twopointouch

On the IWantMedia site, there’s an interview with Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0, who has just instructed all his journalists to start writing blogs in addition to their normal duties. The individual blogs will be aggregated on a super-site, in addition to the normal Business 2.0 blog. Quittner says that his team has accepted the extra work enthusiastically:

Yes, everybody wants to be a blogger. Part of this enthusiasm comes from a cover story we did [in September] called “Blogging for Dollars.” We showed how a lot of smart people are actually figuring out how to create these one- and two-man bands that are quite lucrative.

It won’t be quite so lucrative for Time inc. staffers, who will be paid ‘a modest CPM’. If it were me, what I’d be enthusiastic about would be the potential of following the path of their ex-colleague Om Malik who left the magazine to go solo with venture backing on June 12. Says Quittner: “We might end up creating some more Om Maliks, and that in itself would make this project worthwhile.”

Some interesting words, too, on the competing fortunes of digital and traditional media:

I think we’ll see a time when magazines will become the “class” play and digital media will become the “mass” play. On CNNMoney, my stories are seen by about 11 million people a month, which is way bigger than my magazine’s 600,000 circulation.

Over time, magazines will need to reinvest in the magazine-ness of the magazine. Magazines will have to be high-touch, high-impact units. And they’ll probably enjoy much smaller rate bases. But I think we’re going to be able to charge more in the way of subscriptions for the print product because it attracts the people who are the die-hard readers.

I don’t actually agree that the divide will be between casual (online) and hardcore (print) readers. Enough specialisation exists between websites to ensure there’s plenty for even the most obscure enthusiasms. There’s a division along the lines of age, of course, but that is reducing all the time. I think the real division is more about the purposes for and context in which we read each format. When I read print now, it is either because I am reading for enjoyment (Sunday newspapers, music magazines, books) or because what I am reading is not available online (books again). I’m getting magazines so I can read them in an armchair, in bed, in the bath or on a train or plane journey. If I am reading for fast information and opinion, I’ll go online.

As I’ve observed before, marshalling collective intelligence, or the wisdom of crowds, on the Internet isn’t always very easy. Social news voting sites like digg are susceptible to social influences. Wikis are also weakened by this: do you really want to edit what your boss says? One way, though, to generate the necessary conditions (independence, self-interest, diversity) is to set up a virtual stock market.

In 2003, for example, the Pentagon set up a prediction market for world events including terrorist activity, FutureMAP. It was rapidly closed down again when the press discovered this “People Betting on Terrorism Outrage!!!” However, as Time magazine reported last year, this wasn’t a clever move:

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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.)

Personally, I can’t abide text chat. Not enough time for me to think (email) and no real-life presence (phone). However, my new series, This-Guy-Emailed-Me-About-His-New-Product (as in this and this), continues apace.

Charles Landemaine contacted me about Interaction, a text chat application that can be inserted into any web page. This AJAX product comes in three flavours. It’s free for the basic functions, but that includes advertisements. Professional and Enterprise variations on the service are available as a paid-for upgrade. These will remove the adverts, allow for multiple users and company customisation.

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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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Judging from the comments and trackbacks on this site, a fair proportion of blog readers have a blog themselves. But how many of you regard that blog as your day job? There’s an interesting article about your chances of making money from blogging in the new Business 2.0, with a bold promise in the subheading: “here’s how to turn your passion into an online empire”.

The article goes on to focus on how TechCrunch, BoingBoing and Fark are earning a substantial amount of money, together with blogging networks like Weblogs and Gawker. These are, the article says:

Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers - not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy.

(you may recognise what looks a lot like a snarky reference to the recent story about Kevin Rose being worth $60mn in 2.0’s rival publication, BusinessWeek)

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For many observers, one of the key lessons of the Kiko tits-up episode is that startups need to watch out for the evil empire that is the Google Operating System. Mike Yamamoto’s comments in “Google, slayer of Web 2.0 start-ups” seem typical of the sort of conclusions being drawn. One of Kiko’s mentors, Paul Graham, says that this is an overreaction, but agrees that:

What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected.

Google as villain, the new Microsoft, buying up or crushing their competition, seems to be the collective wisdom on the whole affair.

It’s easy to blame Google, but I think more important and less sensational lessons lie elsewhere. To start with, there are at least 15 online calendars out there (see Bob Stumpel’s big list of Web 2.0 applications). If you then look at online products with an integrated calendar as well as other features, such as Basecamp and BusinessITOnline, then there are probably dozens. The majority of the standalone products will fail. Not because they are bad, but because they face so much competition. Some of those calendars will be more usable, innovative and helpful than the others. Kiko was actually better than most of the products on the list, I think. I don’t believe it was the quality of their offering that killed it off.

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Jupiter Research: “The research found 77 percent of online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings. Viewers were found to be increasingly loyal to the stores that featured product feedback. Another survey determined that 22 percent of online consumers who posted feedback on forums tend to purchase more online.”

Research company Gartner has given a cautious thumbs up to a host of Web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, Social Network Analysis and Location Based Services in a press release published on 9/7/06. Interestingly, it also believes that the use collective intelligence techniques will start to become the norm in business before too long:

Collective intelligence … is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Gartner’s thinking on trends is that they go through five stages. This is what it calls the ‘hype cycle’. The ‘technology trigger’ is the period when it becomes possible to do something for the first time. The rapid adoption of broadband over the last four years, for example, has made it possible to have mass media Web 2.0 services.

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When it comes to some famous web 2.0 sites and services, it seems as though certain sites rule the roost. With 70% of video downloads from the net, the popular video clip site YouTube, may seem to be sitting pretty. But it isn’t, for three reasons.

On the one hand, there are dozens of other video sharing sites. There’s Google video, Yahoo video, AOL video, Veoh, ClipShack, Videobomb and (probably) a hundred others - sorry, too exhausting to provide links. Everyone wants a piece of the action. This may not make things as difficult for YouTube as it might appear, though. While some of their competitors are big companies, they don’t have user share or “social capital”. YouTube is the clear market leader and this brings with it a considerable competitive advantage. It’s a virtuous circle. The majority of users go to YouTube, so they attract the largest number of fresh contributions, the lifeblood of any such system. Aspiring film makers will gravitate towards the networks that give them the largest amount of recognition. Being the biggest is likely to mean that you have the best material, as well as the worst, but the systems YouTube have in place (favourites, votes and groups) make it easy to find the most entertaining and popular clips. Where it does make things hard is in the costs - Google and Yahoo (and probably AOL, no confirmation?) have their own server farms. YouTube doesn’t.

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