Category Archives: blogging

Blogs as a digestive tract

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Nick Carr is rapidly becoming one of my favorite bloggers.   Not so much because I agree with his points, but because his style is sharp and brilliant and because he recognizes that many of the elitist current distinctions in the writing community are, in a word, nonsense.

This Gaurdian article contains the very clever notion that blogging’s virtue is what others have called a blogging vice – the tendency to regurgitate articles and news gleaned from major outlets, adding personal notes or spin in the process.      Carr notes that this is a *good* thing as it processes information in ways he likens to a digestive tract.    Unflattering as it may seem to the times when bloggers are actually out in the world researching elusive and exclusive topics and writing about them,  much of blogging is just this sort of “reprocessing” of information as it flows through our vast networked media extravaganza.    Re-examination can be as helpful as examination, and I can’t help but think that blogging is making the pie much bigger in the sense that more people are paying more attention to more information.    As long as we brew more coffee to keep everybody awake to read all this, it will all work just fine.

Google’s launches Google Sky

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Over at Webguild I blogged about Google Sky, the new Astronomy mapping tool from Google that has come out before the much anticipated Microsoft World Wide Telescope project which is not available yet.

I’ll be doing most of my technology and business blogging over at Webguild.org from now on, with more personal stuff here at Joe Duck.

Mike Arrington, Chris Anderson on Charlie Rose

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TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is on my favorite show tonight talking about the future of technology along with Chris Anderson of Wired.   (not to be confused with TED conference coordinator Chris Anderson).

Here are the videos

Ha – just got a Tweet from Mike that he hasn’t even seen himself yet since it’s not on in CA yet.    

Chris Anderson:
On sharing his next book before it is even out:   “Open Source” the idea, leading to a flood of more ideas, which in turn enrich everybody.   “Google doesn’t show up on your credit card bill”. 

Anderson’s provocative points are about how “free” is becoming a key concept in the digital economy, and may trump

Where does the some $360,000,000 that Craigslist saves the economy go?    Back to us, says Chris.   Hey thanks for the fish Craig Newmark!

Commodity information “needs to be free” vs unique information which may need to be expensive.

Radiohead as using digital economics for what it’s good at, and stimulate demand for the scarce thing – seeing the band in person, endorsements, and T shirts.

You cannot erase yourself from the web.    Shifting from privacy to self-promotion. 

Anderson:  Yes, MS will get Yahoo.    

Google as algorithms, Yahoo as a people business.   Google and the “machines first” culture are winning.    Microsoft, a pre-web culture, believes in software.   Their success kept them from being hungry, but now they are.  

Tech Bubble of 2000 was different.   Softer landing this time?

Facebook:  We’ll see narrowing of social networks (a GREAT point!).    NING model may prevail.  e.g. Chris’ own  www.DIYdrones.com    What is the right level of granularity? 

Chris: “Everything I believe is written on the back of an iPhone”: 
Designed in California, Made in China

Mike Arrington
Big issues:
* Net neutrality.
* China.   Sites are filtered and slowed rather than outright deleted from the network.   Companies are not happy with the policies, but reluctant to leave 187,000,000 internet users to the competition.
* Mobile space.   Fundamentals are changing such that USA can compete now with other countries in the mobile space.
* Identity theft.   US has done too little to fight this.  Even Sen John McCain had his ID stolen a few years back.
* Education, computers, and internet access for schools.    Government weak in this area, but also true that computers are often an educational distraction rather than enhancement. 
* Economic implications: TV ads suck (great point Mike!), so internet ad share will increase.  However also we’ll see TV and internet increasingly converge.

Mike’s online “about 100% of the time I’m awake”.     TechCrunch startup database is one key focus.    “We’re not worth 100MM”.   (for more on TC valuation issues see the excellent Yahoo Tech TV interview with Mike).

Microsoft won’t back down and be embarrassed by the Yahoo deal.    MS failed in search and fell off the online map.    All the major search engines are roughly equivalent (great point Mike!).  But Google has lots of publishers and lots of action at their own pages.

Amazon – transitioning to a services model.    Renting services in the cloud is eliminating yet another high cost business barrier by providing high level infrastructure at low cost. 

Startups and entrepreneurs:    Modern day pirates.   Gamblers.  They value risk cf risk averse folks.  YouTube’s 1.65 Billion sale as a surprise.

Can Facebook have their “Google Moment”, which for Google was figuring out pay per click advertising.     Facebook as more innovative than Myspace.   Can they invent something to generate a LOT of revenue?   If yes, another Google is born. 

Facebook’s friend based advertising model may be illegal because it’s implying an endorsement without the consent of the person. 

BBC as a great site to review the condition of the world.   Blogs as taking page views from the ‘big guys’.    Comments as important.    Blogs following Silicon Valley as a “trainwreck”, but blogs in general on the rise.

Is privacy an illusion?   Harder to get email address than SSN (hmmm – I don’t think so…).

Obama fan.   Tech potentially will make our lives much better.  3rd world education as exciting.    Worrying about Virtual Reality.   What happens when people want to spend all their time in VR? 

Will Jason Calacanis put a bottle of Macallan scotch where his mouth is?

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Update:  Apparently, no …. !

Jason Calacanis is a clever guy, but I like to call people out when they make wild predictions that they themselves probably don’t believe.  
Here, Jason predicts Google will have 90% search share in a year.    I’m happy to see if he really believes his prediction and offered up this wager over at his blog:

If Google’s search market share is at or above 90% on March 6, 2009 I’ll buy you a bottle of MACALLAN 25.  If below 90% you buy me a bottle.

Now, a bottle of scotch  may not sound like much of a wager, but this Macallan 25 runs about  $500 per bottle.     

In fact I boldly started out posting him that I’d bet a whole case, but luckily checked the price and the post got stuck in his spam controls so I could revise it.    I’m confident I’m right, but I guess I’m not quite 12 bottles confident!     Of course if that’s the only bet Jason will take then bring on the Macallan Calacanian wager!

Yelp’s new funding round.

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TechCrunch has a nice summary of several travel review sites and notes that Yelp has now had 31MM in funding and is rumored to be worth about 200MM.   For a company that makes under 10MM per year this seems pretty high, but the Yelp model has been fairly strong in Silicon Valley and Yelp appears to be extending the model to other areas successfully.        

I do think Yelp will have a lot of challenges as they move out of their Silicon Valley travel sweet spot.   Yelp has done a nice job of connecting people offline who meet online by hosting Yelp parties at Bay Area venues.   This probably won’t work as well outside of Silicon Valley where hip young net users are …. not as concentrated, even in the large urban areas.

Adobe Air – offline to online is good

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Adobe is launching an application that will allow people to work offline on forms and other content which will then automatically be posted to websites when they go back online.   This is an excellent “transitional” application because many users still have to “log on” to the internet via slow modems or other cumbersome connections, and this will help them participate more actively in the online ecosystem.

That said, I’m increasingly convinced that the explosion of user content is to some extent…over.   Certainly we’ll continue to see huge volumes of content pour online, but at least in terms of the USA it is fair to say that internet access and publishing are is now so easy and cheap it seems unlikely there are millions waiting in the wings to jump online.    Some studies are suggesting that “most” internet users have little interest in blogging or commenting or participating actively – rather they want to read and socialize but not produce much content.     Another interesting factor is that young women appear to be the top content producers in many social networking environments rather than geeky boys who are more likely to spend online time playing games.   It’s going to be very interesting to watch the new media trends shake out in the coming years.  

WSJ reports

Farber in charge at CNET: A good move

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Premier Tech news website CNET has a new editor in chief.  Dan Farber takes over today, and as a tech journalist *and prominent tech blogger* the choice of Farber is smart for CNET and a sign that blogging sensibilities are playing an important role even in “legacy” media outlets, though it’s funny to consider CNET – a groundbreaking online news network – “legacy”.    Yet in this rocket paced online world most of us now turn to TechCrunch before CNET for breaking and insider news.    Partly for this reason and partly because CNET can’t leverage internet efficiencies as easily as leaner and meaner sites like TechCrunch, CNETs traffic and profitability has been suffering for some time.   Farber’s experience may help to bring more innovative approaches to blogging tech news at CNET, and Dan will recognize how important it is to work to establish a social network that revolves around CNET’s tech coverage.     Mike Arrington has done this brilliantly at TechCrunch and it drives their very successful efforts.    Sites like DailyKos and Huffington report as well.  Others have built smaller communities around their blogs with more modest levels of success.  CNET already has a brand and a large body of quality journalistic experience and tech related content.   Let’s see what Dan does with all that.

Journablogger Battle Dome 2008

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Blogging people love a heated argument and Mike Arrington always aims to please, so he nailed Fred Wilson for a few inconsistencies in his otherwise very reasonable post suggesting the obvious – that blogs tend to have lower standards of accuracy than mainsteam journal articles.   I don’t think this can be reasonably disputed though I think on balance I’d rather have the fast paced, up to the minute blog coverage that is sometimes inaccurate than the next-day-fact-checked-cold-news that we sometimes see with mainstream technology coverage. 

Of course I hope the Journablogging does not upset Fred too much because I predict things will get *much* worse before they get better.   Monetizing is increasingly dependent on article output, and blogs like TechCrunch are pumping out articles faster than you can click on an RSS feed, and systems like TechMeme encourage mass postings to increase the chance you’ll be seen.    The flood of blogged tech news has only just begun, and accuracy is already one of the first casualties.

Matt explains all this wisely.  He’s pretty smart for a real journalist..