Last December I posted on “The Internet Big Five,” noting their relative strengths and the market cap of each. Since that time, the Five have only gotten stronger, adding a cumulative $272 billion in market cap (much of that is Apple, but Amazon and Facebook – assuming the offering does as expected on Friday – have also increased quite a bit). All in all, nearly 30% increase in value for these five companies – sort of makes me wish I was an investor, rather than a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ll also check the number of engaged users for each platform, to see if there are any significant shifts, though I don’t recall seeing any in the news recently (save Facebook crossing 900 million users). It is interesting to note that Facebook, should it hold its supposed valuation, will be more highly valued than Amazon.

A reminder as to why I’ve made a point of watching the Big Five, from my original and secondary posts:

..there’s more to the selection of this Big Five than just market cap. In fact, there are four main criteria for making it into the Big Five.

First, as I began to describe above, the companies must have financial heft, both in terms of large equity capitalizations, significant cash on hand, and a defensible core profit making machine. This gives them the ability to throw their weight around: they can make strategic acquisitions (like Google’s acquisition of Motorola), and they can leverage their profit centers and cash positions in any number of ways that offer them flexibility to play the corporate game at the very highest levels.

Second, the companies must have scale in terms of direct reach to consumers. By this I mean their brands are used as meaningful platforms by hundreds of millions of people on a frequent basis.

Third, the companies must have deep engagement with those consumers, the kind of engagement that builds brand and creates massive stores of useful data. The relationship between the brand and its customer has to be meaningful and consistent (therefore creating permission to extract a premium and offer new products and services). It takes an ongoing service relationship for such engagement to occur….

More on the product strength of the Big Five here.

Pardon the site-specific interruption, but as part of my ongoing quest to keep my content here on my own site, I’ve begun posting pictures of stuff here that I’d otherwise put on Instagram, Twitter or other services. Given that many of you read Searchblog for my trenchant commentary as opposed to my preferences in pinots, I promised you that I’d create new RSS feeds. Well, here they are!

You’ve got a lot of choices – Everything (all photos and posts), Everything But Photos, Headlines Only, and Photos Only.

Many thanks to the team at Blend for helping me make this happen.

Enjoy!

The remarkable news today that, among other important board moves, Ross Levinsohn will take over as interim CEO at Yahoo may well mark the end of an era – should his tenure stick, perhaps we can stop talking about the web pioneer in past or conditional tenses. If you’d like to get to know him a bit better, here’s an interview I did with him at Web 2 last Fall.

Last Friday Businessweek ran a story on Diaspora, a social platform built from what might be called Facebook anti-matter. It’s a great read that chronicles the project’s extraordinary highs and lows, from Pebble-like Kickstarter success to the loss of a founder to suicide. Given the overwhelming hype around Facebook’s IPO this week, it’s worth remembering such a thing exists – and even though it’s in private beta, Diaspora is one of the largest open source projects going right now, and boasts around 600,000 beta testers.

I’ve watched Diaspora from the sidelines, but anyone who reads this site regularly will know that I’m rooting for it. I was surprised – and pleased – to find out that Diaspora is executing something of a “pivot” – retaining its core philosophy of being a federated platform where “you own your own data” while at the same time adding new Tumblr and Pinterest-like content management features, as well as integration with – gasp! – Facebook.  And this summer, the core team behind the service is joining Y Combinator in the Valley – a move that is sure to accelerate its service from private beta to public platform.

I like Diaspora because it’s audacious, it’s driven by passion, and it’s very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That’s sort of like deciding to build a better search engine – very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure. But what’s really audacious is the vision that drives Diaspora – that everyone owns their own data, and everyone has the right to do with it what they want. The vision is supported by a federated technology platform – and once you federate, you lose central control as a business. Then, business models get very, very hard. So you’re not only competing against Facebook, you’re also competing against the reality of the marketplace – centralized domains are winning right now (as I pointed out here).

It seems what Diaspora is attempting to do is take the functionality and delight of the dependent web, and mix it with the freedom and choice offered by the independent web. Of course, that sounds pretty darm good to me.

Given the timing of Facebook’s public debut, the move to Y Combinator, and perhaps just my own gut feel, I think Diaspora is one to watch in coming months. As of two days ago, the site is taking registrations for its public debut. Sign up here.

A very happy Friday night with my wife, mother in law, and kids (and tomatoes, kale, wild rice, et al), made round by this MacRostie Pinot, 2007. Yippee, it’s the weekend!

The Soho Skylight, awaiting its incarnation as site for the 7th annual CM Summit.

As New York City gears up for its annual Internet Week, the team at FMP has been diligently working away on creating another stellar program for our 7th annual CM Summit, held this coming Monday and Tuesday in SoHo.

Last year we eliminated panels from our program, the move was met with great success – attendees love our fast-paced approach, which features short, high-value presentations from leaders in digital marketing and technology platforms, interspersed with conversations with CMOs from Fortune 500 brands and entrepreneurs driving change in digital.

Monday kicks off at 2pm with one of New York City’s media elites — Barry Diller of IAC, Expedia & Trip Advisor. Diller is more recently known for backing the controversial streaming video startup Aereo as well as high-flyer Pinterest. After his conversation, we move into a rapid fire succession of presentations including Joe Frydl, recently appointed SVP of Marketing at FMP, who sets the stage for this year’s theme with his talk on The Law of Content on the Web.

That’s a perfect segueway to our next speaker, Linda Descano, President & CEO of Women & Co., a service of Citi that brings together the voices of independent writers on relevant and thoughtful financial content. Linda is also a Managing Director and the Head of Digital Partnerships for North America Marketing at Citi, driving brand health and customer engagement goals.

After a deep focus on content, we move to the world of analytics with Amy Chang, Head of Product for Google Analytics, who will show and tell the Next Generation of Measurement. Amy is followed by Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners, who gives his State of the State, a detailed look at today’s marketing landscape in line with the conference theme of Marketing from the 30,000-Foot View. Expect to laugh a few times….

Post refreshments, we continue with a series of conversations with Lisa Weinstein, President of Global Digital & Search at Starcom MediaVest Group; Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director of The White House Office of Digital Strategy; and Alfredo Gangotena, Chief Marketing Officer of MasterCard.

Day one’s sponsor spotlight is Luminate. CEO Bob Lisbonne takes us on a visual journey that highlights New Opportunities for Consumers, Publishers & Brands.

Tuesday, May 15th presents a full conference day that begins at 9am sharp with an intellectual and entertaining conversation with one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected investors, Ron Conway of SV Angels. From there we move forward with a day centered around the industry’s major technology platforms with presentations from Microsoft, Twitter, Nokia, Tapjoy (a youthful yet successful startup that’s creating a marketplace for mobile games), Salesforce.com, and StumbleUpon.

Day two conversations feature:

• Heather Armstrong, mother, blogger and independent publisher of Dooce, one of Forbes’ Top 100 Websites for Women.

• Marc Speichert, Chief Marketing Officer at L’Oreal USA, not only responsible for driving and enhancing innovation for the company’s Consumer, Luxury, and Professional Products, as well as Active Cosmetics, in this role, Marc also runs Corporate Strategic Marketing, Media & Digital, and Consumer Market Intelligence.

• Jim Lanzone, President of CBS Interactive, on a discourse about the current and future state of premium video content and Internet video channels.

• Clara Shih, Founder of enterprise social media software company Hearsay Social and New York Times bestselling author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell and Innovate. 

• Alison Lewis, who’s official title of SVP of Marketing for North America at The Coca-Cola Company really translates to being the force behind how one of America’s historic companies maintains its brand leadership.

To add a little visionary spice to the mix, I’ll also be interviewing Gil Elbaz, an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. As the CEO of Factual, Gil lives in “the data layer,” making data more accessible for machines, developers, and marketers.

Additional companies presenting include The Wyndham Hotel Group, Sharethrough, and Upworthy. These sessions help highlight how existing content around the web can create real business ROI with just the right amount of attention and curation.

Day two’s sponsor spotlight is Meebo. CEO Seth Sternberg will focus on how to Balance User Experience with Revenue Generation. 

We bring the event full circle with closing conversations by two well-respected figures in New York’s digital marketing community: Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Susan Sobbott, President of American Express OPEN.

This year the CM Summit has moved venues, and will be hosted at Skylight Soho (pic above), a creative and beautiful loft space custom-built to accommodate both CM Summit audiences, and the IAB conference which follows.

If you have not already done so, buy your tickets today, and we’ll see you at the CM Summit. 

From our pals at Belle Gloss. This is reasonably priced and rarely disappoints.

And I broke into my stash of Radio Coteau last night and tried the 2010 La Neblina Pinot. One word: Yep.

My RSS feed that will exclude these photos will be ready by Monday, I am told…if you want to see them in all their Pinboard glory, here’s a link to my Wine page on Pinterest.

Larry Lessig is an accomplished author, lawyer, and professor, and until recently, was one of the leading active public intellectuals in the Internet space. But as I wrote in my review of his last book (Is Our Republic Lost?), in the past few years Lessig has changed his focus from Internet law to reforming our federal government.

But that doesn’t mean Lessig has stopped thinking about our industry, as the dialog below will attest. Our conversation came about last month after I finished reading Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2. The original book, written in 1999, is still considered an authoritative text on how the code of computing platforms interacts with our legal and social codes. In 2006, Lessig “crowdsourced” an update to his book, and released it as “Version 2.0.” I’d never read the updated work (and honestly didn’t remember the details of the first book), so finally, six years later, I dove in again.

It’s a worthy dive, but not an easy one. Lessig is a lawyer by nature, and his argument is laid out like proofs in a case. Narrative is sparse, and structure sometimes trumps writing style. But his essential point – that the Internet is not some open “wild west” destined to always be free of regulation, is soundly made. In fact, Lessig argues, the Internet is quite possibly the most regulable technology ever invented, and if we don’t realize that fact, and protect ourselves from it, we’re in for some serious pain down the road. And for Lessig, the government isn’t the only potential regulator. Instead, Lessig argues, commercial interests may become the most pervasive regulators on the Internet.

Indeed, during the seven years between Code’s first version and its second, much had occurred to prove Lessig’s point. But even as Lessig was putting the finishing touches on the second version of his manuscript, a new force was erupting from the open web: Facebook. And a year after that, the iPhone redefined the Internet once again.

In Code, Lessig enumerates several examples of how online services create explicit codes of control – including the early AOL, Second Life, and many others. He takes the reader though important lessons in understanding regulation as more than just governmental – explaining normative (social), market (commercial), and code-based (technological) regulation. He warns that once we commit our lives to commercial services that hold our identity, a major breach of security will most likely force the government into enacting overzealous and anti-constitutional measures (think 9/11 and the Patriot Act). He makes a case for the proactive creation of an intelligent identity layer for the Internet, one that might offer just the right amount of information for the task at hand. In 2006, such an identity layer was a controversial idea – no one wanted the government, for example, to control identity on the web.

But for reasons we’re still parsing as a culture, in the six years since the publication of Code v2, nearly 1 billion of us have become comfortable with Facebook as our defacto identity, and hundreds of millions of us have become inhabitants of Apple’s iOS.

Instead of going into more detail on the book (as I have in many other reviews), I thought I’d reach out to Lessig and ask him about this turn of events. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our dialog. I think you’ll find it provocative.

As to the book: If you consider yourself active in the core issues of the Internet industry, do yourself a favor and read it. It’s worth your time.

Q: After reading your updated Code v2, which among many other things discusses how easily the Internet might become far more regulated than it once was, I found myself scribbling one word in the margins over and over again. That word was “Facebook.”

You and your community updated your 1999 classic in 2006, a year or two before Facebook broke out, and several years before it became the force it is now. In Code you cover the regulatory architectures of places where people gather online, including MUDS, AOL, and the then-hot darling known as Second Life. But the word Facebook isn’t in the text.

What do you make of Facebook, given the framework of Code v2?

Lessig: If I were writing Code v3, there’d be a chapter — right after I explained the way (1) code regulates, and (2) commerce will use code to regulate — titled: “See, e.g., Facebook.” For it strikes me that no phenomena since 2006 better demonstrates precisely the dynamic I was trying to describe. The platform is dominant, and built into the platform are a million ways in which behavior is regulated. And among those million ways are 10 million instances of code being use to give to Facebook a kind of value that without code couldn’t be realized. Hundreds of millions from across the world live “in” Facebook. It more directly (regulating behavior) than any government structures and regulates their lives while there. There are of course limits to what Facebook can do. But the limits depend upon what users see. And Facebook has not yet committed itself to the kind of transparency that should give people confidence. Nor has it tied itself to the earlier and enabling values of the internet, whether open source or free culture.

Q: Jonathan Zittrain wrote his book two years after Code v2, and warned of non-generative systems that might destroy the original values of the Internet. Since then, Apple iOS (the “iWorld”) and Facebook have blossomed, and show no signs of slowing down. Do you believe we’re in a pendulum swing, or are you more pessimistic – that consumers are voting with their dollars, devices, and data for a more closed ecosystem?

Lessig: The trend JZ identified is profound and accelerating, and most of us who celebrate the “free and open” net are simply in denial. Facebook now lives oblivious to the values of open source software, or free culture. Apple has fully normalized the iNannyState. And unless Google’s Android demonstrates how open can coexist with secure, I fear the push away from our past will only continue. And then when our i9/11 event happens — meaning simply a significant and destructive cyber event, not necessarily tied to any particular terrorist group — the political will to return to control will be almost irresistible.

The tragedy in all this is that it doesn’t have to be this way. If we could push to a better identity layer in the net, we could get both better privacy and better security. But neither side in this extremist’s battle is willing to take the first step towards this obvious solution. And so in the end I fear the extremists I like least will win.

Q: You seem profoundly disappointed in our industry. What can folks who want to make a change do?

Lessig: Not at all. The industry is doing what industry does best — doing well, given the rules as they are. What industry is never good at (and is sometimes quite evil at) is identifying the best mix of rules. Government is supposed to do something with that. Our problem is that we have today such a fundamentally dysfunctional government that we don’t even recognize the idea that it might have a useful role here. So we get stuck in these policy-dead-ends, with enormous gains to both sides left on the table.

And that’s only to speak about the hard problems — which security in the Net is. Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also can’t solve, not because the answer isn’t clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the “copyright wars” — practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editor’s note: abolishing DRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldn’t allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.

—-

I could have gone on for some time with Lessig, but I wanted to stop there, and invite your questions in the comments section. Lessig is pretty busy with his current work, which focuses on those lobbyists and the culture of money in Congress, but if he can find the time, he’ll respond to your questions in the comments below, or to me in email, and I’ll update the post.

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Other works I’ve reviewed: 

You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier (review)

Wikileaks And the Age of Transparency  by Micah Sifry (review)

Republic Lost by Larry Lessig (review)

Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (my review)

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (my review)

The Corporation (film – my review).

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (my review)

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle (my review)

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (my review)

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (my review)

The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain (my review)

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman (my review)

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku (my review)