Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Big News

Socialtext closed a Series A round.

Here is Pierre's post about what he has been up to.

Being Googly

Matt Marshall's story on the cover of the Mercury News business section provides the entrepreneurs' perspective of Google's success. Comments include empowering individuals to innovate on their own, good benefits, equity incentives, adhering to good ethics, developing for users first and having fun too.

``The garage is back in business,'' says Ross Mayfield, chief executive of Socialtext, a 10-person Palo Alto start-up, referring to the valley's tradition of starting innovative companies in a garage. ``Google has been a shining example for us.''

Doing good

Socialtext's Mayfield also took a page from Google's book by trying to ``do well by doing good.'' He gave his software -- which helps users collaborate -- to academic and non-profit groups. These users, in turn, are helping spread the word for him, and he's making inroads with the for-profit sector.

Another Google lesson, Socialtext's Mayfield says, is to let users decide what they want. Google demonstrated the keep-it-simple rule, he said. So Mayfield lets users provide feedback, and he has a testing site, giving users previews of products under development.

Finally, there's the make-sure-you-have-fun lesson, he says. ``We goof off, too.''

To clarify, we don't provide free services to academic communities and non-profits, but we provide discount (about 50%) pricing to them so we can sustainably serve them as any other customer.

Some of the lessons are borrowed from Google, but most have been entrepreneurial learnings from going from boom to bust. During the boom, we forgot that relationships were central to business and throught they could be simply disintermediated. To succeed through the bust, you had to value employees, customers and partners. Google's success validates the approaches many are beginning to take.

The unfolding opportunity is leveraging the Net to build your startup. You can leverage open source, the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache MySQL & Perl, and commodity hardware to develop a prototype rapidly at the cheap. Innovate in the user experience, commodity management (as Socialtext and Google does for its hosting complex and Appliances) and integration of services. Release early and often, empower users and developers to build upon what you do -- and enable the market to find you and shape what you supply. Distribute through the network and market in social networks to gain a base of enthusiastic users and you can build a sustainable business with less upfront investment and a greater total potential.

But its the weekend, time to get out of the garage and play with the kids in the driveway.

Extreme Democracy Chapter 10

My contribution to Extreme Democracy, Social Network Dynamics and Participatory Politics, has been posted. An earlier version is posted in wiki.

Olympic Blogs Banned

You may earn medals, but you have no credentials. On top of the IOC's ludicrous linking policy, they are banning bloggers, perhaps to further asocial broadcast media, like this:

Unfortunately, this is not Anthony Famiglietti, but Steve Ahillen. The International Olympic Committee has informed athletes that they are not to do diaries or any other types of stories while under the Olympic Games umbrella. This apparently is not a new rule, however, it is being applied to a new technology, namely blogging...

Some are rightly invoking the first amendment. The linking policy may not be legally sound. My read of the policy against Olympian blogging is to ban blogs set up specifically for the games.

But these are personal blogs, and since when have we been good at sticking to one topic? Make one post about your cat and you may be covered, but check with your lawyers or the ACLU, as there is no blogging legal defense fund.

I'm starting a boycott: Tivo the Olympics and Buy the Unsponsored

More: here, here, /., more, more, more, more, more, more

Feedroll Pro

Robb Interactive shares some of the early results of their Feedroll Pro project.

For example, since becoming available for syndication via Feedroll Pro six weeks ago, the Kerry-Edwards Blog news feed has been picked up for syndication by 13 other web sites, and across those has received 21,325 page impressions and 848 click throughs (CTR of 4%). This is all in about 6 weeks, which equals c.$12 of service, or $0.014/click...compare this to the minimum click rate on Google Adwords of $0.05/click.

Suddenly, syndicating your news feed looks like a very effective way of 'advertising' you web site...a great level of exposure, very contextual because only related sites will syndicate your feed, and extremely cost effective.

High performance click throughs are great to demonstrate. John makes the association between this link sharing program and my recent ruminations on RSS Ads. He is right that putting a publisher in between each endorsement decision provides contextual value. It also may temper saturation. But the self-selective nature of an affiliate-like network for ads may also curb a bigger problem for advertising -- guiding what is socially responsible.

Here comes the Marlboro Man, get a rope.

When Conferences Converge

It's always been a weird dream of mine. You are sitting at a conference at a bland convention center or hotel, say for the International Association of Widget Makers, attending another boring reception with much widget talk. Then, BAM. Suddenly the conference next door, say the National Wonka Union, crashes the party. Worlds collide. Of course this scenario is much more interesting with the NYFD & Canadian Nurses Association or European Demolition Association & International Dictyostelium Conference or the International Psychiatric Conference & the United Astrology Conference, but that's not my point.

Almost every conference has another next door that might as well be on another planet. After the first day of an event you have met all kinds of people and have a sense of the group. But what if an organized attempt to co-mingle groups rocked worlds? Maybe augment it with a little Social Software or n-tag for accelerated networking or just a nice party.

Something like that might happen come November. The Accelerating Change futurist conference is being held at Stanford from the 5-7th. Dave is putting BloggerCon right next door on the 6th. I let John Smart from Accelerating Change know about the overlap, and instead of pointing out the obvious conflict, it turns out he extended a very cool offer to have the events collaborate. Its a co-location agreement that would give a discount to BloggerCon attendees and provide reserved spots for Accelerating ones. Bloggers and Futurists share at least the future in common.

Not as exciting as firemen and nurses, but it could be cool. What groups would you put together?

Evolving Security Markets

NetsEdge produces a great newsletter (get a blog, please) on the markets of networking. John Katsaros and Peter Christy's latest issue provides a case on how markets evolve and their Latest Bubble: Vulnerability Management.

Network based security is an interesting example of how "new" markets evolve. The first elements were proxies and firewalls -- systems that blocked bad things from happening. But bad things kept happening so intrusion detection was invented -- means of looking for suspicious activity or evidence of it after the fact. Intrusion detection was a valuable but "noisy" technology, so security event management was invented as a way of dealing with high volumes of event information, looking for the wheat in the chaff. Then vulnerability analysis was invented -- means of looking at the assets in the network and seeing if their configuration settings or patch levels expose vulnerabilities (pretty radical thinking for network guys). Most recently it's been realized that you can use this vulnerability information to guide the pre-attack part of security (work on the exposures with the greatest underlying business risk) and even as part of the real-time security system (worry more when you see evidence of attack against important and vulnerable assets). On the one hand, after the fact this seems sort of like common sense. On the other had, the evolution is very real and important. The vulnerability management market is hot (and kicks off an investment bubble in this space) as evidenced by McAfee's recent acquisition of Foundstone for $86M.

Markets of arms merchants always offer the opportunity for new entrants to help retool. But vendors should recognize early they are in the business of risk management, which requires a portfolio approach.

Feedster Adds Ads

Matt Hicks reports that Feedster is adding contextual ad words to its feeds. Contextualization at a microscopic level for people searching (not browsing) should be an attractive property for advertisers, but it depends upon how its introduced to subscribers.

"We're giving folks a choice between ad-supported and ad-free feeds," Rafer said. "We're announcing this ahead of time to telegraph what we're doing to the community, because there'll be a certain amount of satisfaction and dissatisfaction."

The community reaction will definitely be interesting. Sifry notes that many prefer RSS today over ad congested mediums and Technorati is proceeding cautiously: "It dilutes the power and the strength of the results, even if clearly marked."

Commercialization is especially painful when people have a sense of ownership of the, uh, medium (Doc, please boil the alternative term down to one generic word). On the other hand, somehow knowing publishers personally may invoke some support for making a living off of doing what they love. Regardless, it should be seen as inevitable:

"If you're some kind of purist and think that advertising doesn't belong in Internet media, get over yourself or pay for it," said Bruner, president of Executive Summary Consulting, in New York. "It makes no sense that RSS should not be monetized, particularly if you're subscribing to RSS from a Web site that already has advertising on it."

Steve Rubel posts:

I bet within a year ads in RSS feeds will be commonplace. Why? It's measurable and it's one more medium that online marketers will use to establish direct relationship with consumers.

I wish it was as measurable as Steve says, but he is right about the feedback loop being fostered. My hope is that the pull model of RSS and abundant choice will prevent ad saturation:

And RSS has a clear user advantages over other media for online advertising, particularly e-mail, said Ross Mayfield, CEO of enterprise wiki software company Socialtext Inc. and an avid blogger. Users ultimately will decide whether or not they will accept a given level of paid links and messages interspersed in their feeds.

"Because it's RSS, if people don't like it, they can click unsubscribe," he said. "What people consume is under the control of the consumer."

Of course, as regular readers know, initial forays into RSS advertising will be undervalued because of the format and metrics.

Doing Well By Doing Good

The Chronicle has a nice in-depth interview with Craig Newmark, done prior to eBay investment. In it, he talks about doing well by doing good:

Q: Your site is one of the few that remains true to some of the earliest ideals of the Internet. It's fairly altruistic and basically non-commercial in nature. How have you been able to keep Craigslist a fairly organic community and why?

A: First, I don't feel like we are altruistic or anything like that. Basically, it's a matter of giving people a break. Just the same, we had to become a serious business. That became clear in early 1999. We were trying to do it with volunteers, and things were falling apart. Falling apart is bad. At that point, I started making a real company out of it, figuring that we would be charging for job postings and that would help us out.

That said, there is nothing pious or anti-commercial about us. The decision to make it a business was based on values I've been somewhat facetiously calling nerd values. The disease of my people -- the nerds -- is that we are very literal, which is a real pain in the butt, frankly. But again, nerd values are simple. It's good to make a good living. It's good to do well for your staff.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort. We're still looking for new and other ways of doing that.

...Q: You provide jobs. You provide salaries. You provide a service. Do you think there's a way that Craigslist could be a model for others to run a successful business while providing a service to society?

A: Well, there's a basic cliche that I guess applies: "Doing well by doing good." We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing. We're seeing the beginnings of a kind of environment like we saw during the bubble.

We're just trying to do our best to maintain that moral compass.

It used to be that companies only addressed the social goods they create when social costs (negative externalities) forced them to. It was a function of risk management and crisis communications.

Doing well by doing good is an old practice that generates results. Post-bust it has seeped into corporate conciousness. Its even at the core of a new business lifestyle magazine. Its encouraging to have founders like Pierre, Larry, Sergey and Craig baking the production of social goods into their companies while generating performance -- while having employees and investors value the same. Its just good business.

From Mesh to Network

The case is being made for opening the premium spectrum used by broadcasters in an article in The Economist and Shirky's Writings. The focus is on interference which previously required geographic monopolies managed by regulators, but we and our radios have gotten smarter since then. If we can get past the issue of interference, it means more than returning a public trust to a public commons, it unleashes innovation in areas we have just begun to explore.

The sheer waste of this system—the “opportunity cost” of services and technologies not offered because entrenched interests are squatting on the spectrum—is behind the third major intellectual current, after central planning and property rights, in recent thinking about spectrum. Starting in the 1980s and gathering steam in the 1990s, there have been calls for “open spectrum”, or a spectrum commons. These initially met with scepticism, since economists and most other people are familiar with “the tragedy of the commons”—the idea that a scarce resource will be inefficiently over-exploited (as in the case of over-fishing, the classic instance). For sceptics, the same fate would await the airwaves.

But this is wrong, says Kevin Werbach at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school and founder of Supernova Group, a consultancy. He argues that the assumption that public sharing of spectrum would lead to chaos presumes that spectrum is scarce; but this reflects a flawed understanding of the physics of electromagnetism. A common myth about electromagnetic waves is that they bounce off one another if they meet. They do not. Instead, they travel onwards through other waves forever (even though they eventually attenuate to the point where they become undetectable). Radio interference, in other words, is not a physical phenomenon, but always and only a technological problem, the result of dumb radios and dumb antennae mixing the waves up after receiving them.

Of course, spectrum owners disagree:

“Unlicensed spectrum is sounding like crack cocaine: the ultimate high that solves all your problems,” says Brian Fontes, a lobbyist who works for Cingular, America's second-largest mobile-phone company (and the largest once its acquisition of AT&T Wireless, a rival, is complete). But, “prove that you're not going to interfere; I mean prove it, don't just say it,” he insists.

Clay provides proof:

Unlike the 2.4 Ghz band, which was already used by microwave ovens and other appliances, the broadcaster's spectrum is only used for communications, so they will have to be shown that new devices can not only cooperate with one another, but operate without disrupting current signals. (The prospects for this are good -- in a related test in February concerning low-power radio, the company performing the interference tests concluded, "Due to the lack of measurable interference produced by [low-power] stations during testing, the listener tests and economic analysis scheduled for Phase II of the LPFM field tests and experimental program should not be done." Report in PDF.)

Setting interference aside, if not putting the issue to bed, enables us to focus on the opportunities of distance with yet to be deregulated bands of spectrum. Clay points out physical constraints and the value of some monopolized bands:

Like the diminishing height of waves that emanate outward from a rock dropped in a pond, the power of a wave radiating outward from a broadcasting antenna falls as the distance from the antenna increases. Worse, this falloff isn't just related to distance, it is the square of that distance. This pattern, called the inverse square law, says that power at distance N will be 1/N2 -- two miles from a given broadcaster, the signal will be 1/4th the strength of the signal at one mile, at three miles, it will be 1/9th, and so on.

...Because of the tradeoff between penetration and data rate, most of the useful radio frequencies are in the kilohertz (Khz) to Gigahertz (Ghz) range -- low enough to travel through walls, high enough to carry the data required for voice or video signals.

Nobody anticipated the level innovation that has occured with the scrap of spectrum left over for Wifi. Based on the success they have had, some even suggest that its enough: Dewayne Hendricks, boss of Dandin Group, a wireless internet-access provider, does not care whether governments open up more spectrum because, “all the spectrum we need is already in play.”

But wireless will not realize the death of distance until more useful radio frequencies are opened. The lower hanging fruit is providing services behind walls or across cornfields. But much prophesized decentralized architectures such as mesh networks also require new spectrum to play with.

I have long held that mesh networking with current architectures is crippled by economies of span. That is, each time a node intermediates in a path it introduces latency, a transaction cost that adds up quickly in mesh architecture. A digital signal is slowed down when processed. In a mesh, this cost is somewhat offset with the risk benefits of additional redundancy. But an optimal mesh uses a few intermediate nodes as possible. A structure less like a filter and more like a network.

The latent potential of open spectrum has yet to be realized, because innovation banned from frequencies with low latency in implementation. If we can get past issues of interference, benefit from new allocations and get down to building new architectures, there is ample room for innovation.