Clay Shirky on LazyWeb.org
Clay Shirky has written an article about the LazyWeb.org site, which collects feature and application requests from bloggers and other random passers-by. At least he does name-check some of the site’s predecessors, such as ShouldExist, and the wonderfully-named halfbakery. However, he also makes some rather dubious statements, such as:
However, nearly a decade of experimentation with single-purpose portals shows that most of them fail.What of Google or Weather.com or Dictionary.com? I don’t think being “single-purpose” necessarily hurts a site; rather, I would say that it’s difficult for any one site to garner a critical mass of traffic. Therefore, the problem with upstart sites that depend on user-generated content is that there’s less incentive for users to contribute, given that their audience will probably be small. (This is why Amazon.com is practically the only ecommerce site that has a significant number of customer reviews for a given book or album.) There’s also the specter of CDDB-like foul play, in which the company could later try to charge the users for access to the content that they had contributed.
Here is where the LazyWeb site, and other sites that make central use of TrackBack-type mechanisms, have a clear advantage. The actual user-generated content resides on the users’ own blogs, which allows them to retain control over their own content, and makes the core audience more of a known quantity. The TrackBack mechanism allows distributed discussions on a particular topic to be brought together in one location on the web, without requiring much effort from the bloggers or the owner of the TrackBacked site.
As for the idea of the “imperative” LazyWeb, wherein talking about an idea actually causes it to happen, rather than merely discovering that it’s already happened, I have my doubts. There are infinite numbers of people who would like someone else to do things for them for free. Shirky does identify the social aspect of implementing a LazyWeb idea:
Furthermore, LazyWeb etiquette involves publicizing any solution that does arise, meaning that the developer gets free public attention, even if only to a select group.I would attribute much of the early success of the LazyWeb meme to the fact that those who’ve invoked it have been relatively well-known in the blogosphere (i.e. Steven Johnson, Cory Doctorow). They have large audiences, which means that they’re more likely to find a taker, because more people see the request, and they have more fame to offer the taker. Without this “star power”, I don’t think that LazyWeb requests will be substantially more successful than requests posted to ShouldExist.
January 8th, 2003 at 12:33 pm
Google is multi-purpose. As for Weather.com and dictionary.com, those replace existing classes of reference lookups.
What has tended to fail are the “If we could aggregate everyone who wants printer toner/barbeque sauce/new software, then we’ll be able to get rich/get famous/rule the world!”
Shouldexist, halfbakery et all all fall into this trap, because they are sites that assume that when people have an idea, they will leave their current context and go to those sites.
The LazyWeb, on the other hand, lets people make the requests in their own contexts (which is to say, in their own blogs.)
You misunderstand the importance of Ben’s work when you think of blog star power/lazyweb as an XOR choice. Unlike halfbakery, the LazyWeb lets Steven, say, invoke the LazyWeb from his own blog, while getting the additional distribution free. LazyWeb is an aggregator and syndicator of existing requests, not an alternative to them.
-clay
January 8th, 2003 at 1:00 pm
Clay Shirky wrote:
“The LazyWeb, on the other hand, lets people make the requests in their own contexts (which is to say, in their own blogs.) You misunderstand the importance of Ben’s work when you think of blog star power/lazyweb as an XOR choice. Unlike halfbakery, the LazyWeb lets Steven, say, invoke the LazyWeb from his own blog, while getting the additional distribution free. LazyWeb is an aggregator and syndicator of existing requests, not an alternative to them.”
I think that we’re mostly in agreement on that point–I wrote:
“Here is where the LazyWeb site, and other sites that make central use of TrackBack-type mechanisms, have a clear advantage. The actual user-generated content resides on the users’ own blogs, which allows them to retain control over their own content, and makes the core audience more of a known quantity. The TrackBack mechanism allows distributed discussions on a particular topic to be brought together in one location on the web, without requiring much effort from the bloggers or the owner of the TrackBacked site.”
Clay:
“Google is multi-purpose. As for Weather.com and dictionary.com, those replace existing classes of reference lookups.”
I would argue that Google originally became popular because it did one thing (websearching) very well. It has grown since then, mostly because the folks at Google are smart cookies and keep finding uses for their tech. But I think that most people still go to google to find stuff on the web.
Isn’t a blog just a “single-purpose portal” for finding out what someone’s thinking about? I don’t go to your webpage to read my email or check the weather, but that doesn’t make your site a failure.
I think we’re just quibbling over semantics here–the important point is that users don’t want to make the effort to hand their generated content over to any old site. If their blogging tool does it semi-automatically for them, then it’s more likely to happen. The LazyWeb site isn’t substantially novel in concept (compared to ShouldExist, etc.), but it does indeed have advantages in the implementation that Ben has chosen.
Now, the LazyWeb site may have more submissions than ShouldExist, because it’s easier to submit using TrackBack, but I’m curious to see whether people will be more likely to read through LazyWeb and decide to implement something, simply because there are more options there. My intuition is that the “stars” will still be more likely to have successful “imperative LazyWeb” submissions, and the readers who do the implementing will have read the ideas on originating sites rather than on LazyWeb.org.
January 8th, 2003 at 3:06 pm
One of my favorite quotations comes from Natalie Jerimijenko, who said “people do dumb things with smart objects, and smart things with dumb objects.”
The goodness of Lazyweb is that it is truly dumb: make it easy for someone else to implement my idea. Frankly, if TrackBack weren’t becoming burdened with overly complex ideas about who-wrote-what content-where, a too-complex implementation, and a misleading BrandName, it too would be a dumb and useful idea. At the moment it is merely a smart one.