TechCrunch50: What Ever Happened To Awesome?

[I am returning to my old 3 threes review format for conferences, starting with this week’s TechCrunch50. This format involves a description of the three most interesting, challenging, or compelling companies, people, and ideas from the event.]

What ever happened to awesome?

Maybe it’s just me getting old and curdudgeonly, but I had hoped that I would see 10 or so really interesting products debuted at TechCrunch50. Instead, the most fun I had was talking to returnees (like David Sachs of Yammer) and hearing what their plans were for third generation products. The awesome start-ups just weren’t there.

Three Companies

Microsoft (Bing) — It’s unusual for me to praise Microsoft, but the newly announced Bing Visual Search was very impressive: the first Microsoft technology I’ve really imagined using since OneNote.

The service arrays results of certain searches in tables of images — like womens shoes, or other products — and provides controls to allow the searcher to change characteristics unique to the search domain to further refine the search results. Very impressive.

Threadsy — I think that the first company to come up with the right way to allow infovores (or ‘onfovores’) to manage their ever-expanding streams of links, recommendations and commentary will become the next big thing. No one so far has cracked that code. I thought that Threadsy was the best candidate at the show, however. And the company was runner-up in the final judging, so I guess others agreed.

AnyClip — I love the idea of being able to access any scene in any movie, since I am constantly pulling out movie references. AnyClip seems geared to supporting my addiction in exactly that way. As the judges said at the presentation, if they can work out all the agreements with the studios this is going to be a great service. And the demo showed that it really worked.

Three People

Mike Arrington/Jason Calacanis — Mike Arrington’s meltdown in the final 20 minutes of the conference was extremely odd (although consonant with Arrington’s Murdoch-like media baron persona), and highlighted Jason Calacanis’ showmanship, by contrast. I found myself wondering if the meltdown was staged, at first, but I guess it wasn’t just a ploy for press attention, but appears to be a real business breakdown between the two, and it means the end of Techcrunch50 as a conference, apprently.

George Zachary — A difficult choice for the best judge, considering that the group including Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Sean Parker, and a dozen other luminaries. Chamillionaire proved himself capable of holding his own, in this crowd, by the way.

Penn Gillette — Penn Gillette appeared to show off his new iPhone app, which seemed pretty lame. However, he wins the award for his one liner. When asked what he was going to do next, which was intended as a question regarding the business behind the app, he responded “I guess I will go to Vegas and shoot some guns at my partner.”

Three Ideas

Dolls Are Scary — I found the obsession with toys and dolls creepy (see TechCrunch 50: Digital Bedtime Stories Are Icky). More importantly, showcasing this niche, as opposed to general purpose Web 2.0 apps, suggested to me that we aren’t seeing as many products intended to be worldbeaters.

Maybe 50 Is Too Many? — Cramming 50 companies into two days meant that the conference started early, ran late, and the companies only had 6 minutes for their pitches. Despite 50 sounding like a small number, I came away feeling like ten or fifteen less — like the original TechCrunch40 — might have been better. Moot now, since the event seems to be headed for the dustbin of history.

The Flow Is Still A Torrent — No one has solved the stream problem: how to effectively throttle the stream so that people can stay on top without drowning. It might be interesting if there was a conference dedicated just to this issue, and showcasing various approaches. (Jason… are you listening? You don’t need Arrington for this.)

Techcrunch50 in Retrospect

So, a few days have passed. I have given away all the tchotchkes and washed all the tshirts (Zark get’s kudos for best shirt, by the way). Looking back, it really didn’t amount to much. No staggeringly beautiful SlideRocket, no enterprise-suitable Yammer, no crowd-pleasing Twitter client breakthrough.

Perhaps its a sign of the times. San Francisco and the attendant tech scene is under the cloud of the econolypse. Despite the bonhomie and attempts at pressing on, the layoffs, stillborn companies, and career wreckage is taking a toll. The investors and entrepreneurs that were preaching thrift and ‘longer runway’ last fall seem to be in a perpetual state of enforced optimism, but the tech start-up scene seems low energy now.

The high points for me were discussions with more established companies, like Yammer, and hearing what David Sachs, their CEO, is contemplating for next year and beyond. Or seeing serial entrepreneur Brian Alvey, former CTO of Weblogsinc, take another run at blogging with his Crowd Fusion. While these are young companies, they are not blazing a trail in the wilderness, defining a new product category.

So maybe it’s a time of consolidation and small advances. If so, Techcrunch 50 was the perfect show.

19 September 2009 1 Permalink

Steve Boyd on RSS “breaking through”

Don Dodge — who is on a tear recently — posts about The new way to launch your product or company:

It doesn’t cost anything to publicize your new product or service. Simply engage a couple of the “A-List” bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus, Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours.

Nice group to be included in.

In effect Don is suggesting that these uber-bloggers are becoming gatekeepers, and as they discover something neat, or innovative, or fun, and then blog it, gazillions of others follow.

The power law at work again.

And of course companies are not blind to this. That’s why I am getting five or more emails/calls from companies in the process of launching new products, every week.

And I am certain that PR firms all over are honing their “blogger relations” skills, as these uber-bloggers begin to fill the role that “analysts” from Gartner, Forrester, and other analyst firms used to fill, and to some extent still do. Except now it’s specific analysts who have proven their mettle, and not just because of the Gartner brand.

As I wrote a few weeks ago …

[from Who Are The New Gatekeepers?]

It’s a dynamic system, where individual authority — good writing on a topic — leads to emergent authority (as many swarm to read a great post), which allows Technorati to mine those readers’ links, which leads to increased individual authority, and so on. Meanwhile, individuals combine into groups — like the Web 2.0 Workgroup — which confers an almost institutional authority, or are included on exclusive lists in aggregation, like the tech.memeorandum 2000 bloggers.

So, the answer is: there is no gate. There are many waypoints, many street signs, and many ways to go, but no one is barring the gate, or deciding who is let in. This is confusing if we try to apply the old map to the new territory, but not if we try to perceive the new media universe as it is.

But even though things are fluid, and constantly changing, and even though there are a million niches out there, companies will try to simplify the system for their advantage. When they are getting ready to launch new products, the entrepreneurs want there to be gatekeepers, so they can talk to 20 or 30 people instead of millions.

So uber-bloggers are filling an economic and social need, based on the trust and authority that they have developed, and acting as a filter for others. And the entrepreneurs, on one side, and the greater reading blogosphere, on the other, are keeping the lens focused on a short list of a few hundred tech bloggers, whose influence is spiking.

The odd things is how the prior arbiters of tech viability have fallen, and how little they have done in the blogosphere. You expect that Gartner, Forrester and so on would have created hundreds of successful, influential bloggers, rather than just a handful. It could be that the writing and analytic styles of the two worlds don’t jibe, but that seems wrong to me. Perhaps the pay-for-advice model of the analyst firms, or their use of the imperial “we” in their analysis, just don’t make the transition to the blogosphere very well.

7 February 2006 Permalink

Blogs its all about the conversation

Wow. What I thought was a modest post with a neat and helpful small idea — The Conversational Index — took off in a big way yesterday, getting picked up, and picked on, by a long list of smart people. I thought I would aggregate various comments and try to address them in one place.

The basic idea?

[from The Social Scale of Social Media: The Conversational Index by Stowe Boyd]

While working at Corante, I had the opportunity to peer at the stats for all sorts of blogs that we had going. And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index, just to put a handle on it.

Go Flock Yourself was the first to trackback on the topic, and giving me the best laugh I’ve had recently:

I’m very happy to pronounce to the world that GFY sports a Conversational Index of 0.135 (233 posts/1724 comments), a number that should make Stowe’s beret flip up off of his head and fly around the room like a frisbee, and reduce Richard MacManus to tears on the floor of his mother’s basement.

Doc Searls comments:

Oh shit. My ratio sucks. I think I run less than a comment a day, vs. half a dozen posts or so.

Of course, my blogging environtment doesn’t encourage comments.

And, I look for comments back on other blogs. I think I’d rather have them there anyway.

So… I dunno.

Don Dodge suggests that the CI is useful, but should be inverted, which I agree with, so from this point forward I will use Don’s variant, where CI = (Comments+Trackbacks)/Posts. This means the CI gets larger as the conversation gets richer:

[from The Conversational Index for blogs]

Note, I have calculated the number differently than Stowe, but the meaning and measurement is the same. Using my formula and Stowe’s blog stats his blog has a CI of (71+31)/80=1.27. Stowe Boyd has several blogs, and is a very well known writer, so my guess is that these numbers are from one of his newer, and lesser known, blogs.

Don is right: I was using the figures from /Message, which is less than 30 days old. My bet is that my CI is small because /Message is new, and the index will go up over time, as more people find /Message.

Peter Caputa has a CI (Dodge variant) of 1.53, and thinks this is because…

I ask a lot of questions and people humor me with answers. And because I say a lot of stupid things, and people yell back at me. And because I ask people for their feedback sometimes on specific posts.

Zoli Erdos builds on the discussion and points out that we are losing track of the other half of the conversation: the dark comments out there.

Tracking The COMPLETE CONVERSATION - Part 3]

we really are losing track of half the conversation in the Blogosphere.

As Stowe points out, for truly vibrant blogs the CI will be <1, which means there are far more comments than blog posts (I am cheating a little, ignoring trackbacks). This will likely be the case for all the Technorati top 100 or even 500 bloggers – from their viewpoint most of the conversation happens on / around their own blog. However, for the the rest of us, the other 26 million (?) bloggers chances are the conversation really takes place outside our own blog, and I for one certainly can’t keep track of all comments I left on other blogs.

The current crop of tracking / linking services all have a top-down publisher-centric view, where everything revolves around a blog and its related posts, totally missing this other, “bottom-up” half of the conversation. So please, somebody give Stowe his badge, but we also badly need a way to show by subject matter an integrated view of all conversations where we are participating whether we started the thread or someone else.

Zoli’s right in a way. After all, if I leave a comment on his blog, I am enhancing his CI and not influencing mine at all. However, if I write a post at my blog and trackback to his blog, I am influencing both CIs: his goes up (Dodge variant), and mine goes down. Of course, I am likely to get a trackback or a comment back from Zoli, or others involved in the conversation, so I personally bellieve that it is best to make that post and trackback. (And of course, there is cocomment, which I am profiling today, that intends to bring those dark comments out there back into the light. See the widget in the right margin?)

Michael Parekh says

[from ON STOWE BOYD’S CONVERSATIONAL INDEX]

Where do I come out on this? Well, I’ve been long-convinced of the value of comments in blogs as the next logical step of blog mining evolution.  (see Comments Search: the next big mother lode of user-generated content (UGC) and this post last June)

But Stowe’s idea of creating a mathematical formula has a Google like simplicity at it’s core. He even visualizes it as a living, breathing thing:

“I hope someone out there — some bored toolsmith, or a computer science student looking for an interesting project — will build a tool that will scan a blog, determine the CI, and provide the result as a chicklet that we can embed on our blogs. Even better would be a 30 day
graph, like Tufte’s sparklines, that shows the social interaction ebbing and flowing.”

It all sounds mesmerizing.

Until you realize that if the Conversational Index (CI) did in fact take off, both as yet another way to rank blogs on the Internet, and then actually as a tool to commercialize said rankings into real dollars for the bloggers, then might not this lead to the next logical step?

The overnight reversal of seeing Trackback and Comment Spam as BAD things, to actually GOOD, welcome things?

That is to say, we may need a mechanism to independently verify that

the Trackbacks and Comments reported as a component in the CI calculation are Good and Pure of the Spammy Stuff.

Not to mention the inevitable emergence of “Comment-fraud” and “Trackback-fraud” to take their place along-side of Click-fraud

Despite these possible negatives, thinking about the Conversational Index at least gets folks to start thinking about the value in comments and trackbacks.

A number of other folks commented that comment spam and trackback spam would artificially enlarge the CI, and I agree. But on the other hand, I was operating under the assumption that all sensible people would delete that junk. Still, it’s a relevant observation.

Easton Ellis deconstructs the CI pointing out that

1. comment quality varies [yes, I agree]
   
   
2. many blogs start out conversation-poor and gradually pick up speed as they gain a consistent following [true, but as I said in the first post, I saw at Corante that the successful blogs started out on the good foot: a good CI from the beginning]
   
   
3. what about the authors comments at her own blog, or trackbacks she sends to her own entries? [comments responding to comments is a good conversation, isn’t it? And tracking back to earlier posts is good ettiquette too, helping readers find subsequent posts that elaborate on earlier thoughts.]
   
   
4. Could this statistic be meshed with a particular individual’s CI? [Sure, you can average your CI from multiple blogs. Why not? We can do whatever we want here in the matrix.]
   
   
5. Is a comment always equal to a trackback? [I don’t know. But for simplicity they are in the formula.]
   
   
6. What about the number of commenters on or trackbackers to a blog? [I don’t know if a conversation is better when there are a smaller number of people involved, making serial comments/trackbacks, or if there is a larger group, where each individual comments/tracksback less. So for now, we don’t care. Also might be hard to get that number.]
   
   
7. My head hurts. I feel like a geek. [Me too.]
   
   

Mathew Ingram calls me a geek, too, but in a nice way:

[from Blogs — it’s all about the conversation]

what makes most blogs interesting isn’t so much the great things that the writer puts on there (as much as I like to hear the sound of my own voice), but what kind of response it gets, and how that develops, and who carries it on elsewhere on their own blog. And I agree that it would be nice if someone like technorati.com or memeorandum.com could track that kind of thing and make it part of what brings blogs to the top.

I like to see what people are talking about — not just what a blogger has to say, but what others have to say about what they say. That’s why I also agree with Steve Rubel that it would be nice to have a way of tracking comments, other than by subscribing to a feed of comments, or bookmarking posts you’ve commented on with del.icio.us or some other tool.

The latter problem is perhaps solved by cocomment (about which more later), and the former, by the blogpulse conversation tracker, which does a memeorandum-ish snapshot of the cascade of posts emanating from an initial “converation seed”. Here’s the picture that they draw from the initial Conversational Index post:

Note that they don’t track comments at the blog, though. Ultimately, I would like to have all that wrapped up into one representation.

Sadly, though, no one has yet stepped forward to build a tool that would yeild the number: we still have to do it manually.

As of this morning, my CI (Dodge variant — (C+T)/P) is (88+42)/89 = 1.46.

5 February 2006 Permalink

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The Conversational Index for blogs

Don Dodge had apparently come up with the Conversation Index on his own, although he inverts the calculation:

[from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The Conversational Index for blogs]

Note, I have calculated the number differently than Stowe, but the meaning and measurement is the same. Using my formula and Stowe’s blog stats his blog has a CI of (71+31)/80=1.27. Stowe Boyd has several blogs, and is a very well known writer, so my guess is that these numbers are from one of his newer, and lesser known, blogs.

Hmmm. Since the arithmetic is barely a day old, I am willing to be swayed. I guess it makes more sense that as the conversation increases the ratio gets bigger. So I will switch over to Don’s formula, instead of my first pass.

4 February 2006 Permalink

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Memeorandum

Don Dodge takes on a thankless task, interviewing Gabe Rivera, of memeorandum. Thankless because he gets basically zero out of Gabe, who doesn’t (sensibly) tell any of the algorithmic secrets under the hood, or any of the cool things he is thinking about for the future. We hear him tell us why he thinks the memeorandum approach is better than others, but not much else revelatory. A nice try, though, Don.

[Disclosure: Of course, I had the benefit of spending a few hours with Gabe last week (I made him some eggs, while hanging around at Michael Arrington’s), and so I know there are neat things in the offing.]

3 February 2006 Permalink