twopointouch

As I make my way down Cannon Street, I feel like death warmed up. I’ve had a bad cold for three or four days, and I’ve used the magical power of cigarettes to develop a simultaneous cough of room-shaking proportions. I’m off to see Julie Meyer at Ariadne Capital. Julie is perhaps best-known as the co-founder of First Tuesday, the entrepreneur’s network which claimed half-a-million members across 100 cities at the height of the dotcom boom. Now, she’s CEO at Ariadne, an investment and advisory firm focusing on web startups.

“Don’t forget to take a dictaphone,” said one of my colleagues. “She speaks really quickly.” Scoffing at the youngster’s lack of power-note-taking skills, I have simply brought my notebook and pen. Like an idiot. He was right. She speaks very quickly and very intensely. Here are some scraps of what I was able to salvage between my coughs. (Apologies, Julie. I hope you didn’t catch anything!)

What is the impact of Web 2.0 on established businesses, I ask.

“So, what we’re finding is an unusual dynamic between large business and startups. You know how they say that M&A is the new R&D, right? Well, that can bring benefits on both sides. Startups need to develop good habits and practices, no matter what stage they’re at. They need to be on track to be bought. At the same time, large businesses need to be radically open to the dynamic change being offered by new companies with new ideas. And large businesses don’t often attract innovators. They’re too slow moving and don’t want to change, you know? Change more often comes from outside companies rather than within them. So there’s a lot to be gained on both sides by new companies working hand-in-hand with established ones.

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My post on Saturday about prediction markets being a useful way to access collective intelligence brought a response from Gary of Tall Street. Tall Street is a new search engine which operates a form of stock market on search results. You search for and add sites to the system and invest pretend money in the sites you like or own. If other users click sites you’ve invested in, your stock increases in price.

They haven’t been Techcrunched or boingboing’ed as yet so the number of sites in the system is low, which limits the utility of the service. However, a search for ‘Search Engines’ has been pre-populated. It would be useful if there were a way to seed the system with results from another service. I also think real money would be an interesting addition. As it is, only the ongoing addition and betting on sites by sufficient users will reveal whether the model actually works. But I have to say.. it looks good on paper. Would I invest real money in Tall Street? No. But then I’m not an investor on the lookout for innovative new ideas.

Yes, it’s just another student project, and it looks a bit rough. But haven’t we seen something fitting that description before…?

Gary was also good enough to answer a few questions for me:

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For some reason, my request for a face-to-face interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuccessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appointment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my questions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attributed to a ‘Google spokesperson’. As I’ve said before, I think email interviews are less than satisfactory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty circumspect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-ordinating this.

How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?

Here at Google we have no single definition of web 2.0. For us, the development of our services rests on keeping creative and innovative, maintaining our focus on improving user experience, and our goal to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

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Chris Anderson is interviewed in this week’s Press Gazette. Lots of interesting ideas, and not all about the Long Tail. I picked out the following remarks as key:

On the internet, stories increase in value over time, rather than disappearing, the way they do in printed newspapers and magazines:

In a weird way, [the internet] completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn’t matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.

I guess this is the Long Tail of news, except it’s an interesting shape. Online, news lasts forever. You could say that the most influential articles online are the short head, and the rest of what gets written is part of the tail. Time - when the piece was written - is only a small part of the equation.

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Techcrunch has posted a great interview with angel investor Paul Graham, which covers some different ground to the one he did with me. Especially interesting, I thought, is Graham’s point that new software startups can effect social and political change:

Frankly, even though I’m supposed to be an investor, the ideas that excite me most are not necessarily the ones that make the most money, but the ones that blow away evil old monopolies. For example, I love collaborative news sites not so much because they make a lot of money– though they might– but because they’ve shown what a bad job the “old media” were doing.

Most people don’t understand what a social force startups can be. There are a lot of changes that can only happen through companies. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies. You know your business model is broken when you’re suing your customers. The new business model must be out there somewhere, and my guess is that the way to beat the bad guys is not through political action (or at least, not only that), but by inventing
whatever replaces them.

(Parochial headline alert: PG Tips is a brand of English tea.)

Lunch today with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research for BT. It was quite a long, or rather intense, discussion, so I’ll only tackle the basics here. I’ve been trying to nail this semantic web issue for some time, but every time I start reading an academic paper, my attention seems to wander off. So this was a good opportunity for me. I wasn’t going to deviate. As soon as he sat down, I was in with my carefully prepared, top journalist’s question: “so what’s this semantic web thingy, then?”

It turns out that that is one of the more difficult questions. (Damn!) It depends on what you mean. You might mean turning the billions of existing web sites semantic or only about possible future sites or services. The second of these options is the most likely outcome at the present. Semantic web is partly about annotating web pages to make them amenable to machines. John prefers the expression ’semantic technologies’ to avoid this confusion.

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What did I expect when I called Robert Scoble, perhaps the best-known blogger to have become famous for blogging? I wasn’t sure. Maybe someone very Californian. In the bad way.

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150-200 blogs out there.

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Being the Elvis of Web 2.0 is a busy job, it seems. I’ve been stalking Kevin Rose of digg for about six weeks, watching him sign a girl’s chest, hit the cover of BusinessWeek and attempt to fend off attempts to hire the service’s most loyal users. And basically, not getting to interview him. It’s hard enough getting through to people on the West Coast from London. By the time they get out of bed, it’s time for me to go to the pub. I know that Kevin likes a pint, so maybe he’ll come over and we can finish the remaining fifteen questions of my interview in a more convivial setting.

Well, anyway. Here’s what I managed to get.

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I’d been hoping to interview Tim O’Reilly since starting work on the book. As the person widely recognised as having coined the expression ‘Web 2.0′, I wanted to know more about what he thought of the way it was all going. He’s a nice guy to talk to, by the way. He’s better humoured, but also grumpier than a lot of people that talk to journalists. In my book, that’s a good thing. What tends to happen is that the people you talk to are so “on message” that you can’t see a personality behind that glazed smile. He’s even older than me, too, which always goes down well.

Did you invent Web 2.0 or discover it?

Neither! It’s a name attempting to point people at something that existed. It wasn’t even me who came up with the expression. However, it’s an idea that I’ve been pursuing since 1997. I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing, at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

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Stephen Taylor is the RVP and MD Search & Search Marketing at Yahoo! UK. Before Yahoo!, he was the MD of Overture Europe. I, on the other hand, am a little-known hack from South West London with a penchant for strong lager and pizzas. Stephen may also like those things.

How are the new changes to Yahoo’s homepage reflecting the mood and approaches of what we might call Web 2.0, and what remains the same?

It’s definitely evolution. Ever since we started, eleven years ago, the heart and soul of our business has been to allow people to find and discover stuff on the web. A little more formally, there have been what we describe as four pillars to what we do on the site: content, search, community and personalisation.

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