Stowe Boyd

I am gleefully presenting Rick Segal with a better title for the thread he has been pushing at recently, where the economics of Web 2.0-ish companies is eroding the traditional value that VCs bring to the innovation game: New Venture Economics. After a long, long preamble, he gets to his core insight: if VCs aren’t needed for money (based on the new economics of startups), what are they supposed to offer instead?

[from The Post Money Value: VC 2.0 part 2 by Rick Segal]

If you don’t need my money, the blogging world is your rolodex, and you could possibly be snapped up before you require capital which allows me to do my VC thing, what do I offer? I believe there is a different model out there that might work for the Web 2.0 type companies.

That’s my point of disruption.

My working theory is that a “Capital firm” with Esther Dyson, Mark Evans, Shel Israel, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, or some combination, might have value that, along side my money, could bring ideas into the mainstream in a much different fashion with great returns for all.

I believe if you come into my office for a 30 minute no harm, no foul meeting and, as part of that 30 minute meeting some combination of the people above giving you some feedback is a priceless piece of capital.

If I can harness that capital in a form that makes sense for the fine folks above as well as me and the start up, well, we’ve got something I think. And the capital of smart technical folks who have build world class systems, etc, etc.

Rick is describing my consulting business, or at least one part of it. Right now, I have a ‘portfolio’ of startup companies — some whose products we can talk about, like TravelPod and SyncPeople, and others that are still in stealth, like 3bubbles (coming soon!) and upper left, and some others that I can’t even name — where I am a strategic advisor to the company, swapping my expertise and insights for a stake in the company, as well as consulting fees. This is the ‘Capital Company’ model that Rick is talking about.

He’s right. It’s happening.

Kottke presages the results of a bet between Martin Niseholtz of the NY Times and Dave Winer: whether blogs or the NY Times would have higher authority (from the Google perspective) in 2007. And the answer, today?

[from Blogs versus the NY Times in Google (kottke.org)]

Here’s the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:

Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen media 6-2).

Overall winner (actual): Blogs (beating the NY Times 6-2).

Some observations:

My feeling is that Mr. Nisenholtz will likely lose his bet come 2007. Even though the nytimes.com fares very well in getting linked to by the blogosphere, it does very poorly in Google. This isn’t exactly surprising given that most NY Times articles disappear behind a paywall after a week and some of their content (TimesSelect) isn’t even publicly accessible at all.

There’s a lot of analysis that I have skipped, because I want to dig into the real issue: will blogs have higher authority than traditional media from the perspective of individuals? After all, Google is a proxy, a channel, to the opinions of the greater public.

We should determine how to measure the authority of blogs directly, through surveys or polls. My bet:

• A surprisingly large proportion — 75% or more — of those who are online regularly will, by 2007, state that the most authoritative sources of information for subjects of importance are blogs. Note the caveat — “subjects of importance” — which is not an attempt to mince words, but on the contrary to point out infovore dynamics. If I am deeply interested in social software, I will think that the most important authorities in that area are bloggers; however, if I am vaguely interested in modern art, I may not expend the energy to track down the most authoritative thinkers, and instead settle for the middle brow coverage in my local paper.
• Those who are not online regularly will not see the same seismic shift to blog authority; but by 2007, in the Western world, these numbers will have slipped another 10% or more. Old fogeys, like my 80-year-old dad, will still reject the Internet, and will view television and other push media as the most reliable source of news and information. The youth demographic, and the connectroids, will all swing the other way.
• Notable pockets of resistence:
  
  • Media professionals: no surprise, they will read their own junk, and state that — for a long list of reasons — it’s just better
  • Politicians: these guys live in a bubble, and have learned how to play the opaque game that is the hallmark of politico-journalism. Bloggers are less inclined to go along with concealing identities — “A highly placed source in the State Department…” — that is a sine-qua-non in the grey zone of political converage, as just one example of the new ethos to come.
  • Corporations, especially CEOs — another group that resides in the psychobubble of media adulation. On one hand, traditional media appears to be poking and prodding at the nutso deals that high-flying CEOs are getting from happy-to-oblige boards, but on the other, even left-leaning media has conformed itself to the power structure of modern industry, so the oligarchs will find it easier to consume traditional media.
  • Religious groups — some may take up the use of blogs, when they have not become closely allied with tradional media (like China), but wherever they are free to proselytize and are seen as a part of the mainstream, they will more closely affiliate with traditional media.

The blog phenomenon is a solidly middle-class, professional-class revolution. An intelligent and educated populace who have decided to regain control of media, rejecting the self-annointed priesthood of the church of journalism. Many or most of the pillars of pre-blog civilization will cling to traditional notions of media authority, and argue that bloggers are not, well, housebroken, accurate, or respecters of authority. Although, for the great majority of the online intelligensia, who aren’t concerned that we tend not to say “Sir” and “Ma’am” a lot, bloggers will have become the authorities.

Shafer argues that newspapers can’t survive by retreat: just cutting costs and trimming the stock quotes won’t win when bloggers are doing so much. Newspapers have to decide to excel in a way that bloggers can’t, or else:

[Not Just Another Column About Blogging - What newspaper history says about newspaper future By Jack Shafer]

[…]

The newspaper guild (again, reporters, editors, publishers) can’t compete by adding a few blogs here, blogging up coverage over there, and setting up “comment” sections. If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.

But instead of improving their product by deploying technology bloggers can’t afford (yet), newspapers are devolving. Many are cutting staff. Daily newspapers are growing smaller and uglier, with no paper looking anywhere near as lovely as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World from the late 1800s. Comic strips have gotten so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read them. I’m fine with newspapers cutting back on stock tables, but they aren’t adding something new to the package. Most newspapers claim they’ve shrunk their dimensions to combat steep increases in newsprint prices, but that’s a lie.

What else do I want? I want a daily newspaper that looks as good as Vogue but smells like a cinnamon bun instead of perfume. I want smarter newspaper headlines. I want a Mike Royko in every daily newspaper. I want editorials signed by people, so I know who to yell at. I want newspapers to restore editorial cartoonists to their place of honor instead of eliminating them. To broaden the answer, I want the newsmagazines to give me a better reason to read them than remixes of the last four days’ news cycle, and I want them to look like Harry N. Abrams’ coffee-table books.

In fact, while newspapers are failing, magazines are still doing well, so his general thrust — turning upmarket on production — might be smart. A weekly, regional news magazine? That might be the future for The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other smaller players.

Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine, wants to revamp the conference business, because we pay too much to get too little.

[from Exploding the conference business by Jeff Jarvis]

Too many conferences suck. They’re too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the expertise of the crowd. They enrich the organizers at the cost of both the “talent” and the “audience” (a distinction that is usually random, meaningless, and essentially insulting). They are filled with commercial pitches. The large-scale conferences are too obvious; the high-end conferences are too often too safe. There are exceptions and conferences I do like attending because of the people they attract or because they are provocative. But often, the problem is that the interests of those who make conferences work — the people who fill it — are not aligned with the interests of the money behind conferences — the organizers and sponsors.



The conference business is ripe for revolution. If newspapers, TV, magazines, books, reference works, telecommunications, entertainment, retail, real estate, recruiting, and countless other industries are exploding thanks to the internet and the direct connections it enables, then so should conferences. Why shouldn’t we organize our own better conferences on our own terms?

He dissects the finances of a typical conference, and makes a case for speakers getting a piece of the game — which some high-flying keynoters may get, but the majority of speakers do not. But that is just one slice of his argument, and not the center of it. A redistribution of the income is not what Jeff is calling for: he wants something more radical.

Although Jeff doesn’t use disintermediation to describe what he intends, he does suggest that the unconference may be the answer, like the various “camps” that have sprung up organically as an abreaction to conference doldrums and excesses, such as last fall’s BarCamp and TagCamp, and the upcoming MashupCamp.

[…]

The emerging Camp model has several parts, but basically can be thought of as an ‘open source’ conference model:

• low-cost or no-cost, subsidized by various sponsors, explicitly based on a non-profit mindset.
  
  
• the principle that all attendees can be presenters if they want to be: a self-selection process, rather than a centrally controlled program.
  
  
• self-organization by an ad hoc group of organizers who are not in the business of running conferences.
  
  
• tightly focused agenda, on a well-defined topic of interest to those involved.

[…]

Just as tech conferences are rebounding, based on a dynamic period of investment and innovation, we will see the emergence of very new, very different approaches to what a conference is supposed to be, what it is supposed to deliver, and how we will measure the value and success of conferences as a whole, and individually.

While in San Francisco last week, I met with David Quiec, who gave me the rundown on his startup Web 2.0 company, called Rrove.

Rrove (pronounced “rove”) is a mashup leveraging the various map solutions, like Google’s. Using a bookmarklet — once you’ve created an account — you can save locations found on Google, Yahoo, Mapquest, and MSN, and then post ratings, comments, and tags on those saved locations. Then they can be managed and shared with others all in one place. This solves the problem of trying to remember which service you used for some location, and of course, makes it social, since you can look through the comments of those in your network (‘community’ at Rrrove), to see what’s a good choice for lunch in the Fillmore district, or a hotel in Soho.

Here’s a screenshow showing a specific location’s reviews by two users. Note the ‘find nearby places’:

The tags thrown on locations can lead to a simple approach to finding what you’re after, although I think they need to support set operations (union of all locations tagged “sushi”, “san francisco” and rated 4 or higher by someone I know, for example) or users will be swamped with too many hits.

Creating a community seems straightforward: you add users to your network. But in fact, the obvious hook — making users’ names linked to a profile that includes an ‘add to community’ button — is absent. This has to get fixed. They do make it easy to delete people, thank god.

Currently, no mashup with Flickr or Plazes, but that seems an obvious direction: pulling pictures from geotagged pictures in these services, for example.

All in all, a cool geoloco app. I am planning to use it for a few weeks, at least, and see what updates they put in place. I know that David walked away with a long list of things to consider from our conversation: RSS, blog javascript widgets, and so on. Enough for weeks of work! That will teach him to have a coffee with me.

Umair Haque is worried that a steady diet of tech.memeorandum is making him stupid:

[from The Problems with 2.0, pt 34514]

I luv Memeorandum and all it’s reconstructor cousins. It’s one of the first things of my reading list. It’s hugely slashed my search costs in finding new stuff. But there’s a problem. Ever since I’ve started using it to the point where it replaces many of my other sources, I have gotten stupider. I can feel it - I don’t think as fast, flexibly, or freely.

I persist in spending at least half of my reading time wandering around, for that very reason.

Aggregation a la tech.memeorandum is great for finding out what people are piling on, but bad for finding new, oddball, errant nonsense… and we need a reasonable admixture of that goo or we get stale, cobwebby, stupid.

The same reason that you have to get out of the RSS reader: too much same old, same old.

Googlescoped uncovers a new demonstration of lack of transparency at Google regarding their complicity in Chinese censorship:

[from Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship, More News]

Incredible. Google removed their help entry on censorship, as Gary Price discovered. Here’s what it used to read:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google’s search technology, please visit …

This is what the page reads now:

Document Not Found

Sorry, the document you requested is not available. You can visit the main page.

[…]

Google may now delete this help entry as well:

As you may know, Google is a reflection of the web. Although we aggregate and organize content published on the web, we don’t control the content itself.

It’s our policy not to police or censor content.

[…]

At this time, there is still no statement on this controversy on the official Google blog.

I had hoped the reason that there is no word (aside from the interview with Sergey, which I posted on here) from Google on this mess is that they are rethinking their stance and would reverse themselves, the true “no evil” path. Now it looks like they are just planning to weather the storm.

I was embroiled in a discussion (argument) with Chris Nolan earlier this week regarding my apocalyptic pronouncements about the imminent collapse of traditional journalism, especially newspapers. She asked me (more or less) whether I really thought the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other premier sources of news and opinion would really be pushed aside by lunatic-fringe bloggers.

My stance is that the economics of newspapers is a mess, based on an odd assortment of junk printed, stuck into the plastic bag, and thrown out of a car window onto your driveway every morning. I said that basically that won’t be happening in a year or two. Chris believes it will be like 30 years.

So, today there is more bad news for the newspaper industry:

[from WSJ.com - Auto Ads Veer Off Newspaper Pages, Head to Web by Joseph Hallinan]

Last week, Tribune Co. said auto-classified revenue at its newspapers plunged 16% in December. Also last week, Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported a 15.2% drop in auto advertising for the fourth quarter. On Wednesday, McClatchy Co. reported a 20% decline for December, saying the downturn in car ads had finally reached its West Coast papers, the biggest of which is the Sacramento Bee, in the heart of California’s car culture.

[…]

The decline adds to the woes of the newspaper industry, already losing circulation to the Internet. For years, fat sections of car ads were a dependable source of business for newspaper publishers, accounting for 30% of the industry’s total classified ad revenue of $16.6 billion in 2004, the last full year for which figures are available. Even as a migration of job ads to the Internet took a big bite out of newspaper employment classifieds from 2000 to 2003, auto ads held up.

That began to change in 2004. While employment ads began to stabilize, a combination of Web competition and changes in the auto industry led to a drop in spending on newspaper auto classifieds. Revenue from auto classifieds has now fallen for seven straight quarters, to $1.01 billion in the third quarter of 2005 from $1.16 billion in the second quarter of 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a Vienna, Va., industry trade group. Fourth-quarter figures for 2005 aren’t yet available. In a report published last week Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Ginocchio, citing discussions with industry managers, said auto ad revenue was “trending down significantly” in the first quarter of this year as well.

The economics are inexorable, and the advertisers are going online fast. Expect even more layoffs, reformatting to eliminate expenses, foreign bureaus closed, management reshuffles, downsizing, and outright closures.

Some papers — the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal — will survive in some form, but I don’t see them being delivered to your house. You will have to buy them at Starbucks, or the airport. But the great majority of regional papers will just be dead.

Liz Moyer of Forbes writes about the inverted, unmarketing model being championed by Root/Markets:

[from Rooting For A Great Sales Lead - Forbes.com by Liz Moyer]

Root/Markets is based on the premise that consumers—being ordinary folks—should be able to control the information collected on them every time they log on to the Internet, fill out forms and sign up for stuff. Every click an individual makes on the Internet is recorded and stored by some marketer looking to sell them something or some spyware scammer looking to steal from them.

So Root has developed a software program that allows consumers essentially to spy on themselves, sending every click into a “vault” of information at Root that can be stored, edited and used to the individual’s liking.

Here’s where the market comes in. Individuals using RootVault can make their data available to marketers they want to reach. For example, someone looking for a new apartment could make their personal data available to mortgage lenders and real-estate agents.

Root’s idea is to create bundles of customer leads that would trade like futures contracts on the exchange.

Root takes a fee from both sides of the transaction—the publishers or sellers of ad leads, and the advertisers or buyers. Root also would act the way a stock-exchange specialist would, by stepping in and buying or selling contracts in the event of a market imbalance.

I love the premise — that we, individually, would assert what we are interested in being promoted to us — but the Root/Vault approach, keeping track of where we spend our time on the web or on our desktop, is to me the wrong way to get there.

I favor a published profile, maintained by an independent arbiter, like Root/Vault, that would allow anonymized publishing of promotions to me. This allows me to retain my anonymity, while still getting relevant promotions. If I am interested in mortgages, for example, I won’t think its spam. Some people really are looking for low-cost viagra, after all.

Sergey Brin equates Google’s acquiescence to China’s request for censorship about democracy and freedom to blocking Nazi content in Germany and child pornography in the US. Please.

[Davos Dispatches: Brin defends Google’s China move - Jan. 25, 2006]

Brin: […] We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.

[…]

And we also by the way have to do similar things in the U.S. and Germany. We also have to block certain material based on law. The U.S., child pornography, for example, and also DMCA

Fortune: You actually actively block child pornography?

Brin: No, but if we got a specific government request. If a third party makes a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) claim that another party is violating copyright, and that party is not able to counter, then we are obligated to block that.

In France and Germany there are Nazi material laws. One thing we do, and which we are implementing in China as well, is that if there’s any kind of material blocked by local regulations we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine. “Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results.” And we’re doing that in China also, and that makes us transparent.

Oh. By saying that you are censoring something, that makes it alright?

[Update: Noticed that Businessweek is running a poll about Google’s actions: it’s very close, pro v con.

More musings on the role of social in social media — which some more mainstream types refer to as interactivity:

[from The Costs and Benefits of Interaction Poynter Online]

interaction isn’t optional. Maybe it never was — an institution
that behaves arrogantly eventually reaps the whirlwind. A lot of the
anger directed against “mainstream media” comes from people who resent
the historic imbalance of power between media and so-called consumers.
At any rate, the individual empowerment made possible by the Internet
has rendered the notion of a one-way media lecture obsolete. We have to
deal with it.

it’s not a social medium if you pull out the social aspects.

But a lot of institutions — including old school media, governments, corporations — are organized around controlled access, controlled messaging, control, control, control. They don’t want to let the loonies ask questions, or snicker when someone says something stupid. Remember Mena Trott at Les Blogs, melting down when Ben Metcalfe posted “bullshit” in the IRC backchannel?

You can’t have it both ways: it’s not a social medium if you pull out the social aspects, where the “audience” can’t shout back, and the “market” can’t tell you your marketing message is laughable.

So, the Washington Post’s retreat away from the give-and-take in the wilds of the blogosphere — back into the quiet halls of the fifth estate, where our emails and letters can be filtered and flushed — is exactly that: a withdrawal from a more dynamic, participative, and egalitarian model of journalism. And if the Post and other old school players decide not to give us what we want, we can certainly find it elsewhere.

The long anticipated Yahoo Messenger for Mac is rumored to be imminent, acoording to Andy Abramson:

[from Yahoo Messenger for Mac]

I heard through the grapevine that the in production version of Yahoo Messenger, that is being rewritten from the ground up, for the Macintosh will include Video.

I’m also hearing that the USA launch of VOIP with Y! Messenger is likely within the next month or so, and certainly before VON in March. It seems Yahoo has internal promotional programs that new product releases need to fall into.

Looks like you can download it from ca.yahoo.com, now.

I was out to visit the Yahoo folks a few months ago, talking about their big picture thoughts about VoIP, and I was peeved that Mac stuff is released months later than Windows. Glad to see them get there.

Om Malik riffs on Andy’s post, disclosing that a new Mac sensibility may be at work in Yahoo. Apparently, the new CPO, Ash Patel has switched to Mac, at least as a companion to his Windows machines.

I believe this will be the year of the switch for Mac, especially once they work the kinks out of the duo Intel architecture, and get a foolproof means in place to run Windows apps natively.

[Update: 10:09am PT — I downloaded the Yahoo for Mac from the Canadian Yahoo. Has a webcam button, but I don’t have my iSight with me to experiment.

The screwy behavior of RSS Menu — where it resets all my RSS feeds to some redirect proxy page — happened again yesterday. This time it was the TMobile redirect page at Starbucks, instead of Logan airport (see I Hate Logan Airport). So I threw it away.

I also got sick and tired of the spinning little ball at Firefox: can’t they ever fix that memory leak? So I decided to give Safari another try, since it has built in RSS feed management.

Interesting side effect of the switch to Safari: apparently the browser can’t display WYSIWYG editing in Typepad, so a little switch I didn’t know existed has been flipped, and now I am editing in text mode, much like what I was used to with Moveable Type. So I have been delivered from that hellish setup where I had to switch back and forth from WYSIWYG to HTML modes in order to get anything done.

As I drove across San Francisco Bay this morning, I heard via NPR the news about Google joining the ranks of MSN and Yahoo, caving to pressure from the fascist Chinese government to support censorship:

[from Version of Google in China Won’t Offer E-Mail or Blogs - New York Times by David Barboza]

In an effort to cope with China’s increasingly pervasive Internet controls, Google said Tuesday that it would introduce a search engine here this week that excludes e-mail messaging and the ability to create blogs. 

Google officials said the new search engine, Google.cn, was created partly as a way to avoid potential legal conflicts with the Chinese government, which has become much more sophisticated at policing and monitoring material appearing on the Internet.

Web sites have exploded in popularity in a country eager for freer flow of information. But Web portals and search engines trying to win Chinese users face a significant balancing act: they do not want to flout government rules and guidelines that restrict the spread of sensitive content, but they want to attract users with interesting content.

One result has been that search engines and Web portals have censored their sites and cooperated with Chinese authorities. Indeed, the move to create a new site comes after Google itself, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, have come under scrutiny over the last few years for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor or block online content.

We should ostracize from the world community those governments who don’t want to allow basic human rights for their citizens. But players like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are afraid of losing market share, so they go along with repression. This is a black day. Google is not on the side of the angels in this.

I expect that overly pragmatic fatalists will tell me that I am being too idealistic, that Google is merely bowing to the inevitable, that China is a sovereign country, blah blah, woof woof. But I just don’t care. It’s wrong, and going along with it for money is simply appeasing the Chinese. If we are willing to threaten sanctions against Iran — they are a sovereign country aren’t they? — why can’t we do the same with China? Low-cost underwear? Or are we just so jaded that we don’t care?

David Kline at BlogRevolt poses the question:

[BlogRevolt.com: What’s Holding Back Corporate Blogging?]

Why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize?

The number of Fortune 500 companies with strategic public blogging initiatives, after all, is still quite small — somewhere between 3-4%, depending on how you figure it. Many of those firms are what you might call “the usual suspects” — i.e., technology firms such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft that are enmeshed in network culture. And basically none of them are the sort of brand-name consumer powerhouses that could really push blogging and related customer-contact media into the mainstream of everyday business.

By itself, this delay is not surprising, especially when you look at the history of early corporate involvement with the Web a decade ago. When the World Wide Web first emerged in 1994, some pundits predicted the “imminent demise of the shopping mall” as name-brand consumer product firms rushed to set up online stores. In point of fact, it took four years for the dollar volume of online shopping to even hit the $1 billion mark — in other words, to even reach half the size of the real-world market in blow dryers.

Change, it turns out, usually takes longer than the pundits predict. Especially change in the business world.

He goes on to ask Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil this question, and Debbie nails it:

Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open, fear of a two-way conversation, fear of not being able to control the message, fear of the time commitment.

I once interviewed Ray Lane about social networking (see here), and one of his comments was amazingly general:

Sometimes you have to wait for a generation to die before new technologies can catch on.

I think one of the key problems is that we, as a society, have so deeply internalized the dynamics of capital-M marketing, and all the attendent clap-trap — messaging, positioning, markets, segments, and all the other mumbo jumbo — that corporate types are incapable of imagining a world in which those incantations no longer have power. Like Freudian psychiatry, which has been shown to be basically without foundation, but people walk around spouting about superegos, the id, and our dark unconscious, as if its real. Its just a mass hallucination.

Corporate types steadfastedly refuse to believe that the post-marketing world is better, because individuals want control, and have grown immune to the tricks and sleights-of-hand that make up marketing, in general. And blogging is considered an adjunct to marketing, “just another channel” to carry messages, slightly recast perhaps, to one “segment” of the “market.”

Honestly, I have grown so disenchanted with trying to debug this mindset, or to explain what the new world order is to people afflicted with this mindset, that I recently fired myself from the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic series. I couldn’t face another roomful of marketing and PR types looking for the path of least resistance.

The only hope is to adopt the vision of UnMarketing:

• There are no markets, only individuals making individual decisions based on communications with other individuals.
  
  
• You have little control over what people say about your products. You can only listen, and engage.
  
  
• Adopting blogs as ‘another channel’ won’t work.
  
  
• No one believes anything written in the third person anymore.
  
  
• Your “market” — the union of the various communities talking about your products and your competitors — is smarter than your marketing department.
  
  

I know its a watered down Cluetrain Manifesto, but I couldn’t help myself.

Steve Rubel referenced new startup Wrickr, which I guess (it’s hard to tell) will be yet-another-personalized-RSS-page thingie. It’s another example of a start-up’s server getting crushed when an A-lister points to your domain, because when I went to the blog, and attempted to click through on the demo (like 25,000 others) I got the interesting error message: “XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 25” — I bet the server’s sideways.

Also, another indicator of undue haste in launching — typos and grammatical errors:

[from Welcome to Wrickr! ( Beta; 2006-01-06 )]

Have you ever try to find good and easy example of start websites which could be easy to manage. We decided to start small project called my personal star homepage. Now you can try the demo. It looks like Google Personalized but it’s going to be much better.

I am totally frustrated with dumbness of calendars. On all levels.

First of all, why do we use a base 12 hour system? 60 seconds in a minute, and 24 hours a day? Can we go decimal, please? I thought the beat time was a good idea, especially as it solved the time zone issue — no time zones in beat time, just a thousnad ‘beats’ per day — but it will never catch on.

So I am resigned to 24 hours, 7 days a week (don’t get me started), and time zones.

But in that case, shouldn’t our calendar tools work? They just don’t, at least not if you travel.

For example, I can turn on the time zone features of iCal, which allows me to attribute an appointment with a time relative to a time zone. But then everything falls apart if you use it. I plan to fly from Dulles to Oakland, leaving at 6.05 am, landing at 10.30am. The reservation info is provided that way, but the appointment only allows a single time zone for the appointment. So I could, I suppose, mentally transpose the 10.30am landing time to be 1.30pm ET, but then the display screws up. And when I set up appointments in CA when I am in VA, I would have to similarly transpose everything, even though I actually plan to be in CA for the meetings. This means you see a meeting at 1pm (ET) when it really will be taking place at 10am (PT) when you get there. Very confusing.

The answer? Apple and other calendar makers need to provide finer grained control for appointments: time zones for start and finish, and a display time zone control. While I am in VA, I may want to display all events ‘localized’ — relative to the time zone I am currently in — or ‘globalized’ where everything is displayed in its own time zone.

Things get even worse when I try to change time zones on my Mac. I land in CA, set the time zone to PT, and all the times on my calendar, which I have not transposed, move three hours. Likewise my cell phone, if I use the automatic time zone features.

So, I have reverted to manual control of all my time-based devices. I turn off time-zone support in iCal, and adjust time and date manually on my Mac and my cell phone (at least when traveling out of ET). Because calendars don’t work. At least not for travelers.

Steve Rubel has a great response to Yahoo’s statements about not being able to catch Google on search:

[Micro Persuasion: Yahoo Cedes Search to Google and So Do I]

That’s it, I am no longer using Yahoo Search. I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn’t aspire to make best of breed. If search is no longer hip to Yahoo, then Yahoo Search is no longer hip with me. As much as I am a fan of Yahoo on the whole, I would rather stick with a search platform that is run by a company that’s always striving to be number one, e.g. Google. (BTW, Microsoft would rather die than say they are ceding search to Google. That’s a big difference between the two companies.)

And the answer to his question — if they aren’t search, then what are they? — I think that’s obvious from the companies they are buying: they are trying to develop leadership in social architecture/media, based on melding Flickr, Yahoo Groups, etc., with new entertainment media stuff, and they have hopes they will be the market leader. (Witness Susan Mernitt’s new gig at Yahoo Personals.) But that’s goiing to be an equally competitive arena.

Hoder, aka Hossein Derakhshan, a friend and well-known Canadian blogger of Iranian background, is headed to Israel:

[from E:M | Visiting Israel, breaking a major taboo]

I’m going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist. 

As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with a consensual political agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians.  I’m going to challenge that image.

Hoder is a man of singular convictions, and I hope that the spotlight that this trip will bring leads to a greater understanding, rather than the growing division between anti-Semitic Iran rulers bent on creating nujes and Israel, who we have to imagine is their target.

Hoder wants to debunk the stereotypes on all sides, and is looking for support, including financially. Please spread the word, and break some coin.

[pointer from Dave Winer]

Jeff Pulver — a guy who really gets the convergence of VoIP, IM, presence, and ubiquitous mobility — has pulled together three Musketeers to ride beside him on the path to a presence-enabled future:

[from Say Hello to Tello by Steve Rosenbush]

Now, Pulver wants to help revolutionize business communications. His latest venture, Tello, is set to launch on Jan. 23 with the support of three high-profile partners, including cell-phone pioneer Craig McCaw, former Apple (AAPL) CEO John Sculley, and veteran telecom banker Michael Price.

Like Vonage, the company uses the Internet as a platform for communications. But it goes way beyond voice. The idea is to help businesspeople get in touch instantaneously in groups of two or more, bridging a multitude of devices and communications platforms.

TAP THE ICON.  How would it work? Let’s say an investment banker in New York needs to get in touch with a colleague in Greenwich, Conn., an attorney at home in Stamford, Conn., and a client in Walnut Creek, Calif. The banker in New York would go to his address book and look up the contact file for the client, which would have a Tello toolbar with a series of icons representing various modes of communication — from home and work phone, to cell phone, e-mail, and instant messaging.

If the client happened to be in a car, with access to his cell phone, e-mail box, and IM account, the banker could initiate communication by tapping one of the three highlighted icons. Once he had contact with the client, he could add the attorney, using the same method. All three could communicate at once, using any combination of voice, IM, or e-mail.

But getting in touch is just the beginning of what Pulver envisions. As their conversation progresses, the banker could pull up a spreadsheet on his PC. And he could click on a Tello icon that allows his business associates to view or edit the same document.

I love it. But this is one of those grand visions where — even if you like the outcome — its hard to imagine how a new start-up, even one with a bunch of well-heeled and well-known financiers and entrepreneurs on board, can in fact get all the moving pieces to work together, especially since those who are already well-entrenched in the various layers of today’s communication stack are working hard to carve out their own piece of the pie:

• The IM players — AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. — have millions of users, and have no interest in letting them cross communicate with Tello. They would like to envision their presence and messaging plumbing as the critical factor in future presence-enabled communication schemes.
  
  
• The telephone companies are trying to counter the explosion of VoIP services with a variety of attacks, and the cell phone companies are likewise working to hold on to what they have. And both are experimenting with presence in their offerings.
  
  
• The VoIP startups, like Skype, Vonage, and so on, are growing fast, and not looking back, making partnerships or working with parent companies (Like eBay for Skype) to roll out comprehensive solutions in large established communities of use.
  
  
• The established web conferencing companies — WebEx, Placeware — understand that they are just one part of the instantaneous economy, and they they will have to play nice with the other players. That’s why Microsoft bought Placeware, after all.

Anyway, I don’t see it. Maybe they will demonstrate an architectural approach that shows where it all needs to go, but I don’t see them having the leverage to do more than guide the way. This group is prescient enough to find the battlefield, but way too small to hold it.