Month: May 2007

I know this is kind of a stretch, but stay with me while I try to pull a couple of threads together from things that are going on right now: We’ve got the launch of Truemors, the Digg-style rumour site that Guy Kawasaki set up — which seems to have been over-run with spam and the equivalent of graffiti (what Second Lifers call “griefing”), and may be burying critical posts.

Then there’s MySpace News, which some argue is a ghost town, and others say merely needs some work. And there’s Newsvine, which some argue isn’t as successful as it could be (and I would agree). And finally, there is the sad tale of how Derek Powazek and his wife were pushed out of the wonderful photo community/magazine they founded called JPG. What do all of these have in common? Community. I know that’s an overused word, but I think it is the key to the success or failure of virtually every online venture that tries to get “users” involved in some way.

Why isn’t MySpace News taking off? Because as Tony Hung suggests, it either isn’t appealing to the community or it isn’t making it easy for them to use it. Why isn’t Newsvine as successful as it could be? In part because the community isn’t as big a part of the picture as it should be. What is the secret to Digg’s success, and the thing that Truemors needs to find? A community. And what could kill JPG magazine? The loss of a loyal community.

It’s not enough to set up a cool site and say “Hey — look at my cool site! Come on over and form a community!” And it’s not enough to start with a community based around other things, such as MySpace, and then bolt on some other function and expect them to take to it immediately. It doesn’t work that way. And yes, there has to be moderation of some kind, but that path is pretty rocky too, as Digg has found out.

Facebook is (at least so far) a good example of a site that had a community, nurtured that community and may have some success in expanding into other things — but it is not easy. Far from it, as this essay by Cory Doctorow explains. In fact, it just might be the hardest thing of all. And I just came across a great post on how to manage a community by Matt Haughey, who runs one of the best there is: Metafilter (hat tip to Kottke for the link).

I don’t want to be accused of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre or anything, but I thought I should probably warn any of you who might be interested that tickets for the mesh conference are going quickly, and we will likely be sold out soon. The big event is coming up in a little over two weeks — May 30th and 31st at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.

There’s plenty of info at the mesh website on the speakers we have lined up (people like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist, Christine Herron of the Omidyar Network, Mike Masnick of Techdirt, Rachel Sklar of The Huffington Post, Austin Hill of Gifter.org and Akoha and others too numerous to mention).

The full schedule is available here. If you want to get a glimpse of just how much fun we all had last year, take a look at this page. And if you want to get a ticket, the ticket window is over here.

So MySpace is launching branded news and entertainment video channels, according to a press release from the social-networking behemoth. The site has signed deals with the New York Times, Reuters and National Geographic to offer news content (National Geographic does news?) as well as with other content owners to offer channels such as The Daily Reel — which compiles links to the best of online video — Kush TV (including the Family Values Tour with alt-punk band Korn) and VBS-TV, from the creators of Vice magazine.

The big question, of course, is whether anyone will actually watch any of this stuff. And something that isn’t mentioned in the release is whether MySpace users will have to go to the MySpace Video page to see the content from these branded channels, or will they and others be able to embed or share the links on their pages and elsewhere? As Quincy Smith of CBS pointed out recently, you have to take the content to where people are, not force them to come to where your content is. That’s why he said that CBS’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

If MySpace doesn’t want its new video channels to become the same kind of online ghost town that its MySpace News seems to be turning into, it might want to give that kind of thing a little thought.

It’s just a mild breeze, says Gavin O’Reilly of the World Newspaper Association:

“Don’t believe all you’re being told about the death of the press: more people all over the world are reading newspapers. What’s more, they’re still a powerful medium for advertising,” he says in a piece for The Independent. In other words, just ignore the dramatic declines in readership and the stories of newspapers laying off thousands of people or putting themselves up for sale. Just a flesh wound.

“The chorus of disapproval for newspapers has become a global trend. These days it is nearly impossible to find a media analyst who actually reads a newspaper or who can see anything other than doom and gloom for the industry.

I can present a different perspective. Let’s start with circulations, which continue to grow – and not just in India and China. Paid circulation grew globally by 1.9 per cent in 2006, with sales of 510.4 million copies a day.”

Wow — 1.9 per cent growth. Woo-hoo! Time to get out the party hats.

Laurent Haug, a very smart guy and part of the brain trust behind the LIFT conference in Geneva, has written a great post on his blog about finding balance in social media, and how he thinks that we are beginning to do that — in other words, stepping back from the “all users are created equal” view that has driven some of the commentary around sites like Wikipedia and Digg and acknowledging that some people actually might have skills or qualifications that make them more valuable. Not exactly a revelation for some, perhaps (yes, I mean you Seth) but still worth saying. As Laurent puts it at one point:

“Kicking out the experts was not the answer. We do not all contribute the same value. Somebody who has carved violins all his life should have more editing power than me on Wikipedia’s Stradivarius page.”

Laurent goes on to talk about how he sees social media and online communities that generate content being made up of three necessary groups: the users, content creators who are “needed to scale the system to a dimension where it starts to matter;” the drivers, who “build the community framework,” and the experts, who “bring credibility to the whole edifice by sharing their extensive knowledge.” Go read the whole thing.

Gabe Rivera — creator of Techmeme, the site bloggers love and/or hate (depending on whether they are on it or not — keeps his cards pretty close to his chest when it comes to the site and how it functions. And he doesn’t exactly spill the beans in a surprise interview with Beet.tv. But it’s still interesting to see and hear him discuss how it works. He also hints about doing some hiring, and possibly launching some new Techmeme spinoffs.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8mLrPPJph8&w=425&h=350]

So Mike Arrington announces some of the new advisors on the “panel of experts” for the TechCrunch20 conference that he and Jason Calacanis have started up as a kind of anti-DEMO conference. And the first thing that some people — like Ben Metcalfe and I, and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, for example — think when we look at the list is: What the F? MC Hammer is on this panel? What’s he an expert on?

Ben makes some good points, I think (points whose value is only slightly decreased by the fact that he consistently misspells the name “Michael” as “Micheal”). The Hammer — or to use his real name, Stanley Kirk Durell — seems to have done very little that qualifies him for a role on a panel of Web 2.0 startup experts. Yes, he is reportedly working with a music-based startup, but is that really all it takes to get on the panel of experts? Then Nick Denton at Valleywag weighs in with the “tokenism” card, at which point Karoli lashes out at the Wag for picking on Hammer — and then Nick and Mike take shots back and forth at each other in Karoli’s comment section. Nick says Karoli has missed the whole point, and Mike says he’s race-baiting. Is he? Who knows. But one thing occurred to me while I was reading this whole sordid tale: It would be a lot easier to argue that Hammer isn’t a token black guy if he had actually accomplished anything in the last decade that justified his presence on the panel. Just saying.

This has to be the single weirdest journalism story I’ve come across in weeks — and yet at the same time, it makes a kind of terrible, brilliant sense: A news website that covers the city of Pasadena has hired two writers in India to cover the city council in that California town, despite the fact that they are thousands of miles away and have likely never been to Pasadena. James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired one reporter who lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year, and another who works in Bangalore for $7,200. He will send them copy and have them edit and write it and then file it to him working in Pasadena.

“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

And these aren’t just Indian workers that Macpherson is trying to turn into journalists. One of the reporters that responded to his Craigslist ad is a former student at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The L.A. Times story notes that Pasadena city council broadcasts its meetings on the Web, and since India is 12.5 hours ahead of LA, the new journalists will be able to file reports while their boss sleeps.

Terrible? Brilliant? Stupid? Perhaps a little of all three. As Editor & Publisher notes, Reuters already has staffers in India rewriting press releases. My friend Neil Sanderson has more.

As we all know by now, Facebook is the new black. It’s the social network by which other social networks are judged — even MySpace, which it may already have eclipsed in terms of page views, if not users. So when it launches something it’s definitely worth paying attention, especially when it is something like classified ads, which Craig Newmark and the gang over at craigslist.org have turned into a low-price battleground.

The always-insightful Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 (who is also clearly a fan of the Cutline theme for WordPress, as I am) says this is another blow for newspapers, and he’s right of course — although they have taken so many body blows in the classified arena, both external and self-inflicted, that it’s getting hard to spot the individual bruises. Donna Bogatin at ZDNet makes the point (while arguing with my friend Mark Evans) that the classifieds on Facebook will not be open to everyone, since Facebook requires you to be a member, and people posting classifieds can choose who can see them), which is a fair point. But it’s not going to help.

It’s clear to me, as it is to Scott, that one of the things that makes Facebook so powerful as a competitor in this particular space is the social aspect it brings. Does anyone feel like they have really connected with someone through their newspaper classifieds? Unlikely. But Facebook and other social networks — including craigslist — are more like the bulletin board at the local campus centre, multiplied by a million. That is a powerful force.

To be quite honest, I’m not sure whether newspapers can compete on that level, since the amount of time and effort they have put into becoming a social network for their communities is in most cases approaching zero.

Guess I missed this somehow, but Richard Rosenblatt — one of the co-founders of MySpace — has formed a new company called Demand Media with Carson Daly, one of the early MTV video jockeys, and they are offering people who want to create their own video channel a video website-in-a-box, with a .tv domain name — they have a deal with Verisign to resell .tv domains — and some social-networking tools to grab, create and share video (the .tv domain, incidentally, ultimately belongs to the tiny island nation of Tuvalu — only 10 square kilometres in size, the least-populated country next to Vatican City, according to Wikipedia). An interesting idea.

As a journalist, I know that sometimes people in my profession get fixated on a particular storyline — in some cases before they even know anything about the subject — and then do everything in their power to force every peg into that particular hole. And I know that sort of thing is particularly prevalent when it comes to “the hot young startup” storyline.

That’s why Matt Mullenweg’s description in his latest blog post rings such a loud bell. There seems to be an unquenchable desire for that quintessential startup myth, of the young founder discovering something in a flash of insight and then becoming a gazillionaire overnight, to the point where some magazines create stories pretty much out of whole cloth to try and get them to fit the archetype, no matter what the cost to their believability. But Matt puts his own story so much better when he says:

“I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands.

That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.”

Well said, Matt. I for one find that a much more powerful story.