Results matching “Facebook”

Patrice Lamothe is the CEO of PearlTrees, an unique social bookmarking service that uses the visual metaphor of "pearls" with each containing a web page. And like all visual metaphors it is best to see it rather than read a description. Here is a quick video and a sample image:

"PearlTrees is a way for people to map the Internet by collecting related web pages. Although each tree is organized subjectively it becomes connected to other trees, and over time it will represent a human map of the Internet," says Mr Lamothe.

He says that social bookmarking, through services such as Delicious, has failed. "If you add up all the users of social bookmarking services it might be 10 million, which is very small."

Social bookmarking has failed, he says, because tagging links is not a good way to organize the web. "You pick a tag but that tag doesn't say much, it is better to visually show the relationship between similar web content."

The company has several thousand users in France and will formally announce the service in the US around February.

Mr Lamothe says that a high percentage of users are women, and many users aren't geeks. These groups likely would never be Delicious users yet they are active in creating PearlTrees and thus are helping to map the web.

PearlTrees has an excellent user interface and is designed to allow people to learn its features through what Mr Lamothe describes as "social play." Some pearls have different colors, some have a small black pearl next to them, etc. The meaning of these things is discovered through clicking on the pearls and exploring.

PearlTrees have all the social sharing capabilities you'd expect: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

The simplicity of the design and concept is intriguing because it allows for potentially unique collections of web sites, and for some novel uses. I want to try it for publishing a blog post and showing the research that went into a story. Or to curate a subject such as the ongoing Rupert Murdoch battle with Google. Or maybe crowd-source a news story...

There are lots of permutations of PearlTrees that can be created because each "pearl" can contain other PearlTrees seemingly ad infinitum "we don't yet know what the limit is," says Mr Lamothe.

An upcoming feature will interface PearlTrees with Twitter to create pearls of recommended links from your network. This would help transform the ephemeral nature of Twitter into a permanent record.

Revenue could come from several sources. All trees are currently public and a future option might be to charge people for creating private trees. "Creating public trees is contributing to the community but private trees don't, so we might charge for that service."

For now, Mr Lamothe wants more users, so that there are more PearlTrees available for new users, and then he will choose an appropriate monetization strategy.

Try it for yourself. The service is in "open alpha" and open to anyone: http://www.pearltrees.com/

A reader writes:

"I've had an interesting experience with two "friends" on facebook. The first was about 6 months ago, with an old friend who I never talk to from about 20 years ago. After I friended him, I started to get movie reviews all the time from him ---about three a day, but only on my iPhone, never when I actually logged in on a regular computer. I never got a personal message from him, and he never posted anything that looked truly personal except a few photos. Here is the tricky thing about the iPhone app. You can't manage your friends on it. But then when you go online with a regular computer, none of his posts are there, so you forget you want to delete him. Eventually, I did delete him.

Celebrating its ninth year "Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2009" takes place Monday November 23 at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

This year's speakers are:
- Ram Shriram, founding Board Member Google inc and founder Sherpalo Ventures
- Biz Stone, co-founder, Twitter

- Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder, LinkedIn

- Bob Goodson, CEO and co-founder Younoodle

- Peter Thiel, President Clarium Capital Management and co-founder PayPal

- Joe DiNucci, Director Coulomb Technologies inc

- Jorn Lyseggen, CEO, Meltwater Group

- Dave Rosenheim, CEO JamBase

- Saul Klein, Index Ventures

- Harjeet Taggar and Kulveer Taggar, co-founders Auctomatic

- Kim Polese, CEO and founder, SpikeSource

- Chris Sacca, venture investor

Past speakers have included: Philip Rosedale, Founder and Chairman, Linden Lab, Second Life; Elon Musk, Co-founder of PayPal, Chairman of Tesla Motors and CEO founder of Space X; Matt Cohler, VP Strategy & Business Operations, Facebook: Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn ; Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist; Christopher Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives, Google; James Hong, Founder Hot or Not; Biz Stone of Twitter; John Warnock, co founder and former Chairman, Adobe Systems; Alex Welch, CEO, Founder Photobucket; Evan Williams, founder Blogger; Pete Flint, co-Founder & CEO, Trulia; Professor, Baroness Susan Greenfield, University of Oxford; Villy Wang, Executive Director and Co-Founder BayCat.

The event is organised by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Saïd Business School. For more information, see www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/

The other day as I was tending to my Facebook duties, and in the "suggestions" for friends column on the far right, up popped John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.

I clicked "add" because I have met Mr Chambers on several occasions and I'm very impressed with his leadership. Facebook then asked me to suggest some friends for him because he is new to Facebook.

It's interesting to see CEOs dabble in social media. I wonder how they have the time because it can be very time consuming.

Sharon Barclay at the Blue Trumpet Group works with CEOs, advising them on how to improve their visibility. She helps them figure out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, etc.

She says that the CEOs are interested in raising their social media profiles as an insurance measure that could help in future job offers.

I seriously doubt if Mr Chambers is looking for a change of jobs but you never know.

Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference is set for January 26 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

It is designed to "catalyze" the career development of women and it will feature successful women giving keynotes and taking part in discussions and workshops.

Catalyst Conference will bring over 250 passionate, creative women together to fuel new relationships and ideas. Come prepared to share concrete technology and business tools and tactics, meet energetic leaders and entrepreneurs, and develop your own business ventures. This conference is for women at the top of their industries as well as those leading their first ventures, and will guide them all in discussions of strategy and success.

More information here.

Join the conversation on:
Twitter with #GITcc
Facebook Group

- - -
Please see:

Girls In Tech Adriana Gascoigne: No Men Allowed - Empowering Women

The New York Times yesterday published a news story on the large profits being made in virtual goods without referring to the controversies that have rocked the sector this week.

In the article: Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays companies such as Playfish, Zynga, and games such as Farmville are mentioned. But there is no mention at all of the scandal that has rocked the virtual goods sector this week, and in one case resulted in a new CEO.

The closest the article gets to criticism is:

For outsiders, the selling of virtual goods -- items with no actual value in the real world -- might seem the very definition of a swindle.

Instead of reporting the accusation of scams in the virtual goods world, as kicked off by Michael Arrington in Techcrunch a week ago, it lamely reports:

"It's not about the good itself, it's about the underlying human emotion or desire," said Moshe Koyfman, a principal at Spark Capital, which has invested in two virtual-goods start-ups. "The recipient knows the person took time, picked something meaningful and spent money on it."

It's shocking that NYTimes editors would publish this article without any reference to the scams in online games which try to use "underlying human emotion or desire" to trick users into signing up for monthly charges for bogus services and using the allure of virtual goods.

The scams are spelled out in this article: Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell.

This publicity has led to virtual goods, online gaming companies and social networks to announce this week that they will be weeding out any scam advertisers and games. And in the case of Offerpal, one of the largest online gaming companies, the company announced a new CEO.

It's shocking that the NYTimes article would not mention the controversy since it is clearly relevant to the topic. Time magazine managed to notice what was going on: Facebook Game Scams Appear on Phone Bills - TIME. What's going on at the New York Times?

I expect more from the New York Times. I would also expect it to unleash its seasoned reporters and take this story further. After all, potentially millions of people have been harmed by these scams. Large companies such as the telcos are making tens of millions of dollars out of these scams by acting as the billing services. And the social networks are also making lots of money. Follow the money and you have a potentially great story.

And it is a story with legs, it continues to surprise. For example, in the latest update, Zynga, after promising to remove scam ads, hasn't -- but it tried to cover things up by blocking Mike Arrington from seeing the ads!

Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga's popular Facebook and MySpace games.

...They weren't taken down though. Or rather, they were, but just for me. Other users were still seeing the same mobile ads. And the filtering was clearly directed at me, since I logged in on the same IP address with a friends account and saw the ads.

... What's really disappointing is that Facebook, even after promising to enforce their rules, continues to just turn a blind eye to this stuff. I know Facebook hates the negative press, but I am really starting to think that they couldn't care less about their users getting scammed.

You can even bring in some prominent VCs that have invested in social gaming companies and therefore must have known about the scams. Take a look at Zynga's investors, it is full of top name VCs.

Geoff Corgis, a commenter on the Techcrunch story wrote:

Bing Gordon, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
Sandy Miller, Institutional Venture Partners
Peter Thiel, Managing Partner Clarium Capital

Are active accomplices in one of the biggest scams ever generated on the web / social media, and should be held accountable with Mark Pincus.

I single them out from the Angel investors, as they take money from pension funds, who get their money from teachers/state employees, and then go and invest that money in companies that scam and bankrupt their children.

It's a great story. Newspapers used to be "muckrakers" uncovering graft in City Hall, publicizing corruption, and looking out for the defenceless in society. I was hoping the New York Times might remember that tradition.

What's the point in running a bland article about virtual goods when there is a far larger story to be had?

- - -

Please see:

"Horrible Things" Slink Back Into Zynga

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues"

Offerpal Tries Out A New CEO. Shukla, Queen Of Scams, Is Out.

Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules

Analysis: The Business Opportunities From The Scam And Spam Epidemic

I recently met with Ijad Madisch, the founder and CEO of ResearchGate - an online community of more than 180,000 scientists sharing research results, helping each other with research problems, and networking within and beyond their fields of study.

Mr Madisch is a doctor specializing in virology. He grew up in Germany from Syrian parents. He lives in Boston.

Here are some notes from our meeting.

- ResearchGate was inspired by FaceBook. Mr Madisch noticed that one of his friends listed his research in his profile and that eventually led to another scientist being able to offer helpful information for his research project.

- The goal is to help scientists help each other with research and to prevent duplication of research projects. This can speed up the overall process.

- The site is growing at more than 1,000 new members every day.

- Members are rated on the quality of their comments and contributions.

- ResearchGate wants to encourage scientists to write up their research even if it failed. There is a lot of valuable information in creating a large database of scientific research even if it didn't fulfill expectations. 90% of research is not published. A searchable journal of failed research would be very valuable for designing future research projects.

- ResearchGate offers access to seven databases of scientific research. It also publishes the research papers of scientists. Research periodicals are very expensive but scientists are allowed to publish their research results on their personal sites -- ResearchGate profiles act as the personal sites for scientists. Otherwise you have to pay $35 per research paper.

- Some universities are using ResearchGate for private networks. This is a potential revenue source.

- Other revenue sources are an "Amazon" for lab equipment with user ratings and reviews. And job postings. It will never sell user data.

- ResearchGate plans to offer collaboration tools for scientists.

- The largest research sector is biomedical. Next is computer science.

- Future plans include online scientific conferences; a peer reviewed online journal; and more that cannot be discussed just yet.

- The company is angel funded. It has a development team in Boston and in Berlin.

- Mr Madisch's visit to Silicon Valley was to meet with potential partners such as a video streaming company, and others.

There is an excellent article by Mike Arrington from Techcrunch on the subject of the duplicity of social gaming networks and social networks as fronts for advertisers that trick people into signing up for monthly "services." [Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell]

This is an issue that has been going on for some time. And it's not limited to the social gaming companies or the social networks.

I raised the problem earlier this year when I interviewed Brett Brewer, president of Adknowledge, the largest virtual goods/cash company. [Will Virtual Cash Reinvent Online Ads?]

Mr Brewer said that Adknowledge was aware of the problem and was taking steps to weed out the problem advertisers.

Mike Arrington describes how some of these scams operate:

...users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription.

There are plenty more variations.

Here is a description of the money that can be made from a self-confessed Facebook spammer: [How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider's Confession]

When the Facebook platform first launched, developers used Google AdSense, which was paying 10-15 cent eCPMs, meaning that developers were earning 10 to 15 cents for every 1,000 ads they shown. But soon, ad networks, such as the one I operated, stepped in to show that by using social data and some clever ad copy, we could raise this to well over $6--that's 60 times better than AdSense.

It's not just gaming and social networks where you can find these types of scams. They are everywhere on the Internet. They are distributed by large ad networks.

And there are plenty of grey areas. For example, Experian, the credit reporting firm that owns freecreditreport.com. The New York Times reports:

[The Federal Trade Commission] has long believed that the company that owns freecreditreport.com is deliberately diverting people from a government-mandated site where consumers can get free credit reports by law, and using the reports as a lure for a $14.95 monthly service that alerts subscribers to important changes in their credit status.

Foremski's Take: This deluge of scam and spam is a serious issue because it threatens the future of Internet commerce. The more people ensnared by these types of scams, the less likely they are to buy much of anything over the Internet.

Media companies, for example, are already struggling to make money from online advertising. This will make matters much worse.

The gaming companies, the social networks, the ad networks all seem to turn a blind eye to what is going on because they reap large rewards from these scams. But it is a short sighted strategy because they are selling out their users, their members.

They should be looking out for them not selling them out.

By turning a blind eye these companies are missing a unique business opportunity to offer a safe place for Internet users, to guarantee that there is no scam advertiser on their network, and to insist that their advertisers clearly spell out billing terms.

But this will take courage and it means saying no to large amounts of money. And it will also raise their costs of business because it will require monitoring of ads, and this can't easily done by machines, it requires people.

Silicon Valley media companies such as Google, Facebook, etc, like to do everything by server and software. This is potentially an Achilles' heel that other media companies could exploit.

For several years I've been writing about the need for "media engineers" part software engineer and part journalist. And others have also started to write about teaching journalism to programmers.

MediaShift . Can Programmers, Journalists Get Along in One Newsroom? | PBS

There is a lot of journalism that can be done by mining data in public databases. Some newspapers now have interactive maps, for example, Oakland Tribune has an interactive map of homicides.

A much better example of data journalism is EveryBlock, which provides a news feed for neighborhoods in all large US cities. Type in your zip code and EveryBlock will email a newsfeed that contains police reports, restaurant openings and reviews, building permits, coverage in the media, and other local data culled from public databases and other sources.

EveryBlock is run by Adrian Holovaty, based in Chicago. It was recently acquired by MSNBC.

EveryBlock was started by a grant from the Knight Foundation and part of its condition was that the EveryBlock publishing software be released under an open source license. It's available to anyone, anyone can replicate what EveryBlock has done.

Adrian Holovalty is a true media engineer, he is also one of the driving forces behind the Django project, an open-source framework for quickly developing web applications for newsroom projects.

Data journalism has had its fair share of critics. But I think it has a bright future as long it it is wrapped within the right context. The temptation is to just publish the raw data without much else and allow the readers to make sense of it depending on how the data affects them.

Data journalism combined with a fair amount of human journalism could be a potent mix, providing context to the content. It'll be interesting to see how newsrooms combine the two.

But most newsrooms lack the software engineering skills to use Django and similar technologies. And with newsroom cuts and the pressure on media business models continuing unabated, we may be running out of time to experiment with data journalism.

That would be a shame because today's media technologies make it possible to create many novel types of media formats. There's a tremendous amount of innovation that can be done with media formats. I've got a few ideas myself that I'd love to try out but unfortunately I, too, lack the resources.

The Committee for Protection of Journalists last night announced funding from Peter Thiel, head of hedge fund Clarium, for the defense of online freedom of the press.

The amount was not revealed but described as a "substantial check."

Peter Thiel told SVW, "Technology can have positive and negative aspects. I want to help the CPJ defend the rights of online journalists."

The CPJ says that 33 journalists have been killed this year, and 760 killed since 1992, of which 482 were murdered. Increasingly, it is online journalists that are being targeted.

Some details about CPJ:

How did CPJ get started?
A group of U.S. foreign correspondents created CPJ in response to the often brutal treatment of their foreign colleagues by authoritarian governments and other enemies of independent journalism.

CPJ has a full-time staff of 23 at its New York headquarters, including area specialists for each major world region. CPJ has a Washington, D.C. representative, and consultants stationed around the world. A 35-member board of prominent journalists directs CPJ's activities.

CPJ is funded solely by contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations. CPJ does not accept government funding.

Without a free press, few other human rights are attainable. A strong press freedom environment encourages the growth of a robust civil society, which leads to stable, sustainable democracies and healthy social, political, and economic development. CPJ works in more than 120 countries, many of which suffer under repressive regimes, debilitating civil war, or other problems that harm press freedom and democracy.

By publicly revealing abuses against the press and by acting on behalf of imprisoned and threatened journalists, CPJ effectively warns journalists and news organizations where attacks on press freedom are occurring. CPJ organizes vigorous public protests and works through diplomatic channels to effect change. CPJ publishes articles and news releases; special reports; and Attacks on the Press, the most comprehensive annual survey of press freedom around the world.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes about Eric Schmidt's predictions about the future of the Internet, delivered at a Gartner conference.

I'm rarely impressed by Mr Schmidt's predictions or analysis of Internet trends. Even though he is CEO of Google, his position seems to fail to provide him with much insightful to say about the future Internet.

Take a look: Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

• - Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• - Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• - Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• - Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• - ...content will move towards more video.
• - Real Time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
• - There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• - "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
• - people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
• - Real Time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."

Chinese language will dominate the web?

So what? It won't dominate in my world or yours.

Teenagers are the model, they move seamlessly from app to app? I move seamlessly from app to app. So do you. I'm fed up with received wisdom about the digital savviness of teenagers. I've got teenagers, and I know their friends. They are as plugged in as you and I. They are better at some things, they are clueless about other things.

There is less of a generational gap than many people without teenagers think. It is an experiential gap. You have to be exposed to the digital world in order to know it.

Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law. The math doesn't look right. Computing power doubles roughly every two years. But so what? What are we going to be doing with that extra computing power?

Distribution distinctions between the web, radio and TV will go away. OMG. Is this the best he can do? I haven't had cable TV for a couple of years, I watch TV through my laptop connected to the TV, I listen to radio podcasts over DSL. I'm no different from tens of millions of people who have already noticed that distribution distinctions have gone away.

People will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. They always have listened to other people given the chance, now social networks make it easier to share recommendations. Learning how to rank this information is a problem? There's no problem here, people know how to rank their friends and their social network sources. It's a personal ranking that is far more relevant, far more targeted than any algorithm Google could come up with.

Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information. Another valuable insight from a company whose mission has always been to "index all the world's information."

The quality of Mr Schmidt's predictions are stunningly disappointing especially since he is sitting on top of a company that is privy to massive amounts of web usage data from every part of the world. Not to mention the tens of thousands of engineers working on new projects.

Megan Taylor over at PBS' MediaShift writes about the challenges of getting programmers and journalists to work together.

MediaShift . Can Programmers, Journalists Get Along in One Newsroom? | PBS

"there's no reason why a programmer can't do journalism," said Rich Gordon, director of digital innovation at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. "They just need an understanding of the mission and culture of journalism and journalists."

Mr Gordon thinks that in terms of personalities, i.e programmers being introverted and anti-social, they can be similar to journalists.

But even with similar personalities, it's not easy to get programmers to think like journalists, or to get used to the chaotic environment of a newsroom.

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive newsroom technologies at the New York Times, has assembled a team of mostly programmers to do journalism.
..."It's not a normal corporate-y type of environment," Pilhofer said. "It's very loosey-goosey, collaborative, hectic, disorganized. It takes time to get used to that environment, and not everyone is comfortable in that environment.

Others say problems arise because of miscommunication.

Matthew Waite, news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, weighed in on how programmers and journalists communicate, and how that communication can be improved. He said ill-will between journalists and programmers arises from miscommunication.
"I've seen a lot of cases where some piece of code did exactly what the requirements document specified, but it didn't do what anyone wanted," Waite said.

Foremski's Take: I've written on this topic many times and I think it is easier to teach journalists to become programmers. They then become "media engineers" rather than software engineers.

Today's development tools are very powerful and they make building complex software applications easier than ever before.

Every journalist should know some html, CSS, JavaScript, etc. They don't need to be proficient but they should know how all these media technologies work. Some journalists can go much further and I think we will see that happening more because there is a real need. If I were a journalism student I'd be loading up on programming courses because I'd greatly improve my chances of getting a job -- every newsroom needs strong media engineering capabilities.

Teaching a programmer journalism skills is challenging primarily because programmers have already chosen their profession. If they had wanted to be journalists they would have become journalists.

But teaching a journalist programming skills would be a lot easier and far more effective because you have to have a strong understanding of media -- that comes first. That's what a media engineer would provide, media first, engineer second.

And a media architect would be similar to a systems architect, they would design the information/publishing architecture of an organization. And by the way, today every company has to be a media company to a degree, every large company needs media engineers and media architects on staff.

- - -

Please see:

Move Over Software Engineers It's The Era Of Media Engineers

Journalism Schools Wake Up To Need For Media Engineers

This is a worthwhile event Silicon Valley Rocks! raising money for local schools. The lineup for this year's show December 9 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco is:

CORINNE MARCUS & THE KINDRED SPIRITS -- catchy and intriguing with hints of Lilith, pop, rock and lounge. Tech Affiliations: Walden Venture Capital, Digidesign.

FAREWELL TYPEWRITER -- melodic rock music that's energetic yet tight, dancey but tough. Tech Affiliations: Hewlett-Packard and Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly).

MARROW -- electronica/dance beats guaranteed to make you move your gloomy ass. Tech Affiliations: Pyramind Studios and the "sflogicninja" of YouTube fame.

THE OPEN SOURCE BAND -- featuring Jonah Matranga (lead singer of Far) and Randi Zuckerberg -- a Silicon Valley Rocks! special freely available for your listening pleasure. Tech Affiliations: Facebook, Norwest Venture Partners, Walden Venture Capital, Amplified Music Services.

THE TELL-TALE HEARTBREAKERS -- tearing through the post-punk music scene with tense, guitar and bass-driven songs that reflect the darker side of rock and roll. Tech Affiliations: PDI/DreamWorks.

THE WHITEHALLS -- from straight-ahead rockers to political drama to crowd-pleasing ballads to electronica, this band covers all the bases. Tech Affiliations: Digg.com, Aldon (software), IT for SF Boys & Girls Club, Bite PR.

This year we had eight times the band submissions we received in 2008! Stay tuned to the Silicon Valley Rocks blog for a list of finalists selected by our "listening committee" and more info on this year's line up -- band history, interviews, music, photos etc.
But for now, say YES to music and education by buying a ticket or making a donation. We're offering a very sweet treat for you monsters of rock that love Halloween and music. It's our "RIP" ticket promotion that gives you a VIP ticket (3 free drinks, light hors d'oeuvres, and premium seating) for only $50 (a $25 savings!). The offer lasts until 11:55pm on October 31 - act now before the candy is all gone! Tickets are on sale here. Be sure to select the RIP - Halloween Promotion!

A lot of PR people have jumped into the world of blogging, Facebook and now Twitter, with a lot of enthusiasm and they have been doing it for years and now have very healthy traffic numbers and very large numbers of Twitter followers.

For example, Brian Solis: His blog BrianSolis.com has about 77,000 unique visitors every month and he has a Twitter following of more than 33,000.

Todd Defren from Shift Communications, his pr-squared.com has blog traffic of more than 30,000 unique visitors and he has a Twitter following of over 13,000.

Steve Rubel at Edelman has recently shifted to a Posterous blog but he has more than 56,000 unique visitors and more than 31,000 Twitter followers.

In contrast, journalists and their employers have been slow to make use of the "new media." Few journalists blog and few are on Twitter or Facebook, and generally, most are very timid when it comes to promoting their own stories and building up their Twitter/Facebook followers and friends.

Yet it is this type of active, always-on social media presence that is required these days, as a journalist, to gain attention to your stories. I do it -- not because I like or dislike doing it -- it's simply that's what the current rules of the game are.

But, it's going to be a while before other journalists figure out these rules of self-promotion and become comfortable with self-promotion. (Self-promotion is fine as long as you can walk your walk -- self-promotion is bad only when you are promoting poor content.)

Since PR people are much more comfortable with self-promotion, many have acquired large traffic to their blogs and also amassed large numbers on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

This brings up an interesting scenario because in the majority of cases, PR people such as Brian Solis, are pitching stories to journalists who have very much smaller pageviews on the stories they write, and far smaller Twitter/Facebook communities to which to distribute their stories, than the PR people.

The PR people could post the stories themselves and pitch them to their already large communities and get a far higher readership!

But, the problem they face is that this would be a "pay per post" type scenario and they would lose credibility very quickly.

Also, having someone else write a story about your client, on a third-party site, where there has been no exchange of money, conveys far higher value to the story.

That's the paradox of PR peoples' large, personal media footprint -- they can't use their own access to large numbers of people to promote their clients.

DejaView: Sometimes when a big story breaks it's not easy to see the story because of all the "noise" around it.

It was difficult to find much insightful coverage of the recent Twitter $100m funding and its $1 billion valuation. But Niki Scevak, an Australian entrepreneur living in Paris has produced the best take on the Twitter investment.

Here is Mr Scevak's analysis from Nuances of Twitter Financing | Bronte Media

Are the investors leading the round, T Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners crazy? Maybe they are but there is likely very little downside for them. That is, it may be extremely hard for them to make money but they probably won't lose it. Shares bought are of the preferred variety and so if Twitter sold for $100m they get their money back and no one else gets anything.
. . .the investment expectation is not so much 'venture capital' but a 'loan with some upside potential'.

What happens to the early investors such as New York's Union Square Ventures (USV) and Spark?

They have a small fund relative to the size of this investment. To keep their pro-rata share they would have to put a decent chunk of their fund into an investment with the risk profile of point 1 - something their limited partners have not asked them to do.
...On the upside, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital just got a huge valuation validation that would put the respective funds in the money on this investment alone. They can now go out and raise another fund easily.

This investment is likely a perfect opportunity for early employees and angel investors to take their money out of Twitter.

There is limited upside for them with a long line of preferred investors ahead of them in the que. ... No one got poor selling at a $1bn valuation.

Mr Scevak raises a good question. What will Twitter do with $100m? It shuffles text messages around, which doesn't require a heavy IT infrastructure such as Facebook, which needs large IT systems for photo and video storage.

The most important point is what will be the effect of a $1bn valuation on Twitter staff?

With so many preffered stock holders ahead of them getting their payouts first, Twitter staff will be left with very little once everyone cashes out.

One of the commenters to the post, Mike Simonsen wrote:

...Here's how the math works against EVERY employee at an overfunded startup - take the mint deal for example: $170M exit (maybe $70 or so is future perf related so that leaves $100M), even without liquidation prefs, the employees get basically nothing. $40mil VC = maybe 60% of the company, 20% for the founder CEO, 3% each for the next 5 guys. That leaves everyone else sharing $5mil to vest over the next 4 years. And even that's skewed for a few people. So with the biggest VC exit of the year, the employees are basically vesting a $20k annual bonus. gee thanks.

Huge VC rounds are only good for people who own big, early, preferred chunks already.

This means it could be tough for Twitter to recruit staff. However, with the current tough employment market, maybe getting a good salary will be enough reward.

For many years I've been saying that Google (GOOG) is a media company. For many years people have been telling me I'm wrong that, " Google is a tech company."

But what technology can you buy from Google? You can buy database tech from Oracle, you can buy microprocessor tech from Intel. What tech can you buy from Google? (OK, a search appliance box but that's it.)

Erik Schonfeld writes about Ken Auletta's forthcoming book: "Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It."

He quotes from a pre-publication copy in a post titled - Googled: Schmidt Wants To Build A "$100 Billion Media Company":

In 2007, Eric Schmidt told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar media company--more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, or News Corporation.

Foremski's Take: Google, Yahoo, EBay, Facebook, and a host of Web 2.0 companies, and many more, are all media companies. They publish pages of content with advertising around it.

What's not a media company about that?

These are technology-enabled media companies. They are not tech companies.

Google uses technologies to harvest content for free and then serve up ads around that content. It doesn't want to produce content or pay for content if it can help it, although it does pay for some content on YouTube.

What is interesting about the quote from Mr Schmidt is that over the past few years Google hasn't wanted to portray itself as a media company because it hasn't wanted to appear as a competitor to media companies. Especially, when it has partnered with them using its AdSense ad network. But most media companies have figured it out by now.

- - -
Please see: "Google Devalues Everything It Touches" - Wall Street Journal Chief

Wrapping up the week . . .

. . . Techcrunch50 came and went. I didn't feel much pressure to do much coverage because TechCrunch gets all the news stories. Things used to be different when conference organizers were separate from the media.

Please see: - Issues When Media Companies Host Conferences

My philosophy is to only publish when I have something original or can add something to a story. The Techcrunch50 companies got plenty of coverage anyway. Threadsy seemed to rise up above the hubbub.

. . . I did pop into the ending reception for Techcrunch50 and ran into a lot of friends. Especially good to see was Sam Whitmore, who runs the excellent Media Survey service. Sam always has keen insights into what is going on within the media industry at a granular level among the reporters and editors.

Here's a quick interview with Sam from a year ago:

- Sam Whitmore at Night: Media Struggling with Media Formats . . .

. . . Many of the Techcrunch50 startups seem to be running in ultra bootstrap mode. Several were relying on whoever they could get to help with publicity, their hairdresser in one instance, a sister, some pals from a coffee shop. It seems in today's "free" social media world some companies think PR can be done by anyone.

. . .Some of my contacts in PR say times continue to be challenging. But there is a bit more hiring going on in expectation of better times in 2010. Retainers continue to be very humble in the $10K to $12K monthly range.

Some companies are inviting up to ten PR firms to bid on new business. That's because they can. Others are demanding as many as ten PR ideas from each firm. A new form of crowdsourcing?

. . . I continue to see lots of people in the valley looking for work or working for free hoping to land jobs once the economy recovers. However, even when the economy does recover, a lot of the jobs won't be back because there are fundamental changes going on in a wide number of sectors not just media and PR but also in software engineering.

. . . It was good to see Frank Shaw, the new corporate communications chief at Microsoft. Mr Shaw comes from Microsoft's long-time PR firm Waggener Edstrom. It's an interesting appointment because he's been involved in new/social media for a long time.

And the way he has handled various issues in the past has been text-book perfect such as this one. But that's because he is involved in blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Too many corporate comms chiefs aren't and therefore they and their staff don't understand the dynamics of these types of media. You've got to be in it to know it.

I'm looking forward to some of the changes and strategies Mr Shaw will be launching. It won't be the same old MSFT, that's for sure.

- Frank Shaw's blog: Glass House

. . . I had a chance to take a look at the latest version of Microsoft's Zune HD this week and it looks great. Excellent user interface, fantastic high-def screen. Combined with the $15 per month music service it's a very nice package. If it only had a texting option it would be perfect for my daughter.

. . . I also caught up with Sabrina Horn, head of Horn Group and Todd Defren, head of Shift Communications. It's always a pleasure to talk with them because they don't spend all their time over here in our fairly insular world and they bring a wider perspective.

- Some Observations On Trends In Media And PR . . .

. . . My recent interview with Bernardo Huberman, head of Hewlett-Packard's Social Computing Lab was popular. And so was my profile of Robert Goldman, a touching and inspiring story of his efforts to save his sister.

- Thought Leader - HP's Bernardo Huberman: Studies Of Mass Social Behavior On The Internet

- Against All Odds - How A Software Engineer Invented A Breakthrough Medical Device In Bid To Save His Sister


. . . About a year ago Sequoia Ventures leaked a presentation it gave to its portfolio companies: "RIP" which called for drastic cuts in jobs and services. It quickly became one of the most hated PowerPoint presentations of all time.

One of my contacts estimates that it led to a massacre, about 50,000 job loses in Silicon Valley as others followed Sequoia's lead. Yet Sequoia was quietly continuing to fund companies. Was it a form of information warfare? That's what I thought at the time: Sequoia BS . . . and the Stepford Wives of Sand Hill Road

A year later it's time for a new presentation, imho: - Pedal To The Metal

. . . This week is Intel's IDF conference focused on developers. I'll be there at the Moscone center. Advanced Micro Devices is hosting some shadow events. I like AMD's focus on graphics performance rather than microprocessor cycles, it's a good strategy when you are up against the behemoth Intel.

AMD is a bit more nimble than Intel but will that be enough to win new market share? We'll see.

Intel's recent reorganization is very interesting. Here's my analysis: - Intel Reorg Moves Maloney Into Key Position

. . . We've been enjoying a wonderful Indian summer in San Francisco with warm evenings. Walking along Market street in the downtown shopping district of San Francisco I was shocked to see Christmas decorations were already lining the street. Up on the lamposts were large illuminated snowflakes. That is too much. It makes me want to boycott rather than shop.

- - -

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Fascinating talk by Bernardo Huberman, Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard. He presents the results of several scientific studies of how large numbers of users behave on the web.

The results are very interesting and raise questions about the effectiveness of viral marketing; they reveal patterns in e-mail messaging; the half-life of popular stories on Digg (about 70 minutes); the influence of ratings on popularity; changing sentiment in reviews, how public opinion can be manipulated, and much more.

Don't be put off by the date of this talk: January 2008. It remains relevant because the studies are focused on behaviors of large numbers of users at sites such as Amazon, Facebook, and Digg - and haven't changed. They reveal what appear to be fundamental behaviors that could very well be hard-wired into our humanity - or at least our online humanity.

Here is my recent interview with Mr Huberman.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4997790860449660566#

Cheap display ads on social network sites have attracted large brands such as AT&T, Experian, Sprint and Microsoft, reports comScore.

The online measuring company estimated that in July, 2009, 20 per cent of all display ads appeared on social network sites with 80 per cent of those on MySpace and FaceBook.

The attraction is low cost says Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president.

"Social networking sites now account for one out of every five ads people view online. Because the top social media sites can deliver high reach and frequency against target segments at a low cost, it appears that some advertisers are eager to use social networking sites as a new advertising delivery vehicle."

More details here: Social Networking Sites Account for More than 20 Percent of All U.S. Online Display Ad Impressions, According to comScore Ad Metrix - comScore, Inc

Foremski's Take: comScore doesn't provide any historical data to determine trend lines.

The reason that ad inventory on social networks is lower cost is because the ads are less effective. However, if advertisers can figure out how to raise the response rate there is an excellent arbitrage opportunity waiting to be exploited.

Heddi Cundle is in town this week, which reminded me of an educational video we shot where she explains Twitter to a group of young visitors from the Ukraine.

[Five years ago I left my job as a reporter and columnist at the Financial Times to become a professional journalist/blogger. The first two installments of my story are here: Part 1 and Part 2.]

After I left the Financial Times I wondered if I would still have the same top level access. I was used to speaking with the top executives of the largest companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. But now I was a "blogger" writing for my own web site. I was just a guy with a laptop working from a home office. This wasn't the Financial Times with its worldwide reach and a trusted reputation built up from over 100 years of publishing newspapers.

To my great relief, nothing changed. I still had the same access to top executives as I had before. I still got pitches from the same people I worked with when I was at the newspaper. In fact, I now had an additional element of exotic notoriety, which helped in my transition.

A suitable transition...

But, some PR people, and also some journalists would sometimes look at me in a strange way. Five years ago, it was poorly understood what a "blogger" was. Some people asked if was still a journalist? Did I keep embargoes? What were the rules of engagement with a "blogger"? I tried to reassure everyone that I was still working as a professional journalist. Just because I used a blogging platform (Movable Type) to publish my articles did not change anything about me or my job.

It's always interesting to meet with outsiders and to hear their view of Silicon Valley, just as it is to leave the valley and notice that there's a whole world outside of our echo chamber (that doesn't care about our little world and its spats and spittle.)

Last week I was on a panel with Carolyn Pritchard, from GigaOm, speaking about the future of journalism. As always, it's the people that turn up to such events that interest me the most.

One of the people I met was Jose A. Del Moral, A Spanish entrepreneur. He was visiting for a few weeks and popping into various events around Silicon Valley. He said he was shocked about how positive everyone is in Silicon Valley.

Mr Del Moral wrote a blog post: There is a lot of bullshit in Silicon Valley.

Everybody is so nice! You have to be really careful, as people are not so honest with how they really feel. There is a lot of bullshit in Silicon Valley! If you come here with white shoes, they will get brown so fast...

There is much discussion lately about the need to upgrade our publishing/conversational platforms to bring together all the places where our content is published, and the responses to that content -- one place where it can all be regarded and archived.

One thing is for certain, what we have right now isn't cutting it.

Om Malik wrote a thoughtful piece last week: The Evolution Blogging. After a long preamble he eventually got to his point:

...blogging platforms need to evolve from the hierarchical content-management systems of today to more fluid, free-flowing, more socially relevant and real-time lifestreaming systems.

Georges van Hoegaerden, a serial entrepreneur, writes that "The Silicon Valley emperor has no clothes."

...Silicon Valley has become the emperor who wears no clothes. Many Venture Capitalists (VCs) like the emperor will hold their head high and continue their procession for the sake of protecting their management fees.

...the simple fact remains that very little disruptive innovation is born. And without disruptive innovation (and the risks that such innovation incurs) it is just a matter of time before the Limited Partners (LPs) recognize that the emperor's procession is coming to an end.

Mr Hoegaerden says that the fault is with the VCs -- many don't have the entrepreneurial experience to do their job. And they will always look to blame others and never themselves.

He writes that "innovation is not the problem," the problem is ineffective VCs

I have two kids, Matt, 21, and Sarah, who just turned 15. I often ask them about their online habits and those of their friends.

Matt and his friends aren't all that keen on Facebook, they are spending a lot less time there. Where are they going? It's not clear they are going anywhere else. Also, a lot of them use Youtube as a free streaming music service. Twitter hardly registers at all with this group.

Sarah and friends spend a lot of time on MySpace, which is also where they find new music. Music is one of the key draws for Sarah. Texting is a big deal in this group, much more than making cell phone calls. But texting programs are expensive unless you can get onto an all-you-can-eat plan. T-Mobile is very popular in this group.

Companies love to have enthusiastic customers because the passion that comes with enthusiasm sells. Word-of-mouth is the most effective driver of sales bar none.

Companies love enthusiastic customers that have blogs, are active on Facebook, Twitter, etc because they can reach more people. But how do you get enthusiastic customers?

Intel [INTC] this morning held a mid-year update looking at its major business groups and initiatives. The first session was with Sean Maloney, Intel's most important executive next to Paul Otellini, CEO.

Mr Maloney is executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. The short video above consists of highlights of his presentation. Mr Maloney said that while other sectors such as consumer have continued to buy, business IT spending has not recovered from last September. The question is will it come back by the fourth quarter?

The questions I struggle with the most these days are these: Where should I publish and how much should I publish?

Should I spend more time in the real-time world of Twitter and Friendfeed?

Should I spend more time on SVW or on my blog on ZDNet: IMHO?

How much time should I spend in Facebook and is it OK to republish my blog posts there?

How much should I publish? How much is too much? If I publish too much will that be "noise" and will people unsubscribe?

How much time should I spend leaving comments on other sites?

How much time should I spend writing email and replying to email?

How much time should I spend sending and replying to SMS? How much on Twitter?

I'm not sure what the answers to these questions are. But I know we are all asking these types of questions because our media and comms channels are fragmenting at a rapid rate and we have to shift resources around to deal with all of them.

We all have a time-pie and we each have to figure out how large each slice for each activity should be. That includes family and self-time.

One thing is certain, you need to have a slice for each media communications channel it's not a good idea to abandon any one of them.

How many more slices will we need to make in the future? Quite a few I think. Which slices get shaved? They all do.

My recent trip with the Traveling Geeks to the UK was an intense week consisting of many events and meetings with European startups, government agencies, conferences, panels, and some remarkable experiences.

My son Matt joined me part of the way through. In this video you'll see my fellow Traveling Geeks and friends: Robert Scoble, Rocky Barbanica, Renee Blodgett, Ayelet Noff, Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica, Meghan Asha, Craig Newmark, Susan Bratton, Jeff Saperstein, Howard Rheingold, Sky Schuyler, Mitzi Szereto, Heddi Cundle, Mark Adams, Paul Carr, Hermione Way, Mike Butcher, Mathys van Abbe . . . and many more.

[BTW, the Facebook video embed is so much better quality than YouTube and many other video sites.]

As people abandon blogs for the visceral thrill and trill of Twitter there is something that many might not have considered about the real-time web.

There is no Google juice.

By Google juice I mean the ranking that Google gives content. Google assesses the importance of content by the number of links to a site, how long that site has been around, and dozens of other factors.

Put them all together and that's how Google puts together its search results.

Everyone wants to be "above the fold" on that first screen of Google results. But Twitter or any other real-time platform such as Facebook status updates, or Friendfeed, won't get you there.

And with the real-time web, without a ranking system, you get lost in the noise, and the noise gets louder and louder with each day as more people (and marketeers) swarm onto the real-time web.

Why do you think that Robert Scoble said he was toning down his real-time web activities and returning to blogging, a few weeks back? Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog

You've got to do both. If you abandon your static web presence for your real-time activities you will find it harder to build your overall social media capital, imho.

[BTW, the Google juice factor is how Google can easily control competition from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Those services don't have a good ranking system, at least not yet.]

Doing both raises the amount of time you have to spend on publishing. But that's just the way things are.