Month: April 2008

I know some people are going to think this video is kind of sappy, but I think it’s great. (via my friend Will Pate)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BxymuiAxQ&hl=en&w=425&h=355]

My friend Scott Karp has a post up at Publishing 2.0 that is nominally about the addition of new features to Facebook’s newsfeed, and whether those features compete with FriendFeed and other social apps. But what Scott is really talking about is what I like to call the “Soylent Green” factor — i.e., the principle that Web 2.0-type services such as Twitter and FriendFeed and Pownce and so on are made of people, just like the new food product that Charlton Heston was so shocked by in the classic 1970s sci-fi movie of the same name (a comparison that I think Ross Mayfield of Socialtext was the first to make way back in 2005.

Scott’s point is that what makes a service like Twitter — or Facebook, or any of the other social networks — succeed or fail is the people who use it. After all, Twitter isn’t exactly rocket science (sorry @ev); it’s really just the Facebook status update as a standalone app. Theoretically, Facebook should be able to duplicate most of its features, or FriendFeed’s for that matter. But at the end of the day, it isn’t the features that matter — it’s the people. But why do they use one tool over another? Why did Twitter take off and Pownce and Jaiuku haven’t?

I’d like to say that I have the answers to those questions — enough for one of those classic Techmeme-bait blog posts, like “8 Reasons Twitter Wins” — except that I don’t. But I do think that answering them is probably one of the most important tasks a service like Twitter or FriendFeed or even Facebook has to confront. What are you providing that your users can’t get somewhere else? In most cases, it has better be community of some kind. That’s the Soylent Green factor.

Update:

Dan Blows has a great post about Twitter from a different perspective — he says it’s a lot like a playground (and no, I didn’t link to this just because he uses a Twitter post about me by Duncan Riley) A worthwhile point: the community you want isn’t always the community you get.

Rogers Cadenhead, who long ago in another lifetime worked with Dave “I invented RSS” Winer, popped up this week with a Techmeme filter called Meme13 — a site that pulls feeds from the newest blogs to hit the charts on the Techmeme Leaderboard, in an attempt to cut through the usual Techmeme spotlight hogs (you know who you are) and show people some new content. When I heard about it, I thought it was a great idea — expose people to new, up-and-coming blogs, etc. etc.

Some people, however — including several bloggers I respect, such as Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests and Frederic of The Last Podcast — immediately posted Twitter messages, followed by blog posts, calling Rogers’ new thing “a scraper blog.” As Tony outlines in his post, he believes that publishing the full feeds is no different than any of the dozens of scrapers out there. Frederic says in his post that he agrees, and that while Shyftr — the most recent subject of a blogstorm over appropriating feeds — tried to create some value, Meme13 just scrapes.

Since I’ve emailed back and forth with Rogers Cadenhead in the past, I asked him for a response. Here’s what he said (posted with his permission):

“I figured that concern would be raised at some point. Sites don’t stay on Meme13 for long — around two weeks at present — and never come back. Although I could cut from full-text to partial, I think this weakens the ability to sample these bloggers.

Another thing I’m not doing is keeping old content around. I don’t think I’ll be archiving old entries. I think the short-term use of the feeds makes Meme13 legal and a bit different than a scraper, but we’ll see how it is received by the community.”

For what it’s worth, I sympathize with Tony and Frederic — but I don’t think Meme13 is anything to get too upset by. If anything, I think it provides a service by making it easier to find new content, which I think many Techmeme critics would agree is a good thing (Marshall has another way at the Read/Write Web blog). And as Mike Masnick has noted at Techdirt on the Shyftr question, sites that repost your RSS feed can actually be beneficial, and at worst are a nuisance that will soon fade if you are providing real value (which Tony does).

Ironically, as Tony has noted, Meme13 has been showing his post about the flaws in Meme13 as the top post for some time now. Says Rogers: “My robot has already turned against me.” In any case, whether you like Meme13 or not, it’s apparently all Steven Hodson’s fault :-).

While watching the Twitter posts fly by last night, I saw some from Robert Scoble (of course) talking about advertising, and suggesting to Twitter founder Ev Williams that he be allowed to share in the revenue from ads on the group IM service. Oh, I thought — is Twitter finally launching ads? Then came a post at TechCrunch that said it was. Or was it? Apparently not, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which emailed Biz Stone at Twitter and got a denial that any such plans were in the works.

As it turned out, a background image from Chinese Business Network blogger Christine Lu’s profile pic on Twitter popped up in a yellow box somehow, which made it look like an ad for the network, as she explained in a comment on the TechCrunch post. In other words, no story, right? Except that Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said in a subsequent comment that “ads are coming, it’s just a matter of when.” As more than one person has pointed out, however — including Frederic at The Last Podcast — this assertion comes without any real facts to back it up.

Nate Westheimer, a contributor to Silicon Alley Insider, also has a curious blog post in which he laments the state of blogging, which he says doesn’t pay enough attention to accuracy, and he uses Duncan’s post as an example. Which is fair enough, of course — except that Nate’s post is riddled with errors, including two different spellings of Duncan’s last name and a couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Fair enough, you might say — as Nate points out in a comment, he isn’t really a reporter. So is Duncan a reporter? Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.

Duncan and I have had our differences in the past, but I’m not here to beat up on him for the Twitter story. Should he have run with it based on what turned out to be very little factual information? I don’t see why not — but I think it should have been updated later, as others have. Nate says that this shows “the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.” I’m not going to argue with that — having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.

This isn’t something the blogosphere invented — wire services like Reuters and Associated Press have been operating this way for decades. Report something as quickly as possible, then fix the mistakes later. It’s when the mistakes don’t get fixed that we have something to worry about, and as Thord Daniel Hedengren reminds us, we could all probably do better at that — regardless of what we call ourselves.

So Sphere — the “related-content engine” whose plugin I have been using here for some time — has been bought by AOL. As my friend Om Malik is, I’m happy for Tony Conrad and the team. At the same time, however, I have to wonder whether becoming part of AOL is such a great idea. Is it better than struggling along as a startup? Perhaps. But Sphere could be exchanging the frying pan for the fire. Chaos may be too strong a word, but AOL has been going through considerable upheaval.

Obviously, an exit that is in the $25-million range (according to Mike Arrington) is nothing to sneeze at. But will it help Sphere to be part of an online venture that is still trying to remake itself, and is part of a gigantic media conglomerate — a conglomerate that may or may not have a commitment to the company longer term? I’m not so sure. I hope that the company’s advisors, who have included Toni Schneider and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, are guiding the company in the right direction (Toni Schneider certainly seems to think it is).

As Kara Swisher says, it would be a shame if Sphere were to “fall into one of the dark holes” over at AOL, since Tony and his team seem like a great group. Before I added the Sphere plugin to my blog, I tore a strip off the company’s blog search for being irrelevant — and Tony not only took it in stride, but listened to the criticism and the service got better. I wish them nothing but the best, and I hope that AOL is it.

Not long after writing my previous post on Nick Denton and the sale of several Gawker properties (which I have reposted below), I got an email from the Dark Lord himself, in which he elaborated on the rationale behind the sale — essentially, that advertising is in for a downturn and the Web won’t be spared, which is pretty much what he said in the memo that Silicon Alley Insider and others have posted. Among other things, he said:

“Gawker traffic up, advertising market slowing: these may not be contradictory interpretations, merely trends that are in tension with each other. i.e. everybody will suffer, but Gawker less than others.”

But that’s not the best part. The best part is that Nick said the forthcoming sale of some Gawker properties was telegraphed earlier this month. Where? Why, in a post he wrote for Gawker itself, in which he talked about why he was selling Jezebel to Conde Nast. But Gawker didn’t sell Jezebel, you’re thinking — it was an April Fool’s joke. Indeed it was. But Denton, the cheeky blighter, put the real reason why he was looking at selling certain titles in that April Fool post. Here’s the important part, he says:

The short of it is that we’re entering an advertising recession, and the internet will, whatever the wishful thinkers believe, not be immune. Rupert Murdoch’s closure of Page Six website is harbinger of the tough times to come. All web publishers will have to make hard choices about the properties they’ve launched during the good years.

At Gawker Media, we’re determined to make those choices sooner rather than later, putting sentiment to one side. Already in 2006, we sold or shuttered three sites—Oddjack, Screenhead and Sploid—that either weren’t performing or didn’t fit the rest of our portfolio. The internet boom, even then, seemed unsustainable. We told the New York Times then we were “hunkering down.”

That wasn’t the last of it… the bulk of Gawker Media’s traffic and advertising, despite the attention paid to our more gossipy blogs, goes to the group’s geekier titles such as Gizmodo, Kotaku and Lifehacker. We have to decide where we’re going to hold the line. Gawker is a technology media company, in a fierce battle with companies such as CNET and AOL’s Weblogs Inc unit.”

Unless, of course, Nick is just playing with me and none of this is even remotely true. You be the judge — I’ve pretty much given up at this point. Oh, and the comments back and forth with Arrington? Nick says he doesn’t know if it was really Mike or not, but he responded “just in case.”

Original post:

I can’t help it — I like Gawker founder Nick Denton. I realize that for some he is the blogosphere equivalent of Dr. Evil, but I just can’t help liking him anyway. It’s true that he seems to come up with sweatshop-style compensation methods just for the fun of it, and he also seems to take an inordinate amount of glee in shuttering blog titles at his Gawker empire, or selling them off when it’s least expected. Maybe that’s what I enjoy: the fact that he just seems to be having such a good time, even when he’s firing people and leaking his own memos.

The one that Silicon Alley Insider has — which plenty of other people seem to have as well — is about Gawker selling off (or giving away, as the case may be) several blogs, including Gridskipper (travel), Idolator (music) and Wonkette. One is going to join Gawker investor Lockhart Steele’s stable, another to Buzznet, and the third to Ken Layne. Wonkette, as Nick himself notes, is a former flagship title, which launched Ana Marie Cox to superstardom (she’s at Time magazine now), and so seems like an odd candidate for sale — but there you have it.

That’s the genius of Denton: give people contradictory quotes about the current health of the business (there’s a storm coming, but Gawker’s pageviews have climbed by almost 90 per cent to 221 million or so), shut down blogs here and there whenever it suits you, change the compensation method for your bloggers suddenly and without warning, and just generally create mayhem and confusion. Brilliant. For bonus points, read the back-and-forth in Valleywag’s comments between Nick and someone who is either Mike Arrington or pretending to be.

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post up about the evolution of media online, and he must have taken some time with it because it has graphics and everything — just kidding, Jeff 🙂 But seriously, Jeff’s general point I think is well-taken: that the way journalism occurs has changed, and is continuing to change. Like most other forms of content, instead of a one-way, production-line approach in which news is manufactured (metaphorically speaking) by mainstream media entities and then distributed to news consumers, the news — and I’m using that term broadly — occurs and is reported, then more details emerge, other sources join in, the story advances, and so on. In other words, a process.

This is not really new, in the sense that Jeff and others (including yours truly) have been saying it for some time now. But it bears repeating, if only because some media entities are only now coming to realize just how much their business is changing. As a friend of mine who used to work at the Washington Post’s website has said often, there is a whole generation of editors who need to realize that we are moving from the “report, write, edit, publish” model to something more like a “report, write, edit, publish, edit, write, report, publish” model. It never stops.

Let’s be clear about something: I’m not saying that journalists — whatever their background, whether it’s mainstream media or blogging — should stop caring whether something is right, or should rush to publish something because someone else will fix their mistakes. And it’s true that expensive investigative reporting is almost always going to be the province of the established media. This isn’t some kind of blogosphere triumphalism thing I’m pushing here. But I think only an idiot would argue that journalism hasn’t changed, or that the industry can continue to do things the way it has done for centuries. It has, and it can’t.

There’s more in Jeff’s post than I have dealt with here, so I encourage you to go and read the whole thing. And if you just can’t get enough of people writing about the future of newspapers and the media online, Britannica has an ongoing debate about whether newspapers are doomed.

I can’t help it — I like Gawker founder Nick Denton. I realize that for some he is the blogosphere equivalent of Dr. Evil, but I just can’t help liking him anyway. It’s true that he seems to come up with sweatshop-style compensation methods just for the fun of it, and he also seems to take an inordinate amount of glee in shuttering blog titles at his Gawker empire, or selling them off when it’s least expected. Maybe that’s what I enjoy: the fact that he just seems to be having such a good time, even when he’s firing people and leaking his own memos.

The one that Silicon Alley Insider has — which plenty of other people seem to have as well — is about Gawker selling off (or giving away, as the case may be) several blogs, including Gridskipper (travel), Idolator (music) and Wonkette. One is going to join Gawker investor Lockhart Steele’s stable, another to Buzznet, and the third to Ken Layne. Wonkette, as Nick himself notes, is a former flagship title, which launched Ana Marie Cox to superstardom (she’s at Time magazine now), and so seems like an odd candidate for sale — but there you have it.

That’s the genius of Denton: give people contradictory quotes about the current health of the business (there’s a storm coming, but Gawker’s pageviews have climbed by almost 90 per cent to 221 million or so), shut down blogs here and there whenever it suits you, change the compensation method for your bloggers suddenly and without warning, and just generally create mayhem and confusion. Brilliant. For bonus points, read the back-and-forth in Valleywag’s comments between Nick and someone who is either Mike Arrington or pretending to be.

Just a quick update for anyone interested in mesh 2008, which is coming up on May 21 and 22 at the MaRS Centre in Toronto: Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, is coming as our keynote speaker for the business stream (you can see the other keynotes here, as well as some of the other great speakers and panelists we have lined up). We’re pretty excited to be able to bring one of Canada’s leading Web entrepreneurs to Toronto for one of mesh’s “keynote conversations.”

Garrett co-founded StumbleUpon in 2001 with several university friends while he was finishing his degree in software engineering at the University of Calgary. He and a couple of the other members of the StumbleUpon team later moved to San Francisco after getting venture financing, and last year the company was acquired by eBay for $75-million. Garrett is still responsible for StumbleUpon’s product design and strategy, and the service has more than 3.5M members.

After a blogstorm (or “bitchmeme,” as MG Siegler likes to call them) about the way in which it handled shared RSS feeds, social-media startup Shyftr has changed the way that its service works, according to a post from co-founder Dave Stanley, which I found via Louis Gray’s latest blog post on the subject. Now Shyftr will only show an abbreviated version of a blogger’s post if there are comments on it at the Shyftr site.

Louis is a supporter of the service, but not everyone has been. I raised the issue of whether Shyftr crossed a line in its usage of full-text feeds, and Tony Hung said he was pretty sure that it did. Other bloggers have also spoken out about the company’s attempts to build a business around someone else’s content — while some, including Robert Scoble and the blogger who calls himself Chartreuse, have said that these criticisms are off base and that bloggers should get used to seeing their content used in such ways. On the Shyftr blog, meanwhile, Stanley says:

“The conversations that have occurred over the past couple of days are healthy, thoughtful, and we appreciate all of the opinions that we have read. We will continue working towards building an environment that stimulates an opportunity for publishers to reach a broader audience, while respecting how that content is presented to our users.”

I give Shyftr a lot of credit for making such a change so quickly. That shows they are listening, and willing to adapt, and that’s good for a startup. But I don’t think this issue is going away. Is it just about the comments appearing somewhere else, as Stanley suggests? I’m not so sure.