mathewingram.com/work

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.

Some good points in David Pogue’s latest Circuits column in the New York Times, about how much there is left to do with what we call "Web 2.0." He writes about how there should be a social web that updates people about the latest flu virus or bug going around (although there’s kind of something like that already — too bad the domain name Sickr.com is taken by some German outfit), and about how there’s a British site that allows people to set up civic petitions of all kinds and vote on them. Some good business ideas in there.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t sound like a legend on the phone. He sounds like a friendly, slightly absent-minded scientist — which isn’t surprising, since that’s pretty much what he was before he invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at a particle-physics research lab in Switzerland, and along the way became a legend. He says he has a rule that anyone who calls him Sir (he received a knighthood from the Queen in 2004) “has to buy a round of drinks.”

In a phone call from Banff, where he was taking part in the 16th annual International World Wide Web Conference, Sir Tim talked about what he sees as the future of the “semantic Web” — in which not just websites will be connected together, but all kinds of data everywhere will be interconnected — and also some of the things he thinks could put the future of the Web at risk, such as the potential for large telecom companies to try and control the flow of data.

Globe: What sorts of things are you talking about at the conference?

TBL: “There are a number of trends happening on the Web. For example, there are pragmatic trends, such as the fact that we’re starting to see people using all kinds of small, portable devices to access the Web, as well as now huge screens. So the question is how do you make a web site that takes advantage of the big screen, when you’re planning a trip or whatever, but still works on a small screen when you’re checking your flights. The Web is also getting more into developing countries, so the number of people and the number of cultures on the Web is exploding… so that’s exciting. And then there’s the work we’re doing on the idea of the semantic Web.”

Globe: What do you mean when you use the term “semantic Web?”

TBL: “It’s a way of taking the data that is in lots and lots of different systems and connecting it together — for example, in a company or a database — and not just connecting it together, but realizing that it’s part of a community, that there are partners and suppliers and customers who all want to see and use this data in different ways. There’s a lot of excitement in the life sciences about doing this, where there are scientists looking for drugs and so on, and they have huge amounts of different sources of data. They’re looking for creative solutions to medical problems, but not everyone who is working on the problem has access to the right data.”

Continue reading “A chat with the Father of the Web”

I know, you’re probably kicking yourself for missing the latest mesh meetup — a social event aimed at poli-bloggers and various other hangers-on, fellow travelers, etc. that we had last night at the Charlotte Room. And so you should, because we had a great time without you 🙂

Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak showed up, as did Steve “Angry in the Great White North” Janke, and our good friend Andrew “call me Andrew” Coyne, who held court at the bar (as is his wont) until well into the evening.

We also had Mike “On the Attack” Brock– who has a new talk show called the Al and Mike Show — and many other luminaries, including Saleem and Kareem Khan, Leila Boujnane and her cohort from Idee, David “Troublemaker” Crow, Jevon MacDonald of Firestoker and a host of others (if you were there and I missed you, please let me know).

Obligatory mesh blurb:

mesh is only a few weeks away, and we have tons of great speakers and panels (see the full schedule here), and tickets are going quickly, so get your butt over to the site and grab a few, etc. etc.

It may not be a $1.6-billion takeover, but Joost seems to be doing pretty well nevertheless, attracting $45-million in funding from a group of backers — including CBS and Viacom, two of the TV networks it has signed content deals with. Obviously, they have decided that Joost is the horse they want to put their money on when it comes to Internet television. As Om notes, among the other investors are Sequoia Partners (also a backer of YouTube) and Index Ventures, whose partner Danny Rimer made a gazillion or so dollars by investing in Skype before it was bought by eBay. So I would imagine that he probably likes Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom just a little bit.

Nick O’Neill of Webpreneur says that Joost is about to pull off “one of the biggest fear-driven deals in history” by playing on the networks’ fear of the Internet, and Kara Swisher says on her Boom Town blog that the networks like it because “It looks and feels like a replication of the old television broadcast model,” which is a point I have also made in the past.

The alarm:clock blog says you will watch Joost, but Adario Strange at Wired’s Epicenter blog says it’s too buggy and too much trouble. And over at NewTeeVee, Om Malik makes some excellent points about the growth of Joost and the weaknesses of the peer-to-peer model for something like video. The bottom line: It may not be as easy to do as it was for voice with Skype. Meanwhile, Heather Green has some comments from investor Danny Rimer about what makes Joost so great.

They’re baaaack. The rumours about eBay buying StumbleUpon have resurfaced, but this time it’s the Wall Street Journal that is breathing new life into the story — a tale that was sparked first by TechCrunch back in April. At that point, the site — which was created by Garrett Camp and two university friends in Calgary — was rumoured to have talked with Google and Yahoo as well as eBay, and the price was said to be in the $45-million range. Now, according to the WSJ, it’s more like $75-million. Not bad for a site that has 2 million users.

Does it make sense for eBay? When the rumours first surfaced I wrote a post saying that I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. Muhammad Saleem at ProNet and Pete Cashmore at Mashable wrote about how they could see it working, but I still don’t buy it. Maybe eBay has some kind of grand vision that I’m not seeing — or maybe it’s just desperate for growth of any kind. Scot Wingo at eBay Strategies has some more thoughts on it, and Valleywag says the only explanation is that eBay just has way too much money on its hands from its online auction monopoly.