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Some people have been asking for closure on my posts about books banned on planes. To be clear: The TSA screener was probably mistook books for matchbooks, but is empowered to apply poor judgment, which is the issue.
Flew to Paris with at least 3 books, no problem. However, I flew back with a lighter that I declared to several French screeners. There is no such thing as a closed system and all we have is illusions of a secure homeland.
The monopoly should be natural: Why can't I print Mac designed business cards through FedEx Kinko's online? If you are going to have a site, seperate this interface this from your transaction backbone to make it a service.
Attractive Design: What is the reason why my 2 year old likes to pluck the keys off my PowerBook whenever he can lay his curious little paws on it?
Atmosphere Kills: When I unpacked my bags from Paris, the stench almost made me agree with Doc's point about great food, bad atmosphere. The problem is smoking in France is so damn enjoyable.
Furthermore: When I worked for a certain President, he had persuaded the press corps to avoid taking pictures of him while smoking so as to not influence the youth. Interesting both that this reminds me of Roosevelt and Polio, I don't want to catch Polio, there is a civility of the press that has a role and don't show those Les Blogs pics to kids.
Tiger Leap: Are people standing in lines because it reminds them of the first Star Wars or to Flickr it?
Clue: We are listed as a recent investment on their site.
Scrape ID: My last random rant shamelessly noted how Stowe Boyd was scraped by an otherwise great Topix service. The SoSo feed is MoMo. Jeff's scraped identity is his Recent Posts sidebar. RSS isn't just good spam fodder, it can help valuable services aggregate too.
SPSSAG: Should Probably Say Something About Google. If I wasn't a blogger I couldn't keep up with all the new Gapps.
Syndicoop: They write headlines and categorize for me, I give them ad revenue, Google news exposure included.
Hack the Earl: If you hack the URL of the greatest free streaming silent movie for boys who like Thomas, you might end up with this @@pple instead.
Paddle: Kayak for Ajaxy travel search, Southwest not included but I would rather go to them better fairs within their Flashy routemap and simple site.
Posted my presentation from Les Blogs on this wiki page, which has grown to a perfect summary of the event with presentations, audio and blog posts.
The vibrant growth of the French blogosphere is something to behold. French is the second largest language and half of students in France blog. This is due, in no small part, to Skyradio telling their listeners to Skyblog what they think at most commercial breaks -- a multi-million dollar advertising investment from an MSM to make blogging cool. Effective, considering they have 1.5 million bloggers according to Pierre Bellanger's presentation. Wonder what will happen when they begin podcasting.
I really enjoyed the contrast Jochen Wegner provided in his presentation on how Germany needs a second pope. Basically, nobody blogs in Germany despite their population and broadband penetration. He implied that there hadn't been an event, or celebrity, or major marketing push to help it along. Could also be similar to when i asked Orkut why Estonia was the six most populous nationality on Orkut the a population the size of Skybloggers -- he said one of his good friends was Estonian. Adoption happens from social networks of founders plus mass event exceptions.
The Germans I spoke to said wikis were far more popular than blogs and the credited Wikipedia (the German version is the second largest), which are both network and mass drivers.
One of the recurring conversations at Les Blogs, beyond metaphysical notions of what is a blog, is why doesn't everybody have a blog? While lots of blog pundits are quick to agree that the real action isn't blogs as publishing (aside: Doc's presentation put the nail in content instead of conversation) -- but chatter with friends that happens to be in the open. We have explored this as part of the network structure, demographics, interests, everything. Barak from 6A noted that focus groups show people consistently think of bloggers are people who are self-important and have too much time on their hands. My wife, who was outed as part of the community this week, and is my favorite focus group, agrees violently. And nobody gives a damn who has more traffic than who.
However, the reason I cringe when toolmakers says all the action is in the skinny part of the power law (uh, long tail) is that the toolmakers haven't followed through. Two notable exceptions are LiveJournal and Flickr. We all know that social networking (especially as a filter) is due to merge with blogging. However, one consensus from insiders over the past week was that tool innovation significantly lags social practice. I'd suggest this is the focus of where toolmakers will catch up over the next year or so.
Caterina made some claims that not everyone has something to write, but all can take snapshots. All true, and the tech makes it dreadfully easy. Time-spread media like audio and video has a tougher time until editing is emergent. But people who use computers are generally literate enough to write letter to friends.
Back to the rest of the world. Not every country has a salon culture. Some are waiting for inflections of networks and mass. Many are oppressed and don't have events to move their voices like Iran. Some still look for a third way like what I can't wait to have emerge from countries like Korea.
The story at Les Blogs wasn't some hot heads from the network core coming over to barf up panel sessions that have been heard before. It was the mix of cultures at a moment in time that expect a day when we all write what we really think through the web.
Socialtext raised a Series B round of venture capital. That's the only clue I'm going to give you, clues are out there.
Almost announced it at Les Blogs. It's a really big deal, something we worked hard on for a long time, with some great people and has wonderful implications for enterprise social software.
That said, I have a list of five key details of the deal (added below), that does not include the valuation. First person to blog those five details by the end of May wins a Socialtext Starter Package of five Socialtext.net seats for one year. So tell me:
Now go get 'em, you bloggers as journalists. I'll be watching tag: socialtextb
Maybe a lawyer would have me include this statement: Employees, participants to the deal and people under a Socialtext NDA (rare) can't win. Our competitors could win as all that hard work has to pay off sometime and we want everyone to have better tools.
UPDATE:
I used to believe that brand-centric companies were not adopting public blogging. Corporate brands are paying attention to blogging as they draw greater attention and criticism. They are listening, some are blogging inside while determining their move into the space, and unfortunately view public blogging as a risk instead of an opportunity.
But General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz is changing this view entirely. Perhaps the best corporate blog yet, with a real voice, engaged with other enthusiasts. Bob blogs about the craft of his work.
Think of brands as art. Steve Jobs won't blog unless it is consistent with his masterpiece. It's hard to make a statement in blogs as it is just a written mode of communication. They produce counter-statements -- messages are morphed.
Craft, however, is about the process of innovation and pride in results. Brand-centric companied that take pride in their craft do indeed have more opportunity than risk in corporate blogging.
Ed Cone has a great piece in CIO Insight that covers enterprise social software and corporate blogging.
...This is technology that users don't have to wait for. Technorati Inc., a service that tracks weblogs, follows more than eight million personal sites. More than one million wikis have been downloaded from open-source sites, for use in organizing everything from design projects to conferences to lunch meetings. "For the first time since e-mail, users on a very large scale are learning a new writing interface," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext Inc., a company that sells wiki and blog-like applications, and boasts 20 members of the Fortune 500 among its customers...
Users appear to be finding new ways to deploy these generic tools. A simple blog that begins as a project-management log for a small group can become a searchable knowledge-management repository when the project is done. Mayfield thinks blogs and wikis could lead to some grand accomplishments that are only beginning to come into focus. The success of Wikipedia, a Web-based encyclopedia created and edited by thousands of volunteers, suggests that companies might also engage in what Mayfield calls "collaboration at a profound scale."
Sitting in the French Senate for Les Blogs. Given the fact that there are 300 bloggers here, I probably will not do my conference blogging schtick. The past couple of days have been a wonderful getaway and chance to see friends. Loic has been a wonderful host.
The Senate representative welcomed us to the first international blog day. John Chambers spoke here last week, Steve Balmer joins them for breakfast tomorrow. Blogs are the next revolution. Half of their schoolchildren blog, French is the second most popular language in the blogopshere, they like to express themselves and debate their views. 20 different countries are represented here, half of attendees from outside the country. As Peter Parker's uncle said, "a big power implies big responsibilities." Like Spiderman, we have big responsibilities.
Joi Ito's presentation
An extension of a series of events. Internet is the first open bottom up network. Ethernet connected some computers, TCP/IP connected the network (IFTF rough concensus working code), HTML (had a tagging protocol of SGML but you couldn't view the source, was too complex), with blogs we are connecting people. Now we are fighting against people that do not want us to share our content and talk freely.
Richard Florida, The Creative Class: anti-establishment, critical thinkers, autonomous action, self-fulfillment, self-expression, sharing collective action, community, learning and openness to innovation. These technologies become adopted through word of mouth. Some cultures adopting faster. Gap between creative and non-creative class is bigger than between countries. Shows the superbowl commercial of kids busted for sharing music. Some people understand this gap and are selling to this creative class. Watch user behavior and create products for it, don't change behavior. Traditional media is trying to force people back into the old model. iPod Shuffle isn't the best specified product, but word of mouth and brand let them make it a success. Even through they have DRM everywhere and are suing bloggers, we believe they are on our side.
Long Tail (gulp): Delivery vs. Discovery of content, file sharing(a sophisticated way of playing DJ), recommendation engines/reviews, blogs and word of mouth. Problem is not how to protect my copyright, it is how to get people to listen to your stuff. Worse than being copied is not being copied.
Blogs and marketing: Kryptonite and a Bic Pen lost $10M in 10 days, Rathergate, Fastlane is honest marketing by conversation to develop trust, BBC and Infoworld Technorati sidebars.
The Sharing Economy: The myth of intellectual property, "creative property" is a new idea, "the commons" is and always has been essential part of creativity, amateur vs. professionals. This is an amateur revolution. Professional sex is not always better than amateur sex. Creative commons has 10M licensed web pages. Red Blood Cells project where the White Stripes remix is an example of skipping the intermediaries whereas works become automatically copyrighted the moment they are made. (cc)
Remix culture is not just about creative content, it is about free speech. Read my lips and other remix videos. NBC is saying you can't use Bush speech because of copyright, lots of things are trying to stifle our ability to share.
Amazing. Today marks the second anniversary of Many-to-Many.
Thanks to Clay, Liz, Seb, David and danah. Also to Hylton and our great guestbloggers.
A random that should not be taken too seriously and should have been done anonymously...
What's a Vacation Anyway: In theory I am on vacation right now, but all that means while in a connected location is no long blog entries and no social bookmarking.
The Future of TV: Watching people watching TV
Barely Existing: Honestly, if you are going to blog about the virtues of aggregation, offer full text feeds so we can read what you preach.
Social Network Exit Turned Spam: Around the time he left some YASNSs, every time his post is picked up by Topix and other aggregators, instead of content we get this social spam: Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante, is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies.
Flickrcasting: Why can't I subscribe to a photo stream that automagically puts the original photo in iPhoto and my photo-enabled iPod? Or extract enclosures and photos within blog posts the same way?
Keyword: My little test with a spammer verified he is plucking "Keyword" to fodder is fake blogs. Intelliseek did learn to filter him out. My guess is he is a SEO trying to pickup clients for keyword optimization. Anyway, I figured better to raise his noise to the level of signal to let real people calibrate their indexes.
Gas Price Indicatr: Gas is too fucking expensive. Maybe sending a moblog of the pump helps people feel each other's pain. But could be an interesting indicatr if aggregated and visualized.
Why the French Hate Us: Google Maps charts Mountain View and London, but they are off the map.
SmellyBlog: I got wind of a new startup working on an olfactory blog service. If we can share text, pictures and video -- there has to be dollars in scents.
Oh, the Humanity: Getting BoingBoinged, the new /., sure does help you gauge the vast opinions out there on potentially paltry subjects. Also, apparently there are more than geeks in this world.
Drill This In Your Head: Just because you blog as in using a tool, doesn't mean you know how to use it. Look to norms: link, attribute your sources, make quotes distinguishable from your own words, read when others link to you, link back, it's called a conversation, you should know the drill.
Tom DeLay: Once again proves the theory: if you let golf run your life your life will be run over.
Comments Are Worthless: Show me and my readers the linked posts from people who can express a facet of their identity on the web (should be everyone, the big adoption problem), sorted in order of link rank. Technorati should do this after letting people sort keyword searches by Authority.
Calling a Winner: You can't call winners in horizontals. Like Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Snap on Search (what is the IN or ON for Snap anyway?). But you can call winners in verticals.And at least not get into trouble. Also, only way to beat Google is a different initial entry point than the command line, they own that.
Double Punctuation: I picked up adding two spaces before periods when writing long papers. Technically, it's acceptable punctuation. Stylistically, it's a horrible habit. And you can thank Steve Gillmor for giving me heck about its (pronounced: heckaboutis). Fuck, it's just words, man, you get my meaning.
On to Him: Brian Dear is on to something about vulture vendors, or rather, they are on to him. My advice: disconnect the phone, leave a message telling them to go through LinkedIn or get a blog.
Speaking of Which: What are your favorite accountant, audit, banker, lawyer, recruiter, insurance agent, office supply, web host blogs? Harder to name than you think. Now think of markets you can turn to. Now think of markets that are spam free. Harder to name than you think.
WYSIWHAA?: Which is worse, debugging HTML you have written or that assisted with a wysiwyg editor?
Blog Revolution: Condy Rice is worried about the centralization of Russian electronic media, with good reason. If only there was affordable decentralized media. The developed and developing world is fine and good -- but the biggest untapped political impact of blogs could be in Cyrllic.
Speaking of Revolutions: They say that France is teetering on a social revolution of 1968 porportions, because they won't sign the EU constitution they helped foster. Leadership requires following through.
Explorer: Tourism is going to places you and the rest of the market pay to know about beforehand. Exploring is purposely going elsewhere. Pros explore to places nobody has gone, Amateurs explore to places they don't know. Somewhere in between going places friends recommend that tourists don't know. Personally, I like getting lost on purpose.
Adobe acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock; see Om, Jeff, Rafat, Tim, Reuters, Cnet and NY Times,
What's interesting about this deal is how the combined company has two web platforms, .pdf and Flash, and neither are web friendly. Both provide slick presentation, but to the detriment of open hypertext. If they can integrate as a company, Adobe should be well positioned to compete against Microsoft. Adobe CEO:
"By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform."
This is also the first time a company with a significant portion of their employees blogging has been acquired. So far, Mike Chambers is the only one to post, acknowledging regulatory hurdle of overlapping product lines and he is excited at the prospect of having more resources behind Flash. Will be interesting to see what Marc has to say.
UPDATE: Kevin Lynch, Jason Kottke's roundup and Marc Canter wants the name back.
En route from San Jose to Phoenix, I was told by a Transportation Security Agency (TSA) screener about a ban on lighters (cough) starting April 14th, but the book allowance has been cut from 4 to 2. I had been tagged for a pat-down, a perfectly reasonable thing considering whatsinmybag. The agent was reasonable and amicable and I knew the drill. When he pulled a cigarette lighter out of my bag he mentioned the forthcoming ban, how you could carry four packs of matches and the whole idea was to prevent quickly lighting explosives (like that idiot with evil shoes). When he pulled out two books he mentioned that right now you can only have four books and on the 14th you can only have two. He didn't have any explanation for this, and I can't even fathom the purpose.
I must highlight that this could be bad information and hearsay. I can't confirm this with the DHS or TSA prohibited items list. However, the TSA list notes it's own inaccuracy -- and the discretion of the screener to interpret policy:
The prohibited and permitted items chart is not intended to be all-inclusive and is updated as
necessary. To ensure everyone's security, the screener may determine that an item not on the
prohibited items chart is prohibited. In addition, the screener may also determine that an
item on the permitted chart is dangerous and therefore may not be brought through the
security checkpoint.
I post this story because our current administration is the only one in history to take away more rights than it gives, the policy would disturb basic freedoms, policy interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of screeners and a screener told me the story in the first place. Can anyone help me bring clarity on this important issue? Until then, it's eBooks for me.
US Government Bans Books: According to the security guy that patted me down, it's not just lighters not allowed on flights, but our book capacity has been trimmed from 4 to 2.
Tivo and Netflix Need Each Other: Why don't they know what movies I have rented or watched? If it's in my rental queue and I saw it for free on cable, spare us both the hassle.
Who the Fuck is in Charge: China, Japan and Korea hold IOUs that can throw the economy into a hard lining and now we want to bankrupt Social Security so Americans can invest in assets even less under their control?
Airbus Search Engine: Unlike air travel, search is a good business, is France really feeling lucky?
Feedburping: When will my aggregator be able to tell when some has hit the rebuilt button on their blog so I don't have to hit the space bar 50 times?
Soap Bubble: This guy says VC is d-e-a-d in established categories, I take notice because it implies the same of entrepreneur returns. It's not just a wonderful contrarian moment, the irony of this bubble thinking is laughable. The more things stay the same, the more things change.
Who the Fuck is in Charge: Consumer debt is at an all time high, so we protect credit card companies who can't even protect our data? Society poses enough costs on those in poverty and want to contribute (especially those put in bankruptcy by contributing to the welfare of the sick). Compassion lost.
Ellison's Shadow: Ever notice that the only mobile deadspot left on 101 is in front of the Oracle headquarters?
Prescient Bumpersticker: Vote for John Kerry...to return full sentences to the White House. Had to squint to read it.
Hear Your Own Dogfood: Every time I see Steve Jobs walking down my street he is wearing earbuds.
Scottsdale Event Effect: Every conference there has attendees saying it's the best in their industry. Bay Area events always have good speakers. Location, location, location.
Organizations searching for a wiki should try Socialtext.
Just testing to see my spammer keys on the word Keyword and if this post rises to the top of blog indexes.
I'm all conferenced-out, but making travel plans for Internet 2.0 in Paris, hosted by Loic.
Love this wiki page someone started: What to do in Paris for five days?
Socialtext has been selected by the Software 2005 conference for their funding forum, an honor great enough for me to fly back in a hurry.
Two presenters on KM & Collaboration Case studies. The moderator, Glen Secor, Senior Consultant & Legal Analyst for The Gilbane Report, notes that legal departments always benefit from KM initiatives. The first presenter provided some good insight into structured collaboration in a highly regulated context (somewhat the opposite of Socialtext at this time) and the second provided some unconventional adoption marketing techniques for broad collaboration.
Charlie Sodano, Ph.D, Manager of Information Services, Berlex Biosciences, discusses Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) in the Pharmaceutical R&D Environment -- which are key to increasing R&D productivity. They transformed a culture of writing in ledgers and using that information down the road for patents in Pharma and regulatory purposes with a new capability to create records. Evolution from laboratory information management systems (LIMSs) to a consortium on authentication of electronic records (ERC) to ELNs provided by commercial vendors -- snapshots of items in a work flow with comments and interpretations. In many cases its the first person to file patents that wins, so time stamping is essential. 250 scientists, 5k paper note books, difficulties with paste-ins, table of contents was inadequate, photographs damaged pages, illegible entries, originals were unprotected, difficult to find and retrieve information. Objectives: share information, improve record keeping practices, protect and preserve IP, simple architecture, minimal training and support. More complete information captured, retained and available, higher level of security, searchable, easier to share. Approach: use available supported software components, engage users immediately with developer, start with a dedicated user group, make improvements in a timely manner, rely on word of mouth to expand usage. Archived everything in PDFs, but also kept paper and microfilm copies because there isn't a definitive legal decision on submitting electronic versions to regulators. Started in 1997, 1999 approved as an alternative to paper, in June 2001 voluntarily chosen by 80% of Berlex scientists, June 2001 stopped using paper. Bought new transport capacity between California and Germany to enhance network performance in 2001 for a content servers in Japan, California and Germany; with a data server in Germany. Use Documentum as the content management system in the background. Word or Excel as the authoring tool, visual basic module that utilizes Documentum as ERS, standard, scalable and supported, printed experiments are official records. 300 current users in California, 500 in Germany and 40 in Japan. Similar to Tagging: Users like using keywords, not for the overall benefit, but for themselves, don't use a fixed vocabulary (went down that road before), wouldn't use it in a research environment. Form-based UI that then makes all records created transparent for others. 5 pages printed per experiment with 10k pages printed per month in 3 locations., 60k experiments and growing strong. Benefits: legible, better organized, more complete, less reinventing the wheel and repurposing for presentations and reports. Now approaching a terabyte of data, search performance is beginning to drop, restoring the server becomes a greater issue, going to archive more data and have a more distributed environment over time. Language issues: metadata in english and content in native language. Need global support. What's Next: E-signatures, upgrading Office and Documentum and long term archiving. Doesn't support collaborative authoring, because of patent issues, so someone is appointed to enter records.
Stéphane Ethier, Director Knowledge Management, Cossette Communication Group talked about Optimizing Knowledge Management with XML. Cossette is a MarCom company with 1,500 employees and multiple global locations. Uses knowledge as a tool for business development, a catalyst for teamwork, sharing and efficiency, as a creative force impacting our work. KM makes us smarter, more competitive and a better place to work. Enables us to be a truly convergent company (wonder what that means) and to be thought leaders in the industry. A new culture of sharing where you give a little and get a lot in return -- it develops new reflexes: is there anything on this in the Knowledge Center? Sharing cast studies, business development documents and tools, points of view and research. Profiles of all employees. Champions were their secret weapons, assuming three roles: journalists, thought leaders/cheerleaders and liaison officers (between the field and head office). Used IXIASOFT TEXTML server for XML (guess that's why it is capitalized) document management solution. Their requirements were search, customizable interface design, flexibility in the tool and licensing model, flexibility in bilingualism management, low acquisition and annual maintenance. XML so they could create their own meta tags and have structured documents, scalable and powerful search.
Used branding, design, profile collection and a launch campaign to further adoption (note they happen to sell similar services). Branding: called it The Fridge (because its cool, heh,) and the homepage actually looked like a fridge with notes and magnets. You open it to get stuff/sections on the door shelf and a document as the main section and search where the freezer is. For profile collection they used a contest to reward the best profile: What are you hungry for? contest with 8 $250 vouchers for the supermarket and a grand prize gastronomic weekend trip. Got 50% of the profiles within one week. Launch used posters in the lobby of each office, direct marketing piece with a drive-to-web CD ROM. In five months the Fridge became a household word and used for hundreds of documents, profiles, web sites and fresh ideas. Commitment of top management, sufficient content, decentralized network of champions, use of knowledge and contributions to the fridge as part of employee evaluations and other key success factors.
Live blogging the panel I am on at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies -- see the Gilbane Whitepaper on Blogs & Wikis and the ongoing survey for background.
Lauren Wood describes the broad uses of wikis and weblogs. Some for short term information (updates), some for long term (solve a problem). Different facets of information sharing solution. About 1/4 of the audience uses blogs or wikis internally.
I provided an introduction to wikis: Download my presentation on wiki basics.ppt
Peter Quintas introduces Silkroad, emphasis on using blogs as an alert network.
Joe Kraus from Jotspot talks about his personal story, democratizing the web, wiki use for consulting firms, facilitating conversations and building proposals. Says wikis become kitchen sinks, and the solution is adding structure into a wiki (another view is wikis are messy when they are poorly implemented and don't take advantage of empowering practices -- the tool is not a panacea)
Dan Farber from Cnet doesn't have a dog in this hunt, talks about what he thinks is important. Keeping it simple...collaboration, communication, easy to set up, low cost, doesn't take programming talent, makes it accessible for people in a corporation to contribute in ways they haven't before, easy to scale. In the past everything is high cost, complex, difficult to use, feature rich -- like Lotus Notes and even Groove to a degree. From the bottom up, we have different tools that are simpler and more accessible. They have source content that you can push out through alerts and syndication, but then you have RSS and syndication APIs that lets others build upon your content. With blogs and content refactoring tools like wikis, you have new ways to use content and take advantage of it to make your people smarter and get more points of view. Shows a screenshot of their wiki, people set it up on their own and suddenly it becomes populated, wouldn't have happened if it was from the top down. Shows an Intranet blog where people can express themselves within guidelines. What we want is somewhat standard connumications infrastructure. Compose your own blog or wiki with whatever features you want, some blogs won't stay simple as people add features. Will all be refactored in some way. Don't get accustomed to what we have today, it's bound to change.
I'm not able to take notes while participating during the discussion part. Hope the above is useful.
UPDATE: DJ missed my intro, but took good notes on the discussion. Thanks! Also see Chris Jablonski's take and Jason Lewis' highlight of the tension with structure.
Probably because of this post, my volume of Persistent Spam has picked up. Some of it quite creative, auto-generating this:
George W. Bush's single-minded devotion to Ross Mayfield's Weblog.
UPDATE: Starting to like this spammer, yesterday I was the #2 most linked in the blogosphere according to Intelliseek.
I just gave a social software talk, showing off cool tools like Ward's Wiki, Kwiki, Wikipedia, Wikipes, Wikitravel, Socialtext, Typepad, Flickr, del.icio.us, EVDB, Technorati, Newsgator, Feedster, PubSub, Feedburner and NetNewsWire. Rather fun to show how these simple tools have complex behavior in a rapidly evolving ecosystem. Sure beats a blatant pitch. Here are some notes on the other panelists:
Zoominfo is a summarization search engine, used to be called Eliyon. Focuses on people, product and company metadata. Try a search on your name, the transparency is quite disturbing. Used by recruiters, sales intelligence and financial services. Key points: Tagging technologies are due to upset the proprietary metadata defense against Google. Customers are against this defense in the first place, as integration of metadata is a key requirement. Zoominfo tries to out-Google when it comes to Googling People. Looks at tagging as a rich opportunity, now looking to refine 4.5 M Companies to search and a Yellow Pages market.
YellowBrix, a technology company in content clothing. They are an Aggregator in the more traditional sense. Explains the progression of their technology: developed methods of eliminating duplicate content, identifies identities and marks content up, summarize on general content, classify and find relevant articles. Delivery agnostic. People say they want real-time, but really something a little slower will do. Business model emphasizes providing options.
Jargon watch: Isle surfing, wear socks and stand up in the isle when the plane takes off to see how far you can surf.
I got called out by someone in the audience for blogging while paneling, so I'll stop during the discussion ;-).
You know the problem, you go to an event expecting wifi, but there is none. But there is a simple solution that both provides a public good and is great guerrilla marketing.
I always travel with an Airport Express configured as a open access hotspot named Socialtext. For a couple of events without wifi, including the one I am sitting at now, I find a rogue port and offer free wifi. People seem to love this.
One time the event organizer kept announcing on the stage that wifi was sponsored by us. Not bad for $100 and couple of ounces to lug around.
Normally I wouldn't blog such a great idea for competitors to copy, but I hope they and others do.
Notes from an industry overview session at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. I just arrived so I might have missed a little of the intro, and already missed David Weinberger's keynote (podcast). Here's what I didn't miss:
Rafat Ali, Paid Content (pictured Podcasting the session later)
M&A and Venture Deals: M&A came back over the last year. On the B2B side most of the activity is focused on the business database. On the VC side it is about organizing, organizing RSS feeds, tags (as noted in David Weinberger's keynote).
Open Source Media Ethic: Convering of consumer and the open source media ethic (being open to different sources of information and trying to incorporate into your company to use other's expertise). Notes the Business 2.0 article I read on the plane on open web services. For media and business information companies, using search data and open APIs, its a hot area.
Becoming the Center of Gravity:For media companies, new models to contend with. My site is a blog, pure news aggregation, news intelligence service. We are doing well compared to to become the center of gravity. The reason for my existence is to send people to other sites. How to incorporate social tagging? Look at InfoWorld's use of del.icio.us. Aggregation and vertical search, custom branded news readers (Guardian, News.com) lets you become the source of information for your topic using all the resources out there.
Content packaging and distribution: new opportunities, especially mobility.
John Blossom from Shore, a research and advisory services for the content industry.
Content and technology plus people to get high human input and value, high productivity and high content value. Publishing has moved from being a black art to being a pervasive tool with things like weblogs. From where content was a rare commodity to raining content and a challenge of extracting value with abundance. The Star Wars kid video with 15 million downloads and lots of remixes. Google News takes content from premium sources and creating context for it that is of greater value. "Good content is where you find it." Database era meant you had to go log in to get it, now entire libraries of content go where they want to go.
2005 is about the 4 Cs. Cooperation, Commercialization, Containerization and Consolidations. Cooperation: publishers, advertisers and search partnering around highly contextual audiences, authors and markets (weblogs, wikis and social networks), institutional clients and content technologists, instiutions and public content outlets. Commercialization: Google Scholar, Rich Data mining technologies, monetizing in open contexts (Reuters.com, BBC/Moreover, CCC, ValeoIP), empower users as aggregators (RSS, desktop search, iPod, Weed, collaboration tools). Containerization: more options, DRM is the beginning of letting content be useful, but a taboo word, eBooks growing. Consolidation: Collapse of quality mass print circulation, titles search for identity in a search-centric ad world, huge multiples for key companies that fit (Capital IQ for functions, MarketWatch for ad pages).
Winners
Losers
Jeffrey Dearth of desilva phillips provides an investment banker's perspective.
Customers are in control. Search engine disruption: Google scholar, library and news -- look at their acquisitions to see where they are going in fulfillment of their mission statement. Google informs reader and advertiser, the brand equity belongs to the search engine.
Tradition information providers are consolidating (Thomson, Lexis-Nexis, McGraw-Hill), feeding frenzy for eyeballs. Traditional publishers scrambling to position themselves online (NY Times, WSJ, etc.). New media companies buying strategically (i.e. InfoUSA, Google, IAC), private equity firms are flush with cash and targeting content companies, banks are providing great debt leverage to fuel higher multiples. 70% of the revenue for AskJeeves is driven by Google, he doesn't understand the billion plus valuation. Oneline ad growth an gaining share of market, 20-30% growth next year, while the B2B publishing market is only growing at 4% -- pick which market you want to be. 2005 is going to be one of the best years for eContent in M&A, a seller's market.
What's hot: New Vertical Aggregators, lead generation such as franchise solutions that arbitrage google keywords, SEM/SEO/Affiliate network companies, vertical search/local search, rich media, blogs & RSS, business/financial data. "Technorati likely to be snapped up one of these days, at least that is the rumor."
Case study with Carroll Publishing: used to have to lug big manuals around, now its on the web and his biggest customer is a 411 lookup directory that sells oursourced services for mobile telephony, paid $0.02 per lookup -- shows that you don't know what new markets you will find until you make your information available in a user friendly way for others to use.
Janet Ligget, Pfizer, representing content buyers
The mission of our information management group is to provide information and knowledge from employee to patient. Most popular resource she provides is electronic journals. Challenges for content buyers: cost and price structures, integrating information, access and some big changes on the horizon.
Cost and Price structures is a boring topic that wont go away. Budgets are relatively flat. Monopolistic market inhibits innovation in pricing structures: site based pricing (doesn't work for them, people are remote and travel all the time), named user pricing (restricts agility, creates a burden on the buyer to manage user IDs, we don't want to spend our resources managing your products), and unpublished prices (when rationalizing licenses in a merger the variation in prices are really unrelated to the product and more to the skills of the negotiator). Site pricing works for small companies, but when you consolidate locations it doesn't necessarily reduce prices.
Note: these points are eerily familiar to other commoditizing industries.
Integration information: breaking down information silos is a user demand, information needs to be in one place for users (need to search across silos.), single vendor solutions don't work, integration external information with internal information. Want to bring in XML feeds and not use your interface, want to use our own linking tools and provide access on our site. Want to bring in content with metadata attached to it that is industry specific.
Access: Buyers want sellers to endorse and comply with standards -- even promote them such as Open URL and CLI. Buyers need to use information in new ways (text mining, personalization, search across resources, search fulltext). User Names/passwords restrict agility.
Big Changes: Open Access is a revolution in pricing structure, institutional repositories provide new challenge in finding information, author archiving. It stands things on its head and encourages cost to be moved away from the reader, an important feature regardless of who pays for it eventually. Senior Scientist leaving Pfizer, but wanted to continue working in academia and asked if its possible to continue accessing their archive, but licensing makes it impossible, so a retiree that we want to keep working as a society is restricted from doing so. This is why Open Access matters. Google initiatives provide other important opportunities.
Chuck Richard, Outsell, representing the content seller
Think of the room as having suppliers, some disruptors (hi!) and consumers. IT becoming more personal, migration from consumer to business and business to consumer. Red Sox interlude. MLB.com is an advanced media site, is the best use of content driven from the user point of view: look at the statistics and the box score with a player's name and a number of runs linked to get the video clip of the player hitting the run.
RSS & blog experimentation will continue and evolve in ways we can't predict. This is a new tipping point in the industry. Already pulling some of the ad revenue, will pull in other revenue as well.
Worldwide B2B information industry revenue $280 Billion with 9% growth in 2004. Outsell 100 is 53% of the industry, tracked quarterly, revenue growth 12%, approximately where it was in 2000. If you take out Google and Yahoo it removes 4% of the growth. Rates for online advertising is not in parity to CPM, although online is arguably more effective, prices will continue to rise.
Buyers, or readers, over the last few years have changed their preferred method of obtaining information used to be 68% seeking it out yourself, now 51%. Search and RSS aggregation is a time sink." (Note: bullshit) Overload is increasing: 8 hours a week in 2001, 11 hours a week now gathering and analyzing, some increase in the relative time gathering. Users increasingly turning towards their Intranet (10% shift). Good news is people are looking for direction and help. What is making the news on disruption isn't effecting economics yet (one survey says barely anyone wants information delivered to their PDA compared to other devices).
Note: Lots of Fear and Loving in Google. Complete misunderstanding on productivity of blogs and aggregation. Demanding buyers in a commodity industries in a position to drive commoditization. Hot and changing market with big shifts underway, perhaps with fundamentals changing faster than private equity models can keep up.
Like many over the past few months, I have happily filled my aggregator with persistent queries from the likes of PubSub, Newsgator, Technorati and Feedster. At first it was ego surfing without leaving the couch. Now I'm creating lots of queries for even short term memes I want to track. There is a lot of buzz about
One of the many disturbing points a Spammer made when interviewed by Chris Pirillo was that they could even spam RSS. Chris said something to the effect of, "bullshit, there is an unsubscribe button." But when he explained that RSS provided perfect fodder for creating blogs that looked real, there was an Oh Shit moment. No need for scraping, blogging has structured it for you.
All this clicked for me recently when I noticed an uptick in stupid fake blogs in my pretty smart feeds (I am not linking to examples). All that persistence is pretty easy to use for spam. Of course, there will be countermeasures as with any spam war. An link-based reputation and confirmed ties beat the heck out of black or white listing. But it is a shame when social software is a victim of its own openness. When you have to sacrifice your peripheral vision for greater focus on nagging problems. Ah well, at least I can still subscribe to my friends, and some of them have time to filter for me.
UPDATE: Josh Hallett points to a conversation with Bob Wyman around RSS spam.
Panel with Brian Behlendorf from Apache/Collabnet, Josh from PostgreSQL, Chris Hoffman from Mozilla, Larry Wall from Perl and David Wheeler from Bricolage. Moderated by Christian Einfeldt, "How these communities result in 1 + 1 = 5..."
Blogger's Note: It's interesting to think how lucky these guys are, and I mean this in the best way. They have been able to manage large scale projects and arose through some of the purest merit. Now they have significant respect from a broad community and the business world themselves. Non-technical managers do not have these opportunities, to learn and ascend among large groups. Closest thing to it may be in the non-profit world, but the respect of business peers is not the same. Being a startup entrepreneur has levels of meritocracy, however relationships and capital structures provide boundary conditions. Yet picture that young marketing manager with a crappy day job. Could she play a role and ascend in these communities to just as much prominence.
Larry Wall: small group of core developers, different groups and specializations. Have some people still working on Perl 5 and another end of the candle working on 6.
David Wheeler: can speak for those at Kineticode, who knows how many are using Bricolage. Companies and organizations like Portugal Telecom and WHO look to sponsor development. Some like RAND want to part of the community.
Chris Hoffman: Sun and IBM were there at the beginning as corporate sponsors. A number of companies looking to roll Firefox out to even 100k employees. There are also curiosity companies, who see the development model and want to tap into the collaborative process.
Brian Behlendorf: Strange to start this conversation by asking what companies have been involved. Never recognized them explicitly as special entities. It's a membership organization based on individuals, who happen to move jobs, and may have first allegiance to Apache over their jobs. However, have 1k developers who have commit levels, 5k contributing patches and on the list. Some are living the dream of writing software you then give away. Seimens wrote us a $5k check once, and IBM and Sun gave us machines. Tried to keep licenses clean for the benefit of corporations. Some legal questions were beyond us, so we created a forum to talk about legal issues and invite lawyers to participate in the conversation -- has worked out really well, helping us understand nuances. Building bridges to corporations is important but we have been successful without significant initiative.
Josh Berkus: individual developer membership, and have talked about formal corporate participants for issues like J2EE compliance. They say to get an engineer to participate on a list.
Chris Hoffman: Most enterprises don't know how many of their engineers already participate in open source projects.
How should a company who wants to contribute get started? (the panel seemed to resist this question when it was asked before)
David Wheeler: Haven't had companies come to contribute, only to fund the development of a feature. They tell them to develop it within the mix, but not retain copyright, although they have had some say they have a script and look to contribute. Wouldn't want a company to dump code on them, would want a dialogue on licensing and how they can make the project successful.
Larry Wall: In the Open Source Innovation panel there were metaphors that is software more like an encyclopedia or a poem? A language design is more like poetry. Our project is not terribly typical with others. Have to interact with the design team, open to feature suggests and patch contributions that are fits -- then it's in. Most of the pressure went away when Perl 5 went out. Perl 4 had feature pressure. If you make your core extensible, you end up with CPAN instead. Most contribution has gone into CPAN.
Josh Berkus: International contributors that would love to go full time that need funding. Some projects are forum or IM meetings where decisions get made, so you need to participate if you want to have a voice in decisions.
Brian Behlendorf: Just join the use and developer mailing lists. 30 top level projects, a couple of releases within it have diverse problems that companies could contribute to. Adding new functionality can be done within the community. Have a process called The Incubator where new projects start from anyone's proposal, get resources of a project, can exit when you meet a criteria, including packaging and shipping but also having more than a single constituency within the community that participates in the project. Don't want a project to disappear if a company abandons it. Contributor license agreements for individual and corporate participants to make redistribution clear. After The Incubator it can go into one of or a new top level project. XMLBeans as an example that went through the process. Feels like bureaucracy, layers of indirection, but good for quality products without dependence upon companies.
Chris Hoffman: Most of the help we provide is developing a strategy for people to be involved. The harder thing with Firefox and Thunderbird is you can incubate and prototype and promote, but people want assurances that it will appear in the main release. Technical hurdles, licensing, community around it have to happen not just because of the requirements itself but the quality burden for 40M+ mainstream users.
Brian: gut instrinct and intuition has been my guide. If someone else has a good effort going, look to join it. Find people that are trying to solve the same problems. Choose the simplest licenses, to lower the transaction costs to joining your party as low as possible.
Chris Hoffman: when IE launched, Barksdale said we needed to do something significant -- open source the browser and fast.
Unless you ahve a legal reson to open, you dont want to incorporate too soon. You don't want to add structure too early.
Brian: Humility. Say I have a answer, not the answer
I asked about if they see a rationale for when property should be opened (similar to how transaction cost analysis helps inform outsourcing)
David Wheeler: some contribute because it is not thei core competency, dont want to take care of something outside their expertise. Is this improtant to our business. Do we have anything to contribute t o a project outside.
Brian: If it is in the bucket of context, look to partner with others, like Geoffrey Moore said. Sometimes may want to put something core out. Started Subversion at Collabnet, an improvement of CVS, started a community and did the work out in public. Put 4 FTEs on it, large for a startup, and built a community of 20 people, now according to Necraft there are 8k public installs and did 1.0 a year ago. Needed it to be competitive with other software engineering tools out there, a business decision to open, although it was core and it amplified effort and commoditized the space.
Larry Wall: My low level implementation guy in Austria, compiler guy in Taiwan -- its outsourcing!
Brian Behlendorf: Most businesses donate and consider it a promotional expense and don't track it. Open question is if we will have to start tracking value of donations of IP as non-profit organizations.
Josh Berkus: For an established project with a community around it, it is tough to conceive of how to have venture support without new risks.
In the event I can't get all this off my chest on my panel at OSBC on Open Source Innovation, here are my thoughts on a couple of levels.
While we picture the inventor as a solitary, if not asocial genius -- this stereotype is not often the case or on the topic of innovation. Invention is a disruptive breakthrough from pure research, that provides a platform for others innovate. Innovation is implementing something new, largely an incremental process of improvement at the margin.
Innovation springs from diverse groups with specialized expertise. The greatest breakthrough for open source, IMHO, is applying collaborative methodologies for development. Inherent in collaborative practices is a greater opportunity for innovation than competitive practices.
Some norms such as the right to fork, open participation and self-organizing contribution strengthen this opportunity and provide models for consideration beyond software development. When a project can be forked, it provides a balance against poor management (albeit at a cost) and fosters a leadership style that lets other express ideas and have them be heard. Leadership forms the core of a social network of innovation, being an arbiter of information and quality outcomes. Open participation is essential to innovation, to bring in new people with new ideas. By self-organizing I don't mean some high falutin' emergence, but the simple freedom for people to choose where to contribute based on their expertise and personal motivation.
One body of work I suggest you follow is John Hagel and John Seely Brown leading up to the release of their book next week, The Only Sustainable Edge. In their recent HBR article, they suggest that innovation is the only source of sustainable competitive advantage. Most of the opportunities to compete on the basis of efficiency (automating transactions) are gone. Now the opportunity is managing exceptions with groups of diverse specialization under constraints, particularly across organizational boundaries -- where productive friction occurs, a source of innovation. They emphasize the use of a reference model and rapid prototyping. While their approach to sustainable competitive advantage emphasizes continual process innovation, my understanding of this model is very similar to open source methodologies.
Open source practices are proliferating outside software development, most noticeably in open or free content communities such as Wikipedia. This is the topic of a larger post, and in fact my contribution to an O'Reilly book on open source, but I wish to emphasize what might be the core issue of open source innovation.
Part of how Wikipedia is able to enable collaboration at unprecedented scale is not just how there are less dependencies than with developing software. Having a reference model for what an Encyclopedia should be provides an organizing framework, design benchmark while reducing coordination risks and moderation costs.
Consider for a moment the most successful open source projects. Linux, Apache, MySQL, JBoss and even Firefox -- all have established reference models. Further, there is an almost competitive drive to outperform against proprietary incumbent products.
You may think this means that open source is not innovating when building substitutes. But behind the curtain there is a remarkable level of innovation in community process. In fact, a third model of production, commons-based peer. I'm writing part of this while sitting in an Open Source Initiative meeting, watching this process at work (Just overheard in a debate about licensing, Nelson's Maxim: There are no such things as problems, there are only unmet business opportunities). The initial innovation is perceived as driving cost while pooling risk in production processes. Geoffrey Moore suggests an increasing focus on mission critical software that is context, not core to business. But this isn't how many people think of innovation.
As Larry Augustin points out, the next wave in open source may be in applications. I would suggest areas where existing reference models are well established are under the greatest threat. Applications are more visible than Infrastructure (BitTorrent which accounts for half of the net's traffic, but how well is this innovation known?), and the story of product innovation within open source may very well come out.
Innovation does work hand in hand with journalism. Innovation is implementing something new, journalism covers what is new, readers learn what is new and perhaps use or talk about what's new. The point is that some of the best innovation occurs in the substrate of what is otherwise infrastructure or process, but marketing shapes our understanding of innovation and validates what is new.
But let's bring this back to the individual developer. What is truly new is their ability to freely contribute. For companies, they have wonderful opportunities not only to drive down cost and pool risk -- but to tap into the social incentives that drive people to produce. The problem is these cooperative opportunities require enterprises to give up some control.
At Socialtext the interesting open source innovation isn't our support for Kwiki, the hybrid open source business model or how users of our tools employee open source practices. It is how we encourage our employees to participate in communities outside the organization. About 20% of our development time goes back into our open source product. There are times where a certain feature may not be ripe for commercialization. But giving them the freedom to experiment with creating open source plugins may lead to something that directly benefits the business. Community participation goes beyond coding, to blogging, volunteering with non-profit organizations to political activism. All of which not only helps work-life balance, but refreshes creativity and builds relationships across boundaries.
I would suggest that open source could improve management practices, if we can get past treating our employees as competitors. Through sharing, innovation proliferates.
Notes from a talk by one of my favorite people, at OSBC.
I'm a little bit of a late arriver at this party. Personally, a late adopter. You want to catch up when you are late, but I don't think sobriety is your strongest suit. Want to talk about what you look like to someone coming late to the open source cultural, personal and technical movement. And why are we where we are now?
What is open source anyway? Non-proprietary product model, a value added services model (contributed, compensated), a community (self-organizing collaborative, repository of knowledge, forum for sharing best practices -- these dynamics simply work), an altruistic behavior (forgoes proprietary returns to extend reach to all, anti-Microsoft passion, cool hobby, great career development, useful to my job), a capitalistic tactic (put some technologies in the public domain in order to focus resources elsewhere for competitive advantage). As your customers and your customers customers start betting on the economic model they start to get their head around it. Movement has gotten over competitive and manipulative responses, remarkably resilient. As a person interested in social organizations, strategy and power I'm paying a lot of attention to it.
Where is open source in the category adoption lifecycle (where the technology adoption lifecycle is an early subset, the innovator/early adopter part)? Early main street to mature mainstreet (indefinitely elastic middle period), declining main street to end of life. Linux is out of the chasm because Solaris is being marginalized, which had fought off NT, but can't fight both. Being a manager in the declining phase -- Antonio Perez's Kodak movement of digital photography requires he get in the game.
Let's be honest, I have milked this model for the last 15 years. Where are we going to put these things on the model? He takes uses audience to place products.
The Economic Significance: the Internet was a critical enabler to allow the collaborative behavior to happen. Developed company economies face competition, driving efficiency to sustain the unsustainable lifestyle.
Commoditization takes all the earnings of the industry down. Managing core and context is center stage. Core is what you choose to be different about. If you are Dominos, the Pizza is context, 30 minutes is core. If you are Chuck E Cheese the Pizza is context and the animals are core. Tiger Woods competitive capabilities are core, the rest is context -- focus on the game! What ever you have that is core, however, becomes context over time.
We are horrible at managing less differentiated goods. Scarce resources get tied up in context. Context build-up: what once made them great now leads to weakened competitive performance and lower returns on invested capital. Need more healthy processes to extract resources from the context to the core.
Open source's most important role is to commodities context processes so people can extract them and re-purpose them for the core. If you build collaboratively, instead of having 1000's of peopled doing competitively -- you can share the burden. That's right share -- say it. Context means you want less context, not more. It minimizes differentiation (a good thing) to reduce risk and lower costs. Provide flexible APIs that offer clean interfaces to a context abstraction layer and support value-adding differentiation atop context. With the net, we have a fast enough backplane to do this. From computing is free to memory is free to now the bus is free. It changes the economic game, particularly for services businesses. We have gotten a lot of productivity out of other industries, save services. Collaboration extracts productivity from people processes. ATM machines are a perfect example -- and they provide great service! How much contextual tripping complexity snafus of tech have we had, and now through pooling and taking context off of our plate, things can be more efficient.
However, the biggest challenge is mission-critical risk. 2x2 grid: mission critical to enabling vs. context to core. The problem is the high risk context and mission critical area. Where you can't get margin to fund risk management (e.g. the Airline industry is a horrible business to be in, has never returned its cost of capital over any 5 year period). How do we extract risk from this quadrant? De-risk these processes to find lower cost ways of managing them. Five levers:
In other words, Administration for 1-2, Consulting is 3, Products is 4 and Partners is 5.
Maslow's Hierarchy of needs put in a 2x2: Cultivation (Self-actualization), Collaboration (Affiliation), Competition (Achievement), Control (order and security). Cultivation and competition are more individual than collaboration and control as group accountability. Competition and control are more actually "did do" make it happen, whereas cultivation and collaboration are possibility "can do" Let it happen.
Now think about this with corporate cultures: Open source is collaboration. Cultivation is Google. Competition is Microsoft. Control is IBM. Note that Competition was the culture driving the tech community for the past 20 years, but what is weird is the power is shifting to Collaboration. How would you fight open source? What do you think this thing about liability and indemnification is about? All a Competition culture wants is a competitor, and there is none! How do you play Tennis without someone on the other side of the net.
How Open Source succeeds: As a community -- drives Competition Culture nuts, can't find the enemy. A Collaborative -- you give before you receive (all Prisoner Dilemma games have this as the winning strategy). This isn't a Sunday School sermon, this is a competitive strategy. Collaboration cultures go sour when they become self-serving, clubby and self-indulgent. As a Cooperative -- have to be disciplined with your scarce resources. Notion that everyone has a veto is a hard way to work in practice. Seek alignment, with patience.
How Open Source fails: Slips into a Control Culture; bureaucracy of standards organizations (we have seen this movie before, but this is now a collaborative exercises that is entrepreneurial -- but this is the thing that got us last time), majoring in minors, co-opted by vested interests. Slips into Cultivation Culture: ego inflation and demagoguery, tyranny of political correctness.
Final thoughts: the good news is there is no end to mission-critical context, a lifetime employment opportunity. All core ends up here eventually. Focus on abstracting context (five levers). Align with Services Oriented Architectures -- interfaces to core. Stay at the efficient frontier.
Andreas Cervenka, AffŠrsvŠrlden, was working at Sweden's largest daily during the boom and saw a demand for tomorrow's news today, so he started his own new media venture.
One thing they started with was the attention of other journalists, as they were shaking things up. Traditional media helped bring them their first readers. Covered a major IPO as the first story that showed up on the web before print. Realized that attention of mainstream media, covering their coverage, was an instrumental tool. Advantage was speed, updates, flexibility on publish dates and story length. But mostly interaction with readers.
Published a story about a CEO who hired his wife into a major bank when she had no experience. In hours, comments showed outrage, even from people in the bank. A few more hours later they issued a press release saying she wouldn't be hired. All in less than 8 hours.
Learned from what links people clicked on. This effectively shaped how and what we wrote about. Tweaked headlines for better clickthroughs. No tradition in the editorial staff, letting people pick topics more freely.
Time pressures meant they got some things wrong and didn't get to dig as deep into some stories as they should. Had trouble getting acc
