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June 10, 2003
Weblog Business Strategy Conference Wrap-Up
My panel is over. I felt like it went pretty well. We talked about start-up experiences, tools, culture, knowledge management, and alternate uses of blogs. The panelists were all well spoken. One issue that came up that I hadn't written about before is the hierarchy issue surrounding what a CIO, for example, might take as a casual response might have a much larger perceived effect. I'd like to do another one of these with a slightly different feel. Ask each panelist for take five minutes to present a case study (with a standard format, perhaps) ands the have the panel comment on each and let the audience ask questions.
Overall the conference has been good. There's been some good information, some insights, and a lot of seeing old friends and making new ones. Dan Bricklin has put pictures up from the conference. His are better than mine. He's got one of those Sonys with the big lens. I've been looking for a new camera and thinking about whether I should get a Canon Powershot A400 (small) or a Canon G5 (bigger lens). I've been leaning towards the A400 since I like to carry it around with me all the time. Maybe I should rethink that.
02:05 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Tony Perkins: The Open Source Media Movement
Tony Perkins, of Red Herring fame, is the last keynote of the conference. He now edits Always On, an online high-tech journal. There is an RSS feed. I've just gone and signed up---mostly because I'm curious about the format and what he's doing.
Tony believes that right now is the cheapest time to start an Internet company---its only going to get more expensive from here. Whatever we did in the past 5 years, we educated 700 million people to have a new behavior: using the Internet. That's an expensive proposition. Its done and we don't have to incur that anymore. There's plenty of people and lots of good tools right now. In the future, it will be more expensive to build a brand, high good people, and overtake the people who start now.
He gives some stats about the always-on generation: 74% of teens use IM every week. 94% surf the web for homework help. 41% use IM or email to talk to teachers. 30% have used IM to find new friends. 17% have used IM to break up with someone.
24 million US households now have broadband---up 2x from 2001. This is in contrast to what many people believe. The "broadband myth" still persists. 42 million TV's worldwide are Internet enabled.
Tony's rules for media start-ups:
- Its better to boot-strap than to go to board of director meetings
- Build a community that advertisers care about
- Create multiple revenue streams
- Build a virtual team
- Trust your gut, but listen to your readers
- Building a media brand is black magic
Tony talks about comments as viewer ownership. Third time this has come up for me. Maybe I should reconsider? Tony doesn't allow anonymous posting---he wants people to own their words. He considers member transparency to be an important invisible hand that guides posting.
AlwaysOn makes money from multiple sources: sponsorship and advertising, producing events, paid membership for premium services, pay-per-drink for AO generated archives, re-selling research and other info products, classified advertising, and AO Media Labs (new network development).
12:12 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Law of the Blog
Mark E. Young, Communications Counsel, PARTNERS+simons is moderating a panel on \"The Law of the Blog.\" The panelists are
- Arik Hesseldahl, Senior Editor, Forbes.com
- Denise M. Howell, Counsel, Reed Smith Crosby Heafey LLP
- John Palfrey, Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
- Catherine E. Reuben, Partner, Robinson & Cole LLP
- Maurice J. Ringel, Esq., Founder & President, Ringel Law Group, PC
Denise makes the point that the root of litigation is interaction and blogs are all about interaction.
John recommends the Creative Commons license and to be sure your copy right statement is baked into your RSS feed. After a question from the audience, John says that you need to make sure you understand the license and what rights are being given away, whether you can legally give them away, etc.
Catherine talks about employee relations. She says not to automatically sign confidentiality agreements when you take a job. Exclude things that are overly broad. Your employer may own your blog.
Maurice says that to the extent a blog may be considered advertising, it may be subject to laws regulating ads.
Arik is giving some specific examples of where journalists have been shut down by their employers for writing a blog.
10:47 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms
David Shnaider, Former President ZDNet, Founder of Prodigy is moderating a panel called \"Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms.\" The panelists are:
- Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, PaidContent.org
- Vin Crosbie, Managing Partner, Digital Deliverance
- Jeff Jarvis, President & Creative Director, Advance.net
- Elizabeth Spiers, Editor, Gawker.com
Jeff says that posting in a forum is like saying something in the bar last night. No one remembers what was said or who said it. Writing it in a weblog is like crapping in your neighbors yard. You've put you're name on it and no one will forget. Their advantages is speed, variety, voices, tools, and interactivity. Weblog tools are the cheapest fastest publishing tools with the widest potential distribution ever. Digital cameras are cheap.
Elizabeth, who writes Gawker.com tells some anecdotes about how the big media pays attention to her blog and others. Gawker is a little bit of a special case because its mostly about the media. Media is big-time narcissistic, so the fact that they read things about themselves is no surprise. My recent experiences bear this out. The media is reading blogs and quoting from them.
Rafat Ali blogs for a living at PaidContent.org. He also runs an email newsletter that is essentially the same content. He says they're complimentary. This is something I've often wondered about. He poses a question: how many of you have read a print publication on wireless? Not many hands go up. He asks: how many of you have read a blog on wireless? Many hands go up. Of course this conference is biased that way. He says:
Blog + database + research reports = big business
Blog + nothing = hobby
Vin makes the point that keeping a journal isn't a fad. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Blogs are online journals. Think of Lewis and Clark, Charles Darwin, and so on. If the net existed when they were writing, they'd be bloggers. Vin believes the media, despite their claims to the contrary now, will start to use blogs, once they understand blogs. He notes that smart media have already begun blogging.
09:58 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Where Blogs Matter
Jason Shellen is the Associate Program manager at Blogger. He's keynoting on Where Blogs Matter. He makes the point that most blogs have an intended audience. What people write is meant to be read and blog writers get to know their audience. That's really true. I have a whole new group of people I know because I write a blog.
Jason talks about some of the things that create community and points to comments as one. I've never enabled comments on my site for a couple of reasons. First, that makes it seem less like my site where I say what I want and more like a bulletin board. Second, I'd rather people who want to comment take the time to write out their thoughts on their own site---I think it encourages more thoughtful response.
Jason says that Google is using a blog called "Google Love Notes" for support to publish notes that they get that the rest of the company should read or see. This is a cool idea. A blog makes this so easy and letting everyone else know the issues that support is seeing through real email messages is a good way to do it.
08:19 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Matthew Berk: Digital Self-Fashioning
Matthew Berk is a Jupiter Research analyst. he's talking about what he calls digital self-fashioning. He suggests some various approaches to this task:
- Anthropomorphic approaches - these are metaphors for reconstituting the body in a virtual world.
- Topological constructions - this treats the network as a virtual place with conversational interaction.
The political backdrop is about
- Freedom of the self - boundary transcendence
- Alienation of the self - a loss of presence
Self fashioning is how people constitute themselves on the net through collections of content. It is done through technologies of the self, which usually take the form of documents or writing. People explicitly act to fashion their identities and at the same time they are fashioned by their context.
Online people constitute themselves as assemblies of documents and other data designed for people to read and establish some relationship. The more structure in and between this content, the greater is its action potential. This structure and meta-data gives the content meaning. Content, like identity, is always plural, differential. These plural collections of content relate to different views of the identity.
Berk defines community as dynamically connected collections of content. Some examples include: Amazon user reviews, Classmates.com, eBay seller ratings, yahoo! groups, AOL profiles, online personals, and, of course, blogs.
Blogs represent a new "technology of the self." They are a pure expression of content management application that have few attached metaphors and are mark-up independent. Blogs represent a tool for self fashioning. The community is a network of interlinked content. Berk points out that other uses of the Internet have lots of metaphors (browsing, navigation, etc.) but blogs do not.
07:38 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Presentations
Remember that presentations are due tomorrow unless you're the betting sort. You can email me your presentations by noon or bring it on a CD. There's no need to run your Sieve code.