Author: Mathew Ingram

I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that startups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just re-launched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.

There’s no question that Scribd is pretty cool — especially when you consider that it was created by a couple of twentysomethings through the Y Combinator startup program run by programmer and VC Paul Graham. There’s a video of co-founder Trip Adler here, in which he looks like the next-door neighbour’s kid, the one you get to look after the cats and maybe mow the lawn while you’re away.

Trip and his team are clearly smart as well, since they ditched Adobe’s Flashpaper, which they were using initially, in favour of their own Flash viewer called iPaper — which appears to be faster, has a smaller footprint and has a bunch of custom features. It’s pretty cool to be able to view what looks like a PDF document with images and everything, in an embedded Flash widget. And it’s easy to implement on your site so that links to Word documents or PDFs are autoconverted.

All that said though, I just can’t see how Scribd makes money, even though the service does include the ability to put ads on document pages. I don’t see that being a huge revenue generator (although I could be wrong). I suppose there could be tiers of access to documents or sharing features, but I have no idea what those might be, or whether people would actually pay for them. Maybe Scribd could get bought by Google — I think Google Docs could use a few of those cool features.

It’s never easy when a friend passes away suddenly, but it’s even harder when that friend is as vibrant and full of life as Val Ross was. A writer and editor at the Globe and Mail, and before that at Macleans magazine and many other places, Val died on Sunday, just a few months after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. She was 57.

Although I only worked with Val directly for the past six months or so, in the Review section of the Globe, I spent several months before that working closely with her and several other Globe staffers as part of a “reimagination” project within the newspaper, and got to know her fairly well. She was funny and smart, and never hesitated to call a spade a spade — but did it in such a pleasant way that no one ever minded.

Having worked as a magazine editor as well as deputy comment editor for the Globe, the last year or so of Val’s life was spent writing about one of her passions: Canada’s cultural institutions, including the Royal Ontario Museum — where she took great delight in tormenting former Globe editor-in-chief William Thorsell. She was also writing a book about Robertson Davies. There’s more about her life here.

I was sitting about six feet away from Val in the Globe newsroom in October, when she suddenly cried out in pain and said that her left arm had seized up, as though she was having a sudden muscle spasm. Someone suggested she should go to the hospital, so she called herself a cab and was gone — and that’s the last time I saw her. She was a wonderful writer, and even more important, she was a wonderful person.

Further reading:

Others writing about Val’s passing include author (and former Globe writer) Trevor Cole, as well as D.B. Scott.

I know there’s probably been enough sturm und drang about Fred Wilson’s post on journabloggers and Mike Arrington’s response, in which he calls Fred “hypocritical, wrong and conflicted,” but there’s an undercurrent behind the furore that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit. Tony Hung puts his finger on it in this post, and Andy Beard mentions it in his as well. It’s the old “truth vs. traffic” dilemma, and while bloggers like to think that it was invented by the Web, it’s probably as old as journalism itself.

To recap: Tony says that Mike is using a blog/nerd fight to his advantage for traffic reasons, and that when TechCrunch or any other blog is controversial, they win (i.e., they get linked high on Techmeme and they get more traffic as a result). Mike also says in a comment on his own post that:

“we’ve found that the “hits” – the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion – are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens.”

and in a comment on Fred’s post:

“here’s a secret – a lot of what we write about generates the traffic. And every day I sneak in a bunch of posts about startups that get the benefit of that traffic.”

Mike also told me last year — when I interviewed him as part of a mesh conference keynote — that he always wants to be first, because if he’s not first then “it’s a lot more work.” Does that mean he is willing to jump into print with something quickly even if he hasn’t pinned it down 100 per cent? He admitted that it does (although he also made the point that trust must be gained over time, and can be easily lost).

But in making that admission, and talking about traffic as a motivator, all Mike is really doing is admitting to the same impulse that newspaper editors have been driven by for the past 100 years or so. In fact, the early days of newspapers — when there were hundreds of scandal sheets and political bully-pulpit rags pushing their respective biases — resembled nothing so much as the current state of the blogosphere.

That tradition continues today with tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily Mail in the UK, and with blogs like TMZ and PerezHilton.com. Got a hot rumour? Print it first, ask questions later. Even reputable newspapers can fall prey to that impulse: I remember a story that hit the front pages of dozens of British papers (as well as my own paper) about a guy who made custom wooden gibbets for hanging prisoners, and claimed to have sold them to various African despots.

It was a great story — except that it turned out to be complete fiction. Did we or the other papers check it out before printing it? Sure. But maybe we didn’t check quite as hard as we might have, because it was such a great story. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing Mike Arrington to a tabloid or a scandal sheet or anything of the sort. I’m just saying that the quest for traffic, and the tension between that and “the truth,” is not a new one invented by the blogosphere. It goes on all around us.

Paul Buchheit has a great post up at his blog about startups and some of the criteria that can help to ensure success, and one point he makes is that many of the things you might think would help — things like, say, being really smart, or knowing a lot about technology or programming — may not actually help, and in many cases can make it harder. Paul is the guy who developed what would eventually become Gmail while at Google, and is now running a feed-tracking service called FriendFeed.com.

As he notes in his post, Paul’s central point is similar to one of Marc Andreessen’s posts about entrepreneurs, in which the Netscape co-founder and Ning founder says that smart teams don’t matter as much as what the market wants. As Paul describes it:

“You can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don’t want it, then you will fail. This is roughly what happened with the Segway, for example.”

This seems fairly simple when you say it, but I expect it’s harder for many teams to haul on board than they like to admit. If you’re a super-smart programmer and your team is the envy of startups everywhere, or your company or service is based on an incredibly cool and cutting-edge implementation of something, you would probably like to think that would help you succeed. But it may not.

Paul has a couple of great examples of the opposite ends of this spectrum. The Segway, for instance, came from the brain of inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, who is ridiculously smart, and was backed by some of the most influential people in Silicon Valley — and yet, it was a complete flop because, well… people just didn’t want it.

YouTube and MySpace, by contrast, succeeded in spite of some obvious flaws, because people wanted them. Craigslist is probably not a bad example either — a flawed design, and yet it hit the sweet spot in the market with perfect precision, whether through sheer luck or brilliant planning. The market wants what it wants.

Note to Marc Andreessen: Better watch out, Marc — Paul seems to be going after the “long, thoughtful post on entrepreneurs” market 🙂

Update:

Fred has an update on his post in which he makes it clear that he wasn’t picking on Matt or Erick, and he has also retired the term “journablogger.” And Mike Arrington has now come to the defence of Erick and Matt, and questioned Fred’s motives in posting what he did — although I think Mike overdoes it a little in his post.

Maybe Fred’s post was flawed (which he admits on his blog and in a comment at TechCrunch), but I still think it’s a worthwhile discussion to have. But then, I guess I’m a traditional journalist. Mike says he doesn’t care about being balanced, he just wants to be right. I think that’s a natural impulse, but it can have unpleasant side-effects.

Original post:

I have to give VC blogger Fred Wilson some props for calling out what he calls “journabloggers” like Mashable, VentureBeat, GigaOm, TechCrunch and so on. Fred’s point — one that others have made as well — is that it’s easy for such sites to fall into the trap of posting salacious headlines that aren’t fully backed up, whether because they want to be first, or because they simply want to boost traffic.

The example Fred uses is a VentureBeat post about visual-search site Like.com (formerly known as Riya), which Matt Marshall says has seen its traffic climb to the point where it is beating competitor ThisNext — a claim that Fred takes issue with. He also mentions a recent post from TechCrunch, and his point seems to be that Matt and Erick Schonfeld could have done a bit more research to back up some of their claims.

Matt seems like a stand-up guy, and I know Fred didn’t bring it up to pick on him, or on anyone else for that matter (and just to be clear, neither am I). I think it’s good to point out when the bloggers we read aren’t thinking things through fully or are falling short (and that includes me), provided it is done in a constructive way. The great part about the blogosphere — which Fred didn’t really mention — is that it’s easy to flesh out and/or correct a post when something like that happens.

VentureBeat, for example, responded to Fred’s concerns (which Matt commented on at Fred’s blog) and added them to the original post. That’s a substantially better response than Fred would have gotten from traditional media, I expect. Steven Hodson at WinExtra makes a good point: if the top “journabloggers” get too comfortable or lazy, all that does is open up opportunities for new ones, which is good.

Update:

Heather Hopkins has an update to her post in which she goes into a bit more detail about where the data for the chart comes from. And just to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that the data is wrong — just that it’s probably not wise to be drawing sweeping conclusions from it.

Original post:

There’s a Hitwise traffic report up that looks at (or purports to look at) the demographic differences between those who spend most of their time at Yahoo vs. those who spend most of their time at Google — a report that led Duncan Riley at TechCrunch to boldly proclaim that “poor people use Yahoo, and those better off use Google.” While I am not a sociologist or market researcher, I have to say that multiple warning bells went off when I read this. I think there are a whole series of leaps of logic going on, most of which are based on not a lot of evidence.

Like most such research, the chart included with the Hitwise report looks great — colourful blobs represent different demographic groups with catchy names like “Blue-collar Backbone” and “Small-town Contentment,” which are clustered at various points on a graph with Yahoo on one axis and Google on the other. “Struggling societies” is at one extreme and “Affluent Suburbia” is at the other. So that’s it, right? End of story.

Except that there are some pretty large holes in all of this — or at least information that we don’t have. According to the Hitwise report, the demographic groups with the cute names are based on “offline data” from Experian, which appears to be a credit reporting agency with a marketing consulting arm (Note: Experian apparently acquired Hitwise last year). Where does that information come from and how reliable is it? That’s one question. Then there are the blobs: their size apparently refers to how many in that group have spent $500 or more online.

But what does that tell us? It tells us whether people who spend money online (or at least people who say they spend money online) are more likely to use Google or Yahoo, not whether those people are rich or poor. Maybe it’s just geeks vs. non-geeks, as more than one commenter on TechCrunch pointed out. In any case, we have one questionable set of data about spending habits balanced on top of another set of questionable data about demographic groups. Not much to draw conclusions from, I wouldn’t say. Sociologist danah boyd has some thoughts that tie into her research as well.

(*The title is based on a Pink Floyd song, for no other reason than it popped into my head. No, I don’t know why).

Harper’s magazine has a great feature in its March issue under the “Annotation” banner: It’s a close-up look at the blueprints for Google’s new server farms in The Dalles, Oregon — the ones that the New York Times wrote about back in 2006. The plans describe three giant buildings of almost 70,000 square feet or so, right beside the Columbia River (where there is a handy hydroelectric dam nearby), although only two of the farms have actually been constructed so far.

Based on industry standards for such farms, Harper’s figures they will use about 500 watts per square foot by 2011, which would mean a total of 103 megawatts, or enough to power a town of about 82,000 homes. The piece also notes that a nearby aluminum smelter that is being torn down used about 85 megawatts, and employed about 500 people. Google estimates it will create between 100 and 200 jobs.

When the New York Times wrote its piece in 2006, Google was estimated to have 25 server farm complexes around the globe, with a total of about 500,000 servers. That was already one of the largest distributed computing clusters in the world. According to Harper’s, current estimates are that it has about twice that many now — which means that its power costs could be as high as $200-million a year.

A few days ago it was the RIM network that suddenly went down, cutting people off from their emails and other BlackBerry goodness (which some saw as a good thing rather than a catastrophe) — and this morning it was Amazon’s S3 network that suddenly went offline. The network provides cheap remote storage for dozens of Web startups, including Twitter, as well as some larger companies. What users of those services wound up with for several hours was a host of 404 and other errors.

This is something I was just talking about on TVO’s The Agenda program (there’s more info here, if you’re interested), and I wrote another post about it after reading danah boyd’s account of someone who was suddenly cut off by Google. Ironically, in that post I mentioned how I was in the process of backing up my photos to Amazon’s S3 using JungleDisk. I also wrote a column for the Globe about the RIM outage (which is here) and the implications for cloud computing.

As a friend pointed out to me on Twitter this morning — when I described the S3 outage as “another caution flag in the cloud computing race” — these kinds of outages happen all the time with hosting providers (including my blog host) and other remote storage companies, not to mention Internet cables being severed under the ocean and so on. But every time it happens it’s another reminder about the need to maintain multiple redundant backups for the data you care about.

It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but Richard MacManus has a post up at Read/Write Web that I thought was pretty interesting, about an email he got from Business Wire, in which the press release service brags about its ability to bypass the blogosphere and traditional media and go directly to the markets it is trying to reach, by showing up on Techmeme and other aggregators, as well as in search results.

This may sound like a lot of hot air from a PR service, but as Richard notes in the post, there is ample evidence of press releases showing up at the top of conversation threads on Techmeme. Richard also has some quotes from Gabe Rivera, in which he talks about how that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — provided they are well written — and how some blog posts amount to poorly rewritten press releases anyway.

It was that last point that really struck me. Why shouldn’t press releases get better play than some blog post that basically takes the key facts and repeats them? If a press release gets across the information and has it first, then it deserves to be there — and as Richard notes, as press releases get more “social” and add links and even video, they become more like blog posts, and are even more likely to hit Techmeme.

Memo to the blogosphere: You might want to keep all that in mind the next time you try to get some juice out of posting a rewritten press release. That kind of thing works in traditional media, but it’s probably not going to fly for very long in new media.

Loic LeMeur’s video startup, Seesmic, has finally opened up to the public after being a hot beta invite for some time now, but I have to admit that — while I think it’s great that Loic has managed to raise $6-million from a host of luminaries in the Silicon Valley scene — I still don’t really get it. It’s not just Seesmic either. I don’t get Qik or Mogulus or Ustream or any of those other video things either.

Maybe it’s just that I’m too old (hey, you kids — knock it off back there) and/or too ugly and uncharismatic to get the appeal of video multicasting. Let’s face it, I’m no Loren Feldman. And that’s kind of my point. Most people aren’t Loren Feldman or iJustine or (God forbid) Robert Scoble. Maybe people using Seesmic just want to talk with their friends, and that’s fine. But I don’t see it as being a huge deal, really — or a compelling business, for that matter.

After all, as Valleywag has pointed out, we’ve had video mail-type apps for a long time now. I remember using video chat as far back as 1996, and I didn’t really see the point then either. It’s fun for awhile, but the appeal seems to wane relatively quickly — at least for me, anyway (and apparently for Frederic at The Last Podcast as well).

I’ve said it before — I just don’t think video is as compelling a medium for discussion as blogs are. Video can start discussions or conversations, and Loren’s vlog is a great example of that, but it doesn’t really lend itself to the back-and-forth that makes blogs so appealing — plus, you can’t search it easily, or scan it quickly the way you can with text.

People keep posting Twitter messages saying “I’m streaming live — come chat with me!” and yet I never do. Why? Maybe I’m busy, maybe I just don’t feel like it. The point is, no one ever posts on their blog: “Hey, I’m blogging right now — come comment on my post!” Blogging is asynchronous in that sense, I guess, and that makes its appeal a lot broader, I think. But then again, I am a print guy 🙂 If you think I’m wrong, feel free to let me know.

The Mobile Gadgeteer at ZDNet has some amazing video of the Readius eInk mobile reader, which folds up into something that looks about the same size as a bulky cellphone or first-generation mp3 player. The text appears to be very similar to the Sony e-book reader (although faster, as the video notes), but the amazing part is how easily it folds up at the end of the video. If you’re impatient, fast-forward to about 2:08.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVPSmbJf8aQ&rel=1&border=1&w=425&h=373]

Many people seem surprised that Yahoo would go ahead with layoffs despite its ongoing takeover battle with Microbeast, but the fact is that everything doesn’t grind to a halt when a takeover offer shows up. Yahoo has to proceed as though the deal may not go through, regardless of whether the odds are overwhelmingly stacked in favour of a Micro-hoo merger succeeding (which in my opinion they are). But one thing that is likely to change is the number of people looking for an exit.

Some people — such as Susan Mernit and Ryan Kuder, who have blogged and Twittered their departures — are part of the layoff-induced exodus. Others seem to be leaving of their own accord, however, including (according to a report at TechCrunch) Brad Horowitz, the head of Yahoo’s technology arm, who is reportedly going to the Great Google. Valleywag says he’ll be working on the OpenSocial project.

If I were a betting man, I would expect the number of smart Yahoo employees making that leap to increase exponentially over the next few weeks and months. Just think about it: would you want to not only be acquired by Microsoft — the king of .Net and shrink-wrapped software — but submerged in a sea of merger-related bureaucracy and time-sucking process for the next year or two? I wouldn’t. I hope Google has brought in extra staff to handle all the calls.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt points to a fascinating piece that I also came across earlier today, which describes how a mathematician helped win a Grammy — by using algorithms to restore an ancient bootleg of legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie singing a tune. The recording was so old, and the device used to record it so fragile, that it had to be painstakingly reconstructed using a fascinating process.

As Mike notes, it’s ironic that everyone is so happy to have what amounts to an illegal copy of Guthrie’s song — and also notes how the Guthrie estate has been less than enthusiastic about sharing the legend’s music, despite Guthrie’s own views on copyright. But the thing that really struck me as ironic, as I mentioned in a comment on Mike’s post, is that I listened to both copies of the song, and I actually prefer the original.

Everyone has been giving Yahoo lots of advice on how to negotiate with Microsoft, but now it’s Shpigler’s turn. Pay attention. Click here if you’re reading this in a feed reader.

http://www.5min.com/Embeded/5794173/

It’s in danger of sliding off Techmeme as I write this, but I wanted to send a shout out to Harvard for its proposal to set academic research free on the Web (I wonder if that’s the first time the words “shout out” and the word “Harvard” have appeared in a sentence together). According to this report, the university today voted to require faculty in the Arts & Sciences department to make their research available for free on the Harvard website (although there is an opt-out clause).

This move is being promoted by the Open Access movement, which wants universities of all kinds to make their research freely available. The author still retains the copyright, and is free to submit his or her work to any academic journals, but the paper is also provided for free on the Web. Many proponents argue that too much research — much of which is publicly funded — winds up trapped in journals that no one but academics have access to, journals that cost universities a lot of money to subscribe to.

Web sociologist danah boyd recently called for a boycott of any journal that doesn’t provide its articles to the public in some form:

“Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing… I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.”

Others who have written on this topic include David “Joho the Blog” Weinberger, who says he wishes the policy went even further. Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. In a comment on his post, University of Toronto scholar Mark Federman says that he hopes “the academic journal business model heads down the same road as the aluminum-disk-coated-with-plastic business.”