The Next Virtual “Cottage Industry?”

It was hard for me to start writing this week. Suffering from a combination of writer’s block and a series of allergies made it tough to put words on the screen. However, there came from the Internet a significant amount of chatter that the writer’s block or sickness didn’t matter anymore. The discussion among those focused on 
microblogging and all of its derivates was centered around two major 
selloffs. First, Powers of N was purchased by the Twitter group. 
Powers of N made a handy little program called “I Want Sandy,” which was a cloud computing reference system. The user could email the time of the meeting to those who needed to attend and cc the 
email to Sandy. Sandy would then translate the message of the email 
and format it to any calendar program. Sandy could also recall any 
information sent to her by the user. “I Want Sandy,” and the rest of the cloud programs supported by Power of N will be turned off before the end of the month. Sandy was a significant example of 
the Internet being used as “public memory,” and it will be 
missed.

The second bit of bad news came from Pownce as they were 
bought out by Six Apart. Pownce was microblogging service that 
incorporated the ability to post video and other mediated sources in 
a very fluid datastream. Pownce never had the audience of 
Twitter and Pownce was lost in the shadow of Twitter and other social 
media service. Six Apart is also shutting down Pownce before the end 
of the year. I guess that this leads to two points 
that I want to address. The first, shorter point is that the closing 
of Pownce makes it more critical to use services such as ping.fm as 
a way a keeping the public discourse from dying if one of the 
microblogging/social media services decides to shut their doors. The 
second point to take from this how the economy is affecting the tech 
industry and by extension the virtual economy of the Internet, in a 
more distinct way when compared to the dotcom bubble burst of the 
early part of the decade. As described by other tech writers, there 
was a considerable amount of turnover in the tech industry in the first 
half of the decade, which lead to a higher level of innovation and 
the rebirth of the “garage corporation.” Facebook, Twitter, and 
other “Web 2.0” products were created during the downturn. It 
would seem that we are on the verge of the next “cottage industry” moment of the industry. However, the question that must be addressed 
before the tech sector can advance to “Web 3.0” is the impact of 
funding. That is, with the economy being affected across the board 
instead of merely the tech sector, where will the funding come from that 
will help fuel innovation?