Category: Tech

Why Ad Dollars Alone Can’t Support Web 2.0 Forever

Steve Rubel posts about the economic conundrum that faces Web 2.0.

toomanyads

The problem, as Steve points out, is that Web 2.0 is “largely supported by ads from startups that also are hoping to capitalize in the rising interest in online advertising.” In other words much of the ad dollars generated by Web 2.0 companies are derived from other Web 2.0 companies who want gain enough traffic to make some ad money of their own.

Steve draws an analogy to Bubble 1.0, when Yahoo and many other companies were far too dependant on ads bought by dot.com companies with money to burn. I was very involved in the ad-selling frenzy of Bubble 1.0, selling ads both directly and through agencies for some very popular message board sites. We were all about old media back then, however, so anything that relied on user generated content was frowned upon to one degree or another. That problem was solved when the ad programs moved from a per impression system to a per click system.

One thing we did have in common with Bubble 2.0 was that a very limited number of advertisers were buying up the lion’s share of the ad capacity. As soon as those companies went out of business, ran out of advertising money or decided that internet advertising wasn’t the best place to spend their money, everyone’s ad revenue went from very high to very low- almost overnight.

Unless some new net buyers come into the picture, the current ad game is nothing but a disguised ponzi scheme. The ones who get in early make a lot of money. Those who come in at the middle of the curve make a little money and those who come in at the end lose it all.

The issue is whether those who are in the game now see the ad game as a long term business plan or just a short term money grab. If it’s the former, perhaps the thing to do it take a little pain now by making revenue diversification a priority.

But if it’s the latter, there’s no righting the ship. It just a matter of time.

Meanwhile the band plays on.

UPDATE: Stowe Boyd says it might not be as bad as Steve and I think. I hope we’re all right- that the ad bubble isn’t as inflated as it sometimes appears and that Web 2.0 realizes it can’t survive on ad revenue alone.

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The Tech World is Not the Whole World

techglassesOne the the things I noticed when I started blogging largely about tech topics is that there is a clear and consistent tendency on the part of tech developers and tech writers to view the world through tech-colored glasses.  By that, I mean to believe that the values and trends in the tech-sphere are representative of the values and trends across corporate America.

I can tell you as someone who reads and writes in the tech world, but lives and works in the big-business corporate America world, that the tech world is not representative of the whole world.  I wish it was, but it isn’t.

APC Magazine has an article today about the effect of internet restrictions on employee hiring and retention.  It quotes Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist (another job title for my job title hall of fame), who says:

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day.”

I would try to respond with a kind and gentle hand if not for the following quote that made me wonder if I had accidentally clicked over to The Onion:

“Kirah cited a Norwegian psychologist who claimed that young people were now so reliant on digital communication that ‘taking a mobile phone away from a teenage girl is the same as child abuse.'”

Obviously, that’s ludicrous on its face to anyone who have ever raised a child or worked one day at a real job, but let me try to address my point and let that softball float on past.

Would employees in corporate America prefer to surf the internet all day instead of working?  Of course they would.  People would spend countless hours chatting, surfing the personals, gambling, shopping on eBay, playing flash-based games and having a grand old time.  All at the expense of their productivity.  And, of course, in the process they would answer emails from strangers that say I Love You with a virus.

What was designed as an at the desk coffee break would grow into an obsession for some.  Hours upon hours would be wasted.  Jobs would be lost, resulting in the loss of mobile phones.  A vicious cycle would engulf America until we were a nation of zombies clicking obsessively on our inbox, trained by intermittent reinforcement that an email or chat request would soon arrive.  OK, well maybe not a nation of zombies, but you get my drift.

The internet is addictive.  There’s no doubt about it.  And it’s fun too.  But so is beer and whiskey and nobody’s lobbying to let employees guzzle Maker’s Mark at their desk.  At least not yet.

The level of internet control that companies place on their employees varies.  At my office, only sites that are security risks or are obviously inappropriate (such as porn sites, etc.) are blocked.  At one large company I work for, Flickr is blocked.  I know of one company where news sites are blocked.

Does is suck at times? Undoubtedly, but companies have to make policies that apply to hundreds or thousands of employees.  Just because one person is responsible enough to check CNN and still get his work done doesn’t mean the guy in the next office is.  And non-uniform policies are invitations to a lawsuit.

The tech world did one great thing for corporate America back in the nineties- forced a lot of companies, including mine, to adopt a business casual policy.  I’d love to see the tech world do it again with internet access and the acceptance of new technology.

But it ain’t gonna happen.

Corporate America and the tech world that we read and write about are not the same.  You can’t view the world through tech-colored glasses.

I don’t care what some quack in Norway says.

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Blogging Mistakes: Friends, Non-Friends, and Two Lists of Ten

Two internet buddies of mine are having a spirited debate about blogging and images and basically everything from the meaning of life all the way down to the color of the sky. I’ve already had my kumbaya moment for the day, so let’s jump right in and stir thing up a little.

Randy Morin (one of the fun brokers) and TDavid are the buddies in question. I’ve read both their blogs for a long time, and they’re both smart guys. Here’s the genesis of the debate. Now for my thoughts on the matters at hand.

First, my take on Randy’s Top 10 Mistakes Made by My Blogging Friends, and then more on TDavid’s response.

1. Loss of Links – This is precisely why I am trapped in Blogger and can’t move to WordPress. It’s also why new bloggers should strongly consider which blogging platform they really like, as opposed to jumping on the first free thing that crosses their path. It’s not that Blogger is so bad- it’s just so hard to leave.

2. Forfeiting Your RSS Feed – I have used Feedburner from day one. You can, however, sort of have it both ways by having a hosted link that forwards to Feedburner. I don’t care that much, so I just used Feedburner from the get go.

3. Broken RSS Feeds – I noticed hundreds of those when I did my Scoblefeeds review. Some of those people probably didn’t care that the feeds to their abandoned blogs were broken, but I bet a lot of them did. Subscribe to your own blog in various applications and monitor it to make sure everything is working as expected. Broken feeds are blog-killers.

4. Making it Difficult to Subscribe – Good advice. RSS auto-discovery is a must. Your feed subscription information should be way above the fold and obvious. I have few email subscribers, but I still keep the option in place because it’s free and none of my real world friends know a news reader from a flashlight.

5. Blocking Your Readers – I can tell you from years of operating message boards that bandwidth theft concerns are all over the internet as it relates to hot linking to images. I get emails all the time from web sites whose images have been added to a popular thread on a message board. I won’t hot link to images except where expressly permitted (like Flickr), even if the opportunity is there, because I don’t want some pissed off web master to change the picture of a kitten to some hardcore porn or whatnot. This happens all the time, believe me. Allyoucanupload.com is an easy and free place to host images, so I just use it for images. The uploader gives you all sorts of linking code automatically upon upload.

6. Sucking Up to A-listers – I see both sides of this argument. My buddy Dwight thinks I suck up to them all the time. I don’t think that I do, but I also knew when I began this blog that they weren’t going to come knocking on my door and that if I wanted to join the conversation, the initiative was going to have to originate here. In sum, it’s a balancing act. I don’t think it’s that hard to get links from most of those guys. For example, Steve Newson posted the other day after being inactive for a month or so, and right away he got a link from Scoble (as well as me and others) and was on Techmeme.

Basically, most of those guys are regular guys who will eventually respond to you if you come across their radar. Just like the hosts of a party, however small that party may be, they have a lot of people trying to talk to them and so you have to be patient. Others (Jeff Jarvis, Seth Godin [OK, so I was wrong about Seth] and Mike Arrington come to mind) are not going to engage you no matter what- just identify them and treat them like the old media they criticize while emulating.

A more productive approach might be to find some similarly interested B or C listers and get to know them via comments, links and trackbacks. You’ll get a better bang for your linking buck. Plus by the time those guys become A-Listers, you’ll be an old buddy.

7. Not Reading Your Readers – I agree with this point the most of all. Anyone who is a regular reader and commenter on my blog will find their way onto my blogroll. Absolutely, all the time. And if someone can get and stay on my blogroll, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll say something I find link-worthy. I can tell you that I had worked my way onto the blogrolls of a lot of so-called A-Listers long before I started getting links from them. Your best customers are always your existing customers.

8. Accepting Trolls – I make a distinction between someone who thinks I’m an idiot, but adds value by engaging others in conversation and someone who is there solely as a disrupter. I’m OK with the former, but years of experience have taught me that you can’t tame the latter. So you need to get rid of them and, above all, avoid engaging them.

9. Putting Yourself on a Pedestal – Amen. I suspect, but can’t prove, that the ones most prone to do this are the ones who have not had the recognition they seek in the real world.

10. Partial Feeds – Partial feeds are a way to try to make money off of me, as a reader. You better be a damn good writer if you expect me to click over to your site to read what I ought to be reading right here in my news reader. Even worse is the Obscure approach- headlines only with a forced ad-stop between the click and the story.

And now about TDavid’s rebuttal:

1. I guess if I had ads (which I don’t because nobody clicks on ads, as I will be proving in an upcoming post) and I also put ads on the page where my images were located, maybe I’d be more likely to want to keep people within the boundaries of Newsome.Org, but I don’t. I can’t say there isn’t logic here for others and, sure, I wish every Flickr page and the Amazon store had big, obvious links back to my site, but based on my AdSense experience, I don’t think I’m leaving much money on the table by having my images served from afar.

[I’m skipping 2, 3, 7 and 9.]

4. I understand TDavid’s point about control, but as I discussed above, I’m comfortable with Feedburner, if for no other reason than its turnkey approach to RSS and email subscriptions. I do agree that those click-through URLs are a pain in the ass.

5&6. TDavid and Randy aren’t that far apart about trolls. I suspect both would agree with my approach described above.

8. I believe that good content over time will get you all sorts of links, A-List and others. But there’s more too it than that. Selling links is like selling any other product and a good salesman can sell an inferior product easier than a bad salesman can sell a superior product. If you really want to sell links, you have to develop relationships with these people, if not the easy way via conferences and blog-star parties, then the hard way via comments and trackbacks.

10. One of the things I like the most about Live Writer is its spell checker. I have a 100% failure rate at typing than as that- which sadly isn’t picked up by spell checkers. I don’t think spelling is a huge deal in blog posts, but like anything else it’s a matter of degree. I don’t think anyone could argue any differently that than 🙂

So there you have it…

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At Long Last: The Convergence of Phones and PCs

I remember a few years ago when we were selecting new telephones for my office. A few of us got to test out some of the possilibities and we later talked about the pros and cons of each.

I made the point over and over again (as I know I am prone to do, but at least I’m consistent) that I couldn’t believe there wasn’t more convergence between the PC and the good old phone. Specifically, I was amazed then, and I am still amazed now, at the lack of communication between PCs and phones, particularly in the corporate environment. If you’d told me back in the eighties that in 2006 there would not be an easy and widely used way to click on a name in your Outlook contacts and have your phone dial that person’s number, I would have laughed in your face. Yet, if anything it’s gotten worse over the years. One click dialing actually worked back in the dial up with your slow modem days. If I were creating the tech universe, once click address book dialing would have been the next thing I did after word processing and email.

But is hasn’t happened. And the inroads that have been made are much better suited for you home telephone than your office one. There’s still not easy way to get your office PC to talk to your office phone.

Sure, I have a Skype account at home and I know we could use some fancy VOIP phones at work that integrate, at least somewhat, with your PC. In fact, I tested a Cisco VOIP phone for almost a year. It was fine for me, as someone who is very tech savvy. But it would have been a disaster to roll them out to thousands of people who aren’t. Not to mention very expensive.

So we continue to plug along tethered to our regular old phones, which sit beside but never speak to our PCs.

But things are finally starting to change.

Jajah, for example, allows you to make phone to phone calls from their website. Just add your number to the first blank, the number you want to call to the second one and click “Call.” Your phone will ring, the other person’s phone will ring and, presto, you’re talking. It is easy and it works. Even better, there is an Outlook plugin that promises one click dialing from within Outlook- including both contacts and phone numbers that appear in the email you’re reading. The plugin would not install correctly in my exchange-driven office computer, but it is still in beta, so whatever problem I experienced may be fixed before the plugin is finalized. I will contact Jajah and see if I can get a fix on the issue.

Another startup, Hullo, provides similar services. Plus it lets you talk either via your regular phone or over the internet via VOIP. Plus, you can also add others to the call, creating easy conference calls. You can even switch between your regular phone and VOIP during a call.

Pinger, which I just read about today, takes things one step further. It allows you to store a special number in your mobile phone’s speed dial. You press the button for that number and, via voice prompts, you can access a person’s information from your phone’s address book and send that person an audio message, either to his email account or via SMS. Handy for when you need to leave a quick message, but don’t have time to talk. It’s in invitation-only beta right now but it looks very promising.

The big winner will be the company that combines most or all of these features in a cross-platform application that can be used in with corporate phone systems.

We’ve got a long way to go, but I’m excited about the possibility that my PC and my phone might soon be on speaking terms.

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Let’s All Grow Up and Play Nice, Shall We?

Rogers Cadenhead and Paul Kedrofsky aren’t buying what Dave Winer is selling.

catboxingI have mildly defended Dave here a few times when I thought he was getting ganged up on and I have also said many times that he often makes it hard to defend him. Just yesterday, I mentioned how happy I am that Dave is focusing on Blackberry applications, simply because we need to close the media gap between the otherwise lovable Blackberry and every other phone on the market. I don’t know Paul from Adam (though I note that he refers to himself as Dr. in his bio, so please think of me as either Lawyer Newsome, Mr. Newsome or Cool Rocking Daddy, take your pick, for the duration of this post). While I don’t know Rogers, he seems like an allright guy and I have read his blog for some time. In other words, I don’t really have a dog in this fight, and I really, really don’t care who invented the internet or who invented news wires or news rivers or news papers.

Rather, I will make three points about getting along in the blogosphere:

First, whether Dave is right or wrong, he is sometimes his own worst enemy. When he writes something like this:

“Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they’re having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin. Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions.”

That doesn’t just sound like bragging- there’s no other way to interpret it. It’s a “look at me, I’m not getting enough attention” sort of thing. One of the basic rules of human interaction is that someone who keeps grabbing your collar and telling you over and over how smart or how successful they are is bound to lose the argument. Let it go. If you’re smart and successful (which from my perspective Dave seems to be), people will figure it out. If they don’t want to admit it, it’s usually because they think you’ve been unkind, arrogant or a braggart. A pugilistic personality will grab the spotlight from personal achievement every time.

Second, why write in condescending riddles like this:

I don’t share this space with hitch-hikers. I use my blog for my own ideas. They make good money. No point diluting what I have to say.

I can see more arrogance and I can tell Dave’s mad at someone, but I have no idea who. All that a reader who doesn’t follow the story like Jane Goodall follows chimps can glean from that paragraph is contempt. For crying out loud man, just say what it is you want to say. Who are you dumping on? Everyone? No one? Just tell us. At least then there is the possibility that someone might agree with you.

And finally, all this fighting over who invented what and all these little smart boy nerd-of-the-week clubs that pop up here and there in the blogosphere make the blogosphere look more like a nursery room than a place where intelligent grown-ups engage in distributed conversations about grown-up stuff.

Everybody needs to grow up, take a long look in the mirror and stop believing their own bullshit.

Is anybody with me?

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Afternoon Extras: 8/22/06

Susan Getgood on the Gatekeeper Debate: “A bunch of white guys linking around.” A good read, and I largely agree with her point, even though I’m sure she’d say I perpetuate the problem.

Shelley Powers takes on a roomful of rowdy commenters. I really like her writing, even though I know she could punch me in the nose at any second.

Matt Craven on the echo chamber chamber chamber chamber…

Mathew Ingram on a better, funnier Digg. I always find at least one hilarious thing every time I look at Fark.

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Dave Digging Crack for Our Berries

crackberryDave Winer has begun using a Blackberry, which is a good thing for the rest of us, because he will drag applications out of developers and, if all else fails, write them himself.

The format of the New York Times’ Newsriver that Dave writes about is exactly the way mobile content ought to be pushed- though I’d like to see it updated more frequently. There’s nothing to set up, no registration, just quick and easy like mobile content ought to be. Hey Dwight, how about something like this for the Chronicle?

I have used a Blackberry (or Crackberry, as they are often referred to) for years, recently having the good fortune to lose my old one, which required that I buy a new one. That post contains my mostly positive thoughts about my Blackberry- including the best feature. The model I have lets me connect my laptop to Verizon’s wireless broadband network.

It works great in Bandera, where Verizon can hear me now, but not so well in Concan, where it cannot. The best use of course is in airports and hotels in order to avoid high daily connection rates.

Here are some things I really want for my Blackberry. Hey Dave, can you help a brother out?

1) I want a media player that is easy to install and works. I pay for Verizon’s broadband service, so I want to be able to use it. Any of the features on the Sprint phone that Dave and I both got for free would be a good start. The Sirius Radio capability alone is enough to love that phone.

2) I want an application on my Blackberry that will let me listen to my office voice mail via email, the way I do at the office. For years my voice mail has been delivered to my email inbox, where I listen to it via the possibly abandoned Lucent Voice Player. It sounds silly if you’ve never tried it, but once you get used to getting clickable voice mail via email, you’ll never go back.

3) I want some reasonably priced GPS functionality. My Blackberry has GPS, but as far as I can tell only for 911 calls, etc.

4) And of course, I want to have Blackberry network capability in a Treo, but that’s a gift for another Christmas I suppose.

The biggest impediment to writing killer Blackberry apps, in my opinion, is the lack of a flash memory drive. With all that extra, swappable, memory, it would be a breeze to expand the Blackberry’s relatively meager media offerings.

Hopefully Dave will figure out a way to get us there anyway.

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Blogging and that Fame Thing

blogfameStowe Boyd talks today about fame as a motivator for blogging. His piece originates from the recent gatekeeper debates and was inspired by an article in the New York Times exploring the general concept of fame as a motivator of human behavior.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, and I want to add my thoughts, specifically as it relates to fame as a motivator for bloggers in general and, because Stowe mentioned me is his post, me in particular.

Here’s the quote from the New York Times article I want to start with:

“People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.”

I think that’s generally true. Paris Hilton seems to me to be the the poster child for this sort of motivation. Of course the financial rewards of fame, however undeserved, can lead some to hide one goal behind another.

The other thing that occurs to me is that to be “widely known to strangers” is the badge not only of fame for fame’s sake, but also of being a visible and valued part of a process. The postman in our neighborhood is widely known to and valued by many, but he’s not famous.

In other words, inclusion in a process can make you known to strangers but not necessarily famous.

Is fame a motivator for my blogging? It’s a fair question.

We must be careful, however, to remember that those of us who lament the gatekeeping issue all have our individual motivations. Fame, inclusion, jealousy, logic and just the love of a spirited debate probably all fall in the mix somewhere. The key is to sift through the collateral motivations and identify the emotive reaction that leads you to pound out a response whenever the issues arises.

By pound out, I hope to mean write a heartfelt, but thoughtful, rebuttal. Not just calling the other side assholes like Mike Arrington does. Or dismissing them out of hand, like Scoble sometime does. When I am arguing with someone in real life and they call me an asshole, I know I have them beat.

I don’t blog to be famous. In my mind that would be like playing jacks to get famous. As I pointed out in the post that got this last debate started, you can be the most read blogger in the world and nobody in the real world will ever hear or read your name.

And I certainly don’t blog for money. I am on record over and over again about the folly that is blogging for riches.

But, upon reflection, there is an element of recognition that, if I am to be honest, does come in to play, at least indirectly.

I rarely talk about my real job on this blog, because it is largely unrelated to what I write about and a lot of what I do is subject to rules and agreements regarding confidentiality. But the fact is that I am very well known in my industry. I’m not going to belabor the point, but I’ll give one small example. Not long ago, some of my partners and I went to another city to interview some lateral hire candidates. When we walked into the conference room to introduce ourselves, the senior partner of the group we were interviewing commented that they already knew me because “everybody knows Kent- he’s famous.” We all laughed, but the fact is that I work on a lot of high profile stuff, I do a lot of writing in old media and I speak at seminars and conventions across the country.

I also have written a bunch of songs, a few of which are on records and I was a major player in the internet message board space during Bubble 1.0.

None of this makes me truly famous, but it does result in being widely known to strangers. In the real world.

But very little of that pre-existing recognition translates into the blogosphere.

On the one hand, that is appealing to me, because it gives me a chance to earn my stripes again. But sometimes, deep in the back of my mind, I find myself getting a little irritated when people who would be very pleased to include me in any real world conversation ignore me in the blogosphere. That sounds petty even as I type it, but it’s true. I don’t dwell on those thoughts and I try to ignore them, but they happen.

I don’t think that’s about fame, though. I think it’s a matter of what you’re used to and your expectations, right or wrong, that you’re as smart and valuable in the blogosphere as you are in the real world. I joked in a post the other day that if I were starting over, I’d blow my vacation money on a few conferences so the people who currently link around my detailed analysis in favor of 10 word posts by their buddies would think I was one of their buddies and ignore other detailed analysis in favor of my 10 word posts. I was trying to be funny, but there’s an element of truth to that. A lot of these so-called A-Listers see and hear each other at these conferences and build friendships and mutual respect for each other.

I have no doubt that if I spent a few months going to these conferences, meeting these folks, having dinner with them and getting to know each other beyond the occasional email and cross-blog conversations, I’d get to the top of blogger’s hill in no time. But I can’t do that, so I have to take the harder trail. That’s not unfair. It’s just the way it is.

Blogging for me is not about fame and it’s not about fortune. Whatever I end up with in those regards will be determined by real life, not by what I blog about, who I link to and who links to me. Nor do I feel disconnected or alienated. I would hope my posts about family life and all the fun stuff we do with our friends would be evidence of that.

For me, the primary motivation in blogging is to converse with people who share interests of mine that aren’t generally shared by my real world friends; to learn about things that interest me; and, now that I have some readers, to be active in bringing new voices to the conversation.

I’ll repeat once more my recent slogan: the blogosphere is not an equal opportunity place. Life isn’t either. It’s OK that they aren’t, as long as you don’t try to pretend they are.

It sounds like I am disagreeing with Stowe, but I’m really not. I’m only saying that my motivations for blogging are different than those described in his post.

I’ll leave you with another of Stowe’s patented home run paragraphs, from the end of his post:

“The crowd — occasionally wise, but always judging — collectively decides who to look at, to listen to, to pay attention to. And some play to the crowd, trying to grab that attention, and hold onto it. Some succeed. There is a scissors-like inner logic to this, and the outcomes are decidely not equal to merit, effort, or wants. But a statement that sounds like a poet explaining chaos theory is unlikely to comfort those that feel shorted by a capricious and uncaring law of the universe. And those that have achieved fame will always want to believe it is by their own merits, not because the whole lunchroom is rubbernecking at the guy with the loudest voice sitting with the cheerleaders.”

That, friends, is a beautiful summation of the blogosphere- and life.

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Morning Reading: 8/22/06

I’ve been waiting for podcast tours of museums, historical places and cities to become more mainstream.  It just seems like a great use for podcasts.  Now all we need is a central place to put them.  Hey Jimmy, doesn’t this sound like a natural addition to Wikipedia?

Believe it or not, I was wondering last week whether anyone ever survived a parachute jump when their parachute didn’t open.  This guy got up like Wylie Coyote, shook himself off and walked away.

Something about this just seems wrong to me.  Let’s play ad-infested music for people we think can’t afford better….

Stupid shit like this makes me glad I’m a Methodist, but it still makes us all look like idiots.  Tim LeBouf (here’s his blog) should count his blessings that I am not a member of his congregation.  I would stand up during a so-called sermon about women learning in quietness and submission and expose it for the horse manure it is.  This really pisses me off, in case you can’t tell.

Does anyone really care about Paris Hilton, other than for the ridicule value? 

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