Thinking about media as a platform

Back in my InfoWorld days (2004-ish?) I somehow woke up to the idea that media could be a platform.1 Whereas my professional media experience prior to that was all about creating user experiences that resulted in better page views and conversions, something changed in the way I perceived how online media was supposed to work.

I didn’t have language to use for it at the time (still working on it, actually), but I knew it wasn’t inspired by the “openness” and “walled garden” metaphors so much. Neither concept reflected the opportunity for me. Once I saw the opportunity, though, the shift happening in online media seemed much much bigger.

In a presentation at the Bioneers conference back in August 2000 (below), architect William McDonough talked about designing systems that leverage nature’s strengths for mutually beneficial growth rather than for conservation or merely sustainability.

He tells us to design with positive results in mind instead of using less bad materials,

Similarly, the implications around the “openness” and “walled garden” concepts get clouded by the tactical impressions those words draw for someone who has unique assets in the media business.

It’s not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It’s about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.

When you look around the Internet media landscape today you see a lot of successful companies that either consciously or subconsciously understand how to make media work as a platform. MySpace created a fantastic expression platform, though perhaps unwittingly. Wikipedia evolved quickly into a massive research platform. Flickr and del.icio.us, of course, get the network effects inherent in sharing information…photos and links, respectively. Washingtonpost and BBC Backstage are moving toward national political information platforms. Last.fm is a very succssful music listening platform if not one of the most interesting platforms among them all.

All of these share a common approach. At a simple level, the brand gets stronger the further their data and services reach outside of their domain and into the wider market.

But the most successful media platforms are the ones that give their users the power to impact the experience for themselves and to improve the total experience for everyone as they use it.

My commitment to flickr, del.icio.us and last.fm gets deeper and deeper the more I’m able to apply them in my online lifestyle wherever that may be. We have a tangible relationship. And I have a role in the wider community, even if only a small part, and that community has a role in my experience, too.

The lesson is that it’s not about the destination — it’s about the relationship. Or, if you like the Cluetrain language, it’s about the conversation, though somehow “relationship” seems more meaningful than “conversation” to me. Ask any salesperson whether they’d prefer to have a relationship or a conversation with a potential customer.

Ok, so user engagement can extend outside a domain. Where’s the opportunity in that?

Very few media platforms know how to leverage their relationships to connect buyers and sellers and vice versa. They typically just post banner ads or text links on their sites and hope people click on them. Creating a fluid and active marketplace that can grow is about more than relevant advertising links.

Amazon created an incredibly powerful marketplace platform, but they are essentially just a pure play in this space. They are about buying and selling first and foremost. Relationships on their platforms are transactional.

Media knows how to be more than that.

eBay and Craigslist get closer to colliding the buying/selling marketplace with deeper media experiences. People build relationships in micromarkets, but again it’s all about a handshake and then good riddance on eBay and Craigslist.

Again, media knows how to be more than that.

The big opportunity in my mind is in applying the transactional platform concept within a relationship-building environment.

A more tangible example, please…?


Washingtonpost.com is an interesting case, as they have been more aggressive than most traditional media companies in terms of “openness”. They have data feeds for all of their content. And they have an amazing resource in the U.S. Congress Votes Database, a feed of legislative voting records sliced in several different ways. For example, you can watch what legislation Nancy Pelosi votes on and how she votes.

Unfortunately, everything Washingtonpost.com offers is read-only. You can pull information from Washingtonpost.com, but you can’t contribute to it. You can’t serve the wider Washingtonpost.com community with your additions or edits. You can’t engage with other Washingtonpost.com community members in meaningful ways.

Washingtonpost.com thinks of their relationship with you in a one-to-many way. They are one, and you are one of many.

Instead, they should think of themselves as the government data platform. Every citizen in the US should be able to feed data about their local government into the system, and the wider community should be able to help edit and clean community-contributed data (or UGC for you bizdev folks).

For example, I recently spent some time investigating crime data and how that gets shared or not shared in various local communities. Local citizens could provide a very powerful resource if they were empowered to report crime in meaningful ways on the Internet.

Washingtonpost.com is as well suited as anyone to provide that platform.

Now, imagine the opportunity for Washingtonpost.com if people around the US were reporting, editing and analyzing local crime data from Washingtonpost’s platform. They would become a critical source of national information and news across the country. Washintonpost.com would be well poised to be the primary source of any type of government-related information.

The money would soon follow.

As a result of becoming essential in the ecosystem of local and national citizen data, they would expand their advertising possibilities exponentially. They could create an ad platform (or partner with one) that is tuned particularly for their ecosystem. Then any number of services could start forming around the combination of their data platform and their ad platform.


You can imagine legal services, security, counseling and financing services wanting to reach directly into my local Potrero Hill crimewatch community. The marketplace would probably be very fluid where people are recommending services and providers are helping the community as a whole as a way to build relationships.

Washingtonpost could sit behind all these services, powering the data and taking a cut of all the advertising.

Again, it’s not just about being “open” or taking down the “walled garden”.

The “openness” and “walled garden” concepts which often turn into accusations feel more like objectives than strategic directions. If “openness” was the goal, then offering everything as RSS would be the game.

No, RSS is just step one. The media platform game is much more than that.

It’s about both being a part of the larger Internet ecosystem and understanding how to grow and design a future that benefits lots of different constituents. You can be a source in someone else’s platform, a vehicle within a wider networked platform and a hub at the center of your own ecosystem all at the same time.

I would never claim this stuff is easy, as I certainly failed to make that happen while at InfoWorld. The first place to start, in my opinion, is to stop worrying about “openness” and “walled gardens”. Those are scary ideas that don’t necessarioly inspire people to build or participate in growing ecosystems.

Instead, it’s important to understand “network effects” and “platforms“. Once you understand how media can be a platform, the world of opportunity will hopefully start to look a lot bigger, as big as the Internet itself, if not even bigger than that.

It’s at that point that you may wonder why you would pursue anything else.

1 It shouldn’t be surprising that my thinking changed while surrounded by thinkers like Jon Udell, Steve Gillmor, and Steve Fox to name a few who all waved the web services flag and sang the software-as-a-service song before many of the leading IT efforts at some of the most innovative companies knew how to put those words into coherent sentences. Those concepts can apply to lots of markets, media among them.

The magic of Hack Day

Even after seeing Hack Day work internally a bunch of times and now twice in the open format with external developers I’m still amazed every time. There’s something magical about the event.


Yes, ok, obviously, if you attract a bunch of creative people, give them the right kind of stage to express themselves and an audience of peers to listen to them then you are going to be surprised one way or another. And if you add some rules that make it feel like a game, then the competitive spirit will naturally motivate people to reach further.

It seems obvious now, but it amazes me all the same. I’ve never really experienced anything quite like it in the workplace.

In many ways, the experience both as a host and as a participant at the event feels similar to the intensity and even panic you get working at a startup that suddenly feels like it’s turning the corner. Everyone is operating at full speed. You know you’re on to something hot. But you have no idea what will happen next…and you’re pretty sure that you will fail if you stop running at full speed.

It’s also a little bit like the mid point in the sport season when you’re on a team that might actually win the championship this year. You know you can do something great, but you have to focus and make it happen. Intuition takes control of every decision. There’s no time for analysis.

One of the powerful lessons of Buddhism is the idea of letting go of the things we want to control. It’s incredibly difficult to throw an event where the outcome is so completely unknown. I can’t tell you how much time and energy we spend trying to remove all the rules and controls and precedents that come with being at a high profile company like Yahoo! in order to run Hack Day the right way.

Asking people to understand the event without experiencing it is a tall order. There’s always a “this will never work” look on their faces while you tell them that we invite a bunch of people over to build stuff. And then comes the panic while the actual hacking phase of the event silences the socializing aspect from earlier in the day. It can be uncomfortable hosting a party for a bunch of people who aren’t talking to each other.

This long quiet period carries on into the night, essentially a hum of keyboards banging away and murmers amongst team members, where you start to wonder if any of the hacks will be any good or if there will be enough to present or if anybody even cares. Part of you also knows the magic is happening right now…brains are crackling and the creative fire is blazing amongst these people who are intently focused on their computer screens.

The demos are a good indicator of the success of the event, but reading the follow up posts out in the blogosphere brings it home for us as hosts. Like the bride and groom after a wedding, we’re never totally sure how well the event went until people tell us. Here are some of my favorite quotes about Hack Day London:

Josh Clark: Lightning! Blimps! Submarines! And, um, Machine Tags!
The event was thoroughly engaging and altogether humbling. The amount of know-how, creativity and sheer geekery in the room was overwhelming. It’s just plain exciting to be part of a profession and community whose frontiers are expanding so fast.

Neil Ford
All in all, it was a fantastic, if tiring, two days. The total number of hacks presented at the end was 73, all of which were of a superb standard. I think it was impossible to leave the event uninspired.

Ryan Morrison: Land of the Living
I loved the event, I had one of the best times of my life and it’s re-inspired my love of getting down and dirty with code.

It’s incredibly gratifying to know that people enjoy the event as much as we enjoy putting it on. It isn’t an easy event to run, and knowing that people get something real out of it makes it all worth it.

If you were there at Alexandra Palace at Hack Day, we would love to hear what you’d like to see next time. We’re always looking to improve it. We’re watching the blogosphere, so post away, or feel free to comment.

Photo: Andy Piper

Freebase.com is hot

I don’t get a chance to review products often enough these days. But when I heard about Freebase I knew I needed to dive into that one as soon as I was able.


Fortunately, I was invited only yesterday to take a peak. And I’m officially joining the hype wagon on this one.

Someone once described it as Wikipedia for structured data. I think that’s a good way to think about it.

That image leaves out one of the most powerful aspect of the tool, though. The pivot points that are created when a piece of data can be interlinked automatically and dynamically with other pieces of data creates a network of information that is more powerful than an edited page.

The Freebase screencast uses the movie database example to show this. You can dive in and out from actor to film which if you wanted could then carry on to topic to location to government to politician to gossip and on and on and on. And everything is editable.

Now, they didn’t stop at making the ultimate community-driven relational database. They exposed all the data in conveniently shareable formats like JSON. This means that I could build a web site that leverages that data and makes it available to my site visitors. I only need to link back to Freebase.com.

But that’s not all. In combination with the conveniently accessible data, they allow people to submit data to Freebase programmatically through their APIs. They will need to create some licensing controls for this to really work for data owners (NBA stats data and NYSE stock data, for example). But that’s getting easier to solve, and you can see that they are moving in that direction already.

Here’s a brief clip of the screencast which shows some other interesting concepts in action, too:

Suddenly, you can imagine that Freebase becomes a data clearinghouse, a place where people post information perhaps even indirectly through 3rd parties and make money or attract customers as others redistribute your data from the Freebase distribution point. They have a self-contained but infinitely scaleable data ecosystem.

I can imagine people wanting to manage their personal profile in this model and creating friends lists much like the typical social network except that it’s reusable everywhere on the Internet. I can imagine consumer goods producers weaving coupons and deals data with local retailer data and reaching buyers in highly relevant ways we haven’t seen yet.

Freebase feels very disruptive to me. I’m pretty sure that this is one to watch. And I’m not alone…

Michael Arrington: “Freebase looks to be what Google Base is not: open and useful.”

Jon Udell: “Freebase is aptly named, I am drawn like a moth to its flame.”

Tim O’Reilly: “Unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”

John Markoff: “On the Web, there are few rules governing how information should be organized. But in the Metaweb database, to be named Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and even meaning”

In some ways, it seems like the whole Web 2.0 era was merely an incubation period for breakthroughs like Freebase. Judging by the amount of data already submitted in the alpha phase, I suspect this is going to explode when it officially launches.

The Hack Day London Video

I’m heading back home from Hack Day London tomorrow. What a spectacular event.

I did my best to capture the behind-the-scenes action this time, as I think the Hack Day event process itself is really interesting, too. Of course, sharing the day-to-day work would be frightengly boring, but you can at least get a sense of what happens the day or so before Hack Day starts in this video here:

What’s easy to forget is that the event process itself is treated like a hack. We break the rules. We invent on the fly. We don’t know if it will work.

Anyhow, there’s more to come, I’m sure.

(Apologies for the horrible editing in this video…it’s my own hack contribution…unpolished, experimental, and a little bit broken.)

How to fix building construction bureaucracy

Sometimes I forget to step outside of our little bubble here and see how people use or in fact don’t use the Internet. When I get that chance I often wonder if anything I’m doing in my career actually matters to anyone.

Usually, however, I’m reminded that even though the Internet isn’t weaved into every aspect of everything, it has great potential in places you might not consider.

For example, I’ve been remodelling my house to make room for a new little roommate due to be delivered in September. I’m trying to do most of the work myself or with help from friends and neighbors. I’m trying to save money, but I also really enjoy it. It’s a fantastic way to reconnect with the things that matter…food, shelter, love and life.

Well, I made the mistake of working without permits fully aware that I probably should have them. It’s my natural inclination to run around bureaucracy whenever possible.


As luck would have it, just as the pile of demolition debris on the sidewalk outside my house was at its worst, a building inspector happened to drive by on his way to another job. He asked to see my permit to which I replied, “The boss isn’t here. Can you come back later?”

The building inspector just laughed. After pleading a bit and failing, I started making calls to get drawings and to sort out the permits.

It was at this moment I realized how much building planning and construction could benefit from the advances made in the Internet market the last few years. The part of construction that people hate most is the one that is perhaps the most important. And it is this part that the Internet is incredibly well-suited to improve.

Admittedly, the permit process was not actually that painful and relatively cheap, too. I have spent in total maybe 1 day dealing with permits and drawings, so far, with a bit more to come, I’m sure.

But the desired effect of permitting jobs is sorely underserved by its process.

At the end of the day what you want is the highest building quality possible. You want builders using proven methods with at least semi-predictable outcomes. You want to make sure nobody gets hurt. And you want incentives for people to share expertise and information.

Rather than be a gatekeeper, the city needs to be an enabler.

One of the brochures I read called “How to Obtain a Permit” includes a whitelist of project types. I’m apparently allowed to put down carpets and hang things on my walls without a permit. Glad to know that.

Strangely, after explaining all the ways the city asserts itself into the process, on the very last page of the brochure it then says, “Remember, we are here to assist you. If you have any questions about your project, please give us a call!” I didn’t meet one person in the 6 queues I waded through the first morning who wanted to help me. They were mostly bored out of their brains.

Instead, the city should be putting that brainpower to work finding ways to lubricate conversation and collaboration around solving building problems. If the building community was in fact a community powered by thoughtful city-employed engineers, then I would be much more interested in working with them. I might even become dependent on them.

For example, if they helped me organize, store, print and even share my plans, then I’d be more than happy to let them keep my most current drawings, the actual plans I’m using to build with. If they could connect me to licensed contractors and certified service providers, I’d gladly give them my budget.

As it stands, my incentive is to avoid them and hide information whenever possible.

Imagine if I was able to submit a simple SketchUp plan to a construction service marketplace. I could then sit back and watch architects and interior designers bid for the planning work. My friends in the network could recommend contractors. Tools and parts suppliers could offer me discounts knowing exactly what I needed for the job. I could rate everything that happens and contribute to the reputation of any node in the ecosystem.

Imagine how much more value would be created in the home buying market if a potential buyer could see all this data on a house that was for sale. I might be able to sell my home for a higher price if my remodel was done using highly reputable providers. There would be a financial incentive for me to document everything and to get the right certifications on the work.

Imagine lenders knowing that I’m an excellent remodeller based on my reputation and sales track record. I might be able to negotiate better terms for a loan or even solicit competing bids for my mortgage on the next house I want to invest in.

At every step in the process, there is a role for the city government to add value and thus become more relevant. Then the more I contribute, the more it knows about what’s happening. The more it knows, the more effective it can be in driving better standards and improving safety and legislating where necessary.

My mind spins at the possibilities in such a world. Of course, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But it seems to me that the building permit and inspection business is broken in exactly the places that the Internet is more than capable of fixing.

Crime data stories

My Potrero Hill neighbors tell me that the sweet song of crackling firearms in the evening always begins again in May as the days get longer, hotter and schoolless.

Recently, I witnessed a sample of the gun play happening in the nearby projects, and I decided to do some of my own research to understand what’s going on. The first thing I found was that I wasn’t the only witness to this particular incident:

“Two of the bullets hit our daughters bedroom– one went through the wall and crossed a small portion of the room and lodged in another wall near her sliding glass door.

[The Police] told us that based on the 24 bullet shells they found up the hill on Missouri St. near the public housing, there were two guns involved, one of which was an AK47 the other was probably a 9mm pistol. The police have no idea who was firing the guns and given that there are not witnesses, there is not likely to be any resolution to the incident. The officers were confident that the two bullets that hit the condo were random and not targeted at us.”

There are lots of factors behind violent neghborhoods, and the San Francisco projects are pretty densely representative of many of those factors. But it really irritates me that guns are so prevalent in the area, and, in general, so prevalent in America.

So, I started my journey at the old PotreroHillSF Crime Mashup which apparently doesn’t work any more. There is an ongoing “Police Blotter” on the site, though, with some good reporting.


I then found the official San Francisco Police Department Crime Map. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats. The tool is burdened with legal trappings and strangely fails to acknowledge homicides, though they offer an explanation:

“A homicide may not appear correctly on the map because:

  1. The incident was initially reported as an assault and the victim died some time later from the injuries.
  2. The incident was reported as an arson, and the body was not found until a later time.
  3. A body was found and the cause of death was not obvious to the officer making the incident report.”

I’m hoping that the City has more advanced reporting capabilities internally, as it seems pretty obvious that we have a data visualization failure going on here. I can see some data around assaults, robberies, larceny, vandalism, drug incidents, etc.

But the compelling visual storytelling is missing.

I want to know how many crime incidents in the projects this year involved guns. How many guns in these events are registered/unregistered? How many of the gun incidents were or became homicides vs non-gun related incidents? Where did the guns come from? What kinds are being used?

I suspect most guns aren’t registered which is an argument used by those who think a gun ban would be useless. People who want guns will find them, legal or not. But I also suspect that the victims aren’t carrying guns. Thus, the argument that people should have the right to own a gun to protect themselves isn’t a counterbalancing force. People who avoid violence won’t carry guns, legal or not.

As I progressed with this research I realized that somewhere in between raw data and overt campaigning is an interesting space. Data can help us learn and make more intelligent and informed decisions about how to manage and evolve our society and its rules.

Unfortunately, that space seems more difficult to find than it should be. I should be able to download data for myself or at least be able to visualize the stories behind the data in relevant pictures and charts.

Of course, there’s the fantastic ChicagoCrime.org web site which has done a lot to raise awareness about crime data. Despite the lack of available data from the local government, site owner Andrian Holovaty found a way to collect what he needed to make this site through an automated script:

“Each weekday, my computer program goes to the Chicago Police Department’s website and gathers all crimes reported in Chicago.”

The site has some great info (such as this screenshot of “Armed Robbery: Handgun Incidents”), though I still want to see an editorial lens on this data that puts a bit more meaning behind it.

For example, it only takes a glance to see in this series of Census images of San Francisco that the City is incredibly segregated, something I think many residents choose to ignore under the mask of open-mindedness. Even here, though, the story is incomplete without some intelligence wrapped around the data. What’s the trend? Is it becoming whiter? Where are people going who are leaving?

This same question punctures my happy place every time I exit onto Palo Alto’s University Avenue from Highway 101 and pass what is now a high end office park where one of the most dangerous areas in the country used to exist only a decade or so ago. I’m very pleased it’s a safer place, but do we understand the cost of that transition? Where did those people go? Are they better off?

Yahoo! colleague Micah Laaker pointed me to an interesting project he worked on back in 2002 and 2003 called the Denver Census Tract Animation Project. He worked with Citizen Mapmakers to trend movement of the African-American population in Denver from 1960 to 2000. Here’s a snapshot of their work:

I really like the way they visualized data to tell a story here. We need similar visualizations for crime data.

The InfoPlease “School Shootings” site gets closer to telling a story about guns just by focusing on a type of statistic and representing it. What a powerful domain name! However, the data here is still pretty raw and limited. This is hugely important information, but there’s an implicit argument here that should be made much more explicit with actionable information and analysis. In its current state it’s just telling us that there are a lot of school shootings (a surprising number in Europe, actually).


The Citizen Crime Watch site for New Orleans gets even closer to what I want to see. Similar to ChicagoCrime.org, they visualize with your standard data-on-a-map mashup, but the hover links point to coverage in the local media. I’m suddenly given a much more human window into the crime scene, and I can read about each event. For example, on April 9, 2007, there was a homicide in a trailer park:

“…Officers found Williams lying on the floor of the trailer with blunt-force trauma to her head. Emergency medical technicians declared her dead at the scene. An autopsy shows she had been beaten to death, said John Gagliano, chief investigator for the Orleans Parish coroner’s office.

The trailer is in a trailer park at 6801 Press Drive run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Although the trailer park is near the campus of Southern University, the chancellor, Victor Ukpolo, said neither faculty nor students live there.

The murder is being investigated by Detective Harold Wischan, who can be reached at (504) 658-5300.”

I’m very thankful for local reporting from sites like Nola.com, The Times Picayune, and community leaders such as Mike Lin of PotreroHillSF and the increasingly active Yahoo! Group Potrero Hill Parents Association who all help surface this kind of information, but it’s not enough. The City needs make it easier for its residents to both report on things that matter to us and to collect the data, filter it, and act on it.

People will always want greater access to information. This is particularly true in communities where poor decision-making creates mistrust:

“Under pressure from constituents who say New Orleans police stonewall requests for crime data, the City Council’s criminal justice subcommittee took police representatives to task Wednesday, calling for a faster, freer flow of public information…When asked for a written breakdown of policy and procedures relating to the release of public information, Maj. Michael Sauter, the head of technology, told the council most of that information was ‘not meant for the public.'”

Similarly, Rick Klau has begun experimenting with this kind of thing in response to the Magnetix toy recall incident. He calls it “Open source parenting” and observes that bottom-up community-driven politics is likely to be more successful than anything a politician can enable:

“If the government is under-staffed and under-funded to help parents avoid harmful toys, then why can’t we help ourselves?…Give thousands of parents the tools to easily identify harmful products, leverage the community’s ability to provide visibility to legitimate threats while minimizing less serious risks, and quickly disseminate information that could be instrumental in avoiding a serious accident.”

I’m suddenly wondering what role politicans will play if communities are able to form solutions to issues locally, nationally and internationally on their own. Maybe instead of legislators (or merely professional campaigners/marketers), politicians will become community managers.

I also start wondering what politicians do all day if they can’t sort out ways to curb violence in our neighborhoods. I don’t see why anyone living in this country or any other should have to worry about whether their child will be shot accidentally in his or her bedroom by stray AK47 bullets or intentionally while at school.

I’m convinced the answer is in the data that is already being collected in various government crime databases. And I’m sure the answer is related to gun access.

Where is Tufte when you need him?

IDG does the right thing

For a company that avoids PR so actively, IDG has recently launched itself onto the media stage with great vigor.

The closure of InfoWorld magazine a month ago signalled the end of an era across the magazine market, and then Colin Crawford’s conflict with Harry McCracken resulted in a very public slap on the wrist from IDG headquarters.

IDG Chairman Pat McGovern isn’t known for tolerating mismanagement at any single business unit. He gives each business unit leader great control, but that comes with responsibility. As people have joked in the past, McGovern gives them enough rope to hang themselves.

Here’s how Business 2.0 described the turn of events:

“In a rare and dramatic victory for editorial independence in today’s dismal magazine climate, PC World has ousted the CEO who spiked a story critical of a major advertiser — Apple Inc. — and reinstated the editor-in-chief who had quit in protest.”

What I find most interesting about the PC World story is the fact that both employees have decided to stay at the company. I don’t blame them. It’s a great place to work.

Harry’s profile while already high at the company will become an important symbol for all IDG editors who occasionally get challenged by the business pressures to file fluff. His return means this wasn’t a personal quest for martyrdom but rather a compassionate stand against unpleasant and maybe unethical working conditions.

On the other hand, Colin’s reassignment will create new challenges for an already difficult role as a centralized service in a truly decentralized organization. At a company where credibility is so important, Colin will have to redeem himself to be effective.

But Pat McGovern is not a spiteful man. I wouldn’t find it surprising at all if Crawford gets reassigned yet again when his skills make sense in another context at the company. Chad Dickerson insightfully identified the guiding hand behind the public voices in all this:

“I don’t know the inside scoop of what happened at PC World, but you can bet that Pat McGovern was in the mix, empowering people like Bob Carrigan to make the right decision in the end. In the news cycle, this might seem like a flash-in-the-pan story about journalism, but for me, it’s a story about respect and good business in the long term. Hats off to IDG and Pat McGovern.”

Agreed, Chad. Well done, Pat, Bob and Harry.

Here’s more on the story:

StartupCamp

A few of us went to the Startup Camp unconference yesterday in San Francisco representing YDN’s development tools and services.

What a hoot.

Some of the startup ideas were really interesting, a few were promising but clearly still cooking, and some were just plain silly. For example, the second-place winner for the best startup (“people’s choice” of course) was Mizpee.com, a bathroom locator for mobile phones. It basically fell into all 3 categories — clever, unfinished and a bit mad.

I was glad to see the entrepreneurial spirit so alive and well. Like any dotcom event these days, you certainly get a fair share of chest-thumping and occasionally insane marketers trying to make some noise around vaporware. But I also saw people putting themselves out there, taking the big risk in hopes of at least being able to control their own destiny if not becoming wildly successful. It was a great place for people worried about the same issues to meet each other and share war stories.

The event organizers, Mass Events Labs, were clearly having a good time, too. I spoke briefly with Dan Farber who is ZDNet’s EIC about David Berlind’s role at both companies and how he has done such a good job balancing interests. They have posted a disclosure at ZDNet explaining how things work:

“As a matter of CNET Networks and Mass Events Labs policies, when David covers an organization that is also a sponsor of a Mass Events Labs-produced event, a disclosure will be included with the coverage.”

This is tricky stuff, but David is able to manage it because he maintains such high integrity standards.

For example, we were talking about ZDNet’s site traffic sources, and he mentioned that he holds a hard line against staff Digging their own articles. I thought this was a curious point, as I have Dugg my own blog posts that I thought Diggers would like. Why can’t you Digg yourself? David is clear about the journalist’s role in marketing himself or herself, and he’s right. It’s a similar argument around the ethics of paying journalists a share of the traffic their stories generate…it’s the wrong incentive. They need to get the story right, and everything else is a distraction and perhaps even a conflict of interest.

I was also interested to see what types of VCs were present and how they fit into the scene. Jeff Clavier gave a talk about the basics of getting funding. And First Round Capital meandered around sniffing out opportunities. In both cases, they became very much part of the scene, a presence in the network that makes today’s startups successful rather than an obnoxious members-only club.


As for sponsors or “co-hosts“, Kent Brewster posted a really funny flickr photo set that said a lot about what’s going on here. We were positioned next to the Salesforce guys who seemed to be doing a great job of signing up developers. Sun’s presence as the event sponsor was completely appropriate. Unfortunately, I missed Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote, but I heard it was well done.

I’m really curious to see how this event evolves. It’s a great formula. And the attendees obviously enjoyed it. There’s a lot of potential here no doubt.

Ziff Davis sells its mission statement

Paul Conley rants on Ziff Davis for their latest breach of journalistic ethics. They’ve gone so far as to sell the very text of their editorial mission statement to advertisers. Check out this screenshot:

“If you want to see the single most ridiculous, most offensive, most disgusting and dimwitted thing in the entire history of B2B publishing, then take a look at the Editorial Mission statement of Baseline magazine — the Editorial Mission statement, for god’s sake!!! — where ads have been inserted in the copy.”

Rex Hammock agrees and clarifies his distaste for the intelliTXT model:

“I’m not even opposed to having clearly marked advertising or sponsored content that is interspersed with editorial content. The practice that Paul (and I) oppose is the hidden nature of hyperlinked-text advertising…This is a slippery slope.”

It’s just unbelievable what people will do to their future to get an extra dollar today.

Getting back to basics

There was something really depressing about Web 2.0 Expo that I can’t quite put my finger on. Though when I woke up Monday morning after a weekend of working on my house it started to become more clear.

On Friday I prepared the work plan, rented a truck, and bought some new gear (loving the laser-guided cicular saw). On Saturday four of my friends came around to my house. We removed one wall and put up a new wall. On Sunday I hauled the junk to the dump, bought a bunch of sheetrock and more 2×4’s for next weekend’s job.

(By the way, great tip here, instead of hiring a garbage removal company for $700-1000, rent a 15 footer and just load all your trash directly into the truck bed. Drive it right into the dump yourself and push it out. The dumping cost for me was $75 plus the truck rental fee…which of course was super handy for getting the lumber, tools and sheetrock, too.)

Anyhow, now I have a 2 bedroom house where we once technically just had 1 bedroom. I also have a sore back and aching hands. Shredded skin on my fingers. A bruised elbow. Tired legs. I couldn’t be happier.

Struggling to get my body out of bed Monday morning, I realized I hadn’t thought about or even used the Internet for 3 days. I saved ideas by writing them down in a notebook with a pencil. I used the yellow pages to find things I needed. I contacted people using the telephone.

I wasn’t worrying about the scalability of the construction (only the joists over my workspace), optimizing the collaborative labor (except that they got coffee, food and beer), or marketing my property. I was simply building. With my hands (and a few borrowed ones).

I’ve argued over and over about how the Internet can change just about everything. And though I’m sure there are ways it could have helped me this weekend, there was something deeply satisfying about getting back to basics for a few days, particularly after losing the plot a bit last week.

Somehow the tone of the dialog in the Internet market has shifted away from the fundamentals, things like expanding the network or the concept of the network itself, building the tools and systems and data streams that help people accomplish things, creating the opportunities for new breakthroughs to emerge.


It’s a natural progression for a mature market to start optimizing for revenue gains as the platforms define themselves. I guess I’m just paranoid that the smell of instant fortune is wafting in the noses of sharks and leeches while the revenue models that they plan to exploit are emptier than they know. The spending arms race will surely follow where budgets won’t matter, hiring will get out of hand, and marketing messages will get silly.

But if the market crashes again or worse, violence or viruses erupt in our cities or the planet heats up, I’ll have my hammer ready for building things that people care about. That’s all I need. My trusty hammer. And my thermos. All I need is my thermos and my hammer, and maybe my chair…