Henry Blodget Spells out the Google problem that people have been ignoring, brilliantly.
Until recently everyone seemed to blithely assume that Google is immune to an ad spending pullback because its ads are performance based.
Wrong. Blodget points out the 800lb gorilla in the room, via an ad industry source. Google makes its money selling CPC ads not CPA ads.
If the average amount spent per click drops, because people spend less, then the value per click drops and therefore so does the CPC revenue.
Apple's market cap is currently $119 Billion, at the beginning of the year it was around $175 Billion.
Google's market cap is currently $158 Billion.
The economy looks fragile: housing is a bust and banks have hemorrhaged cash, insurance companies are teetering, employment looks dubious, gas prices are high and consumer confidence weakening.
But in SF and Silicon Valley people are partying like its 1999, because VC money is buying the drinks again. Should they be?
You would think that tech stocks would do well in this market, of cheap exports and Web 2.0 hype, but the reality is quite the opposite.
Amongst the best performing stocks this year, are Walmart and General Motors . Among the worst are tech stocks like Apple.
Even with all the infrastructure requirements of gazillions of video 'bits' flying around the Internet, Akamai and Cisco are lackluster.
But the biggest worry of them all is that Google, the company that looked like it would become bigger than Standard Oil (and it still could be) and which sits right at the top of the Web 2.0 food chain, has lost a third of its value in a few months.
To put it in perspective, Google, the company that for many people IS the Internet economy is worth less than a computer manufacturer, Apple, with less than 10% market share, was worth a month ago.
It may recover quickly, but only after confidence in funding Internet startups has waned, in which case the alcohol fueled, party phase of Web 2.0 will be over and many companies will be running on fumes.
This reaction is bad PR:
1. It gives the impression the company is run by bureaucrats.
2. It makes them look scared and defensive (and it could spook stock holders who will second guess the reasons)
3. Google has demonstrated it can beat Microsoft, their best weapon is innovation not legal knots, which will slow their own innovation down.
A Microsoft/Yahoo deal is good for the software industry, it will guarantee at minimum, a Coke vs Pepsi style duopoly rather than either a Google or Microsoft Monopoly.
Google's reaction is not a conspiracy, but a function of what happens when you hire lots of lawyers - they start doing lawyer stuff all over the place, even if you hired them for another battle.
Having lived in the US for nearly 10 years now, I have come to the conclusion that the whole place operates pretty well, except the legal system requires a complete reboot, from the Supreme Court down.
America's broken legal profession is the reason why health care costs twice as much as most other countries (pro bono work), why free markets are hampered (lawyer lobbyists) and why democracy is imperfect (Supreme Court).
It is also the reason why Google was hiring an army of top lawyers when the rose tinted, public perception was that Google's hiring policy revolved almost exclusively around getting the best engineers.
Google needed these lawyers in a society where a big company will attract hundreds of opportunistic legal challenges from people hoping to get at some of its money and from the inevitable anti-trust action that will eventually come its way.
Unfortunately, expensive lawyers won't just sit around fiddling their hourly sums, waiting for anti-trust action. And being lawyers they are very difficult to argue with.
Until now Google have maintained the image of a confident company with founder vision and a mantra of "don't be evil". With their Chief Legal Officer now issuing company statements has that now changed?
My guess is that they have been temporarily bamboozled by Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond and followed his tactically sophisticated but strategically naive advice.
From watching this PR gaff, Drummond is clearly not qualified to act as company spokesperson and perhaps Google's lawyers need to be reigned in.
The best challenge to any Microsoft threat is innovation, something which Google can be confident about shouting from the hill tops.
If the reviewers of the Macbook Air are right, then people don't really care about Apple design.
Above is a commercial for an original Pentium, it promises movie quality films, amazing computer graphics and instant number crunching.
A Pentium had around 3 million transistors, 2 year old Intel processors today have 1.7 billion.
You would need six hundred Pentium based computers, in an office the size of a hangar, to equal the processing power of a single Macbook Air that fits in an envelope.
Yet if you would believe what you read, the Macbook Air, is under spec'ed, when the vast majority of professional computer users use exactly the same software as we did when we had Pentiums.
And this opinion, that the Air is under powered, is according to the leading technology journalists in the country, not mad people with tin foil hats.
Pentium's were first made when the applications that people most used were spreadsheets, word processors and presentation software. A tiny minority pf people did things like 3d graphics and high resolution photo retouching.
In fact the most notable new entrant in software, the browser, would potentially reduce client computer requirements.
Today not much has changed, more people do photo retouching but often at lower resolution. More processing is done on servers, and most people still use things like word processors and spreadsheets in similar ways.
In fact the extra demands on computing power are largely for consumer applications, so you could argue that 'professional' computers need something else than computing horse power.
The initial reception of the Macbook Air proves that the current process of designing, marketing and selling computers has nothing to do with 'specification' requirements, but everything to do with specification lust.
If the critics are right, they show that above all that despite Apple's great designs, people don't really care about design, unless its lathered on top of tech prowess.
But what if the problem was with the critics themselves. Perhaps they are out of touch and way too geeky for a world where computers are not sold like self assembly amateur electronics projects.
Meg Whitman is to step down at Ebay after 10 years.
Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley will have heard rumors of what an inefficient shambles Ebay is internally and how it is devoid of any creative inspiration.
But before dismissing Whitman, consider that she grew a company from 30 people and $4m revenue, to the behemoth it is now.
Like all things in life, the Ebay story is complicated, but here is a stab at a simplified version.
Ebay's model was very clear when Whitman took over, they needed an executor not tempted by innovation or distraction, a John Sculley type not a Steve Jobs type.
As Ebay grew, it remained focused and held on to its monopoly by building a reputation system that created a switching cost for its users. Ebay performed financially.
Like all monopolistic companies there is a time when the growth starts to slow as it saturates its market and creative input is required to develop new products and explore new markets.
For Ebay, its weaknesses started showing with the PayPal acquisition and the tipping point was the Skype purchase.
Ebay had no option but to buy Paypal, because a fleet footed startup was potentially hijacking their business by inserting its payment system into their own transaction flow, as Ebay users were having to sign up with Paypal, in flagrante.
Paypal could have been a threat to the entire retail banking industry, rather than Ebay. With Ebay's purchase Paypal's ambitions were scorched and its efficacy demolished. It was a good deal, however, coming in the middle of the dotcom crash where the premium for Paypal's potential banking play didn't show too much.
Paypal's founders had no place in a company run by management consultant types, they left and the product calcified while the team swelled, several people doing the job that one person had previously.
If Paypal was a way of acquiring innovation, where the company had been unable to innovate internally, the Skype purchase was a somewhat creative acquisition itself.
Sure there was a potentially hijacking threat with Skype, but it hadn't yet manifested itself, and the asking price was more than the value of buying it just to kill it. Paypal was about banking and Skype about telecoms, big ideas that command big prices when you have lost of users.
Ebay doesn't do creative, so this was a mistake. Skype wasn't yet part of the Ebay transaction flow, and its price wasn't cheap. To justify its price it needed to continue to innovate, something that Ebay is not setup to do.
This is where Ebay is now, a very successful business woman is leaving a company at the time where it needs a visionary.
The amazing thing, is that Ebay has some obvious and profound visionary potential:
1. Ebay is all about Green, the biggest angle any company can have, currently, and yet it has ignored this. As the largest marketplace for second hand goods, it is the worlds largest recycler.
2. Ebay contains a collective memory of the worlds stuff. How we interact with the world is largely through this stuff, yet Ebay throws away this memory by deleting its archives from the web. If you don't think this is of profound importannce, William Gibson says it much better, here.
What is needed is a visionary to take what Whitman has built and let it flourish again, by building products and services based upon fundamental concepts, like those above. Ebay needs a Steve Jobs.
Ironically, and against all consensus, I suspect that Steve Jobs's are actually less rare than Whitman's, they just don't often get a chance to run a company.
eBay’s Whitman To Retire; Donahoe As Leading Candidate | paidContent.org
A great article on why Japan still leads the US in terms of Gadgets.
There are a variety of reasons posited, but the main one is that gadgets are not dominated by males in Japan.
I couldn't help but be reminded of the fact that Myspace's growth came from its male/female balance, caused by teenage girls attraction to alpha males in bands.
Perhaps this gender symmetry helps achieve viral growth since hubs and key influencers are more likely to connect male -> female -> male etc.
Thanks to Keith for the article.
ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap / Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?
Amazon SimpleDB has just been released as a Beta, its like S3 but for databases, allowing structured queries.
What this means is that you don't need to worry about database clustering or possibly backup (although I have never gotten a decent answer to the question of whether you still need to backup S3 data).
This potentially provides a beautiful solution for startups - EC2 as application servers, SimpleDB for structured data and S3 for binaries.
It is not clear whether SimpleDB can be used, somehow for efficient full text search.
If only S3 had a front end like Squid to enable automatic cache on demand for binaries, and there were a better front end to instantiate, configure and manage EC2 instances, then Amazon would be the default choice for most startups.
There seems to be a worrying trend of people who actually believe that the Internet is benign. That it contains primarily useful information and will make stars out of people who make wooden educational toys or sincere bands from Portland.
Those of us that have been working in the Internet since before the Web, know a different story.
Here is a Newly discovered map of the Internet with accurate statistics. And here are the names of the authors to help you find it in future: "Amazing Britney S. Crotch and top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911":
Internet traffic and content by percentage:
The World Wide Web:
Porn: 22%
Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan, Ron Jeremy, Eric Estrada: 21%
Finding Porn or Paris Hilton: 14%
Trying to Find other stuff: 8%
Information about how to build web sites without tables and with rounded boxes: 7%
False Apple rumors: 6%
Self Referential Internet and technology news: 8%
Clips of Lindsay Lohan, a cat that can flush a toilet and a guy that lights his own farts dressed as Han Solo, while miming to the Numa song : 5%
50,000 million copies of images of the same 5000 people and places: 4%
Comment spam and fake weblogs: 2%
911 conspiracy theories: 1%
Information about how the Internet benefits mankind and how you can get rich wallowing in the vast profits of the long tail: 1%
Useful or intelligent information: 0.7%
The long tail: 0.3%
Email:
****
Spam email: 95% (true)
Lists you signed up for by mistake and never read: 3.5%
Stuff you read when you really should be working: 1.4%
Useful email: < 0.1%
Archie, WAIS, FTP, Gopher, Group V fax over IP, plastic cups and string: Huh?
The Curate's Web
Jason Kottke points to an excellent review by Alexander Bohn of Ffffound, a newer visual bookmarking site based upon the same principal as Wists, but with a supremely visually literate, design focused, community rather than a craftster one.
Social Media
When we developed the idea of visual bookmarking in 2005, it was fashionable to look at publishing as being purely democratic - all readers were publishers and everything was 'social'. We created the term Social Shopping (hip word meets $$$) as a joke, and people took it seriously. Two companies did versions of it, and one sold for $40M. And the very best of luck to them, too. But there is something fundamentally wrong with sites that are driven by a passion for the business model at the expense of the content. In the long term these don't work as businesses.
Digital Curation
Something different and much more interesting is now happening, social media sites are cropping up with a focus on a narrow but expert community of contributors. The buzzword for this is 'curation' and is what we are doing with sites like Oobject and Cribcandy which are collections of 'picks'.
The Myth of Social Media
Within 2 weeks Digg will release their visual bookmaking tool. I have heard people suggest that that this will become the platform for the filtering of visual content of the web, just as I heard people say that Digg would become the platform for filtered links in all the major verticals.
This is wrong. For all the focus on 'everyone as a contributor', social media sites like Digg or Epinions before it are highly asymmetric, and gravitate towards the subjective taste of a specific community. A tiny number of users (a fraction of a percent) determine the content, and the user base tends to be like minded.
The Curated Web
There will be very few 'platforms' and very few startups that will play out the way that their investment justifies. At the moment Facebook looks like the only one, everything else is probably irrelevant.
What there will be is a natural distribution of communities, rather like (in fact, mathematically, exactly like) the distribution of animal species.
These communities will not be like social networks or they will be interminably bland. They will be highly stratified, driven by the obsessive pickers, the collector types - or to give them the fancy name that makes people write about them - the curators.
In a nutshell, today's FCC ruling means that you will be able to use a Google version of Skype on your cellphone.
F.C.C. Hands Google a Partial Victory - New York Times
I eventually got my iPhone activated, yet 2 days later the number hasn't processed, and ATT won't accept anything other than a 'fax' (yup no sms or email can be sent to a sodding phone company), to get my international plan up and running because I have had less than 3 addresses in the US. Then I had to get a replacement iPhone because the speaker was broken. As Dave Winer would say - Oy!
-- And you know what? Despite the fact that ATT continue to behave like the kind of company that has a 200 yard wide dinosaur-extinction-type asteroid thingy headed for it. Its actually worth it, The iPhone is the kind of superior intelligence that can only emerge as the dinosaur's fade. A truly innovative and disruptive piece of technology. The kind of product that will aid the fall of companies like ATT as iTunes did to the music companies with a tight butted little tango of bait and switch.
As an example, the fact that iChat is missing from the iPhone cannot possibly be an oversight. I suspect its temporary absence is due to Apple wanting chat to be treated as a standard data service like on the Sidekick, and ATT wanting it to be treated as an SMS message (or more accurately and scandalously for each individual sentence of an IM message to be treated as a separate SMS message) like on the Blackberry. Clearly the latter case is both stupid and greedy, and pushing to hard against natural changes in an industry is not a good idea, if the music industry is any precedent to learn from.
If this is the real reason for no iChat on iPhone, (and I'd love someone to confirm this), then telcos fighting for 10c a sentence IM will only increase the provocation of the computer co's and make a battle for 0c mobile Internet calls, more likely and worth fighting for.
Here here! Jason has an excellent post about Facebook as the new AOL.
Its a comparison that people don't want to admit to being accurate, because AOL is everything that is considered unfashionable amongst the web's key influencers, whilst Facebook is quite the thing.
I must admit this short lived enthusiasm mirrors my own feelings. A couple of months ago I was breathless about it, largely because of its minimalist design. And now I find it pretty amateur and useless, despite its slick appearance.
In short, there is something about Facebook that doesn't feel like its a step forward in the development of the web.
Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org)
Microsoft's Live Search Is No Longer Live
ResearchBuzz has found this hilarious gem. Apparently Microsoft couldn't create a way (huh, as RB suggests - what about captchas after repeated queries?) to stop data mining of their advanced live search - so they killed it.
If I were a VC this is a startup I would back.
If the money in a gold rush is made from selling picks and shovels, then Openfount are selling stainless steel Web 2.0 tools for the price of plastic ones.
They have built value-added products upon Amazon's excellent S3 storage and EC2 pay as you go grid computing.
The most interesting is the distributed file system product. They give you a disk image to load onto S3. From that you can instantiate as many clustered machines as you want and have them share the same disk, with infinite capacity.
Simple and elegant. Stuff that used to cost six figures for a grand or so.
Enabling web 2.0 where the metal hits the meat | openfount
The Day Web 2.0 Died.
Google release a completely obvious but great new product - saveable personal maps.
On the same day, Techcrunch review an enterpise mashup service, Rearden Commerce, with $100M of funding. This wouldn't appear so ironic, (since they currently and sensibly have their feet firmly in the 'stupid money' enterprise camp), if it weren't for the fact that they are announcing a move into the consumer space.
Talk about a day to pick for that announcement. To add insult to injury, Rearden have an hilariously meaningless 'long tail' graph and are apparently going after the services market: "services are roughly 60% of the worldwide economy."
Oh yeah, are Rearden gonna run the Bosnian police force (like Computer Sciences Corporation) and hook up tourists with Bangkok Ladymen?
Going after the 'services market' with a mashups startup is like going after the global arms trade market with a paintball gun and smacks of the heady days of 1998 when Internet Startup plans used to quote the Forrester numbers for the entire 'eCommerce' market.
Meanwhile, OM Malik points out that Google's very predictable move blows away a raft of maps mashup startups.
Plazes is in the list, and somewhat unfairly, since its not really a 'saveable map'. In fact, if anything, it scloser to the current darling of the digeratti, Twitter.
But you know things a screwy when the current investment climate requires people to describe their product in incomprehensible jargon. See the description of the company from Plazes' Felix Petersen.
GigaOM » Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups
Om,
Just for clarification:
We really don´t like to view Plazes as a map mash-up. Plazes bridges your physical presence with your digital identity. It allows you to publish your current geo-presence through different check-in channels.
QED
Apple TV at one tenth of the cost and 90% of the functionality:
A long cable.
A Mac user switches to Vista - MSNBC.com
The kicker comes right at the end - he switches back .
The Wow Starts Now? How about: The Yawn Dawns.
Alexa currently shows a 90,000 % increase for Macrumorslive. Taking its rank from 1,264,571 to 3,023.
That kind of fluctuation makes a halloween costume store look like a year round business. It also shows quite how big the cult of Jobs has become.
Related Info for: macrumorslive.com/
"Web 2.0 is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google."
Amen.
Dave predicts that we'll know when the web 2.0 bubble bursts when Google's stock crashes.
This will happen when the ad market stutters again. Google is the infrastructure that routes ad revenue to many startups, but the crash comes when the ad market stops growing at the same pace. My guess is that this will be half way through next year when consumer spending drops triggered by the real estate market crash.
Imagine what all those business plans look like with their eCPMs halved.
If the most stupid thing ever said about the Internet was Ted Stevens' infamous "the Internet is a series of Tubes" speech, Andy Kessler's pieces about the Internet as a series of pipes must rank amongst the most intelligent.
If you can create a 'virtual pipe' between the service and the customer, where the the customer cannot exit, and you can hold on to it, and broaden your base - you win.
But there are all sorts of pipes, and nothing special about the material the pipe is made of, what matters is where is links to and from, in the multi dimensional phase space that defines a market.
Unlike the days of mainframe and frame relay, there is nothing special about the technology of the pipe itself - there are lots of pipes, a road network rather than a railroad system, and you can try building them anywhere.
In many ways this is a decription of a natural ecosystem where there is no need for 'intelligently designed' infrastructure, but self emergent relationships based upon environmental niches.
Go read Kessler - its worth it.
I'm currently looking at a project based on self replicating content. Closest thing out there is Jeremy Rushton's awesome TiddlyWiki, however it seems that PHP can self-write with no problems.
[PHP] Self-overwriting Scripts - GameDev.Net Discussion Forums
This thing written by Brian Donovan a couple of years ago, is very interesting.
Its basically like tinyurl, except that the links are to any point in a web page, regardless of whether there are any (named anchor) links created by the author.
I remember talking about this with Evan a while back.
The only channel I ever watch on TV is PBS. I ditched Cable, because the only channel I ever watched was HBO. I like the Tivo interface, but there is no way that I'm paying a rental fee or premium for TV listings, as a very occasional viewer. I also don't have a land line telephone.
The Toshiba PVR with DVD burner, below is ideal - it gets free listings from TV guide, directly from within the channel 13 signal, so you buy it and stick a co-ax cable into it and you're done. No signup with any service and no phone connection required. Works with Cable but not Dish services, if you are into paying a mortgage for TV. Cheap: $320
Toshiba | RD-XS35: Multi-Drive DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive
Its like watching a real life version of the Risk board game.
Google is telling the other players, 'I won't attack you for the next ten moves' as it prepares to roll the dice and line up all its armies next to Microsoft who will also do the same.
Because a Microsoft/Google battle royal is kind of innevitable, Google wants to avoid any other trouble.
Its caving on personal media with an Apple board seat for Google's CEO and holding off a PayPal and listings assault on Ebay, with a 'partnership'.
Both companies will lose in the medium term, in the long run one will survive.
Remember what happened to Novell, IBM, Commadore?
I think Google will win in 'three rounds', but nothing is certain. Its a game of dice , after all.
Microsoft: 'We Are Watching Google'
Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete
In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank.
Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy.
In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy's real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure).
This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax 'page flakes' but there is no advertising system for Ajax.
To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C's.
Blogging showed that ITEMS were more important than PAGES, from a semantic perspective. The rise of Video and audio is also changing this view for obvious reasons. This now extends to an application perspective.
Here's a lazyweb idea - an 'item view' stats package, with an ad serving system directly geared around Ajax driven sites.
In a sense this could seem hopelessly naiive - to try and re-educate advertisers around a new paradigm. But its not advertisers that need re-educated its techies. Advertisers measure IMPRESSIONS - and most page refreshes on sites like Myspace are not impressions, if the content remains the same, when you request some functionality, like an 'email this' form.
The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%.
Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker.
Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact - I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn't, Deadspin, Alexa's accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore.
Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month
Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month
According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin's 10,000 ranking.
Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15 even within the top 10,000 sites where the accuracy is higher.
In short, Alexa is almost useless for websites outside of the top 1000, and no sensible investment or reporting should be influenced by it.
Website Statistics and Traffic Graphs comparing www.valleywag.com and www.deadspin.com
Amazon's EC2 is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while - If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss.
EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth.
This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting - allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees.
I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the 'launch' problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks.
I can't help thinking that Amazons naming is a bit bland or too clever - Mechanical Turk, EC2, S3.
Perhaps they should buy anywhere.com off me for EC2.
Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services
Has Digg Been Hijacked, by FUD
Today a largely factually based story with referenced quotes and run by the Associated Press, which was also reported in most US newspapers is flagged by Digg as potentially Inacurate.
I've noticed recently that a large number of political stories, particularly left of center ones, get slapped with the 'Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inacurate" - Because enough people who want to deliberately create uncertainty in light of the truth, say so.
This is the way wikipedia does it, and to be honest, with no other option for wikipedia, it means that Wikipedia is largely useless and hopelessly banal for contentious political issues.
But news is not like Wikipedia - users are directly linking to a source not editing it. If people on the political fringes moan, that does not necessarily mean that the source is innacurate.
The Wikipedia reputation system does not work on Digg.
digg - "Bush Misled America" - John McCain
Michael Dell once said that to fix Apple, they should: "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".
Apple is doing just fine, it survives on true innovation, but perhaps Dell should be shut down now.
Profit Falls by Half at Dell - New York Times
Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.
We've moved Wists to hardware with five times the horsepower and into new datacenters. the overall speed is several times faster than just before the move.
Traffic has been doubling every two and a half months (interestingly with no reflection of this on Alexa - oh well), and we're getting ready for the roll out of Wists rev 2!
Since its such a pain for people to install bookmarklets in Internet Explorer, we've automated the process with an installer.
Wists, top web picks from for all. Wists, social shopping scrapbook, wishlist
When junk mail comes through the door with moneymaking scams like - make $100,000 in 2 months, its typically supported by testimonials that aren't quite outright falsehoods, but are, lets say - economical with the truth.
...It typically goes straight in the trash can.
So when one of the worlds biggest business magazines prints an even bolder claim "this kid made $60 million in 18 months" in tabloid sized lettering on its front cover, and it turns out to be an outright falsehood, does Business Week look like something serious investors and business people should subscribe to, or something to put in the trash can?
There is nothing actually wrong with the companies or the people mentioned in the piece - they are all interesting.
However, Scott Rosenberg etc. are rightly on Business Week's case.
In doing so the tech press may turn this around to make the responsible reaction to the piece, rather the the article itself a defining moment of web 2.0 and the refusal to fall for 1999 style hysteria.
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard » Blog Archive » Business Week on Digg: Smells like bubble spirit
An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago - provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web.
Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless.
Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video
Probably the single biggest asset that Friendster has now:
Back from vacation and noticed that the People Aggregator is already up.
Congrats to Marc and everyone involved! Wishing you every well deserved success.
Focus on 'Reach', use Rank anomalies, and the 'geek factor' for audience, to lower the reach figures to get the real picture for some sites.
Many 'web 2.0' startups are likely to have a bunch of their own employees who have the Alexa bar installed and are feverish stats obsessives. For moderate ranked sites this can skew Alexa since their own traffic is a significant percentage of the overall number of Alexa users who hit the site. Fortunatley, you can actually use this to help correct the stats.
Here are some rules of thumb I use to get better stats:
1. Ignore Page views and Rank, for sites that are not in the top 5,000.
2. Always monitor your own site, from a machine that does not have Alexa istalled then look at your site's reach vs another's reach and then your sites rank vs another's rank. If there is a marked difference in the spread between these 2 sets of figures such that rank looks relatively better than reach for the competitor site, then they probably boost their own Alexa figures. Depending on the spread you can actually use this to your advantage to calculate the appropriate reduction in their reach numbers.
3. Weigh in the 'geek factor'. A site with 1000 geek marketing types will likely have a higher Alexa than 100,000 teens. Look at inbound links to the sites and try and figure out the audience and weight appropriately.
"If Google bought MySpace, it'd all of a sudden be waist deep in the content creation/publishing business"
... oh, cummon. Its not like Google have avoided being in this business, ever, vis a vis Orkut and Blogger neither of which really played into a big strategy one way or the other.
Just because Google doesn't do something does not mean its a strategic move. Google do not have any plans to put a man on the Moon, as far as I know. Perhaps that's because the online advertising industry isn't big on the Moon.
John Battelle's Searchblog: Google Not Buying MySpace Was Not A Strategic Blunder
Google makes a lot of money from cost per click (CPC) advertising. But for a vendor, cost per action (CPA) advertising (e.g. someone actually buys something rather than just clicks on the ad) is actually a much better proposition, since you only pay when you are making money, making it easy to guarantee profit.
Small businesses - the very ones that may not have sophisticated tracking systems to make sure that CPC ads are profitable but are the main CPC buyers - also may not have the resources to tie their shopping cart system to an advertising system. So CPA based advertising, in theory the web's holy grail, has ceded to the compromise of CPC for small vendors, while the big guys who can even measure the benefits of brand advertising, still buy impressions based ads. Larger publishers, who vendors actively want to advertise with, have some leverage on the type of advertising they can get and therefore want to sell impressions based (CPM) ads (because they can guarantee ad revenue). For the rest of us there was Adsense...until now.
There are some things, that people are ready to buy just by reading an ad, e.g. 'buy tickets for U2'.
Google checkout could mean the return of CPA based affiliate programs for 2 reasons: it allows people to bring transactions closer to ads, improving conversion rates; it solves the problem of hooking the shopping cart system to the ad system.
Google checkout would allow, for example, a distributed Ebay with classifieds appearing on blogs and social networks. It will make a ubiquitous CPA based ad network, with the creative design elements of CPM based advertising to make people hit the 'buy' button, viable.
...making Google checkout a big deal, and making Ebay look very slack for doing squat with Paypal.
Wired News: France Launches Maps Site
1. Geoportail isn't comprehensive.
Google allows you to see a map or picture of anywhere you want (kind of what maps are for), Geoportail is limited to the France and its 'colonies'.
2. Geoportail doesn't actually work.
The site has been down since launch.
3. You have to pay for Geoportail in France, even if you don't use it.
The site was funded with several million dollars of tax payers money (not necessarily a problem if it was any good).
4. Les Mashups?
Non, pas ici.
5. Front page does not have search.
From the few pages that eventually load, it looks like nobody involved has actually ever used the web.
In short, French people should ask for their money back from this execrable, committee driven, pile of old cobblers. The French government, meanwhile, would be better off focusing on creating the kind of business environment that would Foster small startups that would do a much better job.
Jon Udell picks 'User Generated Content' as his least favorite buzzword.
User suggests: adict.
Generated suggests: made automatically with no feeling.
Content, as Jon points out, suggests: the offal that fills a sausage.
What could be a more contemptuous view of a creation and its author?
This second wave of the Internet is distinguished principally by the fact that more people (ahem, users) are contributing.
Caring about these people and what they contribute, will provide genuinely useful services and any business model based upon the perceived cost benefit of cheap, user generated content, shows an inability to differentiate between poetry and the contents of a telephone book.
A celebrated Irish content generator defined a cynic as 'someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing'
A proponent of 'building a platform to leverage cheap user generated content' does not even know the market price, knowing merely the 'cost' of any random string of bits and the value of nothing'.
In the grand scheme of things this is below the level of the cynic. Someone who cannot calculate the difference between value and cost will not be able to make a profit, however cynically.
If anything should hang behind my desk and show what I really want to and don't want to do with Wists it would be a smart little wall plaque embossed with:
Oscar Wilde didn't produce 'user generated content', he knew its value.
There may or may not be much to moan about 'Web 2.0', but one person, Michael Arrington has clearly become its nexus, through TechCrunch.
With that fact is something that restores my faith in the inherent meritocracy of the web, because the mystery, special sauce that makes TechCrunch successful is that its just plain good.
The guys behind Blox were the Oddpost guys, and they pretty much created ajax. Blox was an online spreadsheet app and it was great but before its time.
With the release of Google Calendar, Excel is the only reason I have to go near a PC or any Microsoft products. I've got nothing against Microsoft as a big corp, I just think their products are like badly made, vintage toys
So please, I want Blox back.
Valleywag: Gizmodo talks to YouTube:
"Q: Facebook just turned down a $750 million offer, saying they were seeking $2 billion. Do consider yourself a million-dollar-kind-of guy or a billion-dollar-kind-of guy?
A: What we're really committed to is providing the best experience, and we're not really thinking about what we're worth. We're just viewing this as solving a really hard problem and that's how to distribute video in an entertaining way. So as we move forward, we're just going to stay committed to that"
or...
'Look we're a one show (America's Best Home Videos) product with clips we didn't secure the rights for. We can't talk money till we make sure we're not just a free version of Akamai.'
But hey, users are everything, right? Yes if you are Google, and Overture's business model rains greenbacks out of the sky like an endless ticker parade. No if you are Napster and you are just being crapped on.
It'll be interesting to see if the sky turns green or brown for Youtube.
Microsoft employee on Vista: "I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again what do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs".
... and the built in search could be called something lucky like Alta Vista.
PC Pro: News: Microsoft employees call for Ballmer to go
Craig Newmark has a proposal to counter Goodmail. craigblog: a big advance for spam and phishing fighting?
The problem with Craig's proposal - that authorized, digitally signed email passes through spam filters - is that it doesn't create a sender 'cost'. This therefore cannot be a true cure against spam, since spam is a product of almost zero cost for the sender.
As we are seeing, costs are always introduced in any marketplace, and with email being free to send, the self-emergent cost, in dealing with spam, is passed to the receiver.
The postal service did not grow exponentially until it switched from a receiver to a sender pays model, and US cellphone use lags other developed nations because both call sender and recipients pay. If neither sender and recipient pay, as with email it seems that the recipient ends up paying. So the Goodmail solution plays into the way things are in any system.
If people don't like the idea that the big email hubs like AOL will make money from this (since they are making money for not doing much) then perhaps the solution is that this sender tax should only be levied against people who send much more email than they receive, thus cancelling out any charge to most individuals.
The money raised could be donated to a suitable group. My choice would be a range of charities, including the EFF.
For the New Version of Gawker Stalker, which launches today, Gawker are using Wists as their blog publishing system.
This allows them to publish items and create maps which show pictures and locations of celebrity sightings in Manahattan and gives a sneak peak into some of the kinds of things that you'll be able to do with the new version of Wists that we are working on.
The best blonde joke ever meme has resurfaced after a couple of years. You put a link that people are likely to click on - like 'best blonde joke ever' and this links in turn to the same headline which in turn links to it somewhere else again, recursively.
Kafsemo has built an edge labeled graph
Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America's most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period.
5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition:
Xerox
Siebel
Kodak
Sun
Silicon Graphics
Buffett acquires business wire
Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs
Heh, great post.
Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn't looking for a job.
Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC's.
Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC:
Q. How big is your market?
A. $0
[The current market size is $0 because I haven't been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 - me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.]
Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth?
A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months from now.
[We don't really need that much money the burn rate won't be that much, I'll be doing things on the cheap since I am as tight as a Camel's ass in a sandstorm and if the growth is exponential it'll likely look flat for 6 months.]
Q. Do you suffer from founderitus - i.e. would you step aside for more seasoned management?
A. Yes and No - but Yes. Steve Jobs is just super duper.
[I suffer from founderitus in spades, the reason I start companies is that I have a problem with authority. Steve Jobs is my hero not Sculley. However, I'll be moving to take a 'founder' role at roughly the speed of light, if I'm out of my depth.]
Q. Pages 2-20 of your business plan, after the bullet point introduction read 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', over and over again, can you pass me an uncorrupted copy?
A. I don't want to do a business plan.
[I'm going to write the business plan after the business becomes clear and we have adapted to it in a Darwinian fashion - it'll make for a much better read. I don't think you can truly design things in advance, I don't believe in crap like Intelligent Design.]
Q. Here is our term sheet, its pretty standard, I think you'll agree?
A. I'd never sign an agreement based on that.
[Unless you remove the conditions on the pref shares I won't be saying looky here, 'we have a term sheet' - I would rather have a one in ten chance of making $1M than a cats chance in hell of $100M, my risk isn't spread across a portfolio, and if it isn't going to be a billion dollar company I will still be trying to make it worth something.
Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot.
Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful - and then hits it on the nail - 'Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old'.
Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality.
Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications - and that is really web 2.0.
If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise very successful site could be less than 10 years. This is more than a nightclub or a teenage fad, but much less than offline companies.
Slashdot is Going out of Style in 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny)
It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic.
This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart's customers.
One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single 'bit', since it varies according to what the 'bit' contains - is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text.
Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that some people's bits have a high value-add and they themselves have been charging an absolutely massive premium for voice bits which are now being arbitraged to nothing.
The problem is that they cannot both the sender and the receiver, and they cannot charge the sender based upon the value of the data, without knowing what that data is.
This will be a titanic fight and everyone will lose, but nobody more so than people like Verizon, even if they do get people like Google to pay up in the short term. Equally the free ride is over, for the likes of Google, but they wont be paying what Verizon want. The Internet is more like the road network than a railway network - and Verizon are thinking in terms of railway networks.
I'm sure Om Malik will disagree, but then again, what do I know - he really understands what's happening here.
The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel's 'Google Book Search Hack', which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to 'get Digged' - and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract 'Diggs', but no actual information.
Steve's post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine.
So the irony is this - by posting a description about how to do something 'technical' that isn't and using words like 'O'Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google', you can become one of the top links on a techy links site.
This may seem trivial - but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated.
Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O'Reilly's Hacks Books for Free Using Google
To say that Wikipedia is OK, that it is about as accurate as Britannica, not fantastically better or worse, is not much of a news story.
Much more melodramatic to say that Wkipedia is a disaster, a threat to civilization, full of lies etc.
The reality is that a system that is open for anyone in the world to try to post a lie, that has only been going for a few years, whose contributors don't get paid has only managed to produce a couple of pretty obscure hoaxes.
The truth is that it is a much more accurate reference tool than the Internet as a whole, than most books and, as has just been suggested in a blind test, its pretty much as accurate as Britannica.
Its true that the Britannica test was only for scientific articles - but to be honest, if anybody seriously believes that topics like history are absolutely objective, then they are hopelessly naiive.
Bottom line - considering the way Wikipedia works, its unbelievably, gobsmackingly successful.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wikipedia survives research test
Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa:
$1 per CPU hour consumed.
$1 per gig of storage used.
$1 per 50 gigs of data processed.
$1 per gig of data uploaded.
John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game
Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter.
It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors'. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term?
Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com
The worst mistake we made at Moreover was to raise too much money.
The Bay Area prides itself on the sophistication of its investment structure, but most of the successful Web 2.0 'exits', from a founder perspective, have been non-Bay Area companies or ones that didn't raise too much cash.
Perhaps the further you are from Mountain View, the less likely you are as an entrepreneur, to be seduced by Bay Area style startup investment.
If you are in a casino and you are $5M up, the best thing you can do is walk away from the roulette table.
If you are a young entrepreneur $5M is a life changing experience and selling a company after bootstrapping or a seed round of investment can give you that. A series B round could very well give you more - but it is a much bigger gamble and as recent evidence suggests, puts you out of range of the big 5 (Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Ebay) without revenues, strong revenue predictions or extensive due diligence.
If you really have a $100M plus idea, you may need a decent VC and plenty of cash, but there are a lot more $10M ideas, and 50% plus of $10M may be a much more realistic goal than 25% of $100M.
A VC is making a very high risk investment and will want to think he or she can get a 10x return and will possibly have preference shares that force you too to make that gamble - i.e. you only get a payback if there is a significant return.
If you raise money - pretend mentally that you have borrowed the cash on a charge card at 20% APR - you should be confident that you could pay that off. If you don't feel that pressure then there is something wrong.
Similarly, because VC money is high risk - but the risk spread accross a portfolio of other companies it is in the interest of the investor to push for a business strategy that aims for that 10x return at the risk of making nothing. In other words the investment was high risk to start with, so why should the VC re-gamble with lower odds.
There is a current batch of Web 2.0 startups that have been snapped up quickly by companies like Google and Yahoo for a price that for them is sometimes justified to get really good people, but which is payday for founders that still have a large percentage of equity.
This perhaps changes current tech. startup equation, although one should never start a company to be bought, but because you really believe in it. And if you really believe in it you should surely max out your credit card and raise cash only when you really need it.
Here is a list of some current 'web 2.0 ish' startups, the common themes that stand out - the ones that have 'exited' are not dominated by Bay Area companies and didn't raise several rounds of cash:
Dodgeball:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes
Delicious:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes
Flickr:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes
Gawker:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No
Weblogs Inc.
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes
MySpace:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: Yes
Friendster:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: No
Xanga:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No
Technorati:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No
Six Apart:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: No
Odeo:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No
Oddpost:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired
Bloglines:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired
Congrats to Josh Schachter and all at Delicious.
Of couse if you bootstrap a company from scratch without any investment, like Gawker, then you are not under any pressure to 'exit', you have what everyone should strive for - a real business.
Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven't had a makeover since the dotcom days.
Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components - the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs.
Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval.
Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search.
Google has a bunch of tabs and a search box, so does riffs. The problem with Google's tabs is that they are somewhat randomly distributed between what appears on the front page and what trails off into the neverland after the 'more' link.
I would bet that this time the publishing tools are going to create the right environment figure out what are some of the new tabs that are eventually going to be standard at the top of Google.
Riffs: Your Social Recommender - Ratings, Rants, Raves, and Reviews
"Attention shoppers - some Web sites ditch the online cart and offer new experiences"
"it isn't just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists (www.wists.com) allows users to bookmark pages visually via a small image and summary, which can then be shared with other users. This sort of thing makes sharing wish lists of goodies with others easier, for example."
A good round up of all the shopping blogs is in today's Baltimore Sun:
"Crib Candy: Overflowing with eye-catching items for the home, this site features tons of adventurous products for adventurous people."
Perhaps blogs to do with shopping needs a word?
Blog Shops - Blops?
Got time and money to spend? Click here - baltimoresun.com
Jarvis, pretending not to be a techy but really getting it on Google base: Google Base v. microformats.
"What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet."
Right on - that is the semantic web, which so far is a good idea hampered by daft ideas on RDF, which I once bought into. Base might be the stimulus for that, precisely because putting things in base is currently a one way trip and it highlights this fact.
Base is interesting because it comes at a point where the Google backlash has just begun. To demand that people use open standards is fine - Google do, they allow bulk import of RSS and Atom.
To demand that they dump out their database schema is unrealistic - almost nobody on the Internet does this.
Ah, you say - but people output RSS - yes but they only do that because currently RSS, despite the hype, is used to syndicate headlines not metadata.
Where are all the standard RSS modules and extensions for events and classifieds and genealogy and biographic data? Well they all exist but 99.99% of RSS is merely syndicated headline links with full text if you don't make money from your content.
Perhaps Base will kick people into gear.
BTW - another thing that Jeff has trumpeted but nobody seems to have picked up, is the total lack of tracking of true reader page impressions vs aggregator caching for RSS - I really need that, so am tinkering with something that may or may not work. If any of the RSS ad providers have a system that 100% accurately does that, please email me.
"While social commerce is a fairly new concept in online shopping, it is quickly gaining momentum, as more online vendors realize that there are few more powerful sales forces than a personal recommendation, picking up where comparison shopping engines leave off...Wists.com and Kaboodle.com are two of the early social commerce programs. "
Yahoo Unleashes a User-Plugged Shoposphere
Michael Parekh explains wists much better than I ever could in his post: microchunking commerce the web 2.0 way.
Speaking of which, having eaten my own dogfood by doing cribcandy I now know what I need to fix on wists to make it a lot better.
I'm working hard to try and get a decent wists release out and some more cribcandy like sites are in the pipeline.
Joel is "starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite....I'll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term "Web 2.0" on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You're welcome."
Most of what is 'Web 2.0' is based around ideas of a few people who had to ride out Web 1.0 with no buzz or funding, while people selling fresh mangos online were talking to VCs.
This time perhaps the good people, the Evan Williams' Dave Winers' (yes, dammit, Dave Winer), 'Ian Clarke equivalents are in their garretts building the real next generation web.
Those people will be beavering away, building instead of talking. On that note - I'd guess I'd better get back to work.
Joel on Software - Friday, October 21, 2005
Of all the gadgets which must be coming soon, this is what I want:
A super high res, digital paper, ebook which boots instantly and allows web browsing with lower resolution bitmap images and print quality vector text.
This news.com article shows why it hasn't happened yet.
Forget blogs--print needs its own iPod | CNET News.com
Full article is subcription only.
FT.com / Home UK - Track clickerati's new buzz
As the tech. world awaits Apple's announcement of an iTunes cellphone, Apple's strapline is:
"1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," reads the invitation. "Here we go again."
In 1999 I bought a hard-drive MP3 player that fitted 1000 songs in my pocket. In 2000 I had a Samsung cellphone with built-in MP3 player.
The problem was that both these products had badly designed hardware, poor useability and bug ridden firmware.
Today I have an iPod and it suits me fine, because it is well designed.
In fact it suits me better than the first generation iPod I had, which looked better, but was less ergonomic. The design has improved.
Which brings me to a line that was oft touted by VC's during the dotcom bubble - 'First Mover Advantage'.
From the Ebay auction site, to Google search engine to Microsoft OS to Apple MP3 players, none of them suffered from First Mover Disadvantage.
[physics/0506213] From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
Reading this gruesome study into fragmentation of 'attack units' in modern warfare, that Kottke linked to, it is clear that this is the mathematical model that should be used to examine niches in the 'Long Tail' debate.
I.E. The change in power law coefficient over time and its trend compared with G-7 terrorism or non G7-terrorism could be applied to standard co-efficients for low inventory mass market retail, bricks and mortar, vs unlimited inventory, niche market retail, the Internet.
I wonder what the standard power law coefficients are for these.
I still have a hunch that there are some non-linear affects and that fractals play a role in revealing the same pattern for niches within niches etc.
If I were Steve Jobs...
I would use the Gillette model (free fancy handle, pay for the blades) to sell value-add products like iPhoto on top of a free OS.
I would make power PC and the Intel version of OSX which has been worked on for a while - free.
Particularly in light of this:
Everyone wants 'free' Windows... | CNET News.com
Verisgn estimate that at least one in 50 new sites is a spam site. Given that the total number of weblogs is normally measured by those that are actually posted to, this does not account for the growing number of spam blogs.
I suspect that spam blogs actually account for an alarmingly high percentage of the total, and people like Technorati have to index them. A reputation system for blogs could effectively weed out this load.
Verisign reports that it:
"will change the way it reports the size of its domain name business, in terms of active registrations, because of the amount of speculation going on. It will reduce the size of the reported registrations by about 2%"
"Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers," Sclavos said. "The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period."
With Google hosted blogs, there is no $6 fee, and and many spam term searches on bloglines or Technorati return hundreds of thousands of results.
Pay-per-click speculation market soaring - Computer Business Review
BuzzMetrics/Mouthpiece has a fantastic statistic - further analysis of a survey of awareness of the term 'blog' showed that two thirds of blog readers had never heard of the word blog or did not know what a blog was.
This is great news, it spells ubiquity. Memes need a buzzword to catch on, but by now blogs are more than online diaries.
The weblog publishing model, with built in syndication, tracking, real-time search, permanent, item based archiving and linking and easy to use publishing tools is the way everything will eventually be published on the web.
With magazines and professional websites being blog driven, blog refers to the way something is published not what. There is no more need to know what a blog is than know what an internal combustion engine is if you drive a car.
This is a paradigm shift as important as the browser. Web 1.0 was about reading (browsing and searching), Web 2.0 is about publishing.
For the investors that are looking to invest in blogs or RSS - that's like investing in HTML, the big story is publishing.
Interesting - by acquiring Intermix, Rupert Murdoch has picked up MySpace. Not only that, but Intermix was sued (and settled), having been accused of deception in bundling hidden spyware.
Two good reasons to ditch MySpace.
News Corp. to buy Intermix for $580 million | CNET News.com
... OK not quite, but this news below does seem like a parody from the Onion:
"As previously reported, Microsoft is also proposing extensions to the RSS specification that will add support for ordered lists. That would enable, for example, e-commerce sites to more easily publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best-selling products."
Do they mean extensions to the RSS spec, or an RSS module? Since what is being described can be done with a module, it would be crazy to change the spec.
And if all Microsoft is doing is writing an RSS module, then Jeez, their PR machine needs to understand that this is not a big deal.
You can already publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best selling products in RSS, the problem is not with the standard but the aggregators - no aggregator will display metadata from RSS modules on-the-fly.
"Umbria Communications of Boulder has developed a Web crawler that monitors hundreds of thousands of blogs, turning the information from them, via natural language algorithms, into marketing data that is potentially much more reliable than traditional tools such as focus groups."
The results:
Most mentioned non alcoholic beverage: Starbucks coffee
Most mentioned fast food: McDonalds
Most mentioned female celebs: Britney Spears, Paris hilton etc.
Well there's a surprise.
Blog software tracks consumer preferences
This is funny on so many levels.
A Google Adsense rep calls me today to pitch some form of customized Adsense for Wists. He then sends me an email saying:
"Here's an example of how Flickr.com is using AdSense: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/manhattan/ (you may need to hit refresh to see the ads load)"
1. Flickr was bought buy Yahoo and now has Yahoo ads.
2. Who in their right mind refreshes a page just so they can see ads.
3. Why pitch something with an example where it is broken.
Caveat: I hope this doesn't get anyone in trouble - its obviously a harmless error.
[update: seems like they are in the middle of the switch, so depending on the number of times you refresh the page (not exactly normal behavior), you get either: no ads, Google ads or Yahoo ads. No less stupid, however]
So Google is the biggest media company in the world as of today.
But I've been in San Francisco for a week now and haven't had one free drink, or had to speak to a single 'bizdev' guy in a button-down Oxford. Things just ain't like what they used to be.
Google now most valuable media company | CNET News.com
The first of the gambling IPOs, PartyGaming (which are in the UK because it is illegal in the US) is about to go out for $9 billion (5 bn GBP).
As I wrote before, I noticed that a large percentage of comment spam was coming from affiliates of these companies with pending IPOs.
I suspect that, like porn, conversion rates for gambling affiliates are such that they can't afford to advertise on Google and therefore resort to things like comment spam to scam Google.
In other words, because CPA affiliate programs like the poker sites' don't appeal to sites with any readership (a medium traffic site can go for Adsense CPC advertising and a big brand site will opt for CPM revenues with guaranteed income based on readership) their affiliates tend to be low end sites. Low end sites would normally have to buy traffic, but if the cost of buying it through a normal channel such as becoming an advertiser on Google is higher than the CPA revenue, then sites will often use illegal means to boost traffic for free - e.g. spamming.
TripAdviser very successfully arbitraged this difference by putting non contextual fixed links on sites with abnormally high Pagerank to traffic ratios, getting high up in Google search results and making money off CPA programs for travel which pay very highly. They could buy these links cheaply on scientific sites, where the blog-like culture of linking abnormally boosted Pagerank, but whose normal traffic and demographic readership meant that they were happy to be offered decent cash for links (which did not even need to be contextual like Google ads, since they were designed for robots to click on, not people).
The difference is that what Trip Advisor did was legal and temporarily exploited real opportunity for arbitrage. There are poker site affiliates who are operating illegally, and there may be no arbitrage opportunity for a significant percentage to be viable otherwise.
So the question remains:
If the sites which are about to IPO don't know that they have affiliates that are illegally spamming people, how much of their revenue would disappear if one takes those illegal affiliates out of the equation and how much would that affect the IPO price?
I am amazed that no journalist has picked this up.
(Most gambling sites offer CPA (Cost Per Action) affiliate programs - i.e. you only get paid if someone signs up and pays, on the advertiser’s site. This is compared to CPM (Cost Per impression (Mille - thousand impressions) and CPC, (Cost Per Click). Advertisers like CPA because they only have to pay if someone buys something - so they always make a profit. Publishers like CPM because they know their readership and therefore the publisher makes guaranteed money) CPC offers a middle ground for advertisers to buy ads accross a network of smaller publishers who may not have known readership or brand appeal). Because of the nature of these models CPA is not used for brand advertising but for products and e-commerce. Amazon affiliate programs are CPA, for example. The difference is that the kind of goods that are sold on Amazon often have brand advertising as well. Almost all porn and gambling advertising is pure CPA.)
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Poker firm comes up trumps in £5bn flotation
Answer, write a blog about Gawker - do it well, show that you can write and it will end up on their radar.
Which after all is a repeat of Gawkers' method itself: Write a gossip column where the initial subjects are other gossip columnists, hacks and flacks, then it will get noticed by the people who promote stuff. Down right PReditorial!
Flattery will get you everywhere.
Chris Mohney did just that, with arguably the longest ever resume:
Gawkerist: Nick Denton Finally Pays Us to Stop Blogging
Having finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell at the Syndicate conference last week, I said how much I enjoyed his screencast tutorials. In light of that am putting together a some screencasts of how to use Wists. This one is the most simple, showing how to add a bookmark while browsing. (A trick overlooked by most people is being able to highlight and drag text from the page being bookmarked to the bookmarklet description field).
I'll post more screencasts to the Wists blog, although we are working on redoing the Wists UI, so more on that shortly.
One of the things that the unchristian wrong are good at is making sure that a significant portion of safe surfing products for children also block out sites which promote science or political thinking that doesn't tally with their own medieval sense of morality. By providing free software they tailor the web to their own ideology. Hmm, time to fight back.
I'd personally rather have any child of mine be able to learn about things on the web as well as block porn - so I'd be interested in creating an alternative family filter for people who want their kids to be educated.
For example it could block sites such as WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell properties, Creationist drivel etc. etc.
It seems that everything is topsy turvy:
Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again.
Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web.
SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff.
The changes:
RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals - 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape.
Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps - the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based.
Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today). Then everything went all Craigslist and Google, now Google did maps with javascript and minimalism is out again. (although this time perhaps some lessons will have been learned).
"The upped commitment to PHP from Oracle is the latest of several moves by large software vendors, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, to capitalize on the growing popularity of scripting, or "dynamic" languages."
Grassroots computing languages hit the big time
We've added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr's badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover.
You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text.
To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on 'publish on your site', next to the XML icon.
Dana Blankenhorn graciously apologizes for his piece saying that Evan should resign from blogger. Well done Dana.
After the Fall: Corante > Moore's Lore >
In Why Google Is Faltering on RSS: Corante > Moore's Lore >
Dan Blankenhorn, claims that:
1. Google is falling behind on blogging and RSS,
He provides no argument - like the fact that blogspot is actually the biggest blogging network and that as RSS goes into GMail it will possibly be the biggest RSS aggregator so arguably they are doing ok (and to be honest both RSS and blogging software are not rocket science Google can turn up the heat when they want to).
2. blames it on Blogger management.
He clearly doesn't know or has bothered to investigate how the Google Blogger relationship works.
3. Blames Evan williams in particular proposing he steps down.
Er Evan isn't at Blogger and hasn't been for 6 months.
Ooops.
Fred Wilson, Howard Morgan, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Peter Gadjokov...
Congrats to Joshua on delicious funding. [delicious-discuss] big news
Having now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems like the most useful way to avoid tag overload is to bundle tags into search so that search is the gateway to both full text search and tags i.e. tags are a way of narrowing down structured searches.
This means that we can probably drastically simplify the Wists interface.
Currently working on full layout control via the url so that you can create cut and paste javascript code to place Wists galleries on your site, rather like Flickr's badges. More details on the wistsblog.
The long tail is jagged, fractal – perhaps as any market achieves maximum efficiency it starts to look like everything around us in nature, no matter how hard (or close) we look.
Networks tend to create 'stars', movie stars are bigger than theater stars because their audiences are larger - but not just because of that.
Movie stars, like Valentino, appeared almost as soon as there were movies because the network effect increased the head of the curve, not the tail. Some actors became very well known while most 'rested'.
A tell-tale sign of the star effect is a large gap between the average and the median. The average earnings of actors are much higher than their median income. Broadcast media is an asymmetric form of communication where both creation and distribution require large amounts of capital but for the audience it is cheap. Mainstream broadcast culture created a product which was affordable to the masses, but was created by the few. As such, although the culture of capitalism did more for the masses than the Bolshoi did for the Bolsheviks, there was no long tail of minor celebrities whose total income exceeded the stars’.
When I first heard of the long tail I thought it was profound - the most interesting thing I'd read in ages - but I didn't buy it. If the world becomes more networked, then the network effect should become stronger and the tail shorter, or at least the total area under it, reduced; and the Internet and modern telecom infrastructure makes the world more networked. The early signs of this seemed to back this up, from the natural re-grouping of the Baby Bells to the rapid emergence of Internet monopolies like Ebay.
The difference here is that Ebay and the telcos are distributors, not manufacturers/publishers. Although controlling a customer gives enormous power, in the long term the role of the distributor will diminish - overall revenues cut as competitors, leveraging new technologies, arbitrage the price down. Phone customers will be unhappy, wondering why their calls aren’t as cheap as VOIP, just as sellers on Ebay are increasingly complaining about listing fees and music buyers wonder why an album with no packaging or distribution costs is the same price as CD. In short, playing the role of a distributor in a medium where the economics of scarcity don’t always apply, means that the power of monopoly is all that stands in the way of decreasing revenues. – But that is another story.
In any medium, network, market, there are three primary components: buyer, seller, marketplace; sender, receiver, router or artist, audience, distributor.
If the role of the networked marketplace, router and distributor do tend to create natural but less lucrative monopolies over the long term, and the buyer, receiver and audience has already reaped the benefits of broadcast culture from the daily post to the penny post, then what happens in the truly networked marketplace is that the cost to the: sender, artist or seller is massively reduced.
The difference, however, is that the new networked economy is symmetrical, it is accessible to people without large amounts of capital at both ends of a message or transaction. Unlike a letter, neither the sender nor receiver pays for an email, anyone can become a store owner on Ebay and anyone can become a radio star with a podcast (although I doubt it).
This symmetry or evenness produces a meritocracy of creation, which would lead to a smooth ‘short tailed’ curve of, albeit more deserving, megastars were it not for one simple fact – from the asymmetric ripples of the big bang to us and everything around us, we are not all the same and therefore don’t always subscribe naturally to the same, bland, monolithic, mainstream culture unless it is constantly stoked with marketing fuel.
These natural differences, the ripples in time and place that produce different tastes and sub-cultures, are what create the long tail. But, in the same way that not everyone is the same, some people are similar and these sub-groups have their own stars, and so on. The curve is jagged or fractal, and looks the same no matter what resolution you view it at.
This would seem to be disappointing at first, if a simple smooth curve had been replaced by complexity, but the seeming complexity of a fractal shape is more elegant than a smooth curve – not only is it produced by a simple equation, but it is the type of equation that has literally evolved the shapes of everything we are surrounded by.
The jagged edge that stretches the long tail, as each minor spike reduces the height of the bigger spikes, is the shape that makes it natural. The fractal nature of the long tail makes it pass the Occam’s Razor test in both mathematical and cultural terms, and that is why I now buy it.
The Long Tail: Microstructure in the Long Tail
Having sold our cars and packed all our belongings into a massive truck we moved to NY this week.
The curious thing is that it feels better to have a bag of clothes, a cellphone and a laptop and nothing else, which begs the question as to why I ever buy anything.
Now that I'm here I'll be working on Wists in earnest - have setup a blog: wistsblog and will be fleshing out faq's and general Wists info, over the next week or so.
From Joshua's list, looks like delicious have added 'metatags'. del.icio.us/joshua
Although we implemented from get go in Wists - Joshua said that he had been thinking about this for a while - so is good news all round.
Hopefully sharing metatags amongst multiple systems will be good for everyone, since its looks like some standard metatags such as location= are emerging.
Delicious continues to rule!
Thanks to some fantastic work by Adam Michela at Axentric, there is a much improved 'add to Wists' bookmarklet which can be installed from here, or reinstalled via the help menu in Wists.
The new 'wistlet' has the following features:
Now grabs CSS background images.
Removes duplicate images.
Allows choosing a thumbnail screenshot of the page itself, if you don't like any of the images shown.
Best of all, it is remotely updatable - so we will be able to add new features with you having to re-install.
NB: the new bookmaklet works with most browsers and versions, except for Safari - the original bookmarklet is still available via the Wists help menu, for Safari users.
We've added a global search feature to Wists.
The search will look up users, tags and individual item titles and descriptions all at once - returning the results for each, separately. - So there are no parameters and advanced search settings. Again the rule is: have the user do the least work.
Because tags tend to have multiple variants with the same stem, e.g. Lifehacker, Lifehacks, Lifehacking, Wists search will return everything starting with 'Lifehack'. However, because people have tagged things separately you can still filter by one tag in particular.
I can see that perhaps using search and tags with extensions to common word stems might evolve some interesting patterns.
For example, if I wanted to start a list of restaurants for my friends I coud tag as 'restaurant_dgfriends' and filter by that in a search for restaurant. I'll have to think about it - but the next step for Wists will be how we look at groups and community and hopefully there is something that involves minimal effort for users there too.
New Features:
(The overall aim is to make as much as possible one or two clicks or automatic, based upon normal interaction with the product, from building a network of friends and groups of tags, to publishing - as things like tags fill up we'll overlay tag management on top - again hopefully making that as automated as possible.)
» Automatic friends networks.
If you click on items to add to your wists from other users or someone else adds from your wists, they automatically become part of your network of friends.
» Automatic groups.
Beneath you friends list, all the tags in your friends network are shown. Click on any friend and th