Month: July 2007

I am on vacation for the next week or so, and so posting is likely to be light — and in the interim, here is a musical interlude from one of YouTube’s most popular attractions: “Funtwo,” who turned out to be a young Korean man named Jeong-Hyun Lim.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjA5faZF1A8&w=425&h=350]

It was a couple of days ago now, but Nat Torkington of O’Reilly had a great post about the kerfuffle (or was it a schlemozzle — or a brouhaha?) over Google’s Health blog and how the blogger in charge there took a run at Michael Moore’s movie Sicko in an attempt to sell the virtues of Google’s AdWords. If you’re interested in all of the back story, there’s a post at Search Engine Watch with details, and the blogger’s mea culpa is here.

Nat’s post (which I found via Media Influencer) does a great job of dissecting what went wrong with the Google post — and why that kind of thing is an endemic risk with corporate blogs:

“I feel sorry for Ms Turner, whose post has a painful logic to its existence. Blogs let you communicate directly with your audience. Of course, we’re too busy building product to communicate with our audience, so let’s hire a marketer to do it for us.”

What happens then, Nat says, is that the marketer tries to assume the voice of a blogger — that is, an authentic personal voice — but because what they are really trying to do is push an agenda, it all comes out pear-shaped:

“When inexperienced marketers get a blog, they all blog the same way. Their voice is as authentic as a Twinkie is organic.The time-honored marketing blog post formula is simple:

1. Find something topical. In Ms Turner’s case, it was the release of Michael Moore’s new film.

2. Identify the shiznit you wish to pimp. In Ms Turner’s case, it was Google’s Health Advertising services.

3. Find a line (however tenuous) between the two and the post just writes itself!”

Sadly, I have seen too many posts that fit that exact same formula. And it has the exact opposite effect as the one intended. Instead of making the company or the blogger in question look smart and clued-in, it makes the company and blogger in question look ridiculous and lame.

“So, to recap, the recipe for a disaster is easy: hire marketers with no authentic voice, ask them to pimp offal, and when they’re busted for it make them force out an apology in which they blame it on their authentic voice.

You too can make the front page of TechMeme for two days running with three easy steps, though you might get wet sleeves fishing your career prospects out of the toilet when you’re done. You’re welcome!”

Brilliant.

Peng Shulin was cut in half after getting run over by a truck in 1995, and lost the lower half of his body. Doctors did skin grafts to seal up his torso, but he has been bed-ridden for years — until now. Scientists at the Chinese Rehabilitation Research Center created a kind of plastic housing for his torso that is fitted with two bionic legs (and some cool Adidas shoes as well, apparently), and he has been using the device with a modified walker. I wonder if Johnny Eck would have liked something similar — probably not.

As I mentioned in my recent Globe and Mail column on the Facebook IPO rumours, I don’t think there has been so much frenzy around a tech startup and its valuation since the Google days, although the debate over YouTube’s value (thanks in large part to the always game Mark Cuban) runs a close second. We now have valuations that run anywhere from a mind-boggling $10-billion — and this is for a company with annual revenue of about $100-million, at last estimate — all the way to zero. The big debate lately has been whether Facebook’s poor performance on the advertising front makes it worth less (or worthless), or whether it just means that advertising isn’t the route to profit for a social network, as my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 describes here. I, for one, hope that Facebook does do an IPO so that we can let the market decide what the company is worth. Sergey Brin says he’d be happy to talk to Facebook but isn’t planning to buy it, and thinks it is building a great company on its own.

Like most bloggers, I think I tend to take the power of the link for granted. I write things, I link to other bloggers and to websites, etc. etc. — that’s how it works, right? Carry on — nothing to see here. And yet, every now and then something comes along that reinforces just how powerful a simple link can be. The latest example was a post I came across at The Blog Herald, written by Jason Kaneshiro, who writes a blog at Webomatica.com.

Not to get too self-referential or anything, but Jason talks in the post about how a link from me helped inspire him in his early days as a blogger, a topic that he arrived at after reading a similar post by Lorelle Van Fossen of WordPress, called “Changing a Life With a Link.” I have to say that Jason’s post means a lot to me — in fact, his post may even have as much significance to me as my original link did to him. And yet, I gave virtually no thought to the link when I posted that original item to my blog. I had no idea who Jason was, or what his blog was all about (although I did check out a few of his posts to get a sense of who he was). I just thought he had made a good suggestion, so I linked to it. End of story — or, as it turned out, beginning of story. Apparently a link I gave him made a difference to The Last Podcast as well.

As I mentioned in a comment on Jason’s post, that’s what is so great about the blogosphere. Who Jason was — or how long he had been blogging, or what his background was — was of no interest to me. It was quite literally irrelevant to whether his post made sense or not, just as it was irrelevant to me who Tony Hung was when I first started reading his blog at Deep Jive Interests (Tony is also the editor at The Blog Herald now).

And if nothing else, Jason’s story has reinforced in me the desire to link to as many different voices as possible. I already do my best to find new blogs and links, instead of always linking to TechCrunch or CNET or places like that, but I could do better. I remember my blog friend Kent Newsome (who got mad at me recently for a link I inadvertently removed) had a project called “Second Opinion,” in which he tried to get bloggers to link to new voices, and I thought it was a great idea — and still do. Links are powerful things.

Fresh from his financing round for Ning, former Netscape creator and new blogging superstar Marc Andreessen has a great list of eleven lessons he has learned since he started his blog a little over a month ago. Most of them are excellent, including the one where he admits he was wrong about blogging (when he said it required too much “time and ego”) and says:

“It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact.”

He also notes that in his experience “original content is what generates readership” (although I think it helps if you have a track record like Marc does) and that while he gets hits from Digg.com and so on, a surprising amount of traffic comes from StumbleUpon.com, which is something I’ve heard many times from other bloggers as well. But Marc also says something I’m not sure I agree with: he says he has turned off comments on his blog because he doesn’t have time to moderate them, and in any case that he sees the existence of blogs and trackbacks and search mechanisms like Technorati.com and Google’s blog search as an effective replacement for comments.

It’s ironic, in a way, that Andreessen also says he doesn’t feel he has to have comments on his blog because he can find other blog posts that refer to his — and then post a comment on them. If they also turned off comments, of course, that wouldn’t work. But would it be enough for everyone to have a blog and just respond to each other in the same way Marc describes?

I think there are a couple of problems with that, and it’s something I’ve thought a fair bit about and posted on in the past (raising the ire of Dave Winer, among others). The first is (obviously) that not everyone has a blog, or wants to have a blog. I have some persistent commenters whose opinions I value who don’t appear to have blogs at all — they blog by commenting. Last Podcast makes a similar point, and I see that Fred Wilson agrees with me too.

The second problem is that not everything requires a blog post. Just today, I came across a mention on Jeremy Liew’s Lightspeed blog about my post on Facebook hiring Chamath Palihapitiya, in which Jeremy described me as “questioning the hire.” Not a big deal, but I posted a comment saying I was just having some fun with the AOL connection, not questioning his abilities. Not something that would require a whole blog post, but enough to clear up a misunderstanding (I hope).

I’m only using that as an example. And I see Marc’s point about the difficulty of moderating comments, and looking for other solutions (such as a Meebo plugin, etc.). But why not allow users to moderate their own comments? I don’t know if Typepad has something like that, but WordPress does. Robert Scoble, ever the enterprising blogger, has even offered to host Marc’s comments.

Those of you who subscribe to my Twitter feed will have seen this already, but I just had to blog about something that happened on Friday on the way up to a friend’s cottage in northern Ontario — we stopped for gas at the local Esso station and here is what I saw (click the image below for the full-sized version):

It’s a Windows XP error that says: “The file or directory C:\XPE_ROOTsystem32 is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.” Luckily, I was still able to get gas 🙂

A quick check of Flickr shows that there is a universe of similar shots, including this one and this one and this one — and for some Canadian content, this one.

I’ll say this for Marc Andreessen: he knows how to make a splash. First, he writes a whole series of excellent (and lengthy) blog posts with advice for startups — so excellent that my friend Paul Kedrosky jokes about how he’s making the rest of us look bad — and then he announces a blockbuster financing round of $44-million for Ning, which values the company at something north of about $200-million and has got everyone talking.

My friend Rob Hyndman, a lawyer who advises technology startups, says he is skeptical of Ning’s ability to justify that kind of money, and so is Rob Hof at BusinessWeek — who draws a comment from the man himself by comparing Ning to Facebook. Don Dodge says that he doesn’t think Ning’s revenues will scale. And Umair comes right out and says Legg Mason’s investment in Ning is an example of dumb money. But is it really? I think some of those criticisms miss the point about what Ning is trying to do. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen, but I think Ning is trying to become the “Intel inside” for social networks.

In some ways, Ning’s strategy is the opposite of Facebook’s. Whereas the Mark Zuckerberg show is all about bringing people — and eventually transactions — to Facebook, and becoming a platform in that sense, Ning wants to be the plumbing for any kind of social network. The company is even happy to help you turn your soc-net into a widget that you can then embed in Facebook.

I used Ning to set up an ad-hoc social network for a class reunion I was involved in organizing, and it was easy enough to use that even the ancient classmates I was dealing with could figure it out. I think Ning’s vision is that instead of everyone going to Facebook or MySpace, there will eventually be hundreds of thousands or even millions of social networks, all tied in to each other in some way (through Google’s SocialSystem perhaps?).

Ning clearly wants to power that explosion — and the way it has been configured is easily powerful enough to do that, I think, given enough horsepower and resources to allow it to scale. Will it succeed? I haven’t a clue. But I think the strategy is an interesting one.

There’s lots of skepticism out there about stodgy venture-capital fund Bay Partners creating a special investment vehicle for Facebook apps, called AppFactory. Om’s post is entitled “Bonkers By The Bay,” which pretty much sums up his point of view on the idea — that it’s a dumb move by a VC firm that has been swept up in the Facebook hysteria, and that it’s dumb in part because it means building a business on a proprietary platform.

Others are similarly skeptical — Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of HipMojo, for example, can barely contain his derision for the idea. And the biggest criticism centers around whether Facebook apps are monetizable at all, something that venture capitalist Andrew Chen talked about in very skeptical terms in a recent interview with Inside Facebook. But Mike Arrington, who has no small amount of experience in the startup game himself, seems to think that building apps based on the Facebook platform isn’t such a bad idea at all, since it allows a startup to build and test something relatively quickly and cheaply (the guy behind the Bay venture, Salil Deshpande, responds multiple times in Mike’s comments).

For what it’s worth, I think Bay Partners is making a smart move. We’re talking about a relative pipsqueak of a fund in dollar terms — up to fifty investments worth $25,000 to $250,000 (but most likely far less). That’s pretty close to a rounding error in VC terms. Will any of them work out? Who knows. But it’s possible that one or two could become something real, using Facebook as a springboard, and that seems like a small chance worth taking, along the lines of what Google Ventures and Y Combinator are doing.

Howard Owens has a great list of mistakes that newspapers have made when it comes to online, including three of my favourites:

1. Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging.

2. Fear kept newsrooms from allowing comments on stories.

3. Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push.

Go read the whole thing. Nice job, Howard.

Wired magazine is running some of the stories that have been produced by Assignment Zero — the first “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment from Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired writer (and mesh panelist) Jeff Howe — and one of the first is a piece by Anna Haynes about just how difficult the entire process has been. As she describes it:

“The results of my efforts were mixed. Some parts were rewarding: I enjoyed digging to uncover lobbyist connections to earmarked appropriations in the Earmarks Project, plus there’s a certain satisfaction in publicly exposing stonewalling, and a different satisfaction in finally getting an answer.

But I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high “social good” return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in.”

In the end, however, Anna says that she believes it was worth it — and that more of it needs to happen:

I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn’t measure up — you know there’s potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you’re pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time that potential will blossom.

Given all the talk about Facebook being the new AOL — and I’m as guilty as the next guy — couldn’t the social network have tried a little harder to hire someone other than Chamath Palihapitiya, who was until recently a senior executive at the ill-fated Time Warner unit? His hiring is seen as just another sign that Facebook is prepping for an IPO.

Of course, Palihapitiya has other credentials as well, despite the fact that he is just 30 years old: he comes to Facebook after a brief stint at the venture-capital outfit Mayfield Fund, and before he was at AOL (where he ran the ICQ and AIM business and the broadband unit) he worked at Spinner.com and Winamp.com. Before that, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was a derivatives trader for BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto. Yes, the new Facebook hire is a Canadian boy, who was raised in Toronto and got his degree in electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is also apparently a high-stakes poker player, according to his “fun facts” page at Mayfield, who has played no-limit games against some of the best. And he doesn’t take kindly to snotty car salesmen who fail to pay him the proper amount of respect, according to this New York Times article.

I wrote about this last week — bloggers covering the attacks on a radical mosque in Pakistan — but wanted to return to the subject in a little more depth:

On some “metro-blogs” such as Torontoist.com or NYCBloggers.com, a big day might be a photo montage of a cultural event or a post about something dumb the mayor has done (always a good topic) — or a public fracas such as the one involving a bicycle courier and a driver that got Torontoist so many page views back in January of last year. At Metroblogging Islamabad, however, they have been “live-blogging” the ongoing incendiary standoff between a group of radical Islamic priests and the Pakistani army in the country’s capital city.

While U.S. cities were taking the day off to celebrate July 4th, Metroblogging Islamabad was posting updates like this one at 2:30 a.m.:

“The 111 Brigade from the RWP Corps has assembled at the Lal Masjid and there is a high probability of an assault. The area is cordoned off completely, and there is a curfew. EVERYONE IS ADVISED TO AVOID THE AREA AS SPECIAL FORCES AND OTHER SECURITY PERSONNEL HAVE BEEN TOLD TO EXERCISE MINIMUM RESTRAINT, ZERO TOLERANCE AND ‘SHOOT ON SIGHT.”

Further updates came at 2:40 and 3:00 a.m., then another at 3:10 saying simply “SHOTS FIRED!” At 5 p.m. came a post that said:

“Activity near the Lal Masjid intensifies as gun shots from automatic rifles are heard. Tracked vehicles can be heard. Gun smoke can be smelt several meters away from the site of action. The loudspeaker has gone mute, that was chanting Allah-o-Akbar. After the willing students left, the ones left inside seem to be ready for death or victory.”

Metroblogging Islamabad is part of the Metroblogging network, which includes more than 50 blogs in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Boston, but also foreign centres from Dublin to Manila. The network was started by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo, and began with the Blogging.la website. A competing “metro-blog” network is the series of “-ist” blogs, which started with Gothamist and now includes Torontoist, Chicagoist and Shanghaiist among about fifteen other metro-blogging sites.

As the siege of the mosque in Islamabad continued last week, posts at Metroblogging Islamabad continued to chronicle the attempted escape of one of the ringleaders, disguised as an old woman in a burqa (“So much for Jihadi spirit!” says the post). The following day, the site carried posts about shots being fired in the mosque, heavy gunfire coming from Pakistan Army soldiers and the arrival of AH-1 helicopters — with a helpful link to the Wikipedia entry on military attack helicopters.

The siege has now gone on for six days, and Metroblogging Islamabad continues to pull together eyewitness reports, news reports and rumours on an almost hourly basis. Other Metroblogging sites have done similar things in the past, including the London site during the bombings in 2005 — where people posted eyewitness reports, impressions, news about the missing and so on — and the New Orleans site after the floods during Hurricane Katrina. Metroblogging Montreal also became one of the sites that people went to after the shootings at Dawson College to find out more about the event.

Is this an example of what some are calling “citizen journalism” in action? That’s difficult to say. While many of the reports on Metroblogging Islamabad are journalistic in nature, with facts and attribution (some to mainstream media, some to local reports and eyewitnesses), there are also posts like this one:

“Immense emotion fills me up when I think of the people that have died on the either side of this conflict. While one being in the capacity of delivering pictures to the outside world, I take this time to say a little prayer for Lt. Col. Haroon Islam, a son of Lahore.”

It may or may not be journalism, but whatever it is, I find it fascinating.