Month: April 2008

Although I’m pretty sure his post is intended as advice for marketing people and that sort, I think Seth Godin has some great advice in his post on how to “Write Like a Blogger.” In it he provides a short list of tips for writing effectively for an audience. To me, these suggestions make sense for anyone, but especially for journalists who are trying to wrap their heads around this whole social media thing. Among my favourites:

— Use headlines: Not just boring ones that announce your purpose, but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.

— It’s okay if you leave: Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.

— Show up: Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.

Read the rest of the list here.

According to a report in the Bits blog over at the New York Times, the long-running lawsuit between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his former Harvard classmates could soon be coming to a close, with a legal settlement between the two sides. This particular brouhaha (or is it more of a kerfuffle? I can’t really tell) has been going on for several years now, ever since Facebook really started to take off with university students, first at Harvard and later elsewhere.

If you’re not familiar with this particular drama, the lawsuit was filed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, a pair of identical twins (and Olympic class rowers) who claimed that they created something similar to Facebook while at Harvard — called ConnectU — and hired Zuckerberg to do some programming for them. The Facebook founder stole that code, they alleged, and used it to start his own competing network.

I find this case fascinating, but not just because it involves Facebook and boy wonder Mark Zuckerberg. It also seems like a classic case of coat-tail grabbing to me, by a couple of guys who could have walked out of the pages of GQ magazine or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue, to judge by the photos in the in-depth feature in 02138 magazine. The piece was the subject of a court battle over information drawn from Zuckerberg’s journal, like his Social Insurance Number and his parents’ address.

The Winklevoss twins seem almost too good to be true, like villains from a wacky romantic comedy, with their Harvard rowing-crew background and identically tousled hair and athletic good looks. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is the programming dork — the awkward guy with the glasses, who manages to outwit the jocks and triumph over adversity, and make a few billion dollars to boot. All Zuckerberg needs is the gorgeous starlet to fall for him and everything will be complete (unless she already has).

I’m not a lawyer, but from my reading of the case, the Winklevoss twins and their partner didn’t have two clues to rub together, and Zuckerberg got tired of trying to help them and started his own thing. Similar idea? Maybe. That’s life. I wish the Winklevoss boys nothing but the best in their future endeavours — maybe a social-network for Austrian rowers with an interest in stylish clothing and expensive hair products?

I find it kind of interesting that not many people — or at least not many mainstream bloggers — are writing about Shel Israel and his ongoing battle with video-blogger Loren Feldman of 1938media. Matt Craven from The Blog Herald has just done so in a post about how Shel has lost a lot of his respect for doing two things: 1) Making crappy videos, and 2) Failing to respond to Loren’s jabs at him in the spirit of his book “Naked Conversations.” Shel’s response is here.

For anyone who has an actual life and hasn’t been paying attention to the brouhaha between Shel and Loren, it started when Shel began doing video interviews for FastCompany.tv. Loren — who makes corporate videos and also does his own blend of free-form comedy and commentary videos at 1938media.com — began criticizing the quality of Shel’s videos mercilessly on Twitter and on his blog, and also started posting parodies of Shel’s videos using Muppet-style hand puppets.

At some point, Loren also noticed that Shel hadn’t bothered to register the domain name version of his name, ShelIsrael.com. So Loren did, and it is now filled with parodies of Shel using the puppets, with some of Shel’s actual videos mixed in. At this point, I should probably mention that I know and like Loren — we had him as a panelist at the mesh conference last year, and he is very funny. But there’s no question that he likes it “edgy,” as they say, and not everyone takes to that.

Regardless of what you think about Loren grabbing Shel’s domain name, or taking repeated shots at him on Twitter and elsewhere, there’s no question in my mind that Loren is just having fun with Shel — just as he has with Jason Calacanis, Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble, all of whom are now friends. As Aaron Brazell notes in a comment on Shel’s blog, Loren often goes after people he either respects or likes — it’s the video equivalent of a boy pinching a girl when he likes her.

That’s why I thought the best take on this whole thing came from Tom over at Tom’s Tech Blog, who has written a thoughtful post about how Shel has handled this whole affair in completely the wrong way. It’s not just that he has been sniping at Loren on Twitter, or threatening to get private investigators to look into his background — it’s more that he hasn’t followed through on the principles in his book. And more than that, he’s made it obvious that he doesn’t really have much of a sense of humour either. For a comedian like Loren, that is the ultimate flaw.

I’m sure someone at the New York Times has to be feeling pretty smug right now — after all, look at all the attention the paper’s story on bloggers is getting from the blogosphere. Obviously, the Times has learned the first rule of getting attention from blogs: talk about blogs. The Times also seems to have learned the second lesson, which is related to blog “trolling,” namely: associate blogs or blogging with some kind of apocalyptic or otherwise incendiary statement, viz. “Blogging kills.”

It’s true that the NYT didn’t actually use that phrase, but the story about two deaths (Russell Shaw from ZDNet and Marc Orchant, whose last gig was the ill-fated Blognation) and a near-death experience (Om Malik) in the blogosphere might as well have had that headline, as Marc Andreessen notes in his hilarious roundup of future potential New York Times headlines about blogging (including “Hitler probably blogged”).

Mike Arrington helps the Times out by saying he has gained 30 pounds, has a severe sleeping disorder and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown — which may be true, but could just as easily be said by someone who has become obsessed by major-league football during the playoffs, or someone whose hobby is building miniature ships in bottles. It has nothing to do with whether they spend every waking moment typing on a keyboard or obsessively checking Techmeme.

For me, the low point in the piece — which goes on to talk about how some bloggers for sites like Gizmodo spend dozens of hours blogging for pay from their tiny apartments — is when the Times coaxes this incendiary quote from blogger Matt Buchanan: sometimes, he confesses, he is so tired “I just want to lie down.” Stop the presses! (best quote comes from Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who has trained as a Thai kick-boxer: “I’ve got a background getting punched in the face… that’s why I’m good at this job.” Definitely should have been higher up).

Further reading:

Om Malik’s thoughtful take on the issue is here, and Henry Blodget says the startup life probably has more to do with the phenomenon than blogging does. My friend Howard Lindzon says the story is bunk, and a sign that the NYT is out of ideas, while Dr. Tony Hung takes a look at whether stress actually does increase your chances of having a heart attack. Doc Searls has a thoughtful response as well.

The blogger that Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter to earlier this week isn’t going to back down quietly, it seems. He has published a response on craigslistblog.org to Jim Buckmaster’s recent post, in which he says that the ads were just to “cover some hosting costs.” He also says that with his misleading post, the Craigslist CEO has “tarnished Craig Newmark’s reputation forever,” and that Buckmaster should “do the right thing and step down today.” Gee, Tim — hyperbole much? (this post has since been removed, I presume as a result of legal counsel).

My earlier post on it and update follow:

Update:

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has posted an entry to the new Craigslist blog in which he apologizes for the “ham-handed” C&D letter described below, which the site sent to a blog called Craigslistblog.org. But Buckmaster also provides some more details about why the classified service went after Tim White’s blog; among other things, he says the blog was running misleading text ads with Craigslist’s name in them (the ads were apparently removed from the site before the blog post got a lot of attention).

To me, that changes things substantially. One of the principles behind domain-squatting cases is that in order to avoid such accusations, a domain should have been registered and used in good faith — in other words, not to generate revenue based on the potential misunderstanding generated by a similar domain name. It seems pretty clear that Craigslistblog.org was designed to do that, and so I am backing Craigslist on this one. Jim Buckmaster’s post, incidentally, is a nice example of how to apologize and still make your point.

Original post:

Seems like Craigslist is in some hot water over a blog. But not because its new official blog is really ugly, poorly-designed and difficult to use, which it is — although given the somewhat… er, “distinctive” look and feel of the classified site itself, it’s probably not surprising that the blog looks like my daughter’s fifth-grade class designed it using a version of Microsoft’s FrontPage from 1998 (Craigslist doesn’t have ads? Not to be outdone, the blog doesn’t have comments or an RSS feed).

In any case, it’s not Craigslist’s official blog that’s the issue — it’s a site called Craigslistblog.org, which was started up about a month ago by a guy named Tim White as a way of getting some discussion going about Craigslist, both good and bad. Then he got a rather brusque C&D letter from none other than Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which Tim has posted on his site. In no uncertain terms, it directs Tim to stop using the domain and the name Craigslist immediately or face legal action.

Tim,

We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for tranfer of it to us asap – using/selling/transfering infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied.

Tim, however, responds that Jim has “gotten some bad legal counsel” and asks whether the company plans to shut down other sites with craigslist in the name, such as craigslistmap.info. Jim then copies Tim on a letter to Craigslist’s attorneys, in which he not-so-subtly mentions that the law firm does intellectual property work for “Google and a lot of other prominent companies.” As far as I can tell, Tim isn’t planning to back down.

Is Craigslist in the right here? I’m not a lawyer (although I sometimes play one on TV), but from my reading of past cases involving domain disputes, both WIPO rules and U.S. law require complainants to satisfy several conditions in order to win such a case. The first one — whether the domain name is confusingly similar — is a slam dunk for sure. But the other criteria are whether the defendant is making legitimate fair use of the name, and whether it was registered in bad faith (i.e. whether the defendant registered it with intent to profit from the confusion).

Those last two are a lot harder to answer, and I happen to think Tim has a pretty good case. Whether he can withstand a legal onslaught from Craigslist — which has about $60-million or so a year to play around with, as far as I can tell from the recent revenue numbers — is a separate question. It’s also interesting to note the anti-Craigslist comments on Tim’s post. I expect plenty of criticism of the classified site based on the contrast between its touchy-feely ethos and its actions.

So all this time, Gawker Media founder and evil genius Nick Denton has been pretending to be a mild-mannered blog network CEO, when in reality he is a behavioural economist doing ground-breaking research into the mechanisms of human motivation and productivity. Of course, it could be that even Nick D. doesn’t realize the extent to which he is experimenting with such things — but Felix Salmon’s piece in Portfolio makes it pretty clear that’s exactly what he is doing.

In a nutshell, Valleywag bloggers are paid a low base salary and then have to “earn” that salary through page views generated on their blog posts (instead of being paid a flat rate per post, as they used to be). Once they have done so, they get paid for any additional page views on a per-thousand basis. The number used to be $9.75 per thousand, and now it is $6.50, As Felix points out, that means bloggers at the Silicon Valley scandal rag will have to produce 50 per cent more page views just to keep their income the same. Needless to say, no one is impressed.

As Salmon notes, one reason for the change could be that Denton underestimated the page view growth at Valleywag, and wound up paying his writers more than he budgeted for, so decided to cut back. In a similar vein, the rates paid to writers at the Wonkette political blog were recently cut — likely because Denton knows that page views will skyrocket with the approaching U.S. election, and therefore writers would stand to benefit without having to do any more work.

There’s an even more in-depth discussion of the behavioural economics of this kind of move at the Crooked Timber blog, where Henry Farrell talks about the somewhat perverse Catch-22 that such incentive schemes can run into when they make contact with the real world: for example, if people know that working hard will mean that their salary gets permanently pegged at that higher level and it takes them even more page views to make a bonus, then they won’t work as hard — in a sense, the incentive reverses itself and becomes a disincentive.

If you still can’t get enough of all this kind of talk, I recommend that you set aside half an hour or so and go read Part One of the latest Marc Andreessen series on entrepreneurship, in which he writes about Berkshire Hathaway executive and Warren Buffett sidekick Charlie Munger’s theories on incentives.

This isn’t really relevant to much of anything, but I think it’s extremely cool: it’s a “tattoo” — or more of a micro-etching, really — done on the side of a single human hair with a focused ion-beam microscope, by the engineering department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The tattoo would be cool enough all by itself, but the fact that my oldest daughter goes to McMaster makes it extra cool 🙂

A New York-based entrepreneur named Hank Williams has a guest post over at Silicon Alley Insider about how the tech economy is being ruined by the “freetards” (although he doesn’t use that term). In a nutshell, Hank believes all the venture-backed startups that are littering the Web with their free apps are ruining it for hard-working guys like him, who just want to make an honest dollar by providing a quality service in return for actual money.

This is an appealing story — but is it true? There’s no question that a lot of Web-based services are going the free route, and there is a certain segment of the VC world that believes you need to build something up to a large enough scale first, and then find ways to monetize it. But is this really something that VC’s invented and have forced onto the tech startup market? Hardly. If anything, it is a phenomenon that has grown out of the reality of what it costs to run a Web business.

Why are so many things free? Henry Blodget suggests an answer in his comment on Hank’s post at SIA: because they can be. In other words, things — primarily services, information and so on — used to cost a lot because of the nature of those businesses, embedded costs, etc. Now, a large proportion of those costs have been removed. Does that mean everything can be free? No. But many things can come pretty darn close. And once the value of that service or content has been established, then it’s a lot easier to start either advertising around it or charging money for it.

This is the essence of the “freemium” approach. Give people some of what you have for nothing, and see if they like it. If they do, then offer them more for a fee. It works for SmugMug.com, it works for 37Signals.com and other companies. Did Craigslist choose to offer its services for free because its VC backers forced it to? No. It did so because Craig wanted to do it that way — and because he could do it that way. Only when it had become obvious how valuable it was did he start to charge for certain things, and then only in a limited way, and still the company makes close to $100-million a year with virtually no more effort than when it was free.

That is the power of the “free” model — it’s not some kind of snake-oil trick that VCs desperate for an exit have foisted on Web startups. While that may be happening, it certainly isn’t to blame for the entire Web-based freemium approach, and it has nothing to do with whether Hank Williams gets paid an honest wage for an honest day’s work.

Update: See Hank’s comment below. Don MacAskill of SmugMug also has a thoughtful response, in which he notes that lots of industries have a stratification between commodity (i.e. free) and premium brands — and also notes that SmugMug actually benefits from the free services that compete with it. For what it’s worth, I think Alan’s “Freetardis” offer at Broadstuff is hilarious.

So the hot story that is currently top of the pops on Techmeme is that Loic LeMeur’s video-streaming service Seesmic has bought Twhirl. Or rather, Seesmic has acquired Marco Kaiser, who developed Twhirl. Just one question: Why is this such a huge deal? Is it a slow news day? I could see everyone getting excited if Seesmic had bought Twitter itself — but Twhirl is just a client for accessing Twitter, right?

Don’t get me wrong — I think Twhirl is great, and I use it all the time. It’s a great example of an app built using Adobe’s AIR platform, and it has a lot of cool features. But why should I care whether Seesmic owns it now or not? I know Marshall thinks that this is a vision of the Web’s future, but I have to say I remain skeptical on that front (and it seems like others, including my friend Om Malik, share some of that skepticism). If what this deal means is that I get more “I’m streaming — come chat!” invitations every 10 minutes on Twitter, then count me out.

Update 2

The blogger that Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter to earlier this week isn’t going to back down quietly, it seems. He has published a response on craigslistblog.org to Jim Buckmaster’s recent post, in which he says that the ads were just to “cover some hosting costs.” He also says that with his misleading post, the Craigslist CEO has “tarnished Craig Newmark’s reputation forever,” and that Buckmaster should “do the right thing and step down today.” Gee, Tim — hyperbole much?

Update:

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has posted an entry to the new Craigslist blog in which he apologizes for the “ham-handed” C&D letter described below, which the site sent to a blog called Craigslistblog.org. But Buckmaster also provides some more details about why the classified service went after Tim White’s blog; among other things, he says the blog was running misleading text ads with Craigslist’s name in them (the ads were apparently removed from the site before the blog post got a lot of attention).

To me, that changes things substantially. One of the principles behind domain-squatting cases is that in order to avoid such accusations, a domain should have been registered and used in good faith — in other words, not to generate revenue based on the potential misunderstanding generated by a similar domain name. It seems pretty clear that Craigslistblog.org was designed to do that, and so I am backing Craigslist on this one. Jim Buckmaster’s post, incidentally, is a nice example of how to apologize and still make your point.

Original post:

Seems like Craigslist is in some hot water over a blog. But not because its new official blog is really ugly, poorly-designed and difficult to use, which it is — although given the somewhat… er, “distinctive” look and feel of the classified site itself, it’s probably not surprising that the blog looks like my daughter’s fifth-grade class designed it using a version of Microsoft’s FrontPage from 1998 (Craigslist doesn’t have ads? Not to be outdone, the blog doesn’t have comments or an RSS feed).

In any case, it’s not Craigslist’s official blog that’s the issue — it’s a site called Craigslistblog.org, which was started up about a month ago by a guy named Tim White as a way of getting some discussion going about Craigslist, both good and bad. Then he got a rather brusque C&D letter from none other than Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which Tim has posted on his site. In no uncertain terms, it directs Tim to stop using the domain and the name Craigslist immediately or face legal action.

Tim,

We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for tranfer of it to us asap – using/selling/transfering infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied.

Tim, however, responds that Jim has “gotten some bad legal counsel” and asks whether the company plans to shut down other sites with craigslist in the name, such as craigslistmap.info. Jim then copies Tim on a letter to Craigslist’s attorneys, in which he not-so-subtly mentions that the law firm does intellectual property work for “Google and a lot of other prominent companies.” As far as I can tell, Tim isn’t planning to back down.

Is Craigslist in the right here? I’m not a lawyer (although I sometimes play one on TV), but from my reading of past cases involving domain disputes, both WIPO rules and U.S. law require complainants to satisfy several conditions in order to win such a case. The first one — whether the domain name is confusingly similar — is a slam dunk for sure. But the other criteria are whether the defendant is making legitimate fair use of the name, and whether it was registered in bad faith (i.e. whether the defendant registered it with intent to profit from the confusion).

Those last two are a lot harder to answer, and I happen to think Tim has a pretty good case. Whether he can withstand a legal onslaught from Craigslist — which has about $60-million or so a year to play around with, as far as I can tell from the recent revenue numbers — is a separate question. It’s also interesting to note the anti-Craigslist comments on Tim’s post. I expect plenty of criticism of the classified site based on the contrast between its touchy-feely ethos and its actions.