The blog editing system in action.
At last week’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference I was on a blogger panel where some members of the audience brought up ye olde “bloggers aren’t as good as ‘real journalists’ because bloggers don’t get it right” argument. The audience cheered when the host made the point that magazine journalists go slower to “get it right.” I played the part of the blogger and took the point on the chin, despite also now writing for a magazine and having to work with the old-school editing system of fact-checkers and pre-publication editing.
I tried to make the point that blogs self correct very quickly (usually within hours) because if I get it wrong the people who actually know the truth will jump on me fast and furiously and that blogs arrive at the truth faster BECAUSE of the participation of everyone involved.
This is something that RARELY happens in the paper press. Or, if it does, thanks to letters to the editors, it happens very slowly, so readers never really see that feedback until weeks or months later. And even when it does happen you only see a sample of the feedback, never the whole feedback. In every case gatekeepers are in charge of what the reader sees (try to get something published in a newspaper sometime, even if you have a legitimate case it’s pretty difficult).
Dave Winer told me often that he loves blogging because it lets him tell his story. His complete, unedited, unchanged, unfiltered story. He’d tell me example after example of getting interviewed by journalists who didn’t understand the technology he was building, so they’d misrepresent it due to either misunderstanding what he was saying, or, even worse, some sort of bias toward him or his technology. Many other people have told me the same thing.
Anyway, at the Fortune thing I tried to get across that I liked having my readers as fact checkers a lot more than the magazine style of working to get it right before publishing. Every column I publish in Fast Company magazine gets edited and fact checked by someone else. That’s cool and usually keeps me from looking like an idiot in print. But I much prefer the blog because I think the comments are actually part of the article.
No better way to demonstrate that as with yesterday’s post about Silicon Valley’s VC Disease.
David Hornik, the VC I was talking about, gave a very long reply to my post yesterday. He refuted some things, clarified other things, and had fun with other things. Among the points that Hornik made is that August Capital was one of the few original investors in Seagate. I should have looked that up before publishing. A fact-checker at the magazine probably would have caught it and kept me from looking stupid. But, this let David get a great point across: that he was positioned unfairly by me and let him clarify his remarks on Friday. In the old world a journalist would have been able to throw David under the bus and David wouldn’t have been able to do much about it except write a letter to the editor.
In the old world of publishing you never would have seen his reply and if, for some reason, it would have run, it would have been a month later separate from the article, not combined with the article within a few hours of its publishing, like Hornik’s comment was here.
Journalists who fight this system (and readers who don’t check out the comments) are missing the point. This is a participatory media, not a one-way one, and, while it has a different editing system (the editing is done post publishing, not pre publishing) it’s pretty clear to me that this system arrives at the truth a lot faster than anything on paper does.
But, you gotta read and participate in those comments! Lots of old-schoolers don’t like that dirty work.
Oh, and David also joined in over on the FriendFeed thread.
Thank you David for providing evidence that blogs can make everyone, including the author, smarter.
A new search engine appears: will you use it?.
Tonight a new search engine showed up. Techcrunch has the details. So do tons of other blogs. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan has a great post about the new engine, Cuil, (pronounced “cool”). I wasn’t pre-briefed or anything. Like I said last week I’m trying to get out of the PR game and try to get back to what made me like blogging: sharing information with other users.
So, has anyone figured out a good way to quickly test search engines? I haven’t. Everyone has their own search terms that they use to judge whether or not an engine is interesting.
I remember when I was trying to convince my dad to move from Alta Vista to Google he had a bunch of very specific scientific searches he’d do. He used to love showing me that Alta Vista had more and better results. I kept at it. After about two years he switched to Google too.
Today isn’t like back in the Alta Vista days. Back then there was porn and spam that was showing up in my result sets. Google doesn’t have those problems and usually works for almost anything I search for. When it doesn’t work, I try some of the other engines, or just refactor my search and it almost always works. I can’t remember the last time I was totally stymied by Google.
But, what’s great about the blogosphere is that everyone gets to participate. Look at TechCrunch’s early searches and the comments that are coming in. I, too, think that Cuil is going to face an uphill battle based on my early searches.
On the other hand, let’s give Cuil the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say it actually was a better search engine. I still doubt many people would switch. Why?
Distribution.
Huh?
Well, my Firefox browser has Google built into it. Most people have no idea how to switch it. Most people, on our tests, really don’t understand much of anything except that that little box probably now goes to Google. The Google.
It’s so pervasive of an expectation at this point that many people type URLs into that box. Or, type the word “Yahoo” into that box so they can get to their email and other Yahoo services.
Is Cuil going to be able to get into this game?
No way, no how.
On mobile phones it’s worse. My iPhone has Google built in. No way that Cuil is going to be able to rip out Google and replace that with its own engine.
So, why is Cuil here?
I think it’s a play for Microsoft money. Microsoft needs to get back into the search game, so will continue buying companies to try to get back into the search game. Yahoo, if run by management that’s rational, will probably start doing the same thing.
Look at Powerset. They cashed out early to Microsoft. Cuil probably will do the same thing if it brings enough to the table.
Just for fun, though, and to get back to being a user, let’s try one search:
Barack Obama’s technology policy
I put that into all the search engines without any quotes, just to see which one does the best job. Here’s the result set:
Cuil (gave an error, couldn’t find any results)
Google. (best of the three)
Yahoo. (close to Google, but not quite there)
Microsoft. (by far the worst of the big three, didn’t bring the technology policy up as the first result).Anyway, I did a bunch of other searches on Cuil and they are trying to be different, that’s for sure, but I didn’t see enough of a need to try it out further.
How about you?
FriendFeed search for “earthquake.“
Twitter search for “earthquake.“Interesting how we compare experiences in the live web now.
It’s a 5.8 5.4, centered near Chino Hills.
The passionates vs. the non passionates.
Every morning now I start out by reading FriendFeed. This morning there was a post by Steve Spalding called “the Web’s dirty little secret” which is about how small the audiences are here in the tech blogging world.
Back in May Dare Obasanjo wrote a post about early adopters and how software developers should discount them.
I’ve been doing a bunch of thinking about both of these things. How can entrepreneurs reach both passionate and non-passionate audiences? Do both matter? When? (Clearly crossing the chasm requires going from the passionates to the non-passionates, or the early adopters to the late ones, if you would rather use that lingo).
So, what’s this talk about passionates vs. non-passionates?
Well, one thing I’ve learned over and over is that you can build an interesting business if you have 100,000 people passionate about something. Anything. I used to be an associate editor at a magazine about Visual Basic back in the 1990s. We had millions of dollars in revenue and our distribution was 110,000 copies. That launched conferences and all sorts of things that made money and brought in revenue. Life was good for a while.
On the other hand, if you pick a business model that requires huge numbers of people, like Facebook advertising that might only pay $.25 per 1,000 views, then you gotta go big or go home. How do you do that, though? I wish I knew, cause most companies who try doing that go under before they can acquire enough customers. Passionate users are easier to get than non-passionate ones. It’s why Amazon and Google don’t do much advertising. Reaching the non-passionates is very hard and they’ve decided to just invest in making a better product, reaching through the passionates to the larger audience. Other companies, though, feel they can convince the non-passionates and advertise heavily. Lifelock is a good example of that. Lifelock isn’t something I ever see bloggers or Twitterers talking about, but the company is constantly advertising that product and, from what I hear, raking in big revenues.
Same happens on the Web. People who can build audiences of the 100,000 size can build decent businesses on the Web. Just talk to Gary Vaynerchuk, who does WineLibrary.tv. He has audiences of 60,000 to 100,000 watching each show.
Getting to 100,000 engaged users is reasonably easy to do pretty quickly. But the VCs are needing companies that have 10s of millions. iLike, in Seattle, for instance, is touted by Facebook as one of their favorite applications, which got to 30 million users in a very short time. I remember meeting founder Hadi Partovi shortly after they started right around the time I left Microsoft and they didn’t have a single user. How did they get so big so fast? They had a great app that was out on the first day of Facebook’s new app platform launch (took many sleepless nights to develop that app and then keep it up as it got to six million users in the first few weeks after launch).
Even with iLike, though, I bet that most of its users are passionate about music. 30 million users is a drop in the bucket compared to people who listen to music around the world. Convincing non-passionate users to try something is really difficult.
Some things that I’ve noticed about late adopters (er, non-passionates) and how they use computers they really are much different than the passionates who I usually hang out with. They really don’t care about 99% of the things I care about. FriendFeed? Yeah, right, they haven’t even heard of it, and if I try telling them about it, they say “why would I do that?” See, most people just want to work their 9 to 5 jobs, go home, pop open a beer, sit on the couch, watch some movies, play with their kids, etc.
Stay up all night talking to strangers? No way, no how. Most of the non-passionates I know are just barely trying out Facebook (90 million users). Twitter? Yeah, right. (Two million).
Heck, these people don’t even know how to use an address bar in a browser. Think I’m kidding? I’ve watched how normal people (er, non-passionates) use computers. You go to a search box, and type “Yahoo” even if you are already on Yahoo. Think I’m kidding? Ask the engineers over at Yahoo how many times a day people search for Yahoo on Yahoo’s own search engine. Same over at Google.
When I travel, I look at what people use — thanks to being on planes a lot in the past few months I get to see what people use. Most are using technology I used back in 2000. That’s eight years ago, or 100 in Internet years. I look at them the same way you’d look at them if they told you they just started using a telephone.
The exception? Blackberry. But show me a Blackberry user that knows how to look up Google Maps or uses the Web more than once a week? I’ll show you a passionate. I’ve talked to hundreds of people in airports and I haven’t found a Web-using Blackberry user yet that’s not a passionate (meaning, someone who is really passionate about technology).
And let’s not forget the fact that of the six to seven billion people in the world only about a billion even have a computer in the first place. So, that means that five to six billion people really don’t care about Windows or OSX or all that.
We can be so arrogant sometimes to forget that there are more people who are NOT like us, than who are like us in the technology world.
That said, is Dare Obasanjo correct? Should new companies ignore early adopters?
No, and no.
If Bill Gates had done that Dare would not be working at Microsoft today. Microsoft TOTALLY served the passionates for the first decade of life. Heck, its first product was a compiler!
Early adopters are the ones who will adopt your product or service without you spending hundreds of dollars to get them to try it.
A Kraft food executive once told me they spend about $40 just to get a new customer. Think about that. For FOOD!!! Something that we all need to survive!!!
So, if you want to build a profitable business with very few resources you MUST forget about the non-passionates. They won’t adopt your product unless you are lucky enough to be something like iLike. And even then your chances are pretty slim. I remember when Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, had a great review in USA Today and only got 40 downloads of his product. You think their ads are going to work any better? No, and no and no. Give it up, the non-passionates will probably never adopt your product and if you get them, it’s probably through some very good luck (iLike couldn’t happen if it were launched today, they needed the Facebook paradigm shift to happen for them to be successful).
So, where do we go from here? I don’t know, I’m doing a lot of work to find out how the tech industry can reach more of the non-passionates. There aren’t a lot of easy answers.
Some tips for getting seen by more people, passionate OR non-passionate.
- Believe it or not, Valleywag has a great one. Make your page load faster! It’s amazing to me when I find a blog that doesn’t load fast.
- Make it work great on mobile phones. So many blogs load slow on even my new 3G iPhone. Mashable, I’m looking at you.
- Get more celebrities that the non-passionates care about to use our technology. I remember when one of MySpace’s founders told me that’s how they got to be the biggest social network in the world. They got musicians and others in Los Angeles to use their service. That led to the non-passionates joining up (my brother’s bar is on MySpace and he’s definitely a non-passionate). Kyte.tv’s CEO tells me that getting 50 Cent to use his product was a sizeable breakthrough.
- Make your blog easier to find by Google. Normal, non-passionate users use search engines (mostly Google, according to my friends who study such things). Here, do a search for “blog commenting systems.” Why does Disqus come up first? Why isn’t JS-Kit or Intense Debate even on the home page? (Other than in a TechCrunch article?) If we want to grow our audiences we’ve got to be better about appearing in Google.
- Write more well-thought-out posts. My traffic has been going up in the past few weeks because I started writing longer posts, again, and getting off of the PR treadmill of trying to just cover every PR story out there. Louis Gray is seeing the same trends, because he’s been doing longer “thought pieces” instead of just writing about the latest shiny object.
- Get the advice of other people who have large audiences. This was Tim Ferriss’ advice after our cameras were off when he was on WorkFast.TV recently — he wrote the Four Hour Workweek. He said to look at last year’s hit book author and call them up (if they are hot right now they probably won’t have time to talk with you in depth, he said).
- Carry a video camera everywhere to get those cool little stories. Why? Check out this story from the Knoxville News Sentinel.
- Register your blog on FriendFeed. Many bloggers are noticing they are getting pretty sizeable traffic from FriendFeed. Why? Because that’s where a lot of passionates are now spending their time and they are the ones who are likely toclick on links, try things out, talk about them with other people, etc.
What am I doing? Well, I’m trying to point my camera at people outside of the tech world, but who are influencers in their own circles. Like today’s video of Tim Ryan, congressman, who also Twitters. As everyday people hear more stories about how the new technology is being used by innovators, they are much more likely to try it out themselves.
So, how are you getting non-passionates to try your stuff out? What is working out there? Do you even care? Or do you care more about reaching passionates? And, if so, what’s working for you?
Getting things done over at FastCompanyTV.
If you haven’t checked into FastCompanyTV lately, we’ve been posting up a storm of innovative people.
David Allen, best-selling author of Getting Things Done, tells us how to get more done.
Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, shows me how to use Mind Mapping software and tons of other tools to become more productive.
Philip J. Kuekes, computer architect on the quantum science research team at HP Labs shows me how they are finding new ways to make processors and memory a lot smaller and power efficient. Does he make you feel like you are a few brain cells down on him? I always get inspired and wish I studied more math and science in school when I meet guys like Philip.
Senator Tom Coburn tells me why he likes bloggers, among other things. This was part of our whirl-wind tour of Washington DC.
Microsoft Senior Vice President, Chris Capossela, tells me how they are going to keep all office workers from going to Zoho or Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Seriously, he laid out what Microsoft Office team is trying to do to bring collaborative features into the most-used of Office suites.
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein talks to me about a variety of issues, including child protection, which is what he’s most passionate about.
Congressman Tim Ryan talks to me about Twittering from the House of Representatives. Among other things. Heck, did you catch that a Democrat is now proposing that we build nuclear power plants and get people to buy electronic cars? We wouldn’t have had THAT conversation a decade ago.Whew, and there’s more smart people to listen to over on FastCompanyTV too.
People have been talking about Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” all day. What did they do? They demoed a “future operating system” to end users, got their feedback, usually positive, and then told them it was actually Windows Vista.
This is the first marketing in some time that made me think Microsoft’s marketing department had a clue about how to deal with its perception problem. Amazing to me that it took so long.
But when I see other Microsoft advertising, why isn’t it aspirational? Why doesn’t it just SHOW something cool you can do with Vista? Or with any of its other products?
Oh, by the way, I’m using Windows Vista to type this to you. My wife and I have been having this argument about Windows. I’ve been having her use a Lenovo X300 laptop that’s really sexy. But she keeps asking for her Mac back. Why? She says it feels better and is nicer to use (when we left Podtech she had to return her Mac). My son isn’t helping, either. He makes fun of us for using non-Mac machines. He even was arguing with HP’s head of marketing last week about how much better Apple’s machines are.
What I’d love to see is a head-to-head competition. Take both home for a week. Which one do you return?
Anyway, all this reminds me of is the power of a good demo. Actually, this is what I have loved about Apple’s stores whenever I go in: they are usually demoing what their machines can do. Walk in and they show you how to do all sorts of stuff from podcasting to digital photography. At the San Francisco store you can sit there and take tons of classes for free and they are usually pretty good and aimed at non-passionate users who are trying to do something specific with their machines.
Question: have you seen a Microsoft advertisment lately where Microsoft talks about what their machines can do? Have you seen an advertisment that shows you their WorldWide Telescope, for instance (that is still my favorite demo of 2008)? Or Microsoft’s Deep Zoom? Or Microsoft’s Surface? Or Microsoft Photosynth (my favorite demo of 2006)?
These are all wonderful technologies that demo very well, but if Microsoft is able to find so many people who’ve just heard that Vista is crappy, but who haven’t actually seen it for themselves (that’s what the Mojave Project was really all about), imagine how many people who think that Microsoft isn’t an innovative company who haven’t seen any of Microsoft’s very real innovations?
Personally, whoever buys and makes Microsoft’s advertising should be, well, let’s just say “Starbucked” since they laid off about 900 people today. It’s amazingly bad and it doesn’t have to be.
Hopefully that’s what they are really learning by doing these little “gotcha” experiments.
…you believe Microsoft is actually going to have a completely rewritten Operating System before Bill Gates dies (which might be 20 to 40 more years).
Unfortunately journalists, like this one in Software Development Times, love to make it seem that Microsoft is working hard on a new, completely rewritten, operating system that will solve all the world’s problems.
Let me assure you they are not. At least not one that’ll be productized before my 10-month-old son sees his 10th birthday.
So, what is the Midori team doing?
Well, THAT is an interesting question that I’d love to ask Eric Rudder.
Here’s my theory: it’s a forcing function on the .NET team.
See, Bill Gates wants to make it possible to use a LOT more .NET in operating systems. That’s really what went wrong with Longhorn, er, Vista. Gates tried to make too much of the operating system dependent on .NET and .NET just wasn’t ready for an operating-system-level deployment/use case yet.
It was like trying to build a 100-story building, getting to level 50, and noticing that the thing is starting to lean. They had to tear it all the way down, put a new foundation in, and rebuild. That’s what happened to the Longhorn team. The fact that Vista got done at all is a pretty amazing engineering feat that software engineering schools should be studying for years.
Anyway, how would it be a forcing function? Well, by building an OS completely in .NET they can discover where .NET is deficient. They can use it to bug the .NET team to improve that system until they get it good enough to use it underneath a new operating system.
Let’s say it takes them 10 years to iterate through all the things that .NET needs to do to become a real operating-system-level platform/language. Imagine then that Microsoft could roll that stuff into a version of Windows. Wow, wouldn’t that be useful to have rafts of the OS all built on .NET and hosting a new kind of .NET app?
Imagine writing drivers in .NET code. Or networking infrastructure. Or other things deep down inside the OS.
Now we’re getting someplace.
One other reason a total rewrite wouldn’t be done? Bill Gates believes strongly that you shouldn’t break old apps. Lotus 123 still runs on Vista. As long as Bill is around they won’t break those old apps. A total rewrite would break all sorts of apps.
Anyway, what do you think Microsoft is up to?
Cuil: Why Iâm trying to get off of the PR bandwagonâ¦.
Sarah Lacy, tech journalist for Business Week, has a post that demonstrates well why I am really trying to get off of the PR bandwagon.
See, on Sunday night a ton of blog posts all went up. Most of which were pretty congratulatory and hopeful that there was a “Google competitor.” Tech journalists desperately want there to be a competitor to Google. Why? Monopolies are boring to cover. The best tool a story teller has is when there’s conflict. I like to tell people this world is just like high school. Think back to high school.
In your high school, did anyone talk about the geeky kid who stayed after school to build a science fair project? In my school, which had lots of geeky kids, no, not usually. But if there was a fight in the quad would everyone talk about the fight for days afterward? Yes.
Journalists thrive off of conflict. That’s why we want a competitor to Google so badly and why we play up every startup that comes along that even attempts to compete with Google.
The problem is that competiting head on with Google is not something that a startup can do.
Let’s say someone really comes out with a breakthrough idea in search (which would be a feat all on its own, since Microsoft and Yahoo are spending tons of engineering time trying to find something breakthrough too). If they got all the hype that Cuil did (NPR and CNN played it up, not just tech bloggers) and people really liked it, they would spread it around like wild fire.
Do you have any clue about the infrastructure that Google has in place to handle the kind of scale that it sees? Try half a million servers. Half a million!!!
Think about that. How much money does that take to build out? Hint: a lot more than $30 million that was invested in Cuil.
So, Cuil set itself up for a bad PR result in the end. Either it wouldn’t meet the expections (which is what happened after people started testing it) or it would fall over and fail whale like Twitter has been for the past few months (because it wasn’t built to handle the scale).
Notice that other search companies don’t build up their PR like that. Mahalo never says it’s going to be a Google Killer, just that it’s going to do some number of searches better. In fact, Mahalo uses Google on its own pages.
Why PR works and why I want off
Note that Lacy said she wasn’t pre-briefed on Cuil (Techcrunch says that the company briefed every tech blogger and kept them from trying the service before release). That’s not true: I wasn’t briefed, either. But now, go back and look at the TechMeme rankings. Were either my post (which was harsh, but fair, but published several hours after the original wave of PR-briefed bloggers and journalists) or Lacy’s on there? No.
See, if you want to earn links and attention in this world you’ve got to be first, or at least among the first articles to go out. I’ve seen this time and time again. I call it the Techmeme game.
But it affects Digg and Reddit and FriendFeed, too. The stories that got discussed the most on those were usually among the first crowd.
I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m going back to what makes me passionate. I don’t get passionate when reading a press release, or listening ot some executive on a conference call (I was dragged onto one of those the other day and I stopped it mid-stream, saying, “can I come and see you face-to-face?”)
I also find that I’m getting back to reading my Google Reader feeds, looking for other people who are truly passionate about technology or business and who are looking for innovative approaches to either.
There’s a TON of interesting blogs there that never will get to Digg or Techmeme. Same thing over on FriendFeed. Lots of interesting stuff being discussed on the Internet that never will get the “Cuil” treatment, but is worth your checking out.
For instance, I’m just over the top about Evernote. How did I miss that for so long? Funny that a PR team brought me that, too. So, sometimes this game DOES work out, but note that I didn’t try to be first to get Evernote, I just kept seeing it getting praise from the bloggers I read.
Anyway, help us all get off the PR bandwagon. What are you passionate about? If you could go anywhere in the world and meet with any geek, executive, or company, who would it be?
What are you finding is bringing real value to your life? Hey, even go outside the tech industry. Is there something we should all be checking out and giving as much attention to as we’re giving to Cuil?
The third startup just wrote me to ask us to hold our videos that we’ve done with them until the TechCrunch 50 and Demo conferences slide by in early September.
Rafe Needleman, of CNET, demonstrates that I’m not the only one seeing this happen to.
One entrepreneur noted that TechCrunch’s crew looked very tired and told him that they had gotten 1,000 submissions to dig through for TechCrunch 50.
What does this do?
Well, it holds the best companies in PR hell. They can’t talk to the press if they want a shot at being on stage at either of these companies (which does bring PR and venture capital attention).
Funny that we’re back in this situation.
Anyway, that just gives other companies an opportunity. I was over at Google and Adobe yesterday making plans and was met with open arms. In fact, they welcome any blogger to contact them to build a relationship and check facts. Just write press@google.com and they will try to help you out. They told me that they mostly are a reactive PR team because Google has hundreds of products/services that are iterating all the time (far different than, say, Apple, who only iterates once in a while).
So, if you could troll around Google with a video camera, what team would you go see?
My first choices? Android. Knol.
It also makes me realize that we need a new, how-to show that’ll be more practical. Sort of like a Make Magazine, but for people who are trying to use this new world. For instance, did you know that on Google Maps you can put in an address and then the word “restaurant” after it? It’ll show you that address and all the restaurants around it. I did that yesterday to find restaurants around Adobe’s headquarters.
That’s something that many people won’t figure out about their iPhone’s maps, though. There are thousands of little things like that that, if you knew them, make your life a lot neater.
Anyway, Rafe, why don’t we get together and do a joint project or something this next month. It’ll probably be our last chance to do some R&D for a while.
Oh, and today on WorkFastTV we’ll have David Kralik, Newt Gingrich’s Internet Strategist on. He’s going to show off a ton of eGovernment stuff. For those who don’t know, Newt is known for doing the most innovative stuff in government and I can’t wait.
That will be live at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, come join us, and then come join us in the interactive session right afterward.
Warning: your calendar is in danger with Appleâs Mobile Me.
Apple’s Mobile Me just deleted every single item from my Outlook calendar on Windows Vista. Gone. Deleted.
Luckily I have them backed up on Google, but what a scare.
Apple’s secrecy keeps them from properly testing out their apps with tons of users, the way other companies do who aren’t so worried about secrecy.
Other people are reporting the same thing. Do not buy Mobile Me. Do not install it. Be warned.
Update: Walt Mossberg, tech journalist for the Wall Street Journal, said to avoid Mobile Me too, weeks ago. I should have listened to him.
Update 2: this post got a separate conversation going over on FriendFeed.
The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo.
I read hundreds of blogs. Follow thousands of people on Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m seen as THE poster boy for the Silicon Valley echo chamber. But I don’t see much about Meebo, certainly not even close to the amount of talk that, say, Twitter gets (and Twitter has 1/10th the traffic that Meebo does). Why is Twitter on TechMeme nearly every week, but Meebo isn’t?
Well, recently I started seeing some mentions of them on sites like Read/Write Web so I wanted to find out what was up.
First of all, I was blown away. Second of all, I found I was so interested in the fact that this company has more than 20 million 35 million people using its services and most for hours every day (I heard the number wrong, and they corrected me this morning). Yet you probably don’t know Meebo’s CEO’s name. Unless you’re on the service you probably don’t even know about it.
Which is why I spent 40 minutes videoing a conversation with Meebo’s CEO, Seth Sternberg, learning about what’s happening in its business. This is like an MBA-level course on the latest advertising and community trends. I also got a separate tour of their offices, if you want to see what those are like.
This is why I do video. It’s one thing to read a blog post, it’s a whole nother thing to get a demo, have a conversation, and learn some new stuff. As good as the Read/Write Web post is, I never got an understanding of how and why advertising on Meebo is working so well. Any entrepreneur who is trying to make an advertising business model work should watch this interview for some tips.
So, why is Meebo underhyped? We talked about that after the cameras were off and I theorized one theory:
That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic).
Seth countered and said that’s probably true, but that he’s noticed that most of his users are on Internet Explorer, not Firefox or Safari. So, the audience that’s using IM is much more mainstream than the audience that most tech bloggers hang out with.
Which points to another thing I’m learning here. If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.
What a busy week. Where did it all go? I know I’ve been very active on FriendFeed lately. You can see all the things I liked there (I like things to tell you I think they are interesting for you to read) or see all the things I’ve commented on. I’m about to pass 5,000 things since February that I’ve liked, lots of fun stuff there.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about all week is this discussion of how to save journalism. Any discussion on that topic that has Jay Rosen show up has got to be good (he’s a journalism professor at New York University, among other things). It’s a demonstration of what I love about FriendFeed. The marketers, the idiots, the trolls, the jerks haven’t moved in in a big way yet. Yeah, they are there, but the moderation of FriendFeed is distributed to the edges (moderation of comments is left to the person who starts a topic and everyone can block jerks and spammers from their view) so things are still pretty interesting conversation wise.
Anyway, join in and let us know if you see any other way to save journalism.
âThe bloodiest, sickest game from EAâ.
On Wednesday we hung out at Electronic Arts all day long getting to know the team of Dead Space, a new horror survival shooter-style game that has already won a bunch of awards at industry conferences (it won best new action/adventure game at the recent E3 conference).
I recorded a couple of videos with my cell phone, but the really good stuff will come in about two weeks (we’ll be headed out to New York next week to meet with FastCompany team members). Unfortunately getting a cell phone video out of EA was very hard, I hear Qik.com has a new version coming soon that’ll fix the problems when you are in a low-bit-rate situation like I was on Wednesday.
Here’s a talk with team members while they watch the first group test the game (there were a bunch of game industry journalists and bloggers there to play the game for the first time). Love it when they say “this is the bloodiest, sickest game from EA.”
When one of the key technologies is a “dismemberment algorithm” you know this is a scary game.
This tester, a gaming journalist for GamingBits.com, said that the audio is “just scary.” You get to see him play a little bit of the game in this video, where he died for the seventh time in a row in the same spot.
Some things I learned.
1. Artist Ben Wanat is one demented dude. I wonder what his nightmares are like. Cause the drawings he was showing us were pretty damn scary! (He did a lot of the original art that turned into what you see on screen). In this video Ben comes on and gives you some of his thinking behind the art. Sorry it’s so poor quality video, but I only had my cell phone ready for this and only had an 80 kbps connection to get video out.
2. They have a new lighting engine that lets them have many more light sources than any other game they’ve done. The technology behind that is pretty interesting. One thing I learned: the average movie has six hours PER FRAME of computer time to render a movie, but in a video game they have about 30 milliseconds to render a frame.
3. The process of making a game, getting it sold to executives, and built out is an interesting one. First a small team of artists and creative people get together and build the concept of the game. Draw out a ton of art to show what the feel and look of the game will be. Then they build a prototype for a small slice of the game to give executives a sense of what the game will do and the market it’ll go after. Only then do they get a green light to build the game out totally and take it to market.
4. This is a big game with about 100 people working on it. They wouldn’t give me investment figures, but when I worked at Microsoft I heard that a game of this calibre could cost about $10 million or more to produce.
5. This is the first game that I’ve seen where humans are starting to look good in the game. They said they spent a lot of time in image capture (where an actor wears a suit that digitizes movement) to get that part right.
6. Dead Space is aimed at an older crowd, not a game for young kids. It is very scary and lots of Alien-style creatures.
7. They say that a game of this calibre can only be done in a few places in the world because they need a combination of both entertainment expertise as well as geeks who can build the technology underneath the game.
8. I asked several EA employees about working conditions (and even got rid of the PR people to have some good conversations) and they say that the attitude of management toward work hours has dramatically improved but still could be improved more. For those who don’t know, an anonymous blogger called EA Spouse, wrote that she never saw her husband because he was asked to work so many hours. That led to a lawsuit and changes inside the company. I even heard that the test team has a bet with the dev team that they won’t be forced to pull an all-nighter to get the game out. Nice to see that a little attention out here on the blogs led to what seems to be major changes internally. I also really appreciate being able to hang out for more than a day with all sorts of employees without having PR accompanying us everywhere, that’s a testament to how things are going too.
Anyway, looking forward to showing you more when we get our editing done.
Analytics expert on WorkFast.tv today.
Avinash Kaushik is one of the world’s top authorities on Web Analytics (his new book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day is already getting critical acclaim and when I first met Avinash he had quite a crowd around him at the eMetrics conference. Now he’s working on Google’s Analytics team and this morning he’ll be on WorkFast.TV at 10 a.m. Pacific Time today. Join us live to watch the show (the recording will be up next Monday if you miss it). After the show we’ll have an interactive “after show party” on my Kyte channel at 10:35 a.m. Join us there if you want to ask Avinash a question, or leave a question here and I’ll ask the best ones on air.
Even if you miss all that you should read his blog, really is a great place to learn more about analytics.
Front-row seat to John Edwards sex scandal.
I had no idea that when former Senator John Edwards invited me to come along on his plane back in December of 2006 that I would have had a front-row seat to a sex scandal. John Edwards today admitted he had an affair with Rielle Hunter back in 2006.
I, along with a few other journalists I had a front-row seat and have some of the only photos of Hunter.
See, stuff like this always seems to happen to “other people.” People you don’t know. Never have met. Don’t care about.
In this case, though, my wife, Maryam, interviewed Elizabeth Edwards. I interviewed John and sat next to Hunter. All while not having any clue about the secret they were all keeping.
It reminds me that as a blogger/journalist I have to always capture images, not knowing what the real story actually will turn out being. And always keep looking beyond what I was being presented.
The photo above is Hunter sitting next to Edwards. I never saw them behave inappropriately in front of me and Edwards let me hang out with him nearly around the clock.
There are lots of stories on Google News. Personally, my thoughts go out to everyone involved.
Here’s all my photos of the trip with John Edwards where he announced he was running for President of the United States. Unfortunately the videos I shot are gone, PodTech pulled them down and I don’t have the copyright on those, so can’t repost them.
Here’s my photo of Hunter:
PR-less launch kicks off a stack overflow of praise.
This is the way I love to learn about a company.
No, not from a PR firm.
No, not from a CEO (or anyone else from the company) calling me up or writing me email.
No, not on some junket.
No, not on stage at Techcrunch 50 or Demo or Under the Radar or some other conference.
No, not by reading Mashable.
No, not on Twitter. Or FriendFeed. Or Facebook. Or MySpace. (I really hate direct messages, by the way).
No, not in an advertisement.
“OK, Scoble, knock it off, how did you learn about it?”
A beta tester (a developer I know and trust) came up to me today and said “this is the coolest thing I’ve used in a long time.”
He then gave me a peek at his screen. I agreed after seeing what was on his screen.
But instead of letting the world that, I asked Twitter and FriendFeed if anyone had heard anything about the service yet.
They had. And how.
So, what is it?
It’s StackOverflow. A community knowledge exchange, for programmers, that is being built by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (both famous programmers).
It’s in a closed beta so far (you can sign up for the beta on the StackOverflow Blog), but look at the replies I received on Twitter:
Joel Gray: “@Scobleizer As a participant in StackOverflow, I have to say that it is great. Good community of folks so far, quite easy to get answers”
Levi Figueira: “@codinghorror Man, I’m loving stackoverflow!! Great resource and userbase!! Let’s hope it doesn’t get wild after it goes “public”… :)” and “@Scobleizer I’ve been following their podcast since #1 and am part of the beta!! It’s the best thing for developers ever! “
Phil: “Impressed with StackOverflow. They’ve really thought through usability and trying to create a sticky experience.”
Michael Krakovskiy: “stackoverflow beta rocks!”
Chris Benard: “@Scobleizer Here are a couple of screenshots I just took for you: http://is.gd/1nul and http://is.gd/1nuo ” and “@Scobleizer It’s an experts-exchange for programmers, without all the annoyances. “
schwarzwald “@Scobleizer furthermore, stack overflow is experts-exchange without blackhat SEO techniques (cloaking) and annoying superfluous graphics.”
If you are exciting your early users like this you will get found. I so wish more companies built their stuff this way. Go slowly. Built PR by building a great service and turn your users into your PR agents. Oh, yeah, and blog and podcast about it to get to this point (but look at how they built a community, they didn’t get all “pushy” about what they were doing — they just were informative and inclusive).
Keep in mind that this is only a few days into beta and they only have a few hundred beta testers, but this is going to get big pretty fast because it is a well-thought-out service that already is getting major praise from developers, who are very hard to get to hype anything.
Believe me, we all will hear about your product if it really does rock. There’s no reason to go crazy with a PR firm if you build something that people want. Atwood and Spolsky are proving that right in front of us.
This got me fired up about the tech industry again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this kind of user passion.
UPDATE: Jeremy Toeman has a good rebuttal to this post (he’s the guy who first showed me Bug Labs and Sling Box).
Behind NBCâs Olympics Website.
Eric Schmidt, one of the developers on NBCOlympics.com, the official Olympics Web site for the USA, just dropped by Fast Company’s offices in New York City for a chat. We used to work together at Microsoft. I turned on my cell phone and videoed Schmidt and we talked about the site and he gave me lots of insights. Yesterday in the afternoon the site was seeing 4,000 new video plays started every second. They are still counting up all the views from yesterday, but it looks like somewhere around seven million unique visitors hit the site yesterday alone. In just a few days they’ve uploaded around 200 hours of video and are expecting to have more than 2,000 hours on the site. Four years ago there was just a few dozen hours of video up on the site. Thousands of machines are needed to encode and serve the video and the site. Interesting conversation, hope you enjoy a little look behind one of the people who worked behind the scenes for months on this site.
Streaming video comes to iPhoneâ¦.
I just got a note that Qik just shipped into beta on the iPhone. I’ll be testing this out and will let you know what I think. One thing, the quality isn’t expected to be as good as what I get on my Nokia phones for two reasons:
1. The compression is being done in software on the iPhone, where on Nokia phones there’s hardware support for that.
2. The camera isn’t close to as good, particularly in low light.But, that said, lots of people only have iPhones, and don’t have Nokia phones, so this will let a lot of people do streaming video from their cell phones that couldn’t do it before.
One thing: if you do this, it’ll probably really drain your batteries (my Nokias only last about 40 minutes when I do streaming video) so beware of that if you try to stream something long.
UPDATE: One big thing is you need to jailbreak your iPhone before you can load this app. That’s very unfortunate because most people will not jailbreak their phones.
What do the freaking tech bloggers want?.
UPDATE: if you are a PR person and you are reading this blog, any vitriol aimed at the PR industry is NOT aimed at you. Probably. :-)
I remember working at a small tech startup back in the mid 1990s. Winnov. We made video capture cards and videoconferencing solutions. I was the director of marketing and I used to think that if only Walt Mossberg or Dan Gillmor (who back then was the tech journalist at the San Jose Mercury News) or some other big-name journalist would pay attention to us that we’d have it made.
Eventually I realized that wasn’t going to happen, for a whole lot of reasons, but that it didn’t matter. We still had a lot of very happy customers and they seemed to find us through word-of-mouth and other efforts (we had booths at the big trade shows and I hung out in forums and Usenet newsgroups and went on radio shows, and built relationships with people who did video streaming and stuff like that). Not getting their attention made me focus and come up with innovative ways to get the word out about our products. Same thing I did at NEC, which is what led to me selling Vic Gundotra hundreds of Tablet PCs at Microsoft (and later getting a job there). Vic didn’t find me in the Wall Street Journal, he found me in an obscure newsgroup online.
Over the past few days there’s been a consternation about the future of PR. Mostly based on my rant about PR the other day and how it’s so refreshing to hear about a new company from its users first, especially when those users are very excited about the product.
Here’s just a small selection of the blogs I’ve seen talking about PR and bloggers in the past day or two:
Steve Rubel (Vice President at Edelman, which is the largest private PR firm in the world) talks about how dismayed he’s been at the PR industry lately.
Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, talks about how dismayed he’s been at the PR industry lately.
Brian Solis, who is one of the few PR people who builds relationships first with everyone in the industry (it’s hard to remember the last industry event where Brian wasn’t holding court and if you’re a tech blogger and you haven’t yet met Brian you probably haven’t been blogging for more than a week or two), stands up for the PR industry (and links to pretty much everyone who is writing about this today).
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, in Mashable, says Rubel is onto something.
Jeremy Toeman, who I don’t think of as a PR guy, but rather something else (he’s the only guy that I know of who has gotten other people in the industry to work in a food bank, for instance) also stood up for PR in the comment section of the blog post I wrote the other day.
Jeremy Pepper writes “STFU” to bloggers in his headline, which also sticks up for the PR industry.
There’s a few others talking about this topic that are linked to here on TechMeme.
Why so much noise, both pro and con, about the current state of PR?
I’ve been blogging very little over the past month. I wanted to get off of the Techmeme bandwagon and take a fresh look at what I, and FastCompanyTV are doing. This latest blowup also got me to look at which PR practicioners I find are good for the industry and which ones are bad.
Why so much negativity on PR lately? A few reasons:
1. PR people had gotten wise to how to get their stories onto Techmeme, which made us all look like sheep. We not only were writing the same stories everyone else was, because that’s how you get onto Techmeme, but the PR people were figuring out how to work us into that circle jerk, so they could get their messages out to the world. That is opposite to how life was four years ago back when I worked at Microsoft. Back then most PR people couldn’t spell blog and didn’t know what they were. I’m to blame for helping them figure it out, because we wrote a book about corporate blogging that a lot of them have read. I’ll burn in hell for doing that, I think, if we can’t find a new way to serve the industry better than we are currently.
2. Company after company came to us who weren’t building sustainable businesses that cared about real customers. They only cared about whether they could get onto Techmeme or whether bloggers or “social media experts” would write about them. I feel like I’m just a new social media press release conduit and, while that’s building pretty sustainable businesses over at some other tech blogs, it isn’t what I started writing a blog for. More on that in a second.
3. Bloggers are being commoditized. If we just go to press conferences, or only deal with embargoed news, and report on the same news everyone else is reporting on, well, then, just what reason is there for our business to exist? How will we build an audience that’s any different, than, say, TechCrunch or Fortune’s or ZDNet’s efforts? How will we justify to our sponsors that they should sponsor us as we are doing the same thing as everyone else? Especially if we have a smaller audience? Yeah, advertisers really love getting THOSE kinds of sales pitches. Imagine walking into a big company and putting up a Powerpoint that says “we’re the same as Techcrunch, but smaller.” What’s the chances you’ll walk out with a sponsorship?
4. We aren’t having fun (as Rubel says, discovering new stuff is fun, getting new stuff fed to you at conferences and press conferences where everyone else learns the same news at the same time isn’t nearly as fun) while fun isn’t a good reason to do much, following my heart got me here and if you aren’t having fun as a blogger your writing, reporting, etc will suffer and you’ll start generally just being a jerk. Not to mention if you want to compete with people who do love what they are doing you’ll need to be keeping up at 2 a.m. and if you aren’t loving what you are doing you’ll turn on the Olympics instead and not get the job done. Most tech bloggers love being able to tell you about something cool that you don’t yet know about. Read Engadget, for instance. Their best writing is when they are showing you a new gadget that they found on their own. Yes we all read them for their coverage of Apple Press Conferences but I can tell you that isn’t nearly as fun as walking around with some product designer and getting a first look at a really new product (I was there when Ryan Block got his first look at Bug Labs’ prototypes).
5. We’re all looking for a breakthrough idea or product and they are just very rare. Look at Microsoft’s latest photographic technologies as an example. Now, look at my “to blog” folder, which has 5,000 items in it. How many get close to something as cool? Not many. If we only wrote about Photosynth, though, our blogs would be pretty damn sparse. So we’re faced with writing about stuff that doesn’t come up to that bar. It makes us anxious, because we want to tell our friends (er, you, about cool stuff). Like, have I shown you the Shazam iPhone app yet? It’s very cool, it lets you identify music you hear in a shopping mall or on the radio and it works pretty darn well. But for every Shazam, or Evernote, or Twinkle, there are tons of really stupid apps and if we want to tell you about more than 20 apps we’re going to have to dig into some really lame apps.
“Scoble, you’re rambling, why did you get into blogging?”Oh, sorry. I got into blogging to celebrate the people who are improving our lives through technology and to hear their stories about how they developed it, so that we’d encourage other developers to bring us even more useful technologies.
Scratch that. I got into blogging because Dori Smith and Dave Winer wanted to know what was happening behind the scenes while working at a computer magazine/conference company.
Back when I started blogging I was helping plan a conference for programmers. I just told stories about what I was seeing and hearing and who was doing cool stuff. No one in PR told me about stuff, I just talked about what I was seeing. As my audience grew, more and more PR people started pitching me stuff. They started seeing me as a gatekeeper. The way I looked at those old-school journalists like Mossberg and Pogue and others.
I remember being flattered by the first wave of PR. When Munjal Shah, CEO of Like.com, told me he’d rather have me write about his company than have Walt Mossberg write about it, I was flattered but remembered telling him that Mossberg was still more important (and still is, in my view).
But that was flattering because only a few CEOs were like Munjal and I think he was pulling a little flattery on me to get me to pay attention. And, he knew that doing a different style of PR would get him noticed. It did, too. He now has millions of users and has been on MSNBC and CNN (he told me later that those brought huge numbers of users to his service).
“Scoble, you’re rambling again, get to the point. What is it that tech bloggers want?”
In the early days of blogging I wanted to do a few things:
1. Impress Dave Winer and Dori Smith.
2. Get stuff into Google so I could pull it out later.
3. Share what I was seeing because I had access to unique people and technology that the mainstream press wasn’t writing about.Today I still write for these reasons, but I’d add on some more:
4. Get more people access to interesting experiences. It’s impossible to have 100,000 people visit Facebook’s headquarters and have a tour, for instance, but it’s very possible to have that many participate in a live cell phone tour.
5. Help us get more out of the technology that we’re all seeing. There are about 800 services on the Office 2.0 database. How many of those have you actually used? For most people? None. For most of my readers? I’d guess about five. Out of 800. So, can I increase that to seven? By showing you a demo of something that would improve your life (and mine?) I know I’m using Evernote now because of a demo I got a few weeks ago, for instance.
6. Learn from thought leaders on how to improve our lives. That’s why I’ve had people like David Allen and Tim Ferriss and why I want to get Gina Trapani from Lifehacker onto my shows. They show you a different way to live and how to deal with our changing lives.“So, Scoble, what do these things have to do with PR?”
Well, the smart PR people (like Solis and Toeman) bring me into experiences like these. I still remember when Toeman hosted a dinner for a small group of us, including Dave Winer, where he and a guy I didn’t know showed me a prototype of what became Bug Labs. That was PR. But it was personal, small, and wasn’t aimed at getting 60 journalists to tell the same story to each of their audiences. At that point he didn’t care if he got Bug Labs onto Techmeme. Just wanted to talk about where the product might go and wanted to get feedback.
Hey, PR 2.0 includes listening!
Now I’m getting to where I’m getting fed up with a large swath of PR and why you’re seeing such vitriol aimed toward PR people.
See, some of them (er, most of them) are treating bloggers as just “channels of message distribution.” We’re there to take the news they are pitching and regurgitate it and spit it at all of you.
That exercise it totally not interesting. For all the reasons I’ve gone over here. It doesn’t let me figure out my own take on the story. It doesn’t let me hear from customers who are wildly happy. It doesn’t let me even figure out if the product works (many of those kinds of stories are pitched to bloggers who don’t even have any expertise in what they are pitching). Here, do another exercise. Let’s assume that StackOverflow was pitched to me by a PR company in an email. Would it have gotten coverage here? No. It doesn’t let me really find my own voice, or build an audience that’s any different than anyone else on Google Reader or TechMeme.
First off, why would I write about yet another Digg copycat? Second of all, how would I know that the community there really is good and has some unique aspects? Third of all, how would I really know that it solves real pain, the way that StackOverflow does?
“OK, Scoble, wrap it up. What are some things that you tech blogger types want from PR?”
1. What we really want is an exclusive interview with Steve Jobs. Oh, OK, we’re not going to get that. So, can we get an exclusive with Jonathan Ives? Oh, OK, we’re not going to get that either. :-) (PR teams tell me that handing out an exclusive like that will only be done for journalists with the largest audiences). Well, OK, but let’s see if we can find a different angle on the same topic. When I traveled to Israel with Sarah Lacy I noticed she made plans to interview the same people I did, but she interviewed them alone so she got a different story than I did. Now compare to what you see on TechMeme. How many people get the same story about the same thing. PR people are doing themselves a disservice when they just treat journalists and bloggers like cattle. Every time I get an email pitch it reminds me that I’m being treated like cattle. Especially when I get together with Arrington and Malik and Lacy and other bloggers and we see that we got the same pitch. Moooooo!
2. I want to see some passion about building a great service for customers that solves their pain. I don’t want to hear about how they are hoping I write about them. That turns me (and others) off. I still remember when my brother asked Dave Winer for a link and Dave got very angry at him. Why is that? Because Dave wanted my brother to give him a reason to link without having to beg for the link. Bring me a customer that says “XYZ product solved this need and transformed my life” and that’ll get my attention. It’ll get even more attention when that customer calls me and wants to talk about you and your service. Why? Because it tells me that the company is focused on the right thing. Watch what Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug does. I remember the first time I met him because he didn’t want me to write about his company. He just started talking about customers and why he loved doing what he’s doing. I later learned that he had more than 100,000 people who paid for his service when his competitors, like Flickr, are free. THAT got my attention and it made me want to learn more about the company and the service.
3. If you really have a killer product and a killer service I don’t care how you get ahold of me. Call me day or night at +1-425-205-1921. Email me at scobleizer@gmail.com. Or camp out on my front lawn. It doesn’t matter. If you are as good as SmugMug, I’ll make time for you. If you are a me too product, though, that doesn’t solve a real problem or doesn’t thrill its customers, I’ll see through that and I’ll be less likely to call. Some exceptions? I hate Facebook and Twitter direct messages. I can’t answer those, so don’t even try.
4. Don’t call us (especially me) if you want to get on TechMeme and that’s your main goal. First of all, my TechMeme juice is going down because I’m writing less and less. So if that’s your goal I can already tell you haven’t done your homework (Mike Arrington is the first guy I’d call if that was my goal). But what do other tech bloggers want? Well, even Arrington (who does like getting on TechMeme) tells me he’d rather get there because he found a kick ass company or product before anyone else.
5. For those of us who are on the TechMeme game we MUST be in the first group. That’s how this game works. That’s why Arrington won’t cover you if you don’t let him be in the first set of people to talk about you. But don’t assume that we’re all playing the TechMeme game. I’m a video guy. I want to have an intimate look at your company/product/people. We can do that days, weeks, or even months after you ship. My Evernote video, for instance, was done long after they first launched. I still got excited because the people I hang out with were praising it on blogs and twitters and I wanted to get a good look for myself (I’m a visual learner, I don’t often get the point of a product just by reading about it on TechCrunch).
6. Don’t just pitch the product. When I first heard about FriendFeed I thought “so what, Jaiku and Social Thing do the same thing.” But then I found out that two of the founders were the guys who ran the Gmail and Google Maps teams. Now my expectations went way up (and, sure enough, that service has delivered huge value to me). If you have an interesting person working for you, let me know.
7. Video bloggers need different things than text bloggers. When I do a text blog often times I can just sit on a conference call, pull out a quote, and write up the news. But if you want to get me to put you on video it really helps if you think a little bit about the visual. Don’t shove me into a conference room with 40 other bloggers. I probably won’t even unpack my video cameras. Nothing is more boring visually. But bring me into a someone’s office and magic happens.
8. Why don’t you get a ton of FriendFeed’ers to vote up your own blog? That’d guarantee I’d see it, and I’d see that people are happy about what you’re doing. I’m far more likely to cover you if that’s the case. I follow more than 3,000 FriendFeeders. I even keep track of all the things I like there. It’s quite an interesting feed to watch.
9. Build experiences where we can get to know you. Microsoft recently held a Digital Photo Summit. That was really great because there wasn’t any pressure to report on anything, just a chance to get to know you, your team, and see some of the things you are working on. Same thing at EA last week. By providing experiences where we can get our hands on your products, meet your team, etc, we’ll discover new story ideas together. I found a few at EA that I would never have known about if they didn’t have an event where we could hang out for a day.
Anyway, I’m sorry for generalizing the PR industry. The good ones are invaluable to my mission. They know who they are. The bad ones probably aren’t even reading my blog anyway, so that’s why I shouldn’t piss and moan about the PR industry. I’ll just piss off the good ones and the bad ones won’t care. Just chalk it up to letting off a little steam.
Back to answering email and setting up interviews…
The most important Google Tool for businesses (that you probably have never used).
Yesterday, when I spoke at the New Media Expo I showed off the Google AdWords Keyword tool. Then I asked how many people had used this tool before. At least 1/3rd of the audience didn’t raise their hands. Now this is an audience of professional online content developers. People who SHOULD know how to use tools to find better ways to market their content.
If 1/3rd of this audience isn’t using this tool, the chances that most businesses are using it are between zero and none.
What does this tool do? It helps you see the searches that people are actually doing on Google. Let’s say you had a quilting store. Do you really know what searches people are actually doing to find information about quilting? If you haven’t used this tool, no, you don’t.
This tool also is important to figure out how many people are searching for a particular topic. This helps you test your assumptions of how many people are really searching for something. This will help you choose your title tags, and, even, your content.
It’s not the only tool that online marketers should be using, either. In this video Avinash Kaushik, who is one of the world’s top analytics experts, and now works at Google, gives you other tips for how to use tools like this one, along with measurement tools to refactor your Web site’s content.
Are you doing this stuff? Why/why not?
For those of you who do use this tool, do you have any advice for people who are discovering what this tool does for the first time?
Donât cry for journalistsâ¦.
Look at this photo from the Olympics. I count about 75 photographers, each decked out with a $9,000 (or more expensive) camera and lens (and most of them are carrying several cameras).
This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.
This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.
Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance?
Or, Somalia?
Or, New Orleans?
Or Iran?
Or Congress?
You’re telling me that 67 of the world’s most expensive photojournalists are needed to make pictures of a sporting event and that they couldn’t be better used somewhere else?
OK, let’s say you’re correct. Well, then, don’t ask me to cry when your jobs go away because your business model is being disrupted. Don’t ask me to cry when a gossip magazine breaks a story that you should have. Don’t ask me to cry when Huffington Post gets more page views than your Olympics photos do.
We get the journalism we spend our attention on.
You saw my last post where I showed how our journalistic resources are being squandered on a sporting event.
But now is time to look into the mirror. Truth is there’s lots of great journalism being done to uncover the important issues of our day. We just don’t care.
Rick Smolan is one of the most successful photographers of our time. His book, Day in the Life of America, is still the only coffee-table photo book to reach the top of the New York Times Bestseller list.
Yet last week when I visited him in his home in New York City he told me that only three newspapers reviewed one of his latest works: Blue Planet Run, which includes stunning photojournalism from hundreds of the world’s top photographers about the coming water crisis (which is already killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world and is a more immediate problem for billions of people than Global Warming).
Look in the mirror. Do you care? I don’t. I’d rather watch a sporting event.
Our server logs demonstrate you are the same way. You’d rather watch the Olympics too and you know it.
Anyway, Rick and Amazon are giving away the book for free now so you can see some great photojournalism. It’s a stunning book. Shocking.
Speaking of sporting events, I interviewed the guy who designs sports stadiums around the world (he designed Seattle’s Safeco Field, Los Angeles’s Staples Stadium, among others. I learned a lot about his creative process).
I also, last week, interviewed one of the developers behind NBC’s Olympics Website.
See, even I am giving my audience what it wants: sports! :-)
We get the media we spend our attention on.
Making better Facebook video 606 pixels at a time.
Yesterday I did a couple of interviews at Facebook’s headquarters that’ll be up over the next couple of weeks. But in between I stopped at Chris Putnam’s desk. I’ve known him since he was 16, living in Atlanta (he showed me a web service he built so that people on the Internet could listen to him practice his piano). Anyway, he’s the guy who built Facebook’s video system. Interesting that he has three monitors on his desk. One of which shows how many videos are sitting in a queue waiting to be encoded.
That got me to ask him what’s some things that would help his encoder out and also give you the best possible quality on Facebook for video.
He said that making your videos 606 pixels across would keep his encoder from having to scale down your video size. I did a Google search on 606 pixels and haven’t found anyone else that’s shared that data.
Which shows one of the reasons I blog: to get things into Google so I can pull them out later.
Ahh, the interesting things you learn by asking questions of the geeks who build the technologies we all use. Thanks Chris and Facebook for a most interesting day yesterday.
I’m getting back into using Google Reader. I took a few months off (mostly) because of my fascination with FriendFeed but found that everytime I opened Google Reader I was getting smarter than by reading TechMeme or FriendFeed or Twitter.
There’s real meat in the 600+ blogs I subscribe to (and 500 friends on Google Talk bring me even more news).
Anyway, I’ve been trying to write a note on each blog I share. Today I looked at that and realized it’s a blog about other blogs.
If you notice that I’ve been blogging here less lately, it’s because I’ve spread my attention out to other places. Hope you’re enjoying this because I only share things that impress me and now that I have the ability to put a note on each item I share, hopefully you find that more useful too.
Where Google and Facebook are fighting the next monetization battle.
Think about something you’ve purchased recently. How did you decide to buy that thing?
In my buying behavior I find that I can split it up into three phases:
1. Need generation. This is what happens when someone shows you something you didn’t know you wanted, but that you immediately get interested in. It might be a TV show (how many people will visit China over the next few years because of what they are seeing on TV at the Olympics. I bet a ton).
2. Research. You’ve decided to buy something, say a new car, but now you need to figure out which one is best for you. Some of the things you do here are to ask your friends, look online for reviews, read Consumer Reports, etc etc.
3. Purchase. You’ve decided what you want, now you go looking for the best place to complete the transaction.Think through to the best businesses on the Internet. Most that I can think of fit into one or several of these three phases.
Google, for instance, makes billions of dollars from advertisers who want to help you complete a transaction. Do a search for digital cameras, for instance, and there you’ll see ads.
But competing with Google is not really possible, even for a huge multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft.
So, since Google has pretty much locked up the last phase, where is the next Internet monetization battle taking place?
Both Facebook and Google are beating each other up to lock up the next phase: social recommendation and participation.
Google calls this FriendConnect.
Facebook calls this “Facebook Connect.”
Yesterday I visited Facebook to get an up close look at Facebook Connect. I had previously attended the Google FriendConnect launch and even videoed that with my cell phone.
It’s interesting, though, that both of these systems haven’t gotten widespread use yet. It’s also interesting that the teams both struggle to explain why a normal business would use these technologies in their own business’ sites. At least in language that a normal person who isn’t a Facebook addict would understand.
So, let me simplify into a sing
