Techcrunch has its faults, but can’t be knocked on this fantastic April Fools’ story, which had me (a) relay it to Twitter - thanks heaven for delete and the normal wave of scobleisms to drown it out; (b) draft an indignant blog post. Only a quick peek at the comments set me straight.
Bastard.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/31/techcrunch-has-acquired-fuckedcompanycom/
It’s so sad to hear about the brain drain in the UK recently. Geography is Destiny, said the NY Times in February, stupidly.
Sam Sethi writes recently about the need to be big if you’re going to compete over here - though I understand his (and Mike’s) blog is about to do just that. Tom Coates, Ben Metcalfe, Yoz Grahame have/are all going to the States. Peter Nixey of Webkitchen, who has just departed for San Francisco, writes:
Even in less than 24 hours here it’s blindingly incredibly obvious even to Pete, a friend who’s come out travelling with me, that there is no point in hanging around in London to do a startup.
The people, the technical expertise, the price of living and the weather combine to create an atmosphere of potential here you can almost taste in the air. Visiting San Francisco firmly changes the question from being whether one should come here to how to make it happen.
Back in rainy London (note to self: global warming seems to have devalued this cliche), there’s a climate in the air that says you can’t make your startup internet business work in the UK, because the investors won’t allow it to here. That only the US, and particularly the West Coast, and more particularly the Bay Area of San Francisco is receptive to the NEXT BIG THING. I’m more than a little suspicious of that attitude, to be honest. The atmosphere may well be more heightened in the Bay Area, but I really don’t know if that will make a business more likely to succeed. The millions upon millions spent by webvan (not Bay Area, but close) didn’t make it any less of a crackpot idea.
Y-Combinator - Paul Graham and partners’ mini VC fund, based in SF - typically invests $6K per employee in startups. Are you really telling me that can’t be done in the UK? Their attitude is that it doesn’t take money to be a successful company; it takes a great idea: like reddit, for example, which was profitable pretty much from its inception.
Jean Paul Richter said “cheerfulness is the atmosphere in which all things thrive”. That’s probably true and it’s my own interpretation of the idea of SF, some of its reality and its ability to embrace the pottiest of business ideas. Small examples - digg - three rounds of VC funding from companies based in SF and no closer to a profitable business model. Technorati, same story. Plenty of others, same story.
So what happens when they stop laughing?
At least in London, the museums are still free.
What do MySpace, craisglist and the ‘A listers’ have in common?
Congratulations to Shaun Shull, the inventor of new social media monitoring site Zudos. By coming up with a name whose only rhyme is ‘kudos’, they’re almost guaranteeing good headlines. Which I have awkwardly resisted.
The same thing goes for something like del.icio.us - you’re almost compelled to write about ‘tasty features’, ‘yummy deals’ and other such pap. Not so sure about flickr, in this regard, which rather invites headlines along the lines of ‘on the blink’…
But I digress. Zudos is an aggregator and a search for social media. You start with a blank screen and enter a name. It returns blog posts on the subject, YouTube videos, del.icio.us bookmarks, podcasts, tagged photos, mainstream media sites and voted stories from Netscape.com.
My first impressions are that this is a rather excellent tool for anyone involved in PR or reputation management. Suppose you work for a large multinational, for example - getting the latest from all of these sources on your desktop whenever you need them would be a godsend when it comes to both taking a barometer of the world’s opinion and acting on individual cases. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to search for these things elsewhere - but nowhere can you do it on a single screen. It also works really well - results take about 3-4 seconds to compile.
Missing features? It’s a bit churlish to complain, but a combined RSS feed for your results would be golden. It’s a shame that there’s no digg or reddit results, either, since I believe these both have larger audiences than Netscape.
A little spat has developed this week over something called Liveblogging, which I found quite interesting because it brings up some contentious ideas and opinions about blogging in general. And I’m not referring to the shameful ‘heavy fingers‘ incident that spoiled the Guardian Changing Media conference for one unfortunate woman…
Liveblogging refers to people blogging an event as it happens, typically conferences and so-forth. When I’ve tried, it looks like this, and thankfully, I never hit the ‘publish’ button:
Tall bloke says media doomed cos no use young. Ginger man says maybe right but not yet if right. Woman with long hair - Yeah. What he said. Sky research figures 100mn. 90% of people; 90% of the time.
When someone who knows how to type and listen at the same time does it, it looks considerably more impressive. Like this.
Anyway, the spat concerns live blogging by Naked Conversations co-author Shel Israel of the Social Media Conference in Las Vegas at the beginning of the month. One of the subjects of the blog post, Steve Crescenzo, feels he was misrepresented and cites another liveblog that gives a different account as proof. Various bad feelings and comments ensue. Yesterday, Shel Holtz, who appears to be a friend of both parties, weighed in.
Crescenzo’s main contention (over-simplified): Live blogging is going to lead to inaccuracies. Don’t do it: listen, take notes and write them up later.
Holtz’s retort (over-simplified): Blogging isn’t journalism. Live with the messiness of the blogosphere, which is primed for conversation.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a little uncomfortable about both poles of this argument.
On the one hand, live blogging is here; it’s going to happen; I want the option to do it; when conferences ban it or don’t provide access, it leads to less coverage; it’s often useful if I can’t go myself. I don’t want it stopped.
On the other, live blogging will sometimes lead to mistakes and misrepresentation, and perhaps rather speedy judgements. Yet they do pose as being accurate reports of what took place. If I read your blog post about an event, I’ll probably trust you: I won’t go round comparing it to every other account looking for inconsistencies. While blogging isn’t journalism, it’s not billed as fiction either. Bloggers are increasingly likely to ask for press passes to events, are described as ‘citizen journalists’ and, in many, many cases, deserve such respect. Plus, I certainly feel I should be personally accountable for what I say here, for example. And I expect the same of you. We’re all public figures nowadays, so we have to bear that responsibility for what we attach our names to. To have that categorised as an unreliable mess you shouldn’t worry about too much seems a bit odd, to say the least.
Ah, you say. But blogs allow the right of reply. Barring a couple of notable examples, every blog has comments and people can point out mistakes or reply to criticisms and everything becomes even again. Or alternatively, you can publish your own version of events on your own blog to even things up.
Yes, but… (a) comments have a lesser status than the original post, and aren’t distributed by RSS; (b) they can be deleted, faked and manipulated; and if the blog author retorts, ‘no, you’re still wrong’, then I think they carry the balance of readers’ trust because it’s their ‘place’ and their readers that see that comment; (c) if the criticised party’s blog has a lesser status than the critic’s, then that isn’t balanced - and vice-versa.
Still not quite certain what I think as a result.
So, I’m on a panel about how brands can benefit or suffer from involvement with social media at the forthcoming Blogging4Business event.
Good examples we all know about: Dell (addresses Dell Hell service complaints with its own blog; learns from early mistakes on said blog), Microsoft (developer social network; but also taking stick over its blogger laptop giveaway), Nokia (blogger relations campaign)
Bad examples we all know about: Walmart (pretty much everything they do), Sony (fake blog), Ask (fake ‘underground’ campaign).
I’m on a panel with Antony ‘wrote the book about social media’ Mayfield, though, so I don’t want the examples that he’ll bring up - five seconds before I’m due to speak - leaving me with a contribution that goes something like ‘Yeah… err… Antony’s right. You do have to be careful and transparent and that….’
I’ve already found an excellent positive example. Doggysnaps (beta) is a social network developed by the Dogs Trust. The gist of it is that you - a dog lover - upload pictures of your dog and look at the pictures uploaded by other members. It’s flickr for dogs, basically, you can tag and comment on others’ snaps. There’s a dog of the week and a ton of forums giving dog care advice. What’s this got to do with neglected dogs, then? Well, the community can also buy merchandise, donate directly, and I understand that there are plans to introduce a means to adopt dogs in care.
The bad example? That’s where you come in. Companies, please, that have gone about approaching social media in a totally cack-handed way, earning them torrents of abuse. Not-so-well-known cases especially welcome. Via the comments or email, please.
It’s been on BoingBoing, it’s off-topic and you’ve probably been emailed it about 10 times already. Nonetheless, no apologies for reposting this guy.
I have been writing and thinking (superficially, natch) recently about the future of net video. My belief is that we will soon reach the deep video stage.
And what on earth is deep video?
Deep Video is searchable in the same way that other internet documents are searchable. It’s also like DVDs - the extras will be the value. Say you make a video interview with me that you put on YouTube. You interviewed me for 45 minutes but only 5 minutes remain in the final cut. What happens to the other 40 minutes? Traditionally, they are on the oft-cited ‘cutting room floor’. Because you had to fit a 45 minute interview into a 5 minute slot.
We’re on the internet, now, though. There is no 5-minute slot. The slot is as long or as short as you want to make it. If you want to drill down into that particular news item, then there’s nothing to stop you. Most of the time, you want the top line - the traditional 5Ws of journalism - who when where what why. Most days, you also want a bit more, too, on the stories that really interest you.
So the idea, which I steal from David Dunkley Gyimah and, apparently, Microsoft and Google, is that video becomes three-dimensional. That you can click into it and find other angles and extra footage; perhaps you might find web links to the items that you see using a real-time equivalent to Like. In the future, the idea of watching television on a flat screen that you can’t prod at and explore will be laughable, I reckon.
What do I bring to the party? Bugger all, but a much better name for it than videohyperlinking.
The Guardian reports today that the BBC’s Jam programme, previously known as the Digital Curriculum, has been suspended thanks to the European Commission. This was a project that has already spent a £150mn budget, all of it licence payers’ money.
As you know, I worked previously in educational publishing. I’ve spoken with a lot of key players in the area. They opposed the BBC entering the curriculum software publishing space - four years ago when the Digital Curriculum project was launched - because it would hurt their business. A government-sponsored business in the UK like the BBC shouldn’t do that, of course, even if they were better resourced to do so. So the powers that be came up with a fudge.
That protest sparked the eLC (e-Learning Credits) scheme, whereby every school (about 32,000 in the UK) received £1000 a year, plus about £3.50 per pupil - every year or less - as a ring-fenced grant. They had to spend this money on content (i.e. stuff about Geography or English, not applications or operating systems). It’s still going until October 2008, even though Jam has been canned. The schools didn’t actually want this money. It takes time and effort to learn new software and being forced to buy £1000s of it each year wasn’t helpful. Nonetheless, that programme has run for three years and runs still. Many schools found ways to spend the money on other items that they did need (”We can do you £2K worth of software and it comes with new PCs”); others simply wasted their budgets in fear of losing them ([to a software publisher] “Can you send us another £500 worth of your stuff? No, we don’t care what it is.”) Otherwise, it’s creating an artificial economy for educational publishing that will crash just as it did when the money ran out for BBC computers in the early 80s.
At the same time, the BBC was plugging away at its Digital Curriculum, which it launched at the BETT show last year to widespead amazement at how they’d spent so much money on so little content - five or six games, as I recall. More was coming, we were promised. We were all wondering how much money they’d paid to come up with the name ‘Jam’ and a new logo.
So, at the same time that the Government was awarding monies to schools to buy software they didn’t want, they were also sponsoring the BBC to produce online software that the schools didn’t want. And now - ah ha ha ha - the whole thing’s been binned.
The entire enterprise is quite clearly a national - and now European - disgrace. Teachers need training and time and better money, not more ’stuff’ created because it suits the private sector’s or the BBC’s objectives.
I’m outraged. And I dread to think about the dirt that will eventually emerge concerning the BSF initiative.
OK, I’ll try not to let this site become too much like a boring diary of what I do at work and get back to the normal web services and social media output.
But not yet.
Today, the website for NMK Forum 07 finally went live. It’s taken me a while, mainly because of my incompetence a few small technical teething difficulties. The site is to announce and publicise our summer conference and it promises, though I say so myself, to be pretty good! I’m also lining up a live backchannel chat application for the event itself on the site as well as oodles of A/V extras to document the thing thoroughly.
We’ve got Jason Calacanis, Dan Gillmor and a host of others lined up to speak and a ton of top-rated panellists. We’re after massive panels - 10 people or so - the idea being that they’ll (a) be able to tackle anything the audience wants and (b) not be boring. So there’s still spaces for any Web 2.0 mavens out there. New media journalist Mike Butcher (NMA, Techcrunch UK, Vecosys, etc.) is the programme organiser this year, so do email him if you think you’re qualified to talk about whatever Web 2.1 might be, successfully making cash out of UGC, Mobile 2.0 or any other internet and media topics of moment. It’s worth mentioning, too, that Simon Collister is at this moment bending over backwards to generate PR for the event.
The trouble is now, having made that site, it makes me want to give this place a splash of paint…