Forbes “Tech Boom, Media Bust”

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Brian Caufield has written a great Forbes piece about the impact of new media on … old media. He notes the rise of GigaOm and TechCrunch and the demise of Red Herring and CNET.

My take on much of the new game is that *keeping expenses low* is far more important than *generating big revenues*. We may be seeing a 180 degree turnaround in many industries where we return to small business, entrepreneurial modes of production that use the internet as the mechanism to cheaply scale from small to large. Scaling up in media industries used to take substantial capital but now it takes almost nothing. Info based industries have only begun to reel from the coming changes.

Atlantic City

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OK, here we are in one of America’s top travel destinations – Atlantic City New Jersey – but I’m having some trouble figuring out exactly what we should do tomorrow.   The New Jersey State Tourism website leaves a lot to be desired as it seems to want to lump all of Jersey together in the same format which makes Atlantic City and Camden of comparable tourism worth.    Bureaucratically and politically correct but near worthless when you are planning travel.    Of course an advantage here is that you are not pestered with advertising and pitches while you try to pick through the bland “politically correct” descriptions to decide what’s the “best stuff” here in New Jersey. New Jersey Tourism official site.

After some surfing the gameplan will be generally to head into Atlantic City and walk around on the boardwalk looking for neat shops and restaurants and swim a bit on the beach, which is miles long and hopefully home to some good sized waves and mild water.  The next day we’ll head out to Cape May, the point of land at the south of the Jersey Shore where you can take the Cape May Ferry to Delaware.

Atlantic City’s site is more informative, though I was hoping for more specific info about family related activities.     We are staying in Absecon about 5 miles from the Boardwalk and the big Casinos which now seem to dominate the Atlantic City scene.    I think I was here about 35 years ago on a family trip but certainly don’t remember much.

Atlantic City Tourism official site

New Jersey Tourism official site

Online Highways – New Jersey 

Betsy Ross House Performance, Philadelphia

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Betsy Ross House Performance

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Here in Philadelphia’s historic district many of the buildings offer historical tours and insights.   Here at Betsy Ross’s actors from “Once Upon a Nation” talk about women and the Revolution.     I’ve really been impressed with the quality of some of the interpreters here who make you feel like you really are stepping back in time.

I’m glad to see this approach is becoming a popular way to teach people history. National Park Service ranger guides are usually professional but lack the clothing and often that spark of historical enthusiasm that makes the enactment interpretations so effective.

Dave Winer’s Final Signup?

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Dave Winer is both right on and I fear way too optimistic when, in his discussion of Facebook’s value, he says:

I’m tired of building networks of friends, over and over.
Next time I do it, it’ll be for keeps.

Dave I only wish this were true, but I think you’ll need to be pretty stubborn *or* very socially innovative (hey, you -are- innovative!  Do it!)  to fix the problem of the proliferation of way too many social networks with way too few standards to simplify the whole mess.     But I’m with you if you want to start insisting on some standards – basically some sort of informal understanding among social network users that we won’t sign up for any more social networks until there is a way to port that info safely, easily, seamlessly to other social networks with     I don’t understand why this standard has been so elusive but I think it’s simply that markets have been driving things and there has, until very recently, been too little or negative incentive to make this happen.    As Dave notes Facebook’s open approaches may make them the ultimate social application, leading me to wonder if I was too pessimistic to suggest Facebook’s not worth what many say they should fetch in a buyout.

Bravo to Intel for joining the One Laptop Project

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Good for Intel, and good for the One Laptop project. Intel will cooperate rather than compete to bring laptops to kids all over the world. It was never clear to me that Intel did anything wrong in the first place because the goal is to get the computers to kids, not get *certain types* of computers to kids, but the One Laptop folks seemed to think the Intel “Classmate” computer would impede their progress in spreading the silicon gospel to poor kids all over the globe, so all is swell now.

Blogging Philadelphia ?

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Wow, I’m here in Philadelphia enjoying the Hilton Hospitality with good free WIFI, but didn’t realize until tonight that the Blog Philadelphia UNconference is going on today and tomorrow.   Looks like a great and sold out event, and it’s great to see blogging conferences sprouting up outside of Silicon Valley.  I’ll miss meeting other bloggers which would have been fun, but I will plan to enjoy history and cheessteaks with the family as we explore this spectacularly historical American Masterpiece – Philly!

U-S History is one of our Online Highways websites with great history info.

Pennsylvania Travel at Online Highways

Gophila.com is a great information resource but has some serious navigation challenges.  For example the drop down menus are annoying and complex, and most crazy is the flash photo montage at the index page which almost immediately wipes out the intro screen that has the navigation a user needs.   The pix are OK, but don’t do the history justice.   I think local folks don’t realize that people don’t come to Philadelphia to see a pretty garden or Christmas light display.     They come here to see Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin’s house, and the cradle of American Liberty.     I guess those things just aren’t stylish enough for the Philly web design crowd?   Sillies!

Face Bookie?

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John Battell is wondering if Facebook might even reject a 6 billion dollar offer given how high they are flying these days.  I’m trying to read between his sarcasm but he seems to think they’d (foolishly) reject it.  I’m guessing the big money Facebook buyout buzz may be a little more opportunistic and that they’d love an offer like that, playing hard to get just long enough to firm it up.  I would have to admit being *very wrong* to suggest they should have taken the billion from Yahoo last year.   Facebook is probably not even worth that, but they can get more easily now due to the buzz of irrational exhuberance.

Recommendation to FB: Take the 6 billion and laugh all the way to the bank.

Recommendation to MS: Don’t spend this you fools!

Companies with the biggest buzz (YouTube, Facebook) have what appear to be extraordinary buyout valuations that are not consistent with their profitability or what even seems like a realistic, risk adjusted long term analysis.

Why? Market movers as players combine with speculative frenzy and lead many to assume they’ll get out before things change. It’s more like casino thinking than Warren Buffet thinking. Big players like Google and MS can afford to make what I think they’d see as “strategic” high offers but what a reasoned analysis suggests are foolish bets.

Lots of this happened in late 90s and only a handful of the players are left standing, most at a small fraction of their values at the pinnacle of *that* irrational exhuberance.

Zillow Community

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Matt Ingram, in the wonderfully titled “Is Zillow Building a Ghost Town?” is skeptical of Zillow’s new community pages, noting the failure of BackFence. I’m also skeptical of Zillow’s prospects for online community building but I think for different reasons, and both of us are premature to call this so early. Zillow is a big player in the “city information” space and therefore should certainly look for ways to enhance social networking at the site.

I’ll waste a few electrons to duplicate what I wrote over there:

I’m also skeptical but this is no Backfence – here Zillow will not pay to have the content developed so if communities do sprout up they’ll be gravy to the Zillow bottom line which should only have to pay a modest amount to ramp up and keep this going alongside their core competency, RE listings.

However the *idea* of local voices is excellent, in fact I’m hoping to create a more tourism focused approach with local bloggers rather than contributors to a community in which they have little stake. Hyperlocal *news* will keep failing but hyperlocal *blogging* has only begun to flourish, and IMHO could become the dominant form of human communication. (insert trumpet fanfare here)

Go Google Go. Mashups for the Masses

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Google Maps strikes again with enhanced mashupability.   Google maps is clearly the leader in mapping which is curious because there are many other excellent mapping systems that are similar: Yahoo maps, MSN maps, Mapquest, and several more.

Google, as usual, offers simple integration with websites, very easy navigation, speed, and more.  It “feels” easier and more effective than the others even though I’m not sure it really is.   I remain puzzled by some of the approaches taken by others in the mapping space.   When in doubt just do it like Google does and you’ll have a great, heavily used product.

Marc – Got Blogs?

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Marc Andreessen has been posting some very thoughtful and helpful blog stuff since his recent blogmeistering debut, and today’s post about his lessons from five weeks of blogging is no exception – it’s a great article about why blogging matters a lot more than most people realize, and why we have a lot of work to do to improve the sport.

The most provocative idea is something I’ve been puzzling over for some time – how can blogging evolve from the current form to one where the conversations are more interactive and equal, and can more actively include non-bloggers? I don’t mean equal in the sense everybody gets equal space or attention or time, rather in the sense that great comments on blogs are now relegated to far too low a status. Many “A list” bloggers hardly comment at all unless they are attacked or challenged, making it too difficult to get a spirited conversation going about many of the most important topics.

Marc has even stopped the comments at his blog due to junk comments and spam. Understandable but unfortunate because I’m less likely to read posts when I can’t get in my 2 cents in the comments. Trackbacks are good for people like me with blogs, but unless the topic is something I’m really interested in I won’t want to do a whole post about Marc’s interest du jour.

So, what is the solution to creating better blog engagement for all? I still think it’s some form of hybrid between blogging and forums where topics evolve through participation and then all participants have simple ways to engage in the conversation, and if necessary to disengage from spurious comments.

Gabe at Techmeme solves some of these problems by having his routine choose “newsworthy” items and then showing other blogs that have linked to the main posts.   This allows ‘second tier’ blogs to be featured along with the ‘top tiers’, helping to showcase the value of the topic and the conversation that surrounds it.

Technorati, the brilliant blog search engine, brings a lot to the table but to my way of thinking has not really solved the key challenge of blog conversational engagement.   Technorati APIs may have created the groundwork for the perfect application and perhaps Dave himself will develop the “golden mean” approach to navigate the blogs and the conversations that surround them.