Category Archives: Web 2.0

Kirkland’s Shareware Coffeehouse. Order what you want, pay whatever you like.

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This social and economic cafe experiment by a Seattle Googler is fascinating, especially because it’s actual appears to be working so far to generate enough to keep the business going.  There are no prices and people’s contributions are not monitored.   Thus even the normal social pressure you’d have with, for example, a church collection plate are largely absent here in the Kirkland Cafe.

I’m totally skeptical of this model as a scalable type of business, but it’s sure interesting.   Burning man sensibilities come to mind.

Mark Cuban, the sage of internet video?

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I think Mark Cuban  has more valid points than Cory does on the controversies swirling around copyright and takedown notices delivered by Viacom.     Cory is right that it’s annoying and obnoxious to send takedowns to people who obviously are not infringing, but that’ll shake out soon enough.  What isn’t shaking out soon enough is what I’ve discussed at length before – YouTube and Myspace and other big players are making hundreds of millions by purposing user generated content to their commercial needs.   I’d even concede that commercialism is not the bottom line on these big player/user interactions, and also concede that users like me are agreeing to provide content that in turn gets searched at Google and generates money for them and *sometimes* for me.

However as Mark correctly notes it’s significant to ask within the copyright, content, and user community issue this question:  Who gets the lion’s share of the revenues created by copyright holders or community participants?    I’d like to see more of that cash flow to the community and less to the big players.   But maybe that’s just because I’m a community guy?

Go Mavs!

Pay Per Post Prejudice Pointedly Pokes PodTech’s Scoble

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Robert Scoble is a fine fellow, as almost every blogger knows.  Perhaps it is partly for this reason he’s under an unreasonable attack by many bloggers for accepting an invite to Keynote the upcoming Pay Per Post Conference in Florida.    I’m not a fan of the Pay Per Post concept because it’s probably going to create too much abuse, but it should be discussed and debated rather than thrown out without discussion as many prominent bloggers, many of whom *make a lot of money blogging* want to do.

I  commented over at Scobleizer:

Wow, I’m really disappointed in how hostile people are to you about giving a simple keynote. If Bill Gates keynotes CES does it mean he supports all the violence in GTA and Resident Evil? Of course not.

I’m not currently a PPP enthusiast and don’t plan to blog for them, and perhaps Shel’s even right to call this approach the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere (clever and catchy!).   However if disclosures are prominent and clear PPP people can note that they are doing a similar sort of thing that a *paid* journalist does when they review gadgets or movies or Techcrunch does when they review companies.

I smell a lot of hypocrisy here. Prominent folks who are directly paid very big money to blog in various forms are insisting that stay at home moms can’t pick up a few bucks for reviewing something. And if Shel is right those evil hookers, blogging between tricks, will be denied the money that could get them off the street!

The critics worry about credibility and that’s good, but it’s hypocritical to get paid indirectly by blogging (e.g. TechCrunch, Engaget, O’Reilly, Battelle, Shel, etc, etc, etc) and then suggest without more elaboration that other payment routines are inherently flawed and dishonest. Are you just protecting your turf?

BarCamp USA 2007

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Wow, if BarCamp USA <<too bad… it’s been cancelled >>really pulls in 5000 technology enthusiasts it could be the best conference of the year, and in Wisconsin no less. At a cost of $50 it’ll also be close to the cheapest.

What? You don’t know what a BarCamp is?

I love the unconference formats. After attending about ten computer conferences over the past 18 months including Microsoft’s MIX06 and WebmasterWorld’s in Las Vegas and Boston, my favorite conference was MashupCamp 1, a dynamic gathering of startups and mashup developers down in Silicon Valley at the Computer Science Museum. Dave Berlind, Doug Gold, and supporters did a fantastic job with these Mashup Camps and I’m sorry I missed the one just held in Boston and will miss Mashup Camp IV in July because I’ll be in Pennsylvania for our family reunion.

Organizers of the BarCamp USA say they expect 5000 but could handle up to 20,000. I sure hope this approach prevails in the conference space rather than the expensive and exclusive conferences that are tailored primarily to support existing large companies and sales efforts. I should say that Brett and his crew do a fine job making WebmasterWorld an inexpensive and great conference compared to the alternatives.

Fancy Las Vegas parties at nightclubs like TAO and PURE are really fun and neat, but the really profound changes in technology are only partly happening over cocktails in Las Vegas. They are ALSO happening inside laptops plastered with goofy stickers, handled by young geeks who haven’t even learned how to do laundry. BarCamps cater to that crowd, and that’s a crowd you want to pay attention to if you want to better understand where tech is headed … and headed fast.

Who needs a real world anyway?

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Glenn’s reporting on the new banking licenses offered for the virtual world.    Although there are obvious potential abuses, on balance I think these virtual world development are fantastic.

Back when I was running more website advertisements from Europe, Paypal was a godsend in terms of making it very easy to collect money from European partner.   It was somewhat expensive – often running 5% or more in total fees, but well worth it in that I did not have to wait for checks in the mail and then wait for them to clear (international checks can take 10+ biz days to clear) .

I’m not clear on all the details but it looks to me like virtual banking is going to empower a LOT of places to compete with PayPal’s quality but expensive services, run their own interest rates, CDs, etc.  Once a virtual bank establishes credibility it should be able to very cheaply and effectively offer better rates than conventional banks with their high costs.     More risk?   Probably some, but with greater risk comes greater reward so … you should sometimes choose to roll the dice on these things.

Zawodny to Beal “Spammer!”. Beal to Zawodny “Get a Damn Clue!”

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You’ve got to love these spats between clever and prominent blog dudes. It’s not only the closest onliners generally come to schoolyard or barroom brawling, but often these debates give huge insight into the future of the online world.

When Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, the clever social community application, it fell to Jeremy Zawodny to help refine the project into the robust and scalable environment demanded by the world’s top website. Jeremy also decided to take on a bit of quality control, and accused Andy Beal, a top marketing consultant, of spamming MyBlogLog. Andy had used as his avatar “win a free zune” rather than using the normal convention of a personal picture.

Andy Beal shot back angrily that he was not spamming and even had permission to run the contest from MyBlogLog’s founders. Cheap trick or not, if he had permission I think Jeremy owes him an apology – or at least an upgrade to “officially approved MBL spammy tactic”.

Although I thought Jeremy was too hard on this marketing “trick” by Andy, I certainly agree with many who think that MyBlogLog is now suffering from it’s own popularity. Popularity that has brought a lot of questionable tactics outside of the spirit of a quality community.

There is no great harm in the win a free zune *except* it defeats one of the nice aspects of MyBlogLog which is that you can see the person’s face. Several prominent and clever SEO’s with great blogs like Andy’s “Marketing Pilgrim”, as well as several junk sites and junk SEOs are resorting to similar tactics. The most common is to plant a pretty woman’s face rather than your own face, encouraging signups to your blog community.

Avatars are the heart of this system since they appear at other sites. Therefore to preserve the integrity of MyBlogLog Yahoo should require that avatars reflect either the person or a highly relevant aspect of the community. I’d even consider requiring that if you want to play with MyBlogLog you’ve got to be the real person in the picture.

Andy’s a good guy and a quality SEO, but his claim that he’s helping MyBlogLog with this type of approach rings pretty hollow with me.

Update:  Jeremy retitled his post and apologized.  But hey, it was fun while it lasted!

Fred: Flickr’s Frickin’ Fantastic!

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Like any good Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is trying to figure out what the heck is going on …. online, and looking for great examples of companies that are doing things right.

I could not agree more that Flickr is a stunning example of how to get the new internet right.  The photo handling is superb, the interface is easy and intuitive, the tools are powerful, the basic service is free, the buzz is friendly and cordial throughout the site, and perhaps most importantly it’s easy to share photos and intergrate them with blogs.

No wonder Caterina Fake was hanging at Davos this year!

Social Networks / Social Complainers

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Social networks work because social networking is the new way to interact with folks. And naturally the rise of social networks is leading onliners to complain about … social networks and how people are misunderstanding their significance:

The New York Times‘ Richard Siklos complains that it’s hard to “say no” in the online world, and you’ll aquire more “friends” than you know what to do with if you start hanging out in virtual worlds and social networks.

Brian Solis is concerned that PR people are just not getting Social Networks, especially the large agencies who Solis suggests are abusing Social Network marketing, saying those big agencies:  “… screw the pooch in the public spotlight with highly visible and discussed attempts to fool, capitalize on, or manipulate the market…”

Brian’s also concerned that people are not getting what he meant in his long piece cited above.

My take is that social networking has reached that uncomfortable level of prominence where crass, objectionable commercialism is both undesirable and inevitable.   At the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon people were strategizing about how to manipulate social networks to promote commercial sites and clients and I expect this to become more pervasive very fast.  I think  Solis would say that quality PR can be done without compromising the integrity of the social network experience and maybe that’s true but as with all things commercial we’ll see more obnoxious and manipulative stuff than quality promotion.   And hey, that’s OK because this … is …. America and we like our commercialism crash, superficial, and obnoxious, right?

Who, what, which Wiki?

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There’s a new search in Internet Town called WikiSeek that is creating a search within Wikipedia and sites linked to by Wikipedia. It’s an excellent idea though I’m not clear it’ll lead to better results than a normal search engine query. Wikipedia is generally better than the snail paced DMOZ at reflecting “related sites”, but like DMOZ the politics and anti-commercial concerns of Wikipedia often get in the way of good articles. Wikipedia is notoriously sparse when listing “related” sites. Like many open source driven projects there is a “NO COMMERCIALIZATION WHATSOEVER” bias that gets in the way of providing the best available information which is increasingly found on commercial sites and blogs, which are not treated favorably enough by DMOZ or Wikipedia.

As TechCrunch noted today WikiSeek is going to get confused big-time with Jimmy Wales Wikimedia Search project which is destined to become a huge addition to the search landscape. Formerly known (well – sort of formerly known?) as the Wikiasari project and still called that by most, it’ll be a robust, community driven search that used human editing to keep out the junk and bring in the jewels rather than the algorithmic approaches taken by Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and most other major players. Confusing things further is the fact that projects like WikiSeek above are not primarily a Wiki, they are, wishfully, a way to work with Wikis.

What?

I think somebody might want to clue in the Wiki crowd to the following challenge:

Few people, even total immersion code crazed onliners, are really comfortable with Wikis. Most pretend to be but when it’s time to collectively participate in a wiki I’ve *never* seen it work nearly as well as the collective results from blogs, which reward individuals with attention rather than reward the collective with information. MashupCamp1 and 2 were filled with very capable internet programmers. In fact even the *inventor* of the Wiki, Ward Cunningham, was there (he’s a great Oregonian fellow who invented the Wiki as a collaboration tool for on computer projects). Yet even in this potentially Wiki-rich environment the lack of updating of the Mashup Camp Wiki was conspicuous. Rather it was blogs, Flickr, and huge sheets of paper that kept people well informed during these intense and infoManiacal extravaganzas.

So, I think big Wiki projects like Wikipedia and the upcoming Wikimedia search have huge potential, largely because they constrain the organization of things such that the big project benefits from huge community participation.

Little bitty Wikis? Let’s just scrap them and have everybody crosslink the blogs, OK?