the footsteps of cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. In the case of Vancouver, some very interesting projects have already emerged. For example, Luke Closs and Kevin Jones developed http://vantrash.ca, a trash collection reminder service utilizing Vancouver’s open-data.

Meanwhile, a group called OpenDataBC held the OpenDataBC Hackathon event on January 22, 2011. The group was formed to help to foster collaboration around open-data between the citizens of British Columbia by finding new datasets, submitting ideas and monitoring open-data development in the province.

At the event seven projects where worked on, ranging from http://OpenLegislature.ca to MyRep (http://myrep.dev.opendatabc.ca), an application that lets citizens easily locate their local, provincial and federal representatives.

The value of history in an Open Marketplace

A small group of dedicated individuals have been working on an initiative called Open Marketplace (OM) for some time. The OM project has been a huge learning process for all of us. Put simply, OM is about creating an open platform for marketplace information. This includes everything commercial, non-commercial, from governmental to religious and all aspects of these including places, people, products, services, events and so one. It’s a huge goal, but we know it takes big ideas to change the world.

In working through OM, we’ve dealt with a whole host of issues. I’d like to tell you about one of them, the concept of history in data and in the marketplace.

In high school one of my teachers kept saying something that really stuck with me.  “Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Over the years, I’ve heard the saying tossed about many a time, but usually in a negative sense, since more often than not, we don’t have the insight of history or apply what we learn from it.
When we started working on OM, I started thinking about the role that history has in the marketplace, more specifically the history of places. As we gathered place data (business listings), the issue of old or obsolete data came to the forefront. What is the value of a listing for a business that is no longer in business? Most of us would say, not much, at least not from a traditional directory perspective.

But, a few things struck us; the web is full of outdated directories, so how does a user know if the place in question is simply missing from a particular directory or truly no longer operating? In other words, just because it is not listed in a specific directory - does not mean it doesn’t exist. So we came to the conclusion that a listing of a closed place has more value than no listing at all.

Another reality is that many businesses come and go at the same address. We all know of the local place that everyone refers to for directions or as a landmark. So what happens when that place is gone and we remove all references to it from everywhere? Well, we lose our history and everyone and everything - that at one time or another referred to that place - is now wrong.

Imagine being able to search for a place that is no longer operating, but there is still a listing for it. A listing that identifies it as closed, and it links to the current place in that location - in essence, an archaeological layering of information that maintains the integrity of the marketplace at a certain place in time.

What about the place that moved? Well, this is one that we are still working on - I personally think that we should leave a footprint of the place at that location as well. How we do this we are not yet sure, but this is another step in creating a historical image of the Open Marketplace.

We believe that maintaining historical information will become very valuable over time. Let’s imagine in the future a new restaurateur looking for a location to open up her new restaurant. If she were able to look at the location for the history of places, she might learn that a dozen restaurants have failed in that location and therefore re-think the choice of location. Today this type of information is hard to obtain. In some instances this information can be priceless.

At Open Marketplace we’re as glad to get information that is no longer accurate, as we are to get info that is. Because, we know that at some point someone will correct it, therefore adding another piece of historical value to the fabric of the marketplace.

Picture of closed restaurant by: Editor B

By
Jose Leal

Announcing the wikiDOMO IPhone App

We’re proud to announce that Apple has just approved the wikiDOMO.com IPhone application for release to the ITunes App Store. This is version 0.1 of the app and it has a lot of growing to do – but we think it’s a great start. The app is based on the Open Marketplace (OM) API, so all 2 million plus Canadian profiles of places and people are available and current up to the minute.

 

The app is designed to help you find places near you while you’re on the move. Looking for a restaurant? Open up the app click ‘Locate Me’ and click on the ‘Restaurant’ quick link – that’s it - a list of local restaurants will come up. When you click on a listing you’ll get profile details such as reviews, contact, address, map and listing of people. You will also get a link to the wikiDOMO.com profile – the website profile currently contains some information not yet available on the mobile application.

 

Future of the App

In future versions of the wikiDOMO app, you’ll be able to contribute to profiles just as you can on the wikiDOMO site. You’ll be able to add images, telephone numbers or update the map location - all from your IPhone. This means you will have the full power of a wiki in your hands. It will take some time to get there, but we plan to make the wikiDOMO app the first-ever full read-write wiki IPhone application.

 

About the API

The backbone of the wikiDOMO application is the Open Marketplace API. The OM API is a freely available API (Application Programming Interface) that provides access to the millions of pieces of information already in Open Marketplace. All of this information is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license – allowing applications to utilise the data to create other websites or mobile applications. To learn more about Open Marketplace and the OM API, please visit OpenMarketplace.org.

 

By Jose Leal

Great day at the Bloor West Village, Ukrainian Festival Parade

This past weekend wikiDOMO participated in the Ukrainian Festival Parade.  It’s our second year and it was a great time once again.  We handed out buttons and cards supporting the Bloor West Village and promoting wikiDOMO.com.  The turnout seemed even bigger than last year.

Because this is a municipal election year, we saw a number of politicians, both in the parade and as part of the festival proceedings.  Joe Pantalone, current deputy mayor and 2010 mayoral candidate, was right behind us in the staging area. He and his team were working the crowds. They approached us as we were setting up our dino on the roof of the Prius – so we didn’t have time to chat.  As Joe walked away he commented, “it looks like Rob Ford” while pointing to the inflated dinosaur. I guess that’s how politics role :-)

The parade moved faster this year and we could hardly keep up.  No sooner then we start handing out buttons - designed by Ramal and quickly created by the folks at ARTIK Promotions - and before you knew it the car was a block away.  We did a ton of running so it was good day all around.  It’s always great spending time in Bloor West Village and looking forward to their next event.  It was also nice seeing Mr. Ling – he was too busy with all the festivities, so we did not get a chance to talk, but I hope to see him soon – it’s always a pleasure talking to someone so positive and inspirational.

Thanks goes out to Tamara Mischena, Parade Coordinator for all her work and to everyone from the wikiDOMO team Ramal, Zach, George, Dragan, Vesi and a special thanks to Katherine for taking time from her busy day to help us.

By Jose Leal